Failure Demand

No organisation is completely free of Failure Demand. It’s a hidden productivity killer and if you can address it then you will free up time and treasure to focus on the things that matter.

The easiest way to understand Failure Demand is to imagine an Emergency Department at a hospital. Most EDs struggle with resources, especially at this time of year in the Northern hemisphere.

The lack of resourcing leads to overwork and overwhelm which leads to mistakes. Those mistakes need to be rectified which is drain on resources which leads to more mistakes being made which leads to… You get the idea!

If not identified, corrected and fixed then Failure Demand can lead to an Emergency Department collapsing. Whilst in a hospital, this is very obvious. No free beds means ambulances stacking outside waiting to offload, it leads to death.

It’s (hopefully) not so clear in your workplace but it’s still a pervasive and insidious problem.

Time spent correcting mistakes is the very definition of Failure Demand. But sometimes the mistakes aren’t obvious. Sometimes it is a more subtle failure of process.

On Wednesday afternoon I was engaged in an activity that was the direct result of Failure Demand.

We engaged a contractor to make some changes to one of our websites. The contractor had delivered an incredibly sub-par piece of work and, unbelievably, had pushed it live. This meant I had to clear my calendar and correct the work. This shifted other work to other days and locked me into 90 minutes of low leverage activity.

Instead of doing something high leverage on my list, I was fixing a WordPress dumpster fire.

We often find ourselves fighting fires at work. That is almost always a result of Failure Demand. It’s an obvious truism that it’s better that fires don’t start rather than we spend time and effort putting them out.

Fire fighting is not strategic, it’s not even tactical, it’s reactive. It sometimes needs doing. You can’t stop all fires starting. But if it’s all that you are doing then you are not moving anything forwards. You’re standing still which is the same as a slow decline.

The problem with fixing Failure Demand is that it requires resources. This leads to a paradox. If you have the money available then it can be tempting to “break glass in case of emergency” and add more people but you then hit against one of my favourite maxims: If you add more people to chaos then you just get more chaos.

It may well be that more people is the solution, but, chances are, there are a lot of other things you can do first.

Consultants will throw around terms such as “Root Cause Analysis” or "Critical Paths” which are all fancy ways of saying “What’s the actual problem here?”.

Is it a process issue? A product issue? A people issue? You get the idea…

Investing time to work this out has to happen.

Hint: It’s almost always a process issue.

I use the term process fairly loosely. This doesn’t necessarily mean production lines or tech. It can often be as basic as “Does everybody know what everyone is meant to be doing and who is responsible for what?”

Looking back to Wednesday, the failure was severalfold:

1. Whose job was it to tell the contractor to not push anything live before it had been signed off?
2. Who communicated our quality bar and expectations to the contractor?
3. Which named person’s job was it to check the work before it was put live?

The answer to all of the above in this instance was “Ummm… I think X might have been doing that?”

We didn’t need more contractors or more quality checkers. We needed a better process for commissioning the work.

Looping back to the hospital example above, again, a tempting solution would be to hire a lot more nurses and doctors. But another approach would be to examine the actual cause of the mistakes. Scott J et al (2010) did exactly this and they identified that one of the causes of Failure Demand was the maladministration of medications during drug rounds because the medical staff doing the rounds were being distracted.

The solution? Beautifully simple. Staff doing drug rounds should wear a brightly coloured bib informing other staff and patients that they are doing critical work and are not to be interrupted.

The first stage of fixing a problem is admitting you have one. You definitely have Failure Demand in your organisation. Time spent identifying it and fixing it will pay itself back in spades.