Stop weighing the pig

A story is told of a rural 4H club that held a summer competition to see who can increase the weight of a pig over the course of 3 months. Participants had their selected pig weighed in at the local 4H clubhouse and the beginning weight posted. Then they were challenged to fatten the pig as much as possible in the next 90 days.

At the final weigh in, dozens of pigs and their owners showed up, most of them showed only a modest amount of gain. However, one pig was enormous and had gained an amazing amount of weight. He was awarded the prize.

Some of the lesser pig owners were curious how this could have happened. They recounted their special feeding program which turned out to not be much different from the prize winner. They looked at their sheets they had carefully prepared to monitor progress and the daily weight entries that showed slow but continuous progress.

The prize winner didn’t have such a chart and didn’t bother to continuously track the weight.

It was discovered the other entrants would daily walk their pigs to the nearby 4H clubhouse scales to access their progress. This exercise was their downfall. The prize winner just had his pig laze around and eat. After all, the only weigh-in that mattered was the final one.

I can remember being called away from a project on a regularly scheduled basis just to “weigh in” on project status. It was rare that anything surprising was uncovered. Usually any issues had already been surfaced and addressed by the area owners, so these meetings mostly served to check boxes, which in most instances could have easily been done with an email, text of phone call.

When I represented products that helped people work differently, I would often open the conversation with, “At most companies, there is a limit that an employee can spend before having to get their manager’s approval. What is that amount here?” Most organizations would offer a $50 or $100 number. And I would confirm that such limits make sense.

Then I would ask them, “How many of you can schedule a one hour meeting with six other co-workers without getting management approval?” As I watch them ponder this, I could see the penny drop.

I once saw an application that was attached to your calendar and as you scheduled a meeting, it would calculate and show on the calendar, using company averages, the company cost of the employees being scheduled. Add a person, the price goes up. Go from 60 minutes to 30 minutes, the price drops by half. When you see the actual cost, you can compare it against the value.

There are times when weighing the pig is necessary, but I would challenge you, before you call your next weigh-in meeting consider:

(1) Is it entirely necessary?

(2) Who, at a minimum, needs to be there?

(3) How quickly or efficiently can we get this done?