There is a story about a family with a problem child. The situation eventually became so troublesome that the parents decided to take the child to a therapist. After a brief interview, the therapist suggested a few sessions with the entire family. The parents responded by saying, “Why do we all need to attend? He’s the one with the problem!”

The therapist explained that a family is like a mobile over a child’s crib. All the parts of a mobile are connected and whatever happens to one part has the potential to, and probably will, affect the other parts.

It doesn’t take a huge mental leap to link this same lesson to a group of people working together in a business. In a sense, a team of workers is a family and working together usually calls for a high level of interdependency.

Rather than a mobile over a child’s crib, management guru W. Edwards Deming used the comparison of a bowling team and an orchestra to illustrate the importance of interdependency within a business. Think about it, a bowling team has a low need for interdependency. You basically add up the scores of the individual team members and then compare the results to other teams to determine any competitive advantage or disadvantage. Not so with an orchestra whose members have a high need for interdependency. What if each member of an orchestra decided to do their own thing and ignore the need to play well with others? For example, what if the cymbalist decided to ignore the musical score? I suspect this would quickly lead to some personality clashes and unproductive results.

And what does this have to do with your business? On a sliding scale, if bowling teams have a low need for interdependency and as you move to the right you encounter orchestras with a much higher need for interdependency, Deming advised that most businesses would be well to the right of an orchestra. As a result, businesses must pay a lot of attention to optimization. In this context, optimization means to do what is best for the entire organization, rather than any individual part of the organization.

One common example relates to a purchasing department. Say within a company a purchasing department is measured primarily on quarterly expenditures. The less they spend, the more they are praised and rewarded. Further assume your company has a fleet of trucks. Purchasing agents can buy tires for $75 each that last for 30,000 miles. Or, they can buy tires for $85 each that last 45,000 miles. The trucks all average 90,000 miles per year. Based solely on the quarterly evaluation, the purchasing agents would be motivated to buy the $75 tires. This would, in fact, make their departmental performance look better on a quarterly basis (unfortunately the primary evaluation timeframe for many businesses). However, on an annual basis, their decision would cost the company about 32 percent more for tires.

Perhaps if they optimized, they could afford to fund a company bowling team.

Chris Crouch is CEO of DME Training and Consulting and author of several books on improving productivity. Contact him through dmetraining.com.