The No Tool Zone

Call it a mutiny, a revolt or maybe even anarchy.  But the suppression of operations has gone on for too long.  Operations has been pushed around by HR, finance, information technology, marketing, sales and of course . . . management.  But nobody puts baby in a corner.

The result of years of abuse by supporting areas has led to increased costs and a lot less sanity.  Operations has been budgeted, branded, automated, contracted, down-sized, outsourced, shared, tarred, feathered and quartered.  Yet it is still the only area that can create value in the eyes of a customer.

In my bank management consulting I have seen 100s of thousands of dollars spent on technology and support to get rid of two tellers.  In government I have seen billion dollar contracts to modernize and automate that have turned to lawsuits against a Fortune 500 technology because of lack of performance.  Nothing invested in operations in a complete disrespect of the people in favor of false hope.

How is it the core work of an organization has been relegated to the back of the bus?  As a customer, unless technology enhances my experience or makes the job easier for the person I deal with, otherwise, spare me the agony. 

With this coming mutiny by operations, the organization will be the recipient of a large bounty.  More purposeful, more focused on what matters without all the foolishness attached to the supporting functions answer to creating value. 

The US has not become more competitive on the world scale by following the siren song of those that should support, but instead act like prima donnas competing for scarce resources.  They have allowed the pie to shrink and the investment to evaporate.  Management has spent ungodly sums on a pig in a poke.

Beware the Ides of March are upon us, Caesars prepare.

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Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.

I was reminded today of the nature of change and more importantly the methods of change.  Here, I am reminded more about the fundamental rules of change and less about whether it is lean six sigma, TQM or any of an assortment of other disciplines that may describe organizational change management.

The default method of change seems to be in making people change or training them in ways to do so.  Neither of these methods are optimal, but both may have a time and place.  The former (making people change) is a reflection of the power in wielding control, while the latter attempts to convince people.

People “do” what they believe makes sense.  It is only when people are constantly challenging assumptions that breakthroughs are realized. 

But this creates an uncomfortable position for a world made of assumptions.  Columbus challenged the flat earth theory with his life.  Copernicus was afraid to reveal his theory that the sun (not the earth) was the center of the universe and waited to almost death to have his thoughts revealed.  And so it goes through history that until assumptions are challenged through theory and observation are advancements made and new paradigms created.

New perspectives are a never-ending cycle that shortens the cycle of discovery through new and better thinking.  And so it is with systems thinking that intervention theory for organizations can create breakthroughs in innovation and method that advance mankind. 

This is not just a battle to win the day, but a war with battles won and lost.

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Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.

My heart goes out to Dustin Johnson.  He lost on a ruling.  Right call by the PGA? . . . yep.  Tragedy for the PGA tour? . . . yep.

I am not much of a rule follower, except when it comes to golf.  I don’t do anything egregious like steal or kill.  But was Dustin Johnson the only guy in the PGA Championship that grounded his club in a questionable bunker during the tournament?  I have a hard time believing that he was the only victim of the local ruling, but he was caught on tape during the last hole of the final round.  The other players weren’t under the same scrutiny and may have gotten away with one.

But for Dustim Johnson, he was under a microscope.  Rules are rules and violaters shall be punished . . . it is, after all, a gentleman’s game. 

Yet, I wonder.  What if one of those officials had helped Dustin out a bit, under the pressure of the situation.  Could the officials have prevented this by being proactive? 

In working with service organizations, I often see people that I call the “process police.”  These folks love rules and they love to catch people breaking the rules.  Some rules are just plain dumb and bureaucratic and others achieve their purpose.

I find it a better practice to create a cooperative attitude among workers and managers in the same system.  Instead of catching someone breaking a rule, managers should spend time in the work.  This approach is much better than new edicts and policies to force compliance.

In the case of the PGA, could they have prevented the bunker debacle?  I don’t know, but with a plethora of rules officials can’t they have a role of being helpful?  This protects the field AND the player (and possibly the spectator) when they take a more proactive role.  It also would save the embarrasment of learning that you just got knocked out of a playoff for a major championship. 

Regardless, for service organizations there is an opportunity to build their systems based on principles, rather than an avalanche of rules that are confusing and maddening to the worker.  Working together to achieve business improvement should be something all managers and workers do to make the system better.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.

Alrighty then, we have ourselves a new folk hero – Steve Slater – from an incident on a Jet Blue flight.  Add this incident to the young lady that quit her job using a dry erase board . . . and we may have the start of a revolution.   ”Going postal” just got a little less violent and a lot more creative.

