A few weeks ago I was forwarded a link to this TED Talk by Rory Sutherland:
It’s called “Sweat the small stuff”, and describes how large corporations are often disconnected with what actually happens on the ground. Business leaders expect the world to behave like Newtonian physics: the level of effort should be in direct relation to the size of the outputs.
However, human behaviour doesn’t work like physics: what changes our attitudes and behaviour is not necessarily proportional to the level of complication, expense or force exerted. Small things can be surprisingly memorable. Simple changes can have remarkable impacts.
Conversely, in large projects everyone can get so wrapped up in the big picture, the strategy, that they fail to get the details right. So ‘big stuff’ (e.g. new buildings) can be done spectacularly well, while the ‘small stuff’ (e.g. signage) is the poor cousin that doesn’t get the attention it deserves. But – it’s the the small stuff that can very easily get in the way of the big thing’s success.
Because of this, Sutherland calls for all organisations to have a Chief Detail Officer, as well as a Government Ministry of Detail. Rather than people in charge of the purse strings (who are instinctively drawn to big and complicated solutions), such Details people would be charged with keeping a look out for the deceptively simple – in some cases this might just be seeing what’s fallen through the cracks between one big initiative and the next.
Details are the foundations. Get them wrong and that’s what people will notice first.