Serial to Parallel

In my business life, I often wonder about motivations that drive organizations. I’m talking beyond the make money / become more efficient macro motivations.  Why do we elect to do A over B, in that order, to accomplish our goals ? Is this the only idea we have ?  Or perhaps is this the only way we’ve ever done it before..

How we make decisions on future potential paths would seem to be tremendously insight-full, (as in full of insights) if we can get our heads around it.  One of the trends I see over and over though its rarely acknowledged as such, is the movement from serial work to parallel work.  We know we need to do more with less.  In this case, less refers to resources, time, money, capabilities and so on.  In an effort to do that, the historic model of one foot in front of the other to proceed down our path is being usurped by many feet in front of many other feet to reach the same point 2x, 5x, 1000x faster.  Which is all good on paper, but the devil is in the details.  Time isn’t cheated easily.

Think about a real life situation where we see this.  I'll select Apple as they are well known, and as I write this, recently they had another big launch event.  In some of what they did, they seemed to work well in parallel, while in another, they didn’t do as well.  With the new phone launches, they held an event on Sept.9^th and had the new product in stores and delivered by Sept 19.  Impressive.  They’d developed, tested, refined and put production and delivery mechanisms into place in relative secrecy to move vast quantities of these products almost as soon as they let the cat out of the bag.  Very parallel.  In contrast, they also announced a watch on the same day. It’s not available yet, won’t be for months in fact.  They are still refining, testing and finalizing and no doubt working out production logistics.  Quite serial.  Now they had an advantage as they already made phones, so could tap into that expertise, while they haven’t sold watches before..but still.

Working in parallel requires more than experience.  It needs systems, skills, forward thinking and safeguards.  And let’s not ‘mistake’ the late cycle product announcement for parallel work – it usually just means serially they saved the announcement for the end of the cycle. (Apple does this a little admittedly too but the parallel work started months ago, not just in September).

Beyond products though, we seek to multi-task (parallel work) in our daily lives, we try to achieve life-work balance personally, and we try to refine this skill understanding that the world is throwing more at us every minute, then historically was done in any given days.

So, my prediction for the future is that parallel work will continue to be the aim in it’s many forms for the foreseeable future.  Companies will sell ideas, systems and approaches to enable this. Scale (a code-word for parallel work) and accessibility (cloud anyone?) are needed to allow parallel to be achieved.  Until that is, that the fundamental concept of parallel is itself usurped by another way to achieve the desired end-state.  After all, developing new ways to cheat time is always interesting.