Autonomous Transformation

CHAPTER 11Broken Systems

The Hedberg Strategy

Mitch Hedberg, a beloved comedian taken from the world too soon, once said, “If you find yourself lost in the woods, f%&! it, build a house. ‘Well, I was lost but now I live here! I have severely improved my predicament.’”

Many of us have met organizational leaders who employ the Hedberg strategy. The combination of people, process, and systems in which they find themselves could be equated to being lost in the woods. Rather than work their way back out of the woods, they build a house. They grow comfortable with the lack of vision, the disjointed culture, and the poor quality of the results stemming from their team or organization. Then they decorate, trimming inefficiencies and adding incremental value from within a broken system. They may even get bonuses and promotions. The short‐term loss from the employment of this strategy is wasted human and organizational potential. The long‐term loss is the risk of the organization becoming defunct or reaching an existential crisis that requires a top‐to‐bottom redesign and restructuring of the whole organization.

A Broken System

The prevailing process by which most information or operational technologies intake projects from the rest of their organizations is focused on use cases and problems. This is then transformed into requirements that become the basis for finding an adequate vendor or designing and building a solution. When a given solution introduces a new problem, a new set ...