The oversized crisp

Filtering ideas and creating value

During the hazy summer of 2001, straight out of university, I moved back in with my folks for a few months and took a job in a snack packing factory. It was magical.

Giant containers of snacks arrived and were tipped into a hopper – a big shaking sieve that filtered out the oversized ones and let the rest drop through. From there they ran down a narrowing funnel into a machine that dropped them into little bags, sealed them, and set them on a conveyor belt. My first job, while I learned the ropes, was to sit at the end of that belt and gather the bags into twenties, then seal the full one, swap in an empty, and start again. All day. Rinse and repeat.

Once I'd mastered the noble art of counting to twenty, I moved to the warehouse, then to sales in a white van (epic), then to running the factory floor. The work wasn't hard, but the people made it shine. We'd crank the machine up so the little bags came flying out seconds apart, just to see how long a person could keep pace – never very long. We had the radio going, and the song that scored that entire summer was Murder on the Dancefloor by Sophie Ellis-Bextor. I still can't hear it without being back in that warehouse. And, obviously, we sampled the product. Extensively. For quality. Of course.

Here's the thing I've only really understood since. A business does almost exactly what that factory did. Ideas arrive at the top – from leaders, from teams, from customers, from the exec who read about something on the flight – and pour into a hopper, where something is meant to shake out the ones that don't fit and let the good ones drop through into the funnel. There the people inside the organisation shape them, package them, and turn them into something you can actually sell. Platform, event, chocolate peanuts: the flow is the same.

And so is the way it breaks.

Speed the machine up too much on the factory floor and the person at the end simply can't keep up; the bags stack, spill, and the whole line grinds to a halt while everyone regroups, and has a little laugh. Businesses do this constantly, only they call it being ambitious. They tip far more work into the funnel than the people turning it into value could ever carry, then look genuinely surprised when it jams. Flow matters, whether you're packing crisps or building a platform. Commit too much at the top and you break it further down – and the people in the middle are the ones who often pay.

But the part the factory understood, and most boardrooms don't, was the hopper.

The hopper had one job and did it without fear or favour: too big, you're out. It never once checked who had tipped the product in. It did not wave an oversized pork scratching through on the grounds that it had come from someone very senior. It just did its job.

It's been an observation that many organisations are nowhere near as disciplined. Most of them aren't short of ideas – ideas are the one thing in permanent oversupply – what they lack is the nerve to filter them according to a defined standard – like the hopper.

And the filter fails in a fairly specific and very human way: the biggest, wrongest (is that a word?) ideas tend to arrive with the most seniority attached, and the hopper of the modern organisation lets them through on exactly that basis. The idea from two rungs up isn't tested against where the business said it was going; it's absorbed because of who dropped it in and what mood they were in when they did. Meanwhile the genuinely good idea – the one from the person actually stood at the end of the conveyor belt, watching it overflow – never makes it into the funnel at all, because they didn't say it loudly enough, or from a high enough chair, or with the right job title.

A useful filter asks the same plain questions of every idea, no matter where in the business it comes from. Does this take us toward the thing we said we were building, or just sideways, or, in some cases, backwards? Is it worth what it'll cost the people who have to create it? And can the line actually take it right now, or does something have to come off first?

The email that lands at seven minutes past four on a Thursday, marked urgent by someone important, gets asked those questions exactly like everything else – or it isn't a filter with some rules, it's a tiny step with some suggestions tacked on.

None of which was ever needed to be explained to the factory hopper. The hopper already knew what it's job was. It shook away everything that didn't fit and let the rest fall through, all day, to Sophie Ellis-Bextor, without a single strategy off-site. I've since sat in a great many meetings that could have done with one – the hopper, I mean, though the Sophie Ellis-Bextor soundtrack wouldn't have hurt either.