Some recent post dealt with Ron Askenas latest book. This post triggered me again that focusing on keeping it simple is a prerequisite in these challenging times!

Do Your Controls Create Complexity? – Ron Ashkenas – Harvard Business Review.

Have you ever noticed that organizations are great at creating controls and policies to prevent incidents that have alreadyhappened? Once the proverbial cow escapes the barn, they adeptly make sure it won’t happen again by, say, authorizing only certain people to man the exit and constructing barn-door status reports.

While this kind of organizational response does indeed prevent the recurrence of the exact same negative instance (they won’t lose the same cow in the same way again), the accumulation of these “reactive” controls often creates complexity, confusion, and unnecessary cost. Even worse, the new controls usually don’t prevent future incidents of a different kind from occurring.

To be better prepared, organizations should periodically step back and check their operations for these common problems arising from after-the-fact solutions:

To be continued at http://blogs.hbr.org/ashkenas/2010/02/do-your-controls-create-comple.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed:+harvardbusiness+(HBR.org)&utm_content=Google+Reader

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