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Jan Brink on Briar, world’s #1 dressage stallion, in one of Briar’s last public appearances in Falsterbo, 2009. When training a horse, there are no quantum leaps, only small incremental improvements reinforced during countless hours of training. I can testify that the human rider is no different from a horse in that respect.

In an earlier post I wrote about the pain that is often associated with changing the way we behave, the prerequisite for all improvement. I use the word “pain” here to mean all negative feelings that may be associated with the change such as uncertainty, lack of self-confidence, doubt, and fatigue. I also wrote about the faith we must have in the improvement effort (or any effort really) to keep going even if we don’t see or feel any immediate results. As I hinted earlier, I’ve seen many improvement efforts fail because of too much pain and because of lost faith.

Most of the failed efforts I have seen have been corporate-wide and large, with many people involved in an “improvement program”. They are often slow to start since many people need to be involved and got on-board. Funds must be requested and budgeted. There is a massive amount of planning of a large number of “tangled” activities and long discussions about goals and milestones. Soon enough, managers and other key persons start to feel that they can’t spend the time needed for the massive improvement program because of urgent operational responsibilities. There is simply a lot of talk, and very little action. Faith starts to fade. And should a big change actually be likely to come out of the program, then there will be pain, sometimes too much of it. (There is a third alternative, namely that the large improvement program only produces a few, small changes. Then chances are that the large improvement program is very inefficient and could be replaced by a smaller, more efficient one.)

The rather obvious antidote for both “change pain” and lost faith is to improve in small, independent increments. After all, if you can’t manage a small improvement, then you can’t manage a large improvement so it’s always a good way to start.

Small changes don’t hurt as much as large ones. Small, frequent improvements also keep the faith strong since you see results on a regular basis. They produce the “early wins” that Kotter writes about in [1]. You also learn stuff from each small iteration that you can apply in subsequent iterations. And if you fail, the failure will not be of epic proportions and you can most likely recover from it in the next increment.

I sometime hear that everything depends on everything else and that everything therefore must be changed at the same time. Or that the market situation demands a “quantum leap” in performance. (People forget that a “quantum leap” is in fact the smallest possible increment.) Usually it is possible to find reasonably independent improvement areas though, suitable for incremental improvements. There is an interesting and inspiring parallel in the software development community called Scrum [2]. It is an incremental project management process in which software is developed incrementally in “sprints” of one month.

* * *

I believe that improvement should be part of the regular operations of the organization rather than done in “improvement programs”. If it is integrated in the daily operations and the corporate culture, then it will almost invariably be performed in small increments and be based on real operational needs and business goals. These factors increase the chances for success considerably. If improvement isn’t a natural part of the daily operations, then it is probably better to fix that instead of kicking off an extraordinary improvement program. If there hasn’t been any, or enough (continuous) improvement for a long time, then a big “bold stroke” change might be necessary as a last resort. More on that later.

Links and references

[1] Leading Change, John P. Kotter

[2] Agile & Iterative Development, Craig Larman

What is the purpose of that company training? Or that next presentation you are giving to your colleagues? Or this blog post for that matter?

I’m an engineer by training and like many engineers, teachers and other professionals, I sometimes have this urge to tell people what I know. Perhaps to show off a bit. Or for some other obscure reason. The urge has decreased over the years but I can still feel it from time to time. Unfortunately doing a presentation during office hours just to tell people what you know is a waste of time. I suggest that the only valid reason for communication in a business setting is to change the behavior of your audience.

Have you changed your behavior yet?

Likewise, the purpose of training should be altered behavior. Good course evaluations are nice but if things stay the same after the training, then it is of no value. According to one of the pioneers in the area of learning organizations, David Garvin, learning is in fact the combination of knowledge and modified behavior [1]:

A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.

Very little is of course new under the sun but sometimes insights are forgotten. The purpose of the art of rhetoric is according to Wikipedia exactly to “move audiences to action with arguments” [2]. It should be done with ethos, pathos and logos.

Even if we realize that our goal is to impact the behavior of our audience, we may still lack the skills to do so. During my Swedish and American engineering training i managed to take exactly zero credit points of rhetoric. I didn’t get a proper training in it until the “rookie training” at McKinsey&Co (unsurprisingly it was rather logos-heavy). Perhaps we engineers are also by nature a little weak in the pathos department which doesn’t make things easier.

Rhetoric is a technique in the greater discipline of change management which I will return to in later posts.

So am I wasting time by using this virtual space to share my opinions and the odd piece of knowledge? Well, I do believe (have faith in) that this blog will eventually somehow add to the impact that I have as a management consultant and change agent but the jury is still out on if and how that will happen.

Links and references

[1] Building a Learning Organization, David A. Garvin, HBR, July-August, 1993

[2] Rhetoric on Wikipedia

The exact string “high quality consulting services” renders over 100 000 hits on Google (without the quotes you get over 30 million). Having been in this business for some time, I always get a bit annoyed by such phrases. My platitude indicators are flashing red. What is meant by “high” I wonder. And by “quality” for that matter. And why is nobody ever offering “medium quality” or “low quality” services or products?

