By Daniel Reed, Senior Manager, Digital Operations, Baldwin Richardson Foods
Sometimes when a group of people gathers for some common purpose—a conference, a retreat, a large project—a motto rises to the surface. A phrase that catches and is repeated until no one is quite sure who coined it, but which seems to speak to the truth of the moment.
Given the incredible pace of progress in AI in just the last few years, how can change leaders gauge the readiness of their teams and organizations to adapt to and benefit from innovation? And what does it take to build things that truly last in an era of rapid change when so much seems uncertain?
People first and foremost, because without the people to run it, a process is little more than words on a page or a flowchart that no one really follows. And without people who understand, adopt, and benefit from it, new technology becomes little more than additional complexity and expense. Anyone who has spent time in manufacturing is familiar with the “tribal knowledge” effect, where the gap between theory and reality is bridged by a handful of people with crucial latent expertise. For those straining towards transformation, it’s tempting to see this either as just one more problem to solve or as inevitable resistance to change.
Sometimes that’s the case, but often that resistance is also a form of positive friction that should be treated as a signal about the most important component of the system you’re trying to transform: the people who operate within it. Lean and Six Sigma teach that efficiency, repeatability, and reduced variation lead to performance, and by definition, change disrupts that stability. Is it any surprise that those who’ve spent their careers making things, the artisans and experts, are hesitant to adopt unproven techniques?
Process is next, because without coordination and planning, a group of people tends to cluster on the object of interest, like children playing soccer: plenty of effort and intention, very little movement of the ball down the field except by luck. Even a sub-optimal process is preferable to none, as long as the results are reliable, improvement can begin. Of course, more process does not mean better process, because it also makes it more challenging to stay aligned with your people and the realities beyond theory.
Technology is last in the order of operations, and anyone who doesn’t understand why should spend time on a production line during system commissioning. Automation is a fantastic concept until the process itself is imbalanced, inconsistent, or of poor quality, making that power and throughput suddenly quite frightening. There’s no sense in designing a line or thinking about what the machinery should look like until the product you’re trying to make is clear, and the same is true for investments in business technology that seek to produce a specific outcome.
Despite this fundamental piece of enterprise physics, visionaries and technologists have always struggled to avoid a “tool-forward” approach in which our hammers are always in search of nails. I’m certainly no exception, but when our community comes together with one voice to say “people, process, technology… and always in that order,” it’s worth listening and remembering.
