Layering Your Problems In

How to cook a leg of lamb

When my wife cooks a leg of lamb she asks me to cut off the last 7 inches – the shank.

Cutting the last few inches off a leg of lamb is not easy.  It requires a hacksaw and good deal of gusto.  By the time the shank has gone, the kitchen looks like a butcher’s shop and I need a sit down.

I once asked my wife why I have to saw off the last 7 inches.  She told me that it helps the lamb cook.  Besides which, her mother always did it that way and the lamb shanks are tasty.

The dinner party

The other evening we entertained my parents-in-law.  Roast lamb.  I got out the hacksaw and started my Sweeney Todd impersonation.  My mother in law watched me intently and when I had finished she said to me:

“Why are you doing that, Duckie?”

I explained that it made the meat taste better.  She looked at me in a rather bemused fashion, then told me that my father-in-law used to do the same thing 40 years ago.  Their oven was too small to take the whole leg.

The art of layering

Cutting the end off a leg of lamb is layering.  Adding one activity on top of another because the first one doesn’t quite work.  Layering in and of itself isn’t a bad thing. But layering is cursed. The curse is that we do it without question.  We just carry on, with no time to wonder why.

Then as time goes on, things change and layers get placed upon layers.

• We freeze the lamb shanks to stop them going off
• We invest in microwaves to defrost them quickly
• We buy special microwave cleaner
• We keep the cleaning materials in order so they are easy to find…

Every individual layer makes sense, until you start asking why.

Layering in organisations

What happens in my kitchen is nothing compared to what happens in our workplaces.  They are so big and complex it is hard to see the wood from the trees:

• We take paper copies of documents because the system doesn’t store the information
• We invest in filing cabinets to store the paper copies
• The filing system gets outsourced to a document management company to save space
• We audit the document management company to make sure they are legally compliant…

We set up Q.C. functions to make sure that we apply the layers properly.  We employ people whose whole job is to organise and synchronise the layers.  They never question why.  Their entire reason for being is to maintain the layers.  It pays their mortgages and puts bread on their tables.

We bake the layers in.

It is hard to de-layer

It might be easy to walk into an organisation and point at all the layers.  They look like a nice soft pile of “cost reduction opportunities”.  Just don’t be too surprised when you run into king sized pushback.  The chief layer maintainer — a.k.a. “cost reduction opportunity” — has a family to support.

Until you find him something else to do. Something interesting and productive.  Removing the layers will always be a challenge.

Post Script:

Please note that:

1. That was an apocryphal story and my wife never asks me to do anything pointless.  Never.
2. My wife reads my posts occasionally.