The "Garbage Cycle"
Intransparent processes > Constant problems > Poor company performance
In most companies out there you will find the “Garbage Cycle”, which often looks like this:
A disorganized employee does some work without documenting it well.
Nobody else is aware of what they did because it’s intransparent to them.
Something goes wrong later because of some issues in the work that was done.
The company has little to no insight into why the problem happened but asks the person to fix it.
The disorganized employee ‘fixes it’ while only providing a high level understanding of the problem and how they fixed it (to cover their ass).
Everyone thanks the employee for their great work.
Then it happens again. And again. And again. With various employees.
Who pay the price?
The company and it’s performance pay the price.
That is what I call the ‘Garbage Cycle’ and today I want to break down how this is like a virus in most companies.
But it doesn’t have to be.
How does the ‘Garbage Cycle’ start?
The cycle starts in the processes of the company and the type of people they hire.
Often the company is operating mainly by email or Slack and projects are poorly documented.
Managers say things like “I only care about results” and don’t really care about the process to get there.
As a result many things are happening but it’s often extremely inefficient.
Dependencies are poorly understaood. Projects are constantly running late. Cost efficiency sucks.
Contrast this with how we work in my company, Reviv, using ‘The Beast Method’:
everything in the company is a Clickup task
all work done by anyone is an update to a task (eg. comment, status change)
all relevant followers are added to a task and receive the updates
everyone is expected to keep their notification inbox clean everyday (= everyone stays informed in a timely way and tasks get unblocked fast)
This results in tremendous tranparency throughout the company.
When something gets stuck, I typically know immediately why it’s stuck and who is responsible for it being stuck without having to ask anybody.
And so i drop a comment and it almost always gets ‘unstuck’ very quickly.
Companies stuck in the ‘Garbage Cycle’ suffer
The companies that are in this Garbage Cycle are often spinning their wheels in many different ways:
They don’t know why a project got stuck and need to call meetings to figure it out
Nothing is documented so it’s hard to isolate the root cause of the problem and who was responsible. Thus inept/inefficient employees deflect blame very easily
Projects delay constantly and require much more resources than they should
Good people get frustrated that the processes are so bad and often end up leaving. Thus it becomes a company where the people who suck end up staying.
When a person fixes the issue they are often treated as heroes when in reality the problem should have probably never happened in the first place.
Fixing often requires patching things, which makes things messy over time.
etc.
I think you get the point.
To exit the cycle you need the right people leading
Most managers out there don’t have the right DNA to get out of the garbage cycle. They are accustomed to bad processes and when things go wrong they generally try to:
blame certain people and say that they need better people
tell their team to work harder to fix the problem
create more stress and fingerpointing among their team, which creates more politics
I saw this my entire career when i worked for companies that were not mine. It was the rule, not the exception.
And now i’ve had a chance to operate by my own ‘Beast Method’ rules for almost six years with the last two years being under my own company, Reviv.
This has given me the opportunity to see the reality.
I use much cheaper people, I pay these people only for the work they do and not their downtime, and I still see that we’re getting far more done than when I worked earlier in my career in companies that were stuck in the ‘garbage cycle’.
How?
Simple. We have airtight, transparent processes. And I invest my own time and effort into making sure the system runs efficiently.
Constantly keep the garbage out
This is the mantra that is in my head almost everyday. I need to keep the garbage out.
Garbage comes in many forms….
people who use sloppy, intransparent processes
people who want to blame others
people who don’t check their notifications and so slow down the flow of communication in the company
Do I allow exceptions sometimes? Yes, of course.
In my mind I always weigh the importance of the task or project. Some don’t need to be done so quickly and so can proceed at a slower pace.
And note that it’s not about getting people to work more or harder. It’s about getting people to work efficiently as a team.
Closing thoughts
I spent many years in the early part of my career in companies that were stuck in this ‘garbage cycle’.
Often it didn’t matter if I was working faster or with more discipline than others… because it wasn’t rewarded. I had dependancies on others that would slow everything down.
The structure and speed I tried to introduce was yawned at by managers/leaders who themselves had gotten used to the 'garbage cycle’ a long time ago. And were instead focused on the political games that were their path to upward mobility.
For awhile I thought that that was the game that I needed to learn to play.
Till I created my own set of rules, “The Beast Method”, and used it to operate my own company, Reviv. Which by almost every efficiency measure outperforms those companies by a wide margin.
And so I ended up creating my own game with very different rules.
Now I mock the companies and managers that are still stuck in the ‘garbage cycle’.
Because… that’s the way it should have always been baby!