It appears that great myth ‘more with less’ is in circulation so I thought I’d give you tools to help you manage expectations.
The weasel of all slippery phrases is no stranger to anyone who worked in local government around the 2007 financial crisis. Budgets across the board were cut but nobody really wanted to face up to reality.
I recall an SLT request that a long list of stories be included in the residents’ magazine.
It was pointed out that they had cut this publication at the last meeting.
What ‘more for less’ actually is is a hope that the cuts won’t have an impact. Reader, they will and do.
Why ‘more with less’ is a myth
With the amazing power of AI I’ve produced this image.
Visually, this shows three machines that between them produce 15 widgets a week. If two of them are removed you are left with one machine that produces five widgets a week.
Breaking: if you remove capacity you have less capacity.
Yes, you can cut some corners and with experience do things faster but fundamentally there is no escape from mathematics. One machine will produce less than three.
But how to push back at this?
Why ‘less with less’ is the argument to make
Your task is to be realistic.
With less capacity, five things can be done with one member of staff instead of 15 things produced by three.
I can tell you this with absolute certainty with a story to illustrate it.
When I started in local government there was six full time members of staff in the team. After about 12-months the head of comms left was not replaced and the other members of staff filtered out of the door too. For a spell, I was effectively left to do the work of six. Being quite junior I looked forward to the challenge of learning. However, what this meant in practice was if I worked until midnight five days a week I could go backwards at a slightly more acceptable way.
Looking back, the lesson it taught me was to manage upwards and adjust expectations.
Why ‘make AI do it’ isn’t an argument to make
Right now, it feels like AI is sometimes seen as a wonderful cure all. We’re at the edge of the Gartner hype cycle where we are working out how to make this new tool work. We are in 1997 before the dot com bubble rather than ten years later where it’s clear that a handful of web tools are really useful and others have fallen by the side of the path.
What less with less actually looks like
The only way that less with less can be made to work in an organisation with sky high expectations is to ask SLT to make a choice of where they are prepared to cut back.
What are the organisations priorities?
I’ll give you a tip here. An organisation that has 30 priorities has no priorities at all.
If everything is a priority nothing is.
Senior people need to see that list and work out for themselves what’s most important. What’s the top five? What’s the gold, silver and bronze? Gold gets done to a gold standard. Silver gets reduced support while bronze gets a minimum.
Without this senior buy in you will be trapped in an unsustainable hamster wheel destined to fail because one machine can only ever make five widgets a week.
Creative commons credit: Classroom by Fotothek.
I deliver training to help you make sense of the changing landscape ESSENTIAL AI FOR PUBLIC SECTOR COMMS, ESSENTIAL COMMS SKILLS BOOSTER, ESSENTIAL MEDIA RELATIONS and ESSENTIAL VIDEO SKILLS REBOOTED.