Workers are getting more stressed out.  Nurses and others walking off the job for better working hours.  Even more workers wishing they could.

Meantime, we continue to see the squeeze on workers for more hours leading to more stress and the cycle continues.  Workers are asking for more hires and companies are afraid to hire.

I hear more of this every day from folks on the front-line being squeezed.  The hyprocrisy and power of command and control organizations is evident in these conversations.  Cost cutting is being felt everywhere, but mostly is something done to the front-line . . . an they are starting to fight back. 

Unions are licking their chops at such a plight.  I believe that unions are born from command and control management as when workers feel taken advantage of unions form.

I have listened to employees of systems thinking organizations and I find the exact opposite is true . . . they are happy.  What do you suppose these organizations did to these people? Was it quality education, skills training, empowerment programs, empathy audits, kaizen scripts, best practices, etc.?  Nope. 

These organizations changed their thinking about the design and management of work which changed the system and improved performance.  The work became more important than the management of the work.

Management discovered that being in the work offered better financial returns than pouring over mountains of data and/or financials.  Being in the work allows managers to understand the context of the data they don’t see sitting behind their desks.  Workers don’t have to face dreamed up change programs that are based on assumptions.

Clearly, no one condones the actions of any of these incidents.  However, management needs to be able not just cal HR and legal to clean up the mess.  They need to reflect on the causes of a culture gone . . . Slater.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.  

W. Edwards Deming was the first to say that a goal without a method is useless.  John Seddon in Freedom from Command and Controlcalled goals/targets a defacto purpose that drives the wrong behavior.  Now a new Harvard Business Review (HBR) article supports this thinking.

The article by Max Bazerman is titled, When Goal Setting Goes Bad.  He points to many of the same things that both Deming and Seddon have discovered and further develops unethical behavior is organizations.

I have seen this behavior in many service organizations.  Chief among them are break-fix companies where the owner or president offers rewards and incentives for achieving sales or other goals.  Then, turn a blind eye when workers hit the goal using unscrupulous methods that compromise customer trust.

Interestingly, these same owner/executives get the advantage of being “clean” as they are almost always oblivious to such unethical behavior (or pretend to be).  To me, by designing systems this way these folks are even more guilty than the perpetrators on the front-line.  It’s like having a bad building design and then blaming the contruction worker for structural design problems. 

I found it interesting that Mr. Bazerman doesn’t have a problem with incentives, but talks about how goals drive out instrinsic motivation.  The two go hand-in-hand.  I call incentives a “faux target” (something I wrote about in The Great  False Dichotomy).

Organizations establish goals functionally, this is a design flaw to start with as it creates sub-optimization.  This is something that makes a systems thinker cringe.  Yet, command and control executives seem to think this is an optimal design.

I didn’t see much in the HBR article about what organizations should do.  A focus on method would be a good place to start.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.

The wildly talked and written about Quality Digest article on systems thinking has touched off the debate on standardization (again).  One person commented that because there is a lack of standardization that they can’t get consistently good service.  Hmmm, well, that might be true but let’s take a look at the problem differently.

Folks who read my posts know that the one thing you want in systems thinking is to get knowledge of the “what and why” of current performance.  Which (if you think about it) makes more sense than to plan change without knowledge as is often the case.  In systems thinking you can assume nothing about performance . . . it is important to learn what the work and customer demands are and understand what system conditions drive the performance.

A customer (or manager) may assume that poor or inconsistent performance is caused by a lack of standardization, but they understand little about the system that is provisioning them the service.  But what I know is that system conditions dictate the performance.

Standardization has become a form of best practice and it fits nicely into a command and control thinker’s paradigm.  Information technology likes standardization as it is required to get requirements to be able to code.  Anything less would seem wishy-washy to management or IT folks.

However,  I find it rare that standard forms, procedures, etc. can overcome the variety of demands that customers bring to a service organization.  An inability of standardization to absorb variety leads to failure demand (demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer) and failure demand is expensive waste.  This is part of the reason standardization is not typically the best answer.

So what are these mystrious and nebulous “system conditions?”  They are different for each organization, but many can be found where assumptions rest.  These can be assumptions around  structure, measures, work design, procedures, IT, management roles, best practices, etc.  If you spend enough time in the work, you will see the system conditions driving organizational performance.

So, if you are a service organization . . . understanding that  standardization is an enemy to variety will allow you to look at your system with clarity instead of assumptions.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.

