Two moves feel like improvement and take apart a structure that works. The first is duplicating a post that already exists. The second is changing the thing that already produces, when the change could have been tried on the side.
Duplication
The source opens on the first with no preamble. According to the source, the quickest way to run out of people and money and get no production is to keep the same function running in two places, each giving the same product.
That sounds like a problem for large companies, but a business of three gets there too. Two people answer enquiries, two people price the work, and two people stay in touch with the same customer.
The result, in the source's description, sounds like a contradiction. The place as a whole is overmanned, and yet each division is undermanned for its full functions. The product is terrible, if it exists at all. A division is one section of the business, and that is exactly what a small office looks like when everyone is busy and nothing is covered.
Suppose a clinic of three where each person does a bit of everything. There are three people, and not one role is carried out in full. After the work is divided, one person takes enquiries, one takes treatment and one takes follow-up. The same three people produce twice as much.
How it starts
The source also identifies the moment it begins. In the impatience and emotion of organizing, someone sets up a duplicate function with the explanation:
“it can't get service”
From there, the source says, the catastrophe begins. Somebody waits, gives up, and sets up a copy for themselves. At the moment it happens, it always feels reasonable.
Suppose an owner starts pricing jobs himself because his estimator takes too long. Within two months one customer is holding two contradictory quotes. Or two business partners each keep a client list of their own, because neither can find anything in the other's. There are two lists and no agreed record of which one is right, so nobody trusts either.
The source gives a diagnostic rule in one line: when you look over a business for potential insolvency, look over its duplicate functions.
The cure for duplication is one source for each function. Everybody else is in contact with it and nothing more. Splitting the work in two does not cure duplication. Naming who the source is does.
Experimenting on the line that works
The second move has a name in the source: experimenting on a standard production line.
The source gives two examples. A cook can cook thirty different dishes successfully. She could keep them as they are and look on the side for new ones, but she experiments with the thirty and changes them. The result is failed production. A musical group has fifteen finished pieces of repertoire. It rewrites those pieces when it could be developing new ones, and the shows suffer.
In a small business it looks like this. You rework the proposal, the process or the price that is working, because you got bored or read something somewhere, and nothing had broken.
Suppose an owner changes the shape of his proposal every quarter. No version runs long enough for him to find out whether it is any good. Or an installer changes an order of work that took him eight years to settle, after watching one video. Two months of callbacks and corrections follow.
The rule, and when a change does go in
The source's remedy is simple. Keep the standard production line exactly as it is. If you want to experiment or change something, pilot it off to one side, using people or actions that leave standard production alone.
A change goes into the line after it has been tested and has proved better in experience, once it has been properly piloted. Then, and only then, it joins the line. The reasoning behind the rule, in the source's words:
“There is always a better model in the research lab”
The trouble starts, the source says, only when an unfinished, unfamiliar model gets pushed through as the standard.
Suppose a studio owner tries a new process on one client alone, running next to the old one. After three of those she knows it is better. Now take an owner who swaps the process for every customer at once. When it does not work, there is nothing left to go back to.
The lab always looks better than the line, and that is no reason to swap one for the other.
What the booklet does with this
In I Work Harder Than Anyone I Know, this chapter closes with two short exercises, one to identify and one of restraint. The first concerns duplication, and the second concerns a change you are considering.
Both moves look like improvement while they are happening, and both take apart a structure that was working.