1785, France is on edge, the French Revolution will break out in 4 years. A small gunsmith is demonstrating his method for making guns. Honore Blanc took apart ten guns and put them in a bag and then pulled out random pieces of the guns and remade a new gun from parts of other guns.
This doesn’t sound very impressive, but it was to have a huge impact on the world.
Blanc was inspired by French artillerists who created a way to standardise cannon barrels and shells. Blanc attempted to do the same with the gun. Instead of making each gun by hand and adjusting every piece of it to work for that specific gun, he would make patterns that he would copy and fit a reference gun so that all the parts were uniform.
This method reduced and nearly removed variation between guns. It made the gun more consistent and improved manufacturing speed, costs, and repairability.
But wouldn’t you know it, his fellow gunsmiths ignored his idea, they were afraid that the new process would destroy their business and livelihoods.
One man that was in the crowd at the presentation and saw the power of interchangeable parts was Thomas Jefferson, the future third president of the United States. He was Ambassador to France at the time and thought it was impotant for the US Foreign Secretary John Jay to find out. Jefferson wrote Jay a letter,
“An improvement is made here in the construction of the musket which it may be interesting to Congress to know. It consists in the making every part of them so exactly alike that what belongs to any one may be used for every one musket in the magazine … The advantages of this, when arms need repair, are evident.”
How can a pre-french revolution gunsmith that no one has heard of help you improve your outcomes?
Friction
Friction is all around us. In many processes you want to reduce and if you can remove friction. This helps make the process easier.
If every gun is different and it gets damaged then you need to make a specific part to replace the broken part, you can just swap it out with another part. This adds cost and complexity to the process. Great for the gunsmiths, bad for the person wanting to use the gun.
Think about the processes in your team, then in your business unit, then in your company, how close are they? Should they be the same in some cases? Should they be different?
Switch
If you are doing roughly the same thing but with different clients, the process should be the same so team members can swap between clients as the need arises without much switching costs.
If there is a huge difference in the process between clients then the team members are going to have to unlearn one system and learn a new system before they can be operational.
Adding in complexity for the same task to be handled in more than one way makes it harder for your team to be effective. It increases cognitive load to thinking about how to do something rather than thinking about better ways to do it.
Friction Can Be Good
You shouldn’t make everything easy. Some things you want to discourage so you want to increase the friction to make it harder for people to do them.
Putting treats out of sight and out of reach means that you will be less likely to eat them.
Carrying cash and using that to buy things lowers your spending rather than using the card. And now with paywave and touchless payment systems, there is even less friction to buy things, you don’t even have to enter a pin or sign anything.
- Can you reduce switching costs in your processes?
- Can you remove friction?
- Should you add friction to a process?
Luke McMeeken-Ruscoe 