Over time, things tend to fall apart. Whether engineered machines like a car, living beings (like us), complex systems like a group of friends, or the avocado in your dorm fridge— things left unattended tend to decline in effectiveness. If there are physics majors in the class, they may know of this phenomenon as entropy— which (I’m told) is a measure of randomness. More commonly, the term is sometimes used by non-physics students to describe a tendency for things to break down— or for orderly systems to devolve toward randomness.

The good news is this concept applies primarily to those systems or processes that are left unattended or that lack some sort of consistent energy source. If you don’t want your college friend-group to fall apart after graduation, you’ll need to invest some level of effort into keeping in touch and maintaining relationships.

Organizational problems are similar. You and a team may put extensive work into identifying the root cause of a problem and building or re-engineering a process to solve that problem. Like your college friend group, though, that new process is likely to degrade over time if insufficient attention is dedicated to maintaining it going forward.

Besides acting as an execution tool to solve a problem, the “Plan-Do-Check-Act” (or PDCA) loop is an excellent tool to prevent entropy. Just as a loop has no beginning or end, a properly cared-for PDCA cycle never really ends, but is a continuous effort to ensure that key processes are regularly subjected to review— actively searching for improvement opportunities.

It’s generally not realistic to build and maintain full-blown PDCA loops for every single process an organization owns. However, for key processes on which the experience of customers or other important stakeholders relies; or on particularly difficult problems, the time and effort required to maintain a PDCA loop is worthwhile.

For existing key processes where you are simply trying to avoid entropy, PDCA teams don’t need to meet nearly as frequently as an problem-solving execution team. Often, ensuring that someone is getting together once or twice a year to intentionally evaluate the effectiveness of an ongoing key process is sufficient.

Here are some specific steps that leaders may consider to avoid entropy in key processes. These may be deployed as part of a regular PDCA cadence, or independently. In addition to driving continuous improvement, these steps can reinforce some of the key cultural touchstones described in Part 3 of the course.

• Retain the “to-be” process map and ask that it be compared to actual operations at some point (6 months?) in the future.
  • What has changed?
  • Do we understand why?
  • Has the actual process documentation been updated to reflect the changes?

• Ensure that the output data measuring the effectiveness of a project solution is reported regularly on a predetermined basis. Dedicate time to reflecting on the data and ask:
  • Are results improving? Do we understand why?
  • Are results stable? Is it time to consider further improvements?
  • Are results deteriorating? Do we understand why?

• Ask customers or key stakeholders on a regular basis:
  • Have you noticed the change we’ve implemented?
  • How has it impacted you?

Reflection Questions

1. Can you think of an example in your day-to-day life where entropy tends to operate unless continuous energy is applied?

2. How does entropy and PDCA relate to positive habit formation and reinforcement?

3. How can PDCA loops be a helpful driver of accountability in a problem-solving organization?