In March, we officially launched the #UgandanExcellence Philosophy. And as with all philosophies, the ground beneath is always a work in progress. It’s a journey of clarity, of refining all the elements. Today, in continuation of that journey, we introduce the ‘Leaking Roof Test’ as a measure of both Ugandan Efficiency and Effectiveness.
If you go to a new organization and a roof starts to leak, you will immediately learn something. From this leaking roof, you can tell lots about the culture of the organization. You can tell the effectiveness and efficiency of decision making. Funny enough, the leaking roof test is like that grandmother hack. It works, it tells you thousands of things. It’s such a beautiful data set to explore for insight.
For some organizations, when a leaking roof emerges, perhaps a committee will be constituted to investigate and report back on the leaking roof. For another organization, the finance department will be reviewing how the previous budget for maintaining the roof was used. For some others, a bucket will be procured and placed under the leaking roof. For another, there could be urgency to do something about the leaking roof. And for another, there will be a full root cause analysis to understand the emergence of that leaking roof and a sustainable way to close it out.
And funny enough, depending on how long an organization takes to fix a leaking roof, that’s the turnaround of decision making and implementation in that organization. Does it take your organization a month to fix a leaking roof? Does it take your organization a week? Next time you notice a leaking roof in your organization, you have a fertile ground for observation. You will learn about your organization based on how long it fixes this leaking roof. And if the organization has many leaking roofs, it’s not that the maintenance department is ineffective, it’s because the organization is ineffective. Leaking roofs reveal the culture and processes of an organization.
The best organizations never have leaking roofs. A leaking root is telling enough. If you have worked for an organization without a leaking roof, you’ve worked for an A-star organization. Let’s hear from you…