There are three necessary parts before ANY improvement-by-design effort will gain traction. Omit any one of them and nothing happens.
1. A clear purpose and an outline strategic plan.
2. Tactical measurement of performance-over-time.
3. A generic Improvement-by-Design framework.
These are necessary minimum requirements to be able to safely delegate the day-to-day and week-to-week tactical stuff the delivers the “what is needed”.
These are necessary minimum requirements to build a self-regulating, self-sustaining, self-healing, self-learning win-win-win system.
And this is not a new idea. It was described by Joseph Juran in the 1960’s and that description was based on 20 years of hands-on experience of actually doing it in a wide range of manufacturing and service organisations.
That is 20 years before the terms “Lean” or “Six Sigma” or “Theory of Constraints” were coined. And the roots of Juran’s journey were 20 years before that – when he started work at the famous Hawthorne Works in Chicago – home of the Hawthorne Effect – and where he learned of the pioneering work of Walter Shewhart.
And the roots of Shewhart’s innovations were 20 years before that – in the first decade of the 20th Century when innovators like Henry Ford and Henry Gantt were developing the methods of how to design and build highly productive processes.
Ford gave us the one-piece-flow high-quality at low-cost production paradigm. Toyota learned it from Ford. Gantt gave us simple yet powerful visual charts that give us an understanding-at-a-glance of the progress of the work. And Shewhart gave us the deceptively simple time-series chart that signals when we need to take more notice.
These nuggets of pragmatic golden knowledge have been buried for decades under a deluge of academic mud. It is nigh time to clear away the detritus and get back to the bedrock of pragmatism. The “how-to-do-it” of improvement. Just reading Juran’s 1964 “Managerial Breakthrough” illustrates just how much we now take for granted. And how ignorant we have allowed ourselves to become.
Acquired Arrogance is a creeping, silent disease – we slip from second nature to blissful ignorance without noticing when we divorce painful reality and settle down with our own comfortable collective rhetoric.
The wake-up call is all the more painful as a consequence: because it is all the more shocking for each one of us; and because it affects more of us.
The pain is temporary – so long as we treat the cause and not just the symptom.
The first step is to acknowledge the gap – and to start filling it in. It is not technically difficult, time-consuming or expensive. Whatever our starting point we need to put in place the three foundation stones above:
1. Common purpose.
2. Measurement-over-time.
3. Method for Improvement.
Then the rubber meets the road (rather than the sky) and things start to improve – for real. Lots of little things in lots of places at the same time – facilitated by the Junior Managers. The cumulative effect is dramatic. Chaos is tamed; calm is restored; capability builds; and confidence builds. The cynics have to look elsewhere for their sport and the skeptics are able to remain healthy.
Then the Middle Managers feel the new firmness under their feet – where before there were shifting sands. They are able to exert their influence again – to where it makes a difference. They stop chasing Scotch Mist and start reporting real and tangible improvement – with hard evidence. And they rightly claim a slice of the credit.
And the upwelling of win-win-win feedback frees the Senior Managers from getting sucked into reactive fire-fighting and the Victim Vortex; and that releases the emotional and temporal space to start learning and applying System-level Design. That is what is needed to deliver a significant and sustained improvement.
And that creates the stable platform for the Executive Team to do Strategy from. Which is their job.
It all starts with the Three Essentials:
1. A Clear and Common Constancy of Purpose.
2. Measurement-over-time of the Vital Metrics.
3. A Generic Method for Improvement-by-Design.