I recently joined a meeting and we were talking about how to get something done. There are a group of specialists on the call and each of them knows how to do a part of getting the thing done, but no-one knows the whole – hence the meeting.
At the end of the meeting someone says: “Are we going to need to do this more than once?”
The general agreement is that we are, to which someone else replies: “We need to work out how to industrialize it then.”
(I’ve used the “ize” spelling because that appears to be the popular spelling, but as a British person “ise” feels more natural. The OED has both 😉 )
The basic idea here is that a process that needs to be repeated ought to be able to be defined in a way that is repeatable – like an production line, flowing from one end to another without interruption, turned into an industry, industrialized.
Like other Office Speak the meaning of the term to those using it is not necessarily as clear cut as the term itself may suggest. To the cohort of individuals I was meeting with the meaning of industrialization sits across the full width of several spectra; in my experience at least.
In some situations it’s appropriate for an activity to become fully industrialized, it’s going to occur very frequently and there’s value in defining, optimising and automating it. There are many more situations where there’s little value beyond a simple definition or checklist. If all you do is create a document that describes what you did so that the next person doesn’t have to go through all of the learning, is that really industrialization? It isn’t really, but that’s sufficient criteria for many in industrialisation Office Speak land.
My thinking on the maturity of activities aligns to the Wardley Mapping phases: genesis, customer built, product, commodity. Industrialized activities only really apply to the product and commodity phases. It’s a lot to expect that something that’s only recently been defined, genesis or even customer built, should become part of a product or commodity the next day. There needs to be forces pulling and pushing for activities to move through the phases. One of those forces is scale, you have to be repeating something a lot for the expense of full industrialization to be worthwhile. One meeting does not make it product; one document does not make it a utility, but these are appropriate responses in many situations.
That’s the fun of the English language, we get to create words, define them, adjust the definition, repurpose them and redefine them altogether if that’s what we collectively decide to do. The power of the word is in the understanding that those communicating have of that word. In my meeting we all knew what we meant by industrializing and it wasn’t very much as it happened. We will undertake this activity on a few occasions, it’ll become something a bit more like a Cottage Industry and that will be completely appropriate to our situation.
Header Image: This is Malham Cove on a very hot day with Peregrine Falcons screeching around.
Graham Chastney 