If there is plenty of movement in your business and little coming out of it, that has an exact name. Confusion is flow with no pattern, and its sign is that nothing reaches the end.
The definition
Confusion sounds like a feeling, something between pressure and noise. The source treats it as an almost technical definition:
“All a confusion is, is unpatterned flow.”
Remember what flows in a business: enquiries, quotes, jobs, invoices. In a business that works, they come in, change on the way and go out. When they have no pattern, the source says, they knock into each other, rebound and remain inside the area. There is no product, because a product needs something to flow out.
So the identifying sign is that nothing comes out. The sign has nothing to do with noise or pressure. There is a great deal of movement, and not one item reaches the end of its road.
The word says as much. It comes from a Latin verb meaning to pour together.
Suppose an owner has fourteen projects open and has delivered none of them this month. Movement is at its maximum and the product is zero. Now suppose he closes three of them and freezes the rest. There is less movement, and there are three products.
The test is the count of what left through the door, whatever your workload.
This also explains why the feeling of drowning misleads. You feel there is too much work, which sounds like a problem of quantity. The booklet reads that feeling as a sign that there is no pattern.
Why adding people makes it worse
When volume goes up, the natural step is to add people. The source agrees that volume needs people. It warns that if you add them without an org board, you add confusion too.
An org board is a layout that shows which function handles which kind of work. Without one, the source says, an organization breaks down under overload and under cross flows and currents that work against each other. When they clash, they become confusion.
Every business that grows from two people to four meets cross flows. Two people touch one item, each is sure the other already took care of it, and the item stops dead between them.
Picture a clinic of three where everybody answers enquiries. All three reply to one prospective patient, and nobody replies to two others. Or picture a garage owner who hires a service adviser and never says what should pass through that post. The phones get answered twice over, and the cars sit waiting.
In both cases the people did their work. What was missing was a route saying what goes through whom. Without that, each added person is one more place where two streams can meet. The extra pair of hands brings confusion, and no added capacity.
What organizational genius is
The word genius hints at something big. The source's definition is far smaller. It comes down to two actions: arranging the order in which things happen, and giving each type of thing that flows its own channel. There is no third action.
What does that buy you? In the source's words:
“Then you can handle flows and prevent stops.”
Suppose an adviser sets up three channels for incoming messages, new, existing and support, each with its own fixed order of handling. The volume stays the same and the stops disappear.
Or an installer who rules that every job runs in one order: call, measure, quote, schedule, install. The sequence removes the skipped steps that used to send him back to jobs he had already done.
Now the other side. An adviser handles every enquiry by whatever is most urgent at that moment. There is no sequence, so every enquiry starts again from nothing.
From confusion to flow
If there is a lot of movement and little coming out, the answer is almost never more hours, or more people with no structure behind them. It is a sequence, and a channel for each type of thing.
In I Work Harder Than Anyone I Know, this chapter closes with two short exercises, one to measure and one to act. The first measures, and the second starts to build.
Next time your business feels confused, you can check it with one question: what went out of the door this month?