The word “quality” comes from the latin ”qualitas” which means “from what”. One common definition of the word is “The totality of features and characteristics of a product or service that bear on its ability to satisfy stated or implied needs.” (ISO 8402:1986). “Features” and “characteristics” are according to Dictionary.com synonyms so just “features” would probably suffice. But “stated and implied needs” is rather good. It says that we should not only address the explicitly stated needs but also those that we need to read between the lines or guess. “Bear on”, again according to Dictionary.com means to affect, relate to, or have connection with; be relevant to. Quality is therefore according to this definition the total amount of product or service features that are relevant to its ability to satisfy (customer) needs.

Quality according to Kano

Peter Drucker says “Quality in a product or service is not what the supplier puts in. It is what the customer gets out and is willing to pay for.” This definition shifts the perspective from the product or service to the customer. The Japanese professor Noriaki Kano refines this by suggesting that not all features are equal when it comes to creating customer satisfaction.

Necessary features are those without which the product would be totally worthless. An example of a necessary feature of a car is propulsion. The graph to the right illustrates that you can never win a customer with only necessary features since all the competing products have them too. You can at best get a customer that is indifferent to your product or service.

Expected features are those that the customer typically puts on his or her shopping list. For a car that could be a navigator or a collision avoidance system. Yesterday’s expected features tend to become today’s necessary features. With enough expected features customers may prefer your product or service instead of that of your competitor.

Attractive features are features that makes the customer say “wow” in Tom Peters’ terminology. They are per definition unexpected. As illustrated in the graph, attractive features add substantially to customer satisfaction. It is hard to come up with examples of attractive features as they cease to be attractive as soon as the customer has got used to them. I said “wow” when I installed Ubuntu 9.04 on my laptop and the 3G dongle worked out of the box without configurations or installations. (With version 9.10 there was a regression of this functionality that made me rather annoyed. Attractive features soon become necessary features and may then backfire.) Still, attractive features are a very efficient way to increase customer satisfaction (when they work).

That all makes sense but we’re not done yet. In the book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance the main character Phaedrus came up with the following definition of quality: “Quality is the response of an organism to its environment”. (Then he went mad.) Inspired by this rather philosophical definition I believe we can refine the definitions of Kano, Drucker and others to the following:

“Quality is what makes our customers do something positive for us, in response to our products and services.”

This means that quality is whatever makes the customer recommend our products for his or her peers and come back and buy some more. Quality doesn’t need to be in the product itself. It can be in the “One-click shopping” of Amazon.com that makes it (too) easy to buy books. It may emerge when we see to it that one of our customers writes a paper involving our products and presents it at a conference. Or it may be a friendly voice on the telephone.

This may not be the ultimate definition but I have the audacity to believe it’s better than most of the alternatives.

Links and references

[1] Robert M Pirzig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

[2] Tutorials on the Kano model

[3] Alternative definitions of quality

Vicious circle of poor quality

Vicious circle of poor physical shape

Poor organizational performance is often the result of a vicious circle. One example of such vicious circle in a product development organization is: poor product quality leads to a large effort spent on rework, customer support and bug fixes leads to lack of resources leads to poorly executed early phases of the next development project leads to poor quality…

Similar kinds of vicious circles can be found in our personal lives, for instance: bad physical shape leads to general tiredness and illness leads to pain when exercising leads to avoiding exercise leads to bad physical shape…

For improvement to happen, a vicious circle often needs to be broken. This requires, yes, faith and pain.

The first runs or workouts after a period of sedentary life are painful. You may become short of breath after a few hundred meters of running and your muscles will most likely be sore the day after. If you can’t endure that discomfort or pain, no improvement will be possible; no pain, no gain. Another type of discomfort is that of sacrificing some other perhaps more immediately gratifying activity for your exercise.

To break operational vicious circles involving e.g. poor product quality, “organizational exercise” is required. Ultimately people need to do things differently from what they did in the past to break the vicious circle. (This may look like a truism but it is surprisingly often forgotten.) The change will require new skills to be learnt, old habits to be kicked, perhaps even slightly modified values to be adopted. Some of these things can be joyful but some can also be painful. To find the time for that extra effort you may need to delay the release of a new product, to hire extra help, to work overtime or something similar. All that adds to the pain.

When starting to excercise, you usually don’t see or feel any improvement in the beginning. You only feel the pain. To get through the first few workouts you therefore need to have faith in the future positive effects of the excercise. Only that faith will take you to the point where you can start to feel or measure the improvement. In an organization you likewise need to have faith in the improvement activities to make the initial sacrifices and take that initial pain.

I will return to faith and pain in later posts.

Links and references

There is a great treatise of vicious circles and other types of systems involving feedback loops in Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline.