A few years ago I invented a law of process improvement, which I called The Law of Conservation of Frustration:
Whenever we improve a process in order to reduce frustration, we increase our demands on the process until we are exactly as frustrated as before.
Lately I’ve come to realize that this formulation is analogous to Thomas Malthus’s famous argument, sometimes called “The Dismal Theorem of Economics,” that human populations will grow exponentially, checked only by widespread misery and starvation. We might call my law The Dismal Theorem of Process Improvement.
Recently I’ve been reading Kenneth Boulding’s brilliant book Principles of Economic Policy. Boulding expresses Malthus’s Dismal Theorem this way:
If nothing can check the growth of population but starvation and misery, then population will grow until it is miserable and starves.
Okay, Boulding’s version isn’t much cheerier than Malthus’s. But Boulding introduces an important qualification, and that qualification offers a glimmer of hope: What if something else could check the growth of population?
I like this glimmer of hope, faint though it may be. So I’ve added a similarly hopeful qualification to my law, yielding an improved version of The Law of Conservation of Frustration:
If nothing but frustration can check the growth of our demands, then whenever we improve a process, we will increase our demands on the process until we are exactly as frustrated as before.
The qualification encourages us to ask: What factors other than frustration might check the growth of our demands?
I can think of several candidate factors, all interrelated. The first is measurement. What if, in addition to our frustration, we also had data to tell us that we’re twice as fast as we were two years ago, and we ship one less than half of the defects? Then our improvements would be more visible. We would know that we are making gains.
Another candidate factor is relationships. If we can improve our relationships with our customers, if we can increase our trust in each other’s abilities and intentions, we may be able to replace demands with conversations and negotiations.
A third factor is commitments. If we steadfastly commit only to what we can reasonably deliver, we will more often deliver on our commitments. This will create better working relationships with at least some of our customers.
Measurement, trusting relationships, and reasonable commitments. What other possibilities are there? What other things can we do to keep demands from overwhelming our awareness of our improvements?
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It may (should) be a fallacy that “nothing but frustration can check the growth of our demands”, because that is simply a description of addictive
behavior.
If you think about it, demands should reasonably be for conditions that can be satisfied. If a demand is for something that can never, in the nature of the case, be satisfied, there is no particular reason to try. So the achievement of a satisfying condition should be sufficient.
Or, if I get everything I asked for, I should be happy and shut up for a while. (Often, I do. I’m still driving a 1990 Dodge minivan. It still isn’t a Suburban, but it’s pretty close to what I need.)
OK, maybe we’re not talking about human intelligences, but things collective that behave more like economies. Does satisfaction ever obtain? I say it does. We can indeed achieve saturation of demand - and then prices fall.
Can this apply to a process? Why not? Why can’t we get to the point with a process that we’re satisfied that it performs what it was intended to perform? Actually, I think there are many examples in business of processes that people are sufficently satisfied with to make them no mind. But (precisely!) we don’t notice them. It’s often only when satisfaction no longer obtains that they come under notice.
It could be that your “Law of Conservation of Frustration” (a nonetheless reasonable observation of behavior) appears to apply because there are many activities afoot today about which people exhibit some measure of addictive behavior.
My two bucks, worth more like 2 cents, and probably not very satisfying.