Schrodinger’s Answer

Schrodinger’s Answer

Let me set the scene:

I’m in front of a whiteboard in a generic conference room in one of the industrial parks that sit in a ring in the outer suburbs around Melbourne.

Because I am at the whiteboard, I’m facing the windows that look out on to the concrete hardstand that surrounds the warehouse, whilst the other ten people in the room are facing me. Throughout the day I avoid the impulse to flinch as large trucks swing disturbing close to the conference room as they manoeuvre in their comings and goings.

In my head there’s a taxi meter running. I’ve got a lot of experienced people in the room for the day. The cost of these people sitting here exceeds whatever they are paying for my time.  The meter is spinning wildly as I engage with this group to understand their business processes

(There is a depressingly familiar pattern in these set-ups: typically, eight of the participants will be senior managers – mainly male – and two of them will be lower-level staff – normally women - who have been grudging invited. You can guess which group best understands how things work and gives the greatest value during the day.)

I will have started the day with ‘practised naivety’. This is part of the craft.

I’ll intentionally ask questions as if I know nothing about the processes, forcing people to explain the obvious. Statements like “So you call that a Quote?”, “Is that a Statement or an Invoice?”. This is to give everyone in the room permission to raise questions. It’s one thing to say to a room “there’s no such thing as a stupid question” and another to demonstrate it in practice.

During the day my questions during the day have got progressively sharper. No-one still thinks I’m an idiot. We have followed a straight-forward path as we have run through their business processes. That’s all good, I’m getting what I need to document their flows. Maybe we’ve identified some places where their practises add special value and some sharp edges that everyone agrees could be improved.  

At times during the day, I have shown some excitement. Whiteboard work is performative. You want to speed things up, slow things down and generally show some colour and motion. A wise person once taught me that if you can find an excuse to jump excitedly on to a Boardroom table then your name will never be forgotten at that company.

But it’s 4pm and I’m starting to get worried.  The taxi meter in my head clocked over $10k after lunch and is now heading rapidly toward $20k. This has been an expensive way to educate me.

Then it happens. I ask a seeming simple question. Something like “So when we process the final invoice payment that’s the end of the sales process?” On the right side of the room someone is nodding their head confidently and says “Yes!”. On the left side of the room someone else is shaking their head in a determined fashion and says “No!”  

Boom!

I’m excited, I’ve got what I came for – Schrodinger’s Answer.  The question that one half of the business thinks has an obvious ‘No’ answer, while the other half is convinced it’s ‘Yes’.

I don’t know ‘How’ yet, but that contradiction has paid for the day. $20k is a cheap price if you’ve uncovered one of the hidden fault lines in a business.

Both answers will be correct, or at least both contain a truth. Gold veins run up fault lines and a Schrodinger’s Answer is the glint on the surface that speaks of the motherload below. I know that a lot of time is going to be spent mining that crack.  

Sometimes the fault line will be an Old School vs New Blood thing; the people who came up in the business believing something different to those who have come from the outside.

Sometimes it will be Boots vs Suits. The people on the floor know how things actually work, the people looking down from the mezzanine windows know how they need to work.

Whatever the cause this split will be driving disfunction in the business. Business processes, data, reports will all be compromised as they try to paper over ever present cracks.

I’m being paid to help implement a new system, not solve fundamental business issues, but the last thing we want to do is entrench that disfunction in the new system. You can’t automate a contradiction. Many a system implementation has tried and failed.

It might have been a long day – but if we’ve gotten something like this up onto the whiteboard on day one then I’ve earned my keep.  

A Schrodinger Answer is my excuse to jump up on the conference room table.