Working Up

by Dwayne Phillips

Projects to reduce work, production, or consumption should reduce costs. This corresponding reduction in costs, however, rarely occurs. Instead, an increase in cost often happens. Please be attentive to what you are doing and watch for this contrary behavior.

There are many things than many people want to reduce.

Consider body weight. The average American should reduce their body weight. Many Americans, however, claim they cannot afford the cost of losing weight. This has always perplexed me. Losing weight should cost less money, not more. To lose weight, you eat less food. Eating less food means buying less food, which means spending less money on food – not more.

What happens with the vast majority of people is that they think of costly ways to lose weight:

• join a health club
• hire a weight-loss trainer
• buy special food
• and so on

This really doesn’t make any sense. It does make sense, however, when we consider that the subject is a person and we remember that persons don’t always behave rationally. Eating less food – a guaranteed way to lose weight that costs less money – isn’t much fun. The things listed above, and others, are more fun.

Now consider something like process at work. Process can be good, but it can be onerous if there is too much of it. Reducing process should cost less. After all, once we reduce process we are doing less work than before. Less work costs less hours and less money. Simple, right?

Process, however, returns us to persons who often behave irrationally. So, to reduce process, we usually:

• join a process improvement group
• hire a process-improvement consultant
• buy a new, special process methodology
• hey wait, this all sounds a lot like weight loss

And like weight loss, it doesn’t make any sense. Reducing process is a matter of considering every step we do and asking, “Do we really need to do this?” Simple, but not much fun.

So, the next time you embark on a project to reduce what you do or produce or consume, remember that reducing means doing or producing or consuming less. That should mean spending less, not more.