Clear the Clutter!

The onset of spring, an upcoming neighborhood garage sale, a spell of bad weather and the inevitable accumulations from 25 years in our family home brought it on; it was time to clear the clutter. While our living quarters were easily navigable and presentable, recesses had become the resting place of unused clothing, out-of-date publications, extinct electronic paraphernalia, long dormant files and our daughters’ childhood collections, including CDs, rocks, seashells and Beanie Babies. (Doesn’t anyone with kids in the ‘90’s still have some around?) Over the course of sometimes mindless sorting and pitching, I got to thinking about the occasional need to “clear the clutter” in our organizations and work lives as well.

As with clutter in our homes and personal lives, organizational and work life clutter is distracting, unproductive and annoying. It clouds our vision and priorities, limits focus on what matters and detracts from our wellbeing.

Here are forms of clutter that I’ve witnessed in organizations and work lives:

• Too many goals and priorities – Research reveals that on average only about half of employees can state their organization’s strategic goals or priorities. Research also reveals that no matter how thorough the communication, a main reason is that there are too many goals and priorities. Most of us have learned that humans are taxed if expected to remember more than four or five items from a list, especially for any length of time.

What percentage of your organization can state its strategic goals and priorities? How could it near 100%?

• Lack of focus – Earlier this year McDonald’s and Chipotle de-cluttered their menus by eliminating nearly a fourth of menu options. Both realized that their growing and increasingly complicated menus were confusing customers and reducing speed – not a good situation when in the “fast food” business. Lack of focus obviously results in too many goals and priorities, and also contributes to additional organizational handicaps including overly long “to-do” lists, not prioritizing tasks,    misidentification of driving forces or root causes, and a general lack of direction. When a primary purpose or direction is unclear, everything else is at risk including alignment of structure, staffing and performance management.

How can you help increase focus in your organization and work?

• Outdated measures – If it is challenging to focus on too many goals and priorities, it is doubly so when also needing to focus on performance measures that are attached to them. Eliminate measures of marginal use, or at least emphasize only the truly critical. Just as for airplane cockpits, racecars and other high-performance contexts, the most critical measures and indicators should be positioned to get maximum attention.

What outdated measures can you dispense with, or at least de-emphasize?

• “Baggage” – We jettisoned overly worn and useless baggage from space in our home that could be put to better use. I can remember many meetings with client factions where “baggage” of a different kind stalled progress. In several projects with academic and healthcare institutions, sour relations between professors or doctors and administrators dozens of years earlier were still roadblocks to moving forward, even though the principal combatants were long gone.

What baggage in your organization no longer serves a purpose (and probably never did?)

• Too many, or out-dated policies and procedures – I still remember culling the policy “No expectorating” (no spitting) from an early employer’s thick policy manual; it was a remnant from the days when tobacco-chewing was popular there, and by that time was just common sense (especially in a food-handling operation!)

Which are the truly essential policies and procedures in your organization, and which are robbing their time, attention, adaptability and creativity?

• Cluttered value chains and processes – “Lean” manufacturing and its predecessors focus here, the principles being to define value from the customer’s perspective and to eliminate or resign processes that do not maximize value.

What operations in your organization or work are candidates for the “lean” treatment?

• Work space clutter – This might be easiest for some to tackle and is most similar to home de-cluttering. Basic steps include discerning what still serves a purpose, digitizing paper, implementing regular organizing schemes and exercising the discipline to follow them.

Marie Kondo’s book “The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up” became our guide for de-cluttering our home; her recommendation to ask about everything: “Does this spark joy?” became our mantra. Adapting that principle to our work lives and organizations, perhaps our mantra should be” “Does this serve a valuable purpose?” Another of Kondo’s core principles is to not invest in any storage space, since what we already have is likely sufficient. We can adapt that for our purposes here as well; it may be that we already posses sufficient time, energy and resources to achieve what we need to once we de-clutter.

“Clear the decks” is still a common call to action aboard ship, in preparation for battle, anticipated turbulence or execution of challenging maneuvers. We are all still preparing for battle, anticipating turbulence and attempting challenging maneuvers in some fashion, so if not literally “clearing the deck” there are likely opportunities to clear the clutter. Fair winds!

(You might enjoy a sister article from our archives: “Clear The Deck” at http://archive.constantcontact.com/fs138/1102441252813/archive/1113942359102.html)

“The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t.”

– Marie Kondo

“Clutter is not just physical stuff. It’s old ideas, toxic relationships and bad habits. Clutter is anything that does not support your better self.” 

– Eleanor Brown

“The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak.”

– Hans Hoffmann (American abstract expressionist painter)