kaizen

It may be odd to start a post with a couple of clarifications but I still want to do that in this case, of reasons that will perhaps become apparent further down. First, this post is not about a problem unique to one or two companies that I may have worked with and second, I do think management consultants can be useful from time to time (including myself). Read on!

I am talking about the situation when the top management of a company or a division realizes that some kind of improvement, e.g. reduction of the number of customer complaints, is urgently needed. A common reaction to this sudden realization is to set up an “improvement project”, a task force geared to improve the situation. The task force may get its own steering group with a few of the most enthusiastic members of the organization’s management team, it may get a reference group (of other interested people), and it will name a number of people to be on an improvement team.

The results from the improvement project set up as described above are often disappointing of several reasons:

• The steering committee members will see this as something out of the ordinary and will give the steering group meetings a lower priority than say the management team meetings or some urgent operational issues needing attention.
• The resource requests for the task force will not end up in the organization’s regular resource management systems and may therefore be ignored.
• The goals of the improvement project may or may not be aligned with the business goals of the organization.
• Nobody is formally rewarded (bonus etc) for doing a good job in the improvement project as it isn’t connected to their regular personal result plans or day to day tasks.
• The results from the improvement project are hard to disseminate to the rest of the organization.

Cajsa Warg’s “A Guide to Household Chores for Young Women”.

Many of the problems above emanate from the fact that we don’t use the regular organization and the regular structures in the organization to run the improvement effort; that we instead build a parallel ad-hoc task force to do the work.

Instead I suggest that the existing regular structures are used for the improvement effort:

• Add goals for the planned improvement effort in the (annual) plan for the organization and break down these goals on the individuals that will participate in the improvement effort.
• Track the goals in the regular management team meetings dedicated to track all the business goals of the organization.
• Use any regular improvement organization or group that may exist for implementing the improvement. A typical candidate group is the “quality group” or similar that usually focuses on managing the quality system manual of the organization and on managing any external audits. These people must not only be informed about the improvement effort, it should be a natural and important part of their day to day activities.
• Document the results from the improvement effort in the quality system manual in the form of updated processes, role descriptions etc., not in Powerpoint presentations stored on the improvement project Sharepoint site.

If any of the structures suggested above like an annual planning process, a quality department focusing on improvement, a quality system manual, or regular management team meetings with tracking of the set goals are missing or are ineffective, they should be fixed instead of by-passing them with a task force. Fixing these things should in fact be a high priority early goal of the improvement project so as to bootstrap the project. This is very much in line with the Toyota Production System’s principle of Jidoka, to stop the production line at any time to fix the process instead of fixing the defect products afterwards [1]. Appointing a special task force will hide an organization’s inability to execute the tasks through its regular structures, just like problems in the manufacturing process remain hidden if one settles for fixing the defects afterwards.

So let us heed the advice of the 18:th century Swedish chef Cajsa Warg who in many recipes in her famous cook-book from 1755 wrote “One taketh what one haveth.”

References

[1] The Toyota Way, Jeffrey K. Liker

The cold spell over the Nordic countries was felt by all the delegates to the COP15 conference on global warming. The result of the summit was a lame document that despite its lameness wasn’t accepted by all countries [1]. Is there a connection between the cold weather and the outcome?

This may sound like a condescending question insulting the delegates’ intelligence. Of course there are a lot of reasons for the failure of the conference. I think the question is relevant to some degree though.

As I’ve hinted in an earlier post, the mitigation of the global warming is the greatest change management project humanity has ever undertaken. The idea is to fundamentally change the way we produce and use energy to avoid dramatic changes in our environment and living conditions.

So why does freezing one’s butt off matter? Humans are, despite the evolution of the large neocortex fundamentally controlled by the old “reptile brain”. This part of the brain is what makes us angry, makes us make love, makes us eat candy, and makes us do many other things based on emotions. Emotions are very strong motivators, often stronger than any “higher order” logic we can come up with in our cortices. Emotions are rational in the way that they have kept us alive and procreating from the time when our ancestors were tiny lizards (yes, you have lizards in your family). We base many of the biggest decisions in life on the emotional “click, whirr” response described by Robert Cialdini in [2].

Recent change management literature emphasizes the role of emotions in leading and promoting change. Dan Cohen says: “Both thinking and feeling are essential, and both are found in successful organizations, but the true heart of change is in our emotions.” [3]. Black and Gregersen discuss the importance of creating “confrontations” to move people to change. These confrontations should be what they call inescapable experiences that “cannot just be mental” [4]. Instead they “need to actively involve as many of the senses as possible: touch, smell, sight, sound, taste.” Although Black and Gregersen don’t use the e-word, the clear purpose of that multi-sensory experience is to evoke emotions, not just thoughts.

To evoke the right emotions, the “inescapable experience”, the summit should probably have been held in a very hot place – without air conditioning, not in a cold place like Copenhagen in December. An inescapable category four hurricane passing by the venue would probably have added a few signatures to the treaty.

Links and references

[1] Preliminary version of the Copenhagen Accord

[2] Robert B. Cialdini, Influence, Science and Practice

[3] Dan S. Cohen, The Change of Heart Fieldbook

[4] J. Stewart Black and Hal B. Gregersen, Leading Strategic Changes, Breaking Through the Brain Barrier