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18_The Volume Trap: Why Growing Bigger Can Make You Deaf

Growth without a mechanism to empower people, breeds silence.

BUSINESS & LEAN MANAGEMENT

Waleed Radwan

7/26/20265 min read

The day started with Rocky staring at his phone for the fourth time in ten minutes.

Still no reply to the message he'd rewritten four times and finally sent to the GM two days ago. It had been silently sitting in his “Sent” mailbox ever since.

Then, just as Sage walked into the break room, Rocky's phone buzzed with a notification.

He read it once. Then again. His eyebrows shot up.

“Sage. He replied.”

“And?”

Rocky turned the screen around. The GM hadn't just responded….. he actually asked for a meeting. Today ! With Sage, Rocky, and the entire leadership team.

By 10 a.m., they were all seated in the boardroom : Dashley, Deckson, Pristine, NoNo, Remix, and even Birdie, hovering near the door as usual.

The GM didn't waste time. “I read your message twice,” he told Rocky. “You were right. Deprioritizing the frontline ideas system without a word to the team that built it… that was a mistake. There were reasons for that, but let’s cut it short. Here's what I want instead: I want this running in all three plants. Not just here.”

The room lit up. Rocky looked ready to celebrate.

Sage didn't.

“Big thanks, really, and great work done by the team,” Sage said carefully. “But before we celebrate — can I ask one question? What exactly are we scaling?”

The GM blinked. Then replied, “The system. The Gemba walks. The suggestion process. All of it.”

“That's the easy part,” Sage said. “Anyone can copy a checklist. What's harder to copy is what made the checklist work in the first place.”

Now, everyone in the room was confused. Especially Rocky.

THE VOLUME PROBLEM

“Right now,” Sage continued, “when Khalid has an idea, he tells Rocky. Rocky brings it to me. I bring it to this room. Five people. One hop, and the frontline reaches the top. Simple as that.”

He paused, then continued.

“Now multiply that by three plants. Three hundred people. Suddenly Khalid's voice has to travel through a supervisor, a shift manager, a plant lead ….. before it even reaches someone in this room. The bigger we get, the more layers we add, and the quieter the frontline becomes. That's exactly what turned people into the Silent Majority in the first place…. just at a bigger scale. Growth doesn't automatically amplify voice. Without a mechanism, it usually muffles it.”

Deckson frowned. “So scaling makes us worse at listening?”

“Exactly,” Sage said. “John Kotter, who has spent decades studying corporate transformation, found that most change efforts that look successful in year one, quietly unravel once they try to spread beyond the original team. That’s because the behaviors got copied, but the mechanism that produced those behaviors didn't.”

This got Rocky thinking. Maybe Sage is right.

We can implement a super detailed system, which only intimidates our people and adds layers of complexity, permissions and approvals. Eventually …..the good ideas get buried ……. and so do the real urgent problems!

Rocky started remembering his past jobs. In his previous work experience, he saw large companies with so many layers of management. He also worked with other big companies, but they had a somewhat flat organization structure. And indeed Sage is right. Hiring layers of smart experienced managers, although can add value, but also makes top management almost deaf …. unable to listen to real issues at the lower levels. And then what gets discussed in meeting rooms in the head office is rarely the real pain at the shopfloor. It’s whatever got filtered, processed and remixed throughout these layers. We might sit at the top of the organization embracing values of empowerment and psychological safety… but that’s only on our powerpoint slides ….. where in reality, it’s far from what people really experience at lower levels.

The Plant That Actually Solved This

“Let me tell you a real story,” Sage said. “In 1984, General Motors had a plant in Fremont, California. By GM's own admission, it was the worst-performing plant in the company. Absenteeism. Sabotage. A workforce that had completely checked out.”

“Sounds familiar,” Rocky muttered, glancing at Dashley.

“GM shut it down,” Sage continued. “Then, instead of walking away, they partnered with Toyota to reopen it as NUMMI — same building, largely the same unionized workforce. Toyota didn't just teach them 5S and kanban. They installed something called the Andon cord……. a physical cord running above every workstation that gave any worker, at any level, the right to stop the entire production line the moment they spotted a defect.”

Pristine's eyes widened. “Any worker? Not just supervisors?”

“Any worker,” Sage confirmed. “That's the part everyone forgets. It wasn't a suggestion box. It was a formal, structural right to disagree, built into the line itself - not dependent on someone's courage that day. Within two years, quality and productivity at NUMMI matched Toyota's best plants in Japan. Same American workforce that GM had already written off.”

Rocky went quiet for a second. “Grandma would've liked that one,” he said eventually. “She always says : The lookout person on the ship sees the iceberg first… but only if the captain gave him a horn, instead of just a good pair of binoculars.”

Rocky again started pondering on Andon cords, that came from the Toyota culture. It isn't just a shopfloor concept, he thought. The same principle shows up wherever frontline people are closest to the truth: A support agent needs to be empowered to pause a rollout the moment defects arise. A nurse must be able to trigger a rapid-response alert without waiting for a doctor's sign-off. A junior consultant should be able to flag a flawed client deliverable before it’s sent. A staff member should be able to disagree and suggest an alternative solution to a chronic issue.

The cord looks different in every industry…. but the right it protects is the same: shout out when you see a problem. Stop the process the moment someone closest to the work sees a problem. No permission required.

Structure, Not Just Intent

“So the mechanism has to travel with the message,” NoNo said slowly, “not just get announced.”

“Right,” Sage said. “Ray Dalio writes about something similar in his book : Principles. It’s what he calls an Idea Meritocracy. Not ‘everyone gets a vote,’ and not ‘the loudest voice wins,’ but a structure where disagreement is believability-weighted and built into the process. …. And …. just to explain the word : Believability-weighted …..this is just Ray Dalio’s terminology. What he means is that the opinion of someone who's been right before, or who's closest to the problem, simply counts for more than a guess from someone who isn't.

Thus, a good idea from the factory floor doesn't need a hero sending a perfectly worded message at midnight just to survive.”

Sage was eargerly looking for a way to avoid layers of approvals, and improve psychological safety.

He turned to the GM. “Last week, one person had to rewrite a message four times and hope it landed right. If we scale to three plants without fixing that, we're not scaling a culture. We're scaling a coin flip.”

The GM went quiet for a moment. Then nodded slowly. “So what do we build instead?”

Sage smiled. “That's next week's question. Let this team work on it first to get the details, and suggest a solution that will really work.”

Sage turned to the team, “Team, let’s go find one place, in one plant, where a good idea already died somewhere in the layers between the floor and this room. Just one. Don't fix it yet. Let’s just find it. Then let’s discuss the real reasons for why it died off.”

As the meeting broke up, Birdie lingered a moment too long by the door… long enough for Rocky to notice.

“Sage,” Rocky said quietly once the room emptied, “if we build anything similar to an andon cord .… who do you think is going to be first in line to cut it?”

Sage's eyes had that familiar gleam.

“Someone in that room already knows the answer,” he said. “And I don't think it's who you'd expect.”

#MrSage #Leadership #BusinessExcellence #LeanThinking #TOC #ContinuousImprovement #Coaching #RespectforPeople #WorkplaceWisdom #ScalingChange #NUMMI

18_The Volume Trap: Why Growing Bigger Can Make You Deaf

Photo from PsychSafety.com