The Hair Dryer Was the Final Straw, Or Teach Your Teenager Time Management Skills

My neighbor is expanding their 100-year-old house, and it got me thinking.

What happens if you add a giant new kitchen and family room, anticipating extra TVs, gaming systems, charging stations, and other modern electrical demands, but never upgrade the electrical panel?

My house is also over 100 years old, and I’m pretty sure that if we hadn’t upgraded the electrical panel when we moved in, running the microwave during the Super Bowl would black out the first floor.

Add a teenager trying to panic-submit an essay 6 minutes before the deadline while someone else fires up a hair dryer, and you can probably imagine the result.

Organizations work the same way.

A company can operate for years with the same processes, systems, and structure if everything stays relatively stable. But once the organization starts growing or changing, the underlying infrastructure has to grow along with it.

When the infrastructure doesn’t grow with the organization, folks will start creating mini-processes and workarounds (think: extra spreadsheets or manual tracking lists).

Or they start skipping parts entirely, like not documenting their work, because there just isn’t time anymore.

In my experience, this is not because anyone is lazy or incompetent. It’s because they want to do a good job. They will do what they can with the resources they have to keep things moving.

The problem is that eventually, the organization ends up with not only unsustainable workarounds, but also the degradation of processes that used to work well.

It’s like trying to plug modern technological devices into outlets designed for a time when a lamp and a radio were the pinnacle of technology. You basically end up with a hot mess.

It’s easy for leadership to miss how strained the system is until it stretches beyond capacity and breaks. After all, one extra spreadsheet here or there isn’t necessarily something to flag by itself.

But, add LOTS of extra spreadsheets and at some point the wires will start sparking.

It’s much easier to upgrade the electrical panel before that happens (I mean, have you seen the cost of emergency electrician visits?), so I’ll leave you with this question:

As you think about your own organization, ask yourself this: if you doubled in size tomorrow, which area would have a power blackout first?

The answer can tell you a lot about where your infrastructure needs attention.

Remember, this is all fixable. I’m ready to chat whenever you are.