Forking Work Simplification – Let's Bring Back Eisenhower's Process Improvement

Summary

Happy April Fool’s, but frankly we are all (well almost all) business today with a neat little update. Kevin Hawickhorst’s article talked about Eisenhower-era process improvement tools that transformed federal efficiency during the 1940s-1960s, when government trust reached 80% and major national projects succeeded. You know what? Why keep such a gem hidden away in old dusty books and digital pdf scans? We should create a documentation site with the intent of fully recreating, updating, and creating alternative versions of the Work Simplification program and the artifacts (training materials, art, etc)—not just for governments but for civic organizations, political campaigns, and businesses. The idea is to make it easier for today's organizations (or at least the common political actor local government employee) identify unnecessary procedural steps and eliminate bottlenecks that waste resources, maybe even spot loopholes and poison pills in bills and plans to spot for. Right now we converted the associated manuals into a docs site called Standards, with our end of April plans is recreate the other materials like Process Chart forms and the such Standards - Fork of Work SimplificationProcess improvement isn't intuitive for most people. As stated in earlier articles, even big boy corporations with dedicated resources often struggle to implement it effectively (don’t believe me, ask McKinsey who is less trustworthy than I am but for some reason, you trust these guys). And while think tanks occasionally tackle implementation issues, they're typically far removed from the ground-level reality where policies succeed or fail.We need to make process improvement accessible to ordinary people in local groups who have the most direct experience with broken processes. They don't need MBA jargon or complex methodologies—just practical tools to document what's happening in their communities. Practical tools like what the Work Simplification Program has to offer. A hypothetical e...