White Space Forever

The title of the book that made Geary Rummler and Alan Brache authorities in the emerging field of process improvement and management back in 1990 was Improving Performance, but it was the subtitle (How to Manage the White Space on the Organization Chart) that caught attention.  Decades later, people still refer to it as the “white space” book; that was why Geary’s 2009 follow-up to Improving Performance was entitled White Space Revisited. 

Today the term “white space” has entered common parlance.  There are even a couple of consulting firms using the term in their names. It’s come to mean any general lack of connection between things that should be connected.  But its original meaning still has value for BPM and Operational Excellence.

Rummler first used the term at Motorola, during a meeting of senior managers of a newly created business that crossed multiple organizations.  His depiction of this business clearly highlighted the gaps between different business units and their leaders.  It looked like a map of islands floating in a vast white sea.  While examining this map with the management team, Geary quipped, “You guys have got to manage that white space together.”  It was an “a-ha” moment, evolving to the recognition that classic organization charts also inadvertently show white space and so the sub-title came about.

The problem of organizational white space is these areas are unowned and thus unmanaged.  They are the gaps between one department (or functional silo) and another, or between business units, regions, countries.  Seen from the viewpoint of a cross-functional process map, white space exists wherever handoffs are made from one area or role to another.  It is in those unmanaged boundary areas where often misunderstandings occur, mistakes are made, delays come about… in short, bad things happen.  

Silos themselves get in the way of total organizational performance. Because it is often virtually impossible to see the chain of cross-functional work when sitting inside any silo, it is hard to understand and effectively contribute to the goals of the entire organization.  Work crosses the boundaries between silos but nobody is necessarily responsible for what happens after a piece of work leaves a given silo; instead, accountability is fixed at the borders.  And so the need for managing the white space across the functional silos.

But how?  A good number of readers of Improving Performance and similar books about functional silos decided that the goal was to somehow eliminate white space by reorganizing so that the silos would disappear, replaced with an organizational structure based on processes, or customers, or technologies or products.

The problem of white space, though, is not really solvable that way.  Functional silos exist for very sound reasons even if they do have a bad reputation.  As soon as an organization starts up and work is divvied up, silos start to rise.  People who have something in common focus on their self-interest and look to each other for mutual support.  Silos are the consequence of having to divide up the work of an organization.  No matter what the divisions and the rationale behind them (e.g., functional specialization begets departments; geographies beget territories and regions; products and services beget customer segments and product/service units), the long-term consequence is that the people inside those silos tend to have an incomplete view of the work to be done and they begin to operate according to rules that make sense to them but not necessarily to the whole organization.  Over time, they develop loyalty to their silo instead of to the larger organization.  Their leaders tend to see their responsibilities as territory to own and to manage, and they may encourage sub-optimizing loyalty and behavior.  All of this is natural, inevitable and unavoidable.  

There is no way to design an organization to get rid of silos; you just create a different set of silos and the behavior that goes with them.  Organizations that have busted up traditional disciplines such as manufacturing, engineering, finance, marketing and so on and put everybody on cross-functional teams would discover that the employees in the same discipline flocked together anyway. (Hence the popularity of “centers of excellence”.) It makes sense to work together with people who understand you and can support your goals and your growth.   And matters are not improved by extreme flattening of the organization.  If you’ve ever been in an organization run by someone with 25 direct reports, you know the amount of frustration, inattention and begging for help that occurs, which is hardly any better than functional silos.

The other problem with trying to design white space out of an organization is that it’s an impossibility.  Reorganize by teams and you’ll have white space between teams.  Reorganize by customer or market or region and you’ll still have white space—you’ve just moved it around.  So narrowing down the amount of white space may be achievable by redesign, but total elimination is not.

What can be done is to install what we might call compensating mechanisms—things that enable employees to see and respond beyond their functional boundaries. Cross-functional process teams are a compensating mechanism.  Employees on such teams are collectively responsible for the entire process and are required to learn about the participating departments beyond their own.  Process metrics that measure performance across functional boundaries is another mechanism, encouraging end-to-end collaboration and accountability.  Rewards that are contingent on cross-functional performance are even more powerful for engendering attention and cooperation beyond functional boundaries.  Technological solutions also have the potential to break down boundaries by closing handoffs and facilitating sharing of source data rather than having each function keep its own information about products, customers, etc., which can a strong perpetuator of functional silos.

Management itself—its practices and processes—has the potential to provide mechanisms for leading and controlling an organization across its internal divides.  However, in organizations of any size, virtually all of the existing management and control systems are there to reinforce silos and silo thinking.  Pay for performance systems try to pin down accountability at the lowest individual level rather than hold anyone accountable for cross-functional work; measurement systems are designed to measure functional and individual performance, not process performance; management development programs teach and reward heroes (i.e., managers who lead their teams inside their functional, or regional, or whatever silos).

But when managers are well aware of the existence of white space and the potential for self-serving behavior within functions, they can become the stewards of cross-functional thinking and company-wide performance.  So while white space is forever, the task of managing it is also a permanent preoccupation of leadership, or should be.  Which is where BPM and Operational Excellence come in.