The Holiday Drainpipes

When I was a child our annual holiday was always to the same place. It is a trip now so short as to be a afternoon run out, but then it was a huge undertaking (or so it seemed to me as a child) and on the roads of the late 1950’s and 60’s, a journey several hours in duration.

Our holiday home was on the seafront, although the beach and sea were hidden by a large sea wall. It was a wooden chalet, on stilts to prevent flooding on the highest tide days. Ever present was the smell of sun, damp, food, sun tan lotion, activity and people. I can still remember, after all these years, lying awake at night listening to the combination of late night strollers and the lapping sea.

It was both exciting and boring. The fun of getting to the beach, building sand castles, braving the cold sea, fishing for crabs and facing the waves as they leapt the sea wall at high tide was something I waited for all year. Great experiences. And then the time with my mother’s extended family, all in different chalets nearby. All of them nice, all caring and all very grown up. They did adult things, like talking, relaxing. Time away from work meant not rushing, not being stressed. As one of the few sons in the extended family, I guess I was naturally a bit different from the flocks of girls, sisters, cousins, and so sometimes found myself alone, entertaining myself.

Even at that young age I liked to know how things worked and a house on stilts meant exploring underneath. What to someone else was a mass of pipes, wires, connections and junctions, to me was a fascinating puzzle to solve. Why was it laid out like this? What went where and why? So, alongside the usual daily holiday routine, I discovered how my house worked.

One of my aunties found this hilarious. What was I doing scrabbling around down there? What a funny boy I was! What was so interesting about how the piping worked? I was good material for her light-hearted jokes and banter.

I sometimes wonder about those summer adventures. Maybe with other guidance I might have ended up as an architect or something in building design. I certainly love buildings and good structural design. As it was, I went toward furniture design, and later into management training and organisation change. Now I find myself looking hard at organisations, seeking to understand how things get done, why the processes are performed the way they are. It doesn’t feel a million miles from lying on my back in the cool summer sand studying those pipes and wires.

And I still get humoured, ‘just accept it, that’s the way it works round here’. The DNA and the organisation design – ‘the piping’ – of the business can be archaic, leaky and uneconomical, but ‘it works, so let’s not look there and certainly not change it; too expensive, other things are a priority’. Dripping taps are not a real problem. Yet the best leaders do just that. They look, they poke about, they pull pipes apart and reconnect them in different ways. They are willing, interested and demanding about how the business functions; they put as much attention internally, as externally to customers and the market place. Many organisations I work with find this difficult, often handing responsibility for major internal change to external ‘experts’. I hasten caution here, not because that expertise is not important, but because a review of organisation design or process, and the potential impact on the company culture, the DNA, remains the responsibility of the executive leaders.

Many leaders find it hard to find time, and some may lack inclination, to look at the pipes and wiring of their business. Perhaps they fear a need to strip the lot out and start again. Perhaps though, just lying in the cool sand looking will be enough. It’s amazing what you can spot and potentially rearrange for efficiency and effectiveness, when you take the time to look.

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