Raise the Bar or Lower the Bar

In their book Switch: How to Change things When Change Is Hard, the authors Chip and Dan Heath describe a powerful idea that runs counter to what many of us have thought about stretch goals as motivators of change. They claim stretch goals are not as effective as smaller bite-size goals that are easier to meet. Such "shrunken goals" more readily and steadily provide positive and reinforcing feedback to the person or group that is undergoing change.

This idea is also supported by the getting-things-done guru, David Allen, who advocates focus on the next action, and not on comprehensive - and daunting - to-do lists. This baby steps approach is not new, of course, but it conflicts with the infamous stretch-goal ideal often touted by corporate leadership. The stretch goals may be great for defining long-term vision, but they can be counter-productive in motivating day-to-day change actions.

Why the Particular Interest in Decision-Making?

When I was a young executive at General Motors, I had the common young man's frustration with what seemed to me a series of baffling and irrational decisions that I saw being made at the highest level of the company. At the age 30 or so, I was young enough to be still brash, but in a responsible enough position enough to see what I thought were too many truly dumb decisions being made by the executives of the company.

At that point in my life, being a 20th Century history buff or dilettante ("a person who takes up an art, activity, or subject merely for amusement, esp. in a desultory or superficial way; dabbler"), I came across a book that greatly influenced my interests and thinking ever since -- The Guns of August by Barbara Tuchman. The book had at that time, during the Viet Nam War, a resurgence of popularity because of its focus on folly in decision-making during war.

Originally published in 1962, it is a military history book that primarily describes the events of the first month of World War I. In addition, the book provides the crucial context for this momentous event of the 20th Century by presenting as  background a brief history of the plans, strategies, world events, international cultures prior to and during the war. The book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction for 1962. By the way, Barbara Tuchman is probably the most distinguished female military historian ever and had to overcome more than her share of both blatant and indirect sexism, not unusual in that era.

Why did this book affect me so? It made plain that folly, miscalculations, and misconceptions in decision-making are just somehow inherent in the human condition. The trail of disastrous mistakes made by multiple parties in the run up to WWI was painfully and powerfully described in the Guns of August. I have been studying the good and the bad of decision-making ever since. The most important insights from my study are what I want to briefly cover for you today. Sometimes it seems that we humans haven't learned much since 1914.

How Can Checklists Be Important to Lean Thinking?

Recently, I read the latest book from Atul Gawande, The Checklist Manifesto, and it brings to life a great Lean technique, the humble checklist. Malcolm Gladwell in Amazon provides a brief summary and review:

Over the past decade, through his writing in The New Yorker magazine and his books Complications and Better, Atul Gawande has made a name for himself as a writer of exquisitely crafted meditations on the problems and challenges of modern medicine. His latest book, The Checklist Manifesto, begins on familiar ground, with his experiences as a surgeon. But before long it becomes clear that he is really interested in a problem that afflicts virtually every aspect of the modern world--and that is how professionals deal with the increasing complexity of their responsibilities. It has been years since I read a book so powerful and so thought-provoking.

Gawande begins by making a distinction between errors of ignorance (mistakes we make because we don't know enough), and errors of ineptitude (mistakes we made because we don’t make proper use of what we know). Failure in the modern world, he writes, is really about the second of these errors, and he walks us through a series of examples from medicine showing how the routine tasks of surgeons have now become so incredibly complicated that mistakes of one kind or another are virtually inevitable: it's just too easy for an otherwise competent doctor to miss a step, or forget to ask a key question or, in the stress and pressure of the moment, to fail to plan properly for every eventuality. Gawande then visits with pilots and the people who build skyscrapers and comes back with a solution. Experts need checklists--literally--written guides that walk them through the key steps in any complex procedure. In the last section of the book, Gawande shows how his research team has taken this idea, developed a safe surgery checklist, and applied it around the world, with staggering success.

The danger, in a review as short as this, is that it makes Gawande’s book seem narrow in focus or prosaic in its conclusions. It is neither. Gawande is a gorgeous writer and storyteller, and the aims of this book are ambitious. Gawande thinks that the modern world requires us to revisit what we mean by expertise: that experts need help, and that progress depends on experts having the humility to concede that they need help.

The reason checklists are so Lean-like is that they are built on the core concept of standardization of work. One of Gawande's major themes is that as the world becomes more and more complex, the typical response of most professions is to promote more specialization. This can, in many cases, be a dead-end as the narrow specialist can miss the obvious if it is out of his or her small area of expertise. Furthermore, the view of the total system and it's response, which is often not the sum of the parts, can be overlooked by the specialist. 

