Accommodation in Business Excellence Fatigue
The role of accommodation in business excellence involves understanding what wastes to remove, what opportunities to leverage, what problems need resolution, and when to pivot. It involves identifying what is important and what can be addressed later, if at all.
Accommodating non-substantive background noises and distractions in the environment can strengthen focus, momentum, and support the alignment needed to leverage creativity, innovation, and continuous improvements. The reverse (focusing on non-substantive background noises) can limit the business’ ability to leverage opportunities that exist ‘right under their nose’ as a result of business excellence fatigue or low discriminant ability to single out critical opportunities.
“The word accommodation has been used to designate the adjustments which people in groups make to relieve the fatigue and tensions of competition and conflict.” – Lundberg
Many business environments are unable to differentiate background noise 
from the priorities that support business excellence. These business cultures grow accustomed to accommodating background noise that can actually have a significant impact on the business’ performance. When this happens, outdated assumptions, legacy systems, and counterproductive artifacts/ behaviours are allowed to exist despite their impact on surrounding performance ecosystems.
Accommodation is an increasingly crucial skill in complex environments. It involves identifying the path of least resistance in the pursuit of higher priorities and avoiding the pitfalls that often trip up others with less discriminating focus. Business’ that are able to distinguish background noise that can be accommodated versus noises that need to be resolved (or opportunities to be leveraged) have a competitive advantage.
“Acquired Changes in the behaviour of individuals which help them to adjust to their environment.” – Baldwin
Accommodation can both increase focus on business excellence and pull the business’ attention towards less crucial items. The path depends on the business’ ability to identify, evaluate, and rank priorities. Business’ that are easily distracted by every noise (or inefficiency, risk, conflict, or even opportunity) are at a significant risk of business excellence fatigue. The results are often suboptimal.
“In natural environment, they adjusts themself according to it. In human made environment, they bring about changes into it and then adjusts themself with it. Both these conditions of adjustment are called accommodation.” – Umar Farooq
The following spreadsheet provides a list of business excellence opportunities that are often camouflaged with distracting background noise.
| Background Noise | Business Excellence Opportunity | |
| Efficiency | Doing things fast for the sake of being fast | Serving the right customer, with the right service/product, at the right time. |
| Productivity | Making lots of widgets because that is what we always do | Producing widgets based on customer demand, just-in-time (JIT) |
| Value | Our products are easy and fun to use | Our products are easy, fun, and safe to use & are biodegradable |
| Cost | We create the cheapest products available but without the functions desired | We create low-cost widgets with the exact functionality desired by our customers |
| Quality | The quality met our core customers, and internal stakeholder, expectations – but misses other markets | |
| Safety | Our product has only 5 in 100 defects | Our product has only 5 in 1000 defects and these do not affect safety |
| Learning | Most line staff struggle with learning the core training modules | The leadership team provides additional training and coaching, grounded in the individual’s different learning styles, in order to ensure everyone is successful |
| Financial | Our goal is to make as much money as we can | Our goal is to be highly profitable while reinvesting in the business, stakeholder development, and employee training, satisfaction, and growth. We will not compromise our integrity or the quality of our products and services. |
| Customer Satisfaction | We make sure our highest paying customers are satisfied 110% | We conduct multiple annual initiatives that engage all of our customer groups, solicit feedback and suggestions for improvement, and identify opportunities for innovation |
| Internal Processes | Most of the challenges faced by previous productions have been fixed | Not only have we resolved all of the problems of previous problems, we have created a competitive advantage in this industry with our solutions |
| Social Citizenship | We support social and environmental initiatives as long as they do not impact our bottom line. | The impact of our processes, technologies, strategies, and resources is the first priority. |
| Innovation | We count every change we introduce as an innovation | When we focus on innovation, it needs to meet three criteria: Solves an existing or new customer need; creates a competitive advantage; and is aligned with the business model, values, and vision. |
| Leadership | We have different performance expectations for leaders and management | We hold everyone to the same expectations and hold the leadership team to role modeling business excellence in everything they do. |
| Teamwork | Do as I say, not as I do. | Teamwork helps keep us accountable to the customer, aligned towards a larger shared vision and supports ongoing learning, engagement, and retention initiatives. |
| Communication | We communicate and share information as needed. | We focus on providing proactive communication and sharing of information to support engagement, informed decision making, and responsive management of issues as they are predicted to arise. |
Establishing business excellence as a priority begins with the business culture. Identifying the business’ priorities is just the first step. The next step involves developing and reinforcing the behaviours, values, and tools needed to deliver continual improvements. The third step involves removing the background noises that distract from the business’ focus on excellence, as well as removing the contradictions and inconsistencies that exist in policy, behaviour, and performance throughout the business model.
The context in which business excellence is pursued sets the foundation of what will be realized. Focusing on everything at the same time will often limit the quality of the business’ results. The goal is to focus on ‘just the right’ opportunities, which includes recognizing when ‘background noise’ should not be ignored. Don’t let inefficiencies become standardized in your business culture. Solve these deficiencies and turn them into a competitive advantage!
Travis Barker, MPA GCPM
Innovate Vancouver
Consulting@innovatevancouver.org