RAP for organisational productivity: relearning, allocation, parallel bets

Jason Yip

3 min readJan 4

Some individual and team productivity practices also translate to the organizational level

Organisational productivity has factors that overlap with both team productivity and individual productivity:

Increasing focus;
Frequent customer feedback;
Reducing friction;
Watching the work product, not the workers;
Frequent integration

However, organisational productivity goes beyond just a translation of individual and team productivity practices:

Reducing relearning;
Improving effort allocation;
Taking parallel bets

Learning is good; relearning is waste

Relearning refers to reinventing lessons whether about product, ways of working, or technology.

Two columns marked with a smiley face and a frowning face. Under smiley face: Learning new things; Building new, useful things. Under frowning face: Reinventing lessons because we don’t share knowledge; Rebuilding something because we don’t know that it already exists — Learning vs relearning

Addressing relearning is about knowledge management and platformisation.

Throughput doesn’t matter if it’s mostly on low-value things

Product capabilities exist within a life cycle.

Graph of product life cycle stages. X-axis time, y-axis revenue. Stage 1: market development with no or low revenue; Stage 2: Growth with rapidly increasing revenue; Stage 3: Maturity with still increasing revenue but slowing; Stage 4: Decline with decreasing revenue — Product life cycle stages

Let’s imagine two different organisations: A and B. A completes tasks more efficiently than B, but A’s efforts are mostly on commodity capabilities, while B’s efforts are mostly on differentiating capabilities.

Throughput of A is twice that of B. Differentiating features are worth 5 times commodity improvements. A mostly works on commodity; B mostly works on differentiating. A produces more stuff; B is actually more productive. — A has more throughput; B is more productive

A is more “productive” than B but most of their capacity is allocated to low-value capabilities… which means B might actually be more productive from an organisational perspective (value out divided by effort in).

Or course, ideally, we’d want an organisation C that is both higher throughput and better at allocating efforts to higher value activities, but the point is that improving effort…