Checklists, properly conceived and designed, do not, as this ridiculous review in the Wall Street Journal posits, encourage rote, unimaginative thinking (see this for a detailed take-down of the WSJ review). On the contrary, they free up the expert professional to focus on solving the problem at hand and not waste time and mental energy rediscovering and remembering what has been done many times before. I will discuss what makes a good checklist in a future entry.

If Lean is So Great, Why Toyota's Recent Meltdown?

On the subject issue, there is a insightful column at lean.org based on an interview with a top Japanese Toyota watcher, Professor Takahiro Fujimoto of the University of Tokyo. His bottom line -- increasing complexity, commercially and technically, with a large dollop of arrogance thrown in. This is not a new lesson to any student of history.

The current series of problems represents a massive failure on the part of Toyota. And Toyota must take full responsibility for ending up where it is today. But the root causes of these problems are not easily identified. Many internal and external factors have combined in a complex mix. These include misjudgments by Toyota, and overconfidence in its own quality. The factors also include increasingly complex vehicle design, production increases and globalization, and the resulting explosive rise in the number of related problems. While some of these factors are specific to Toyota, others affect the industry as a whole....

Toyota has absolutely made its own errors: clearly there are specific aspects of Toyota's organizational culture that lurk behind its poor decision-making. Moreover, I have observed an air of arrogance that may certainly have weakened Toyota in recent years. Yet it must be noted that Toyota faces the same huge challenge as any other company of its scale, in terms of product, market, and production complexity - all the challenges of globalization. The automobile companies of developed countries have been and will continue battling what we might call the demon of complexity - a long-distance obstacle course on which they are challenged to build their capabilities....

Having spent the '90s being admired for producing the world's best quality, an arrogance born of overconfidence started to appear in certain sections of headquarters. The signs of that unfortunate arrogance are clear. The number of customer complaints received by the company is significant. And yet even as quality problems and accidents occurred, Toyota leadership clearly responded by saying, "our quality is perfect - it's the user's fault." This attitude is a severe departure from Toyota's true management philosophy and demands correction.

I visited Toyota in 2001 as a representative of GM to look at their benchmarking activities. We were treated politely, but condescendingly, as they made it clear that they had nothing to learn by looking at anything GM did. That may have been true, but it was presumptuous, close-minded, and, it is plain now, a precursor to the arrogant thinking that recently got them in trouble. It is also thinking that is counter to the open, inclusive mind-set that is integral to the Lean Management they perfected. They got away from their roots.

What the Heck is Lean?

First, lean has nothing to do with "faulty towers" as in:

(By the way, I love this cartoon for its triple twist: (1) the lean of the tower, of course, is not the meaning of "lean" in Lean Management; (2) the defective ones are straight -- the requirement is that the correct ones are "defective" in this case; (3) Lean Management would not involve sorting out finished defects at all, but preventing in the production process the possibility of such errors in the first place.)

Nor does Lean Management mean any of these common misconceptions:

Lean is the management philosophy and set of supporting methods that strive to maximize customer value while minimizing waste. A lean organization understands that it is critical to focus all of its key processes on increasing the value of its products and services to its customers. Work to any other end is waste.

More to follow, especially on why Lean must not be viewed as threatening to the workforce.

The Heritage of Lean Office Demystified II

The LODII is the second edition of one of a series of books on Lean Management published by Don Tapping, formerly the “Lean Guru” of Eaton Corporation, and available on-line at The Lean Store and on Amazon. 

The common theme of all Don's books is to apply the principles the Toyota Production System, or Lean Management, to various organizational environments: manufacturing, administration, health care, construction, and financial services. Lean works for any enterprise that has even moderately complex business processes.

This second edition incorporates many suggested improvements form readers of the first edition but the main differences are: (1) the addition of a detailed case study that applies the principles of each chapter; (2) many examples and screen shots showing how common software applications can be applied in support of the Lean Office principles and tools.

It's Here: The Lean Office Demystified II

The book I have co-authored is now available: The Lean Office Demystified II:

Lean Office Demystified II reveals the secrets on how Lean can be leveraged with MS Office (and other applications) to move information where it is needed, when it is needed, in error-free ways never dreamed of - at the speed of sight. Learn how MS Excel, Word, Access, Grove, and Visio, as well as ACT!, Windows Explorer, and Google Docs can be used in applying Lean tools and concepts. This is all conveyed through the Global Winds case study that is included at the end of each chapter.
This easy-to-use book includes everything you need for success - readiness guides, worksheets, forms, screen shots, application examples, etc. Lean Office Demystified II goes beyond theory to explain how all this works in the actual business case study of Global Winds. Lean Office Demystified II will boost office performance, reduce costs, and increase customer satisfaction, while at the same time create stress-free work place. Computer users, Lean leaders, and front-line employees of the world now unite in this tools and concepts explained in this book! 

I will be providing insights and references to the book in the coming weeks. Here is the site for ordering and to view excerpts.