My colleague Steve Towers first really galvanized our attention around this core issue that is stopping many of us from changing our focus from what we now know to be non-value added work to that of value-added work. How did he take us there? He did so by asking the question:

Are you Doing Things Right or are you Doing The Right Things?

The answer to that question takes us to a new place, a place where we must look critically at the work we do, challenging it to make sure it is indeed value-added. That seems quite simple but many of us have found that while we can take this kind of challenge as a mental exercise, moving it to action is a far different thing.

So what’s stopping us from doing the right thing? Well, Inside-Out thinking is certainly part of that. Lack of focus on our customers plays a big role too. Yet for many of us these observations stay too high level. We can’t really point to things and say “that’s Inside-Out.” For our customers, in many cases the customer is so far removed from our line of sight that we don’t know what our company really believes it wants to deliver to our customers (actually, most companies have at best only a marginal understanding of what they want their organization to deliver to customers but that’s the gist of another story to come later).

So how can we spot these non-value add, Inside-Out things that we are so good at doing right? One way is to look for Embedded Controls.

Embedded Controls are the existing shape of processes – primarily driven by IMPLICIT Business Rules – pressing the process into a form that meets an internal need. They come from many places, but in all cases they exist to serve either an internal purpose or a external non-customer requirement that the organization has PRIORITIZED in its orientation on the work it performs. Why do I say “prioritized?” Well, if a process shape (the work) is formed by implicit business rules to serve an internal need then all work will be either pressed or forced to serve that need regardless of how that affects the cost of the company or the service of the customer.

When we first looked into this aspect of organizations, the Bennu Group observed these controls and even considered including them in the Certified Process Professional Program. We did not (though it’s available as a supplemental reference) because we observe that we don’t need to burden our success techniques with this foray into that Inside-Out complexity. It’s definitely not needed to achieve business success therefore why would we go there? That and it can be dangerous because Embedded Controls can absorb our attention, distracting us from the opportunities that await us in the application of CEMM.

That said, we have decided to make available a paper on Embedded Controls to help those who are struggling with understanding why they can’t seem to do the right thing – and even to help people better understand what the right thing this. Embedded Controls are NOT the right thing – period. What they are ranges from:

- Completely unnecessary

- Necessary but should always be minimized so that they aren’t our focus and they take the least amount of time and resource

- Necessary in respect to what we are delivering to our customers, in which case they shift their behavior into complete alignment with customer success

- In every case, a huge opportunity for us to improve our business success

If I have your interest peaked and you want to know more, head over to the Grand Buffet and download the Embedded Controls paper there. In it we cover the most common areas where embedded controls exist, and why, to help expound upon the observation presented here.

But be careful. If you dig into this snake-pit to deeply, you just might get bit.

Terry Schurter
Director - International Process and Performance Institute
www.ipapi.org