How a Force Multiplier Elevates Your Organization’s Success

Organizations can have a variety of factors that contribute to their successful achievements. According to Alan Rencher, vice president of engineering at MasterControl, an essential component in any organization striving for long-term success is a force multiplier.

Addressing attendees at MasterControl’s annual user conference, Virtual Masters Summit 2020, Rencher explained the concept of a force multiplier and discussed how MasterControl’s quality platform is a force multiplier that gives companies the ability to seamlessly integrate business units, excel in all aspects of operations and sustain a competitive advantage.

What Is a force multiplier?

In a nutshell, a force multiplier is a process or tool that makes everything around it better, stronger and easily scalable. For decades, the concept has been studied, refined and applied in numerous capacities in a variety of industries.

Bolstering Military Groups

Rencher recalled how he was first introduced to force multiplication by his father. “He was an officer in the United States Airforce during the Cold War,” he said. “I learned that force multiplication was a term for using a small group of military personnel to create and train a larger group to achieve objectives with local, highly motivated groups rather than a large traditional military force.”

For instance, when the Navy Seals go into a country to accomplish an objective, they typically employ force multiplication techniques to raise an insurgent force comprised of various local people. The Seals ally with indigenous forces and expand their group of 10 or 15 into a group of 100 or more locals. Using force multiplication, a small team of Seals is augmented by a much larger and more powerful force than their original team.

Transforming a Business Culture

Force multiplication is a valuable aspect of any business environment. “Early in my career, I was fortunate to be mentored by Liz Wiseman, a master trainer and thinker on this topic,” Rencher said. “Her book ‘Multipliers’ teaches how to use force multiplication to empower employees in leadership roles. This experience had a profound impact on my leadership style and taught me how to amplify people in my organization with a positive mindset and remove a negative mindset from others. The technique of force multiplication that I learned from Liz Wiseman has helped me develop a strong customer-focused mindset in our engineering teams here at MasterControl.”

The Key to Success in Professional Sports

Turning his attention to sports, Rencher spotlighted NFL quarterback Tom Brady. During his 20+ years in the league, Brady achieved remarkable success in multiple capacities, including six Super Bowl championships and being one of only six players to be named the league’s most valuable player three times.

“Brady is a real-life force multiplier,” Rencher said. “Putting him on the field, puts a coach on the field. He is known for his uncanny ability to create plays on the fly, and he is a master at leveraging the unique strengths of the players around him. The level of talent and knowledge Brady possesses makes him a competitive advantage for any team he plays on.”

Elevating Organizational Efficiency

COVID-19 punctuated the value of integrated technologies and connectivity as employees needed to disperse and work remotely. A technology platform is a highly integrated ecosystem of interrelated capabilities. It dissolves siloes, harmonizes disparate operations management systems and enables seamless, real-time communication throughout the organization.

The MasterControl Platform™ embodies this concept with a tight integration of all its quality tools. Prior to joining MasterControl, Rencher worked for a life sciences company that used MasterControls’ Documents and Training solutions. These tools automated and streamlined critical processes that would otherwise be arduous and difficult to manage. However, the tools were not integrated with the company’s manufacturing and clinical systems.

“Using the full platform could have been a force multiplier for us at that time,” he said. “Specifically, we could have leveraged the platform’s event analyzer agents, allowing us to easily see and mitigate recurring quality patterns.”

The MasterControl Platform is a force multiplier that has the potential to drastically improve your efficiency and competitive advantage. It tightly connects a group of powerful solutions that enable the entire life cycle of your product to be reported, acted upon and managed.

Knowing that a business’s operating circumstances can change rapidly makes being connected by quality more important than ever. By fully integrating your tools and activities and leveraging the power of an artificial intelligence-enabled platform, your organization will be more agile, proactive and efficient. You can quickly understand and act on quality events — in many cases, before they even happen. That level of predictive quality and connectivity truly changes everything.