Human Systems Cost Less and Are Less Brittle

I’d like to introduce a solution-building philosophy I call "human systems" and explain how it saves time and money while delivering solutions that are more widely adopted and more resilient to future change.

This philosophy has been a key tool in my project rescue career.

I see the role of a system as removing the "air gaps" between humans or enabling them to collaborate more effectively and efficiently.

This contrasts with many of my contemporaries, who view a system as a replacement for a human or for certain human tasks.

While both approaches lead to some improvements, their initial focus is very different, resulting in very different outcomes.

In a traditional project, we spend an inordinate amount of time dissecting the current job of the people whose roles we’re trying to transform. We break down each step into sub-steps and document the patterns, rules, and standards those humans use to get the job done. We do this because we're trying to get the system to do everything instead of the human, and all of this needs to be enshrined in code.

I began thinking about alternatives to this approach when I realized that most of a project's cost and time was spent analyzing, documenting, agreeing, signing off, coding (or configuring), and then testing every possible case. I wondered why we didn't just continue leaving the rules to the humans.

The second driver for finding an alternative was that these systems were extremely brittle. In reality, the work environment in most businesses is fluid—it’s not static. Small details about how work flows through an organization change over time. When every detail is enshrined in code, every one of these changes requires a code update. Apart from being expensive, the administrative burden of managing these updates was prohibitive. In theory, each change was small, but because time passed between initial development and each update, new people had to get their heads around all the rules again, make the changes, and ensure they hadn’t broken anything.

In contrast, a human system continues to rely on humans to make judgment calls and simply provides them with hyper-streamlined tools to capture, track, and collaborate on tasks. This makes work more visible and, ultimately, more efficient.

From 2012 to 2017, I was responsible for delivering around 200 of these solutions for 50 clients across government, corporate, and start-up sectors.

I’d estimate that over 50%—probably more—consisted of a form with data validation, a dashboard coordinated by one person, and mechanisms (email and SMS) for individual dashboard items to be passed between people, along with a simple way to feed results into a downstream system.

Most importantly, the "passing from person to person" was at the discretion and direction of the coordinator—not controlled by complex system rules.

We typically had a working solution within the first month, and often that was good enough to continue with. Almost all projects were completed within two months, with only a few edge cases taking longer.

The systems were extremely resilient to change because, apart from some basic data validation, they left decisions up to the humans—particularly the coordinator of each dashboard or process.

There’s also a huge hidden benefit: lowering the average cost of implementing solutions. This makes it financially viable to build solutions in situations where it was previously cost-prohibitive. The result? Many more business processes get improved, making a massive positive difference to the organization as a whole.

This is a really simple approach to take advantage of—I highly recommend giving it a try one day. If you’re interested in why traditional business process mapping is often a waste of time, I covered that in more detail here.

How do you see this playing out in your organization?

Reply and share: Have you worked with a system that was too rigid? How did it impact your workflow?

Andrew Walker
Technology consulting for charities
https://www.linkedin.com/in/andrew-walker-the-impatient-futurist/

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