Chris Hamlin

This FIRSTHAND: Operational Certainty in Pod podcast with Emerson’s Chris Hamlin is a follow up to our 5 Questions for an Emerson Expert with Chris.

In this podcast, we explore Chris’ thoughts on a presentation he gave recently at a conference in the Netherlands. The presentation highlighted the massive technological shifts occurring that are affecting the very way we organize our businesses and drive performance improvements.

We hope you’ll enjoy this episode and will consider subscribing to the whole FIRSTHAND: Operational Certainty in Pod series on your iOS or Android mobile device.

Transcript

Jim: Hi, this is Jim Cahill and welcome to the FIRSTHAND Operational Certainty in a Pod podcast series. And today I’m joined by Chris Hamlin. Chris is a director for our Operational Certainty Consulting team and he’s based in the U.K. Welcome, Chris.

Chris: Hi, Jim. It’s great to be with you.

Jim: Now, I know you were, just before the holidays at the NexGen 2018 Conference in the Netherlands. I recall that your presentation had a fantastic title, “Tyranny, Heresy, and Confusion: The Job’s Not Done.” Tell us a little bit about your premise that organizations traditionally organize themselves to optimize performance against the most valuable or expensive constraints.

Chris: This idea of constraints is becoming more and more fashionable in terms of understanding how organizations work. And the idea…And it’s actually something that kind of we as control and optimization engineers have understood for a long time. If you’re trying to maximize the performance of a chemical plant, what you need to do is identify what’s the most expensive constraint that exists on that plant. It’s the place where the greatest value is, but it’s also the most expensive thing to get rid of.

Very often, they’ll be something like a big rotating machine. The big rotating machine is the size of these, and it is prohibitively expensive to get rid of it. So, what we do is as controls or optimizations engineers, we try and push as hard as we can against that limit, make sure that machine’s working as hard as it can possibly work, for as long as it will possibly do it. And what we do is that we then organize everything else around the facility to make sure that that machine is exercised as hard as we possibly can. And we know that we do that the chemical plant makes as much chemical as it possibly can.

Now, organizations are exactly the same. In fact, all systems that have got some degree of optimization do exactly that. They look to see what was the biggest obstacle or barrier to them being more successful, whatever success means. And what they do is they then maximize their performance against that limit by organizing themselves to ensure they’re always pushing against that to the greatest possible extent. So, in the case of organizations it may be, in fact, I think we may come on to those in a little while is very often around information and information flow. That’s the most valuable, the most valuable thing that an organization possesses is the information and one of the critical things in terms of an organization being successful is the extent to which information can flow through it to support decision making.

So what we see is organizations forming themselves and structuring themselves to make the best use of the information that’s available. And that’s why we have HR departments because it optimizes their ability to use the HR-related information. It’s why we have production departments and maintenance departments and legal departments because it’s all around efficient, fast, effective use of that information. It’s also why we all gather together in buildings called offices because one of the best ways historically of moving information is to talk to each other and that’s much easier done if we’re in the office or the cube next door than on the other side of the Atlantic.

Jim: Yeah, that’s interesting you say that about information because right at the start of that presentation you described a new era that we’re entering into in human history. Can you share a little bit more on why this is you consider it a new era and what are the implications for organizations?

Chris: Sure. I mean, I think this is really, really profound. So as I say, you know, organizations have optimized their structures to take advantage of information. And you say, “Well, how long’s that been going on?” Well, my view is, that’s been going on ever since we stopped being hunter-gatherers and developed agriculture. At the point in time where we stopped fending for ourselves as independent entities and living in caves and we started growing stuff and growing of surplus that we could then somehow trade for other things, we became a social species and at that point the flow of information was the single biggest determinant in how we organized and structured ourselves.

It’s why we came together as communities, in villages, in towns and cities. It describes and explains the way politically we organize ourselves. It explains how the role of countries and councils and parliaments and senates and Congress and, you know, all that sort of stuff. Everything we do as a human species for the last at least 5,000 years has really been about organizing ourselves around the most efficient and effective use of information. And kind of closely then related off the back of that. What that drives is, it drives us geographically, physically, to be close together, to be proximate because we’re still living today. The best way of conveying information is to actually sit across the room from somebody, share a coffee, share a beer and exchange by talking.

So, we were physically proximate to one another. Now what that does, it introduces a new constraint, it introduces a constraint around creativity. So, when limited because of the physical organization, we’re limited to our ability to access creativity and new ideas. So, that’s kind of a secondary constraint that’s existed and that’s emerged. For 5,000 years this has been the case. We organize ourselves physically close together to exchange information but by virtue of doing that, we then restrict our ability to access new ideas, new talent, and creativity.

So, what’s changed in the last…I don’t know you can argue last five years, last three years, last 18 months even, right. For the first time in human history, now, it’s not often you say that, for the first time in human history, we’ve been able to move any amount of data and information at any speed to any location on the planet at almost zero marginal cost. That’s very recent, very, very recent. That’s really been true. What does that mean? That means that, that information constraint that has been the single overriding factor in how we organize ourselves for 5,000 years, in the last five years, suddenly stopped being a constraint. It’s no longer the thing to organize ourselves around. We can now move data and information wherever we want.

What we also then do is we get access to effectively the entire creative talent pool of the whole planet. And the fact that, you know, Jim, you and I interact quite frequently and most of the time, we’re opposite sides of the Atlantic and we kind of work together as though we’ve been in the office next door for many years. We can do that today. We haven’t been able to do that historically. If that constraint goes away, it means we need to organize and structure ourselves according to something else. What’s the next most valuable constraint? Now, I’ll be honest with you, I don’t profess to necessarily to know what that is. I would like to think it’s something to do with well-being, maybe even happiness, I don’t know, maybe…whatever it is. What’s happening today is that we’re gonna see this dramatic change in how organizations, companies, societies, c