When Doing the Job Correctly Creates Unnecessary Work
Sometimes the greatest improvement comes from eliminating work nobody realizes is unnecessary.
More than 50 years ago, my brother-in-law was working as a foreman at a company manufacturing rubber products.
He noticed something interesting about the way employees worked along one of the production lines.
As products moved through the assembly process, workers would pick them up, perform their assigned tasks, and pass them along to the next person.
But there was something happening between those steps.
When a right-handed employee passed a product to a left-handed employee, the receiving worker would rotate the product 180 degrees to position it for the next operation.
When that product subsequently reached another right-handed employee, it would be rotated 180 degrees again.
The product was moving forward through production, but it was also being turned around repeatedly.
Each rotation was a small action. It was part of the routine. Nobody necessarily considered it a problem because the employees were simply positioning the product to do their jobs.
But the rotations added no value to the finished product.
Recognizing the Problem
My brother-in-law recognized that the problem wasn’t with the employees or their performance.
It was the arrangement of the work.
The production process had been organized without accounting for how right-handed and left-handed employees handled the products.
His solution was remarkably simple.
He proposed placing all the right-handed employees on one side of the conveyor belt and all the left-handed employees on the opposite side.
This arrangement would allow products to move between employees without requiring the repeated 180-degree rotations.
There was no need for new equipment, automation, or a complicated redesign of the manufacturing process.
The improvement came from changing the arrangement of the work rather than asking employees to work harder or faster.
The change was implemented.
I don’t know whether anyone measured the resulting time savings. This happened more than 50 years ago, and I have no records of the results.
But the unnecessary rotations had been recognized, and the process was changed to eliminate them.
The Organizational Lesson
What makes this story interesting isn’t the complexity of the solution.
It’s the simplicity of the problem and how easily it could have remained invisible.
The employees weren’t making mistakes. They were doing precisely what they needed to do to complete their assigned tasks.
Each rotation made sense to the individual performing it.
But when the entire process was observed, those individually reasonable actions revealed an unnecessary activity.
The problem existed not within a particular task but in the connections between tasks.
That distinction matters.
Organizations frequently evaluate productivity by examining how efficiently individuals perform their assigned work.
They may measure units produced, time per operation, or employee performance.
But what happens when the inefficiency exists between operations rather than within them?
Improving each employee’s speed wouldn’t have eliminated the rotations.
Understanding the process as a whole did.
The SCALE™ Connection
This story illustrates several elements of SCALE™: Signal, Connection, Awareness, Learning, and Execute.
Signal: The repeated 180-degree rotations were observable evidence of potentially unnecessary work. The signal was present in ordinary production activity.
Connection: The foreman recognized that the rotations were connected to the alternating handedness of employees along the production line. The issue was not an isolated employee behavior but a consequence of how the work was organized.
Awareness: He understood that what appeared reasonable at the individual workstation was unnecessary when viewed across the entire production process.
Learning: Recognizing the relationship between employee positioning and product handling led to a different understanding of how the work could be arranged.
Execute: The production arrangement was changed, placing right-handed and left-handed employees on opposite sides of the conveyor belt to eliminate unnecessary rotations.
The story also illustrates an important distinction between individual efficiency and organizational capability.
An employee can perform every assigned task correctly while the overall process remains inefficient.
Organizational improvement requires someone to recognize what happens between those tasks.
Before You Automate the Rotations
Now consider what might happen if the same production process were examined today.
An organization might explore automation to increase throughput.
Engineers might design equipment to handle products faster, including mechanisms to rotate them between operations.
The automated process could execute those rotations more quickly and consistently than employees.
But it would still be performing work that didn’t need to exist.
This is why Process Viability Before Automation™ matters.
Before asking how technology can execute a process more efficiently, organizations need to ask whether the process itself makes sense.
The question isn’t always how to improve an activity.
Sometimes the more important question is:
Why are we doing it at all?
A Question for Leadership
Where in your organization are people repeatedly correcting, repositioning, reentering, reconciling, or adjusting something simply because of how work passes from one person or department to another?
And who has the opportunity, experience, and authority to recognize that the activity could be eliminated entirely?
The 180-degree problem wasn’t solved by working harder.
It was solved by someone noticing that the work was arranged incorrectly.
Sometimes the most valuable improvement is the work that no longer needs to be done.
Part of SCALE™ Stories & Applications
Primary SCALE elements: Signal, Connection, Awareness, Execute
Supporting concept: Process Viability Before Automation™
Organizational principle: Improving individual tasks does not necessarily improve the process connecting them.