This is a concept that I first heard from Bill Bellows of Boeing at the Deming Forum 2003.

The concept is very simple, it means spending time to save time, just like investing money for a larger return. A simple example might be picking up a nail in your driveway. Spending just a few seconds doing this might save you an hour changing a flat tyre.

Bill asked the audience what percentage of time they spent investment thinking. Answers ranged from 10-40%.

What Bill proposed is that we spend the vast majority of our time investment thinking. If we didn't investment think, he argued, we wouldn't shop for more than one meal at once, we would simply do what was absolutely necessary for the immediate requirement. If we didn't investment think, then we would never consider our children's futures, bother to educate ourselves, or even buy labour-saving devices.

When he asked to audience again to estimate the percentage of time they spent investment thinking, answers were all in the 80-95% range.

Bill then spent some time in his talk examining how much time organisations spend investment thinking. Many organisations typically do not invest time now to save time in the future.

An excellent example is the creation of ever lower-cost call-centres to deal with a customers rather than working on serving the customer right the first time so that most of them don't need to call you. This is discussed further in failure demand.

Following on from this concept I am interested in how investment thinking occurs, or fails to occur in organisations. If you are someone working within an organisation (i.e. a system of work practises) and you can see that investing time now will save time later on, why would you not do it? It is natural human behaviour after all. However, many organisations do not investment think.

Thus, I would conclude that something artificial is preventing people from acting their normal way in the organisational setting. After all, people outside of work are investment thinking, so why is their behaviour changed at work?

I would contend that because the employees are within the work system they are constrained by it. Unless they are able to change the system themselves (autonomy) then they are forced to act as sub-components of the system and not as individuals.

For example, suppose you work in a call centre. You can see that 30% of the calls you get are because people receive bills and don't understand them. However you feel you are not able to influence the part of the system that writes the bills. Maybe you have tried through the staff suggestion scheme and nothing has happened.

Consider how people react to this. How could you respond? Resign, or become resigned to your job?



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