I wrote a post over the weekend about Chase having bankers pull people out of line to upsell products to them (Banks – Don’t Copy Chase on this Policy).  Then today I researched more upselling that happens in other industries at The Consumerist website.

The United States Postal Serviceapparently has to try to upsell on your packages, AMC , Verizon, Best Buy and many more.  Forced upselling has got to end.  I mean when a customer comes in the door and says don’t try to upsell me and the front-line worker continues to do so . . . we have a problem.  We have both waste and customer anger, so what’s the upside here?

The coup de grace is to follow up this madness with mystery shopping for compliance and bonuses.  It is to make stupid  . . . lethal.  Demeaning to both the customer and the worker.

There are better ways to generate revenue for companies.  Understanding customer purpose and delivering service that gives customers what they demand. 

Good service is getting harder to find as service organizations weren’t that good at providing good service in the first place, now customers have to compete with internally-focused programs like upselling that make it even harder.  This is a hard sell in many cases and increases costs and loses customers.

Service organizations that participate in upselling have been sold a bill of goods that can’t be delivered.  Trust erodes the confidence of customers to get what they want as this is over-ridden by mandates for revenue.  To me, it is the beginning of the end.

Provisioning what customers want and how they want it should be the focus, not some arbitrary financial target that leads to chasing away customers.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.  

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• Cut the upsell, or get no sale (timesunion.com)

We all know about the sports famous curses:

• The Bambino Curse- From the sale of Babe Ruth to the Yankees by the Boston Red Sox.  Subsequently, one of the great sports draughts where the Yankees would win 26 World Series and the Boston Red Sox did not win one for 86 years (ending in 2004).
• The Andretti Curse – Mario Andretti won the Indianapolis 500 in 1969, but despite 25 years of efforts he was unable to win again.
• The Curse of 1940 – Cited as the reason for the New York Rangers inability to win the Stanley Cup until 1994.

Many other curses with strange names and funny stories like the Curse of Biddy Early, the Buffalo Sports Curse, Curse of the Billy Goat, the Sports Illustrated Cover Jinx and the list goes on.  However, I believe we are under the W. Edwards Deming Curse.

It was Deming that said we have been in economic decline since 1968, which he noted as the high water mark for the US.  Just as General Lewis Armistead’s fall at Gettysburg marked the decline of the South during the Civil War. 

It hasn’t been a complete disaster with a few rays of sunshine here and there.  But government deficits have built.  

A tiny country with few resources (Japan) has brought manufacturing to its knees . . . and do we really want to talk about how poor service is in the US?  The fall has been incremental so many haven’t felt the decline just as a frog that boils in the kettle doesn’t feel small changes in heat.

What have we missed?  We have had fads like lean, six sigma, TQM and an assortment of promising strategies to break the curse.  Yet, we wallow in the cesspool of an economic conundrum that has everyone turning to China to fund government deficits and manufacture cheap products.  In service, we outsource to cheap labor countries based on our thinking that economies of scale and quarterly dividends will right the ship.

The source of the Curse has been blamed on the lazy, overpaid and uneducated worker.  Most of the improvement fads place emphasis on the front-line measuring productivity, copying and cutting costs (and heads).  Yet costs continue to rise and creative ways to make short-term profits improve are embraced.  Only to compromise the long-term and the day of reckoning has come.

So, if the Curse of W. Edwards Deming doesn’t manifest itself in the front-line where is our opportunity to do what the Red Sox did?  Break the Curse.

For many it lies in the things that haven’t changed, Dr. Deming warned that management must reinvent itself.  Doing so with an emphasis to create value and jobs and something for the greater good.  Rather than the bottom-line thinking that has crushed both value and jobs.

Management  has to begin to understand that economies are in the flow, not the scale.  The functional separation of work  started by Frederick Taylor at the turn of the last century is stagnant.  Leading management to reinventing itself by redesigning the work and its own thinking.

Whether this Curse lifts or not, depends largely in part on whether curiosity leads us to experiment with our thinking.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbitt or LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.  

The misuse of lean manufacturing tools in service is rampant.  There is a risk of getting the ire of the toolheads for not promoting what systems thinking is about and instead attacking blatant errors in thinking in lean.

John Seddon has written an important article (Why Management Tools Don’t Work) on the subject of takt time that follow up from his book “Freedom from Command and Control.”  In the srticle John makes important distinctions between manufacturing and service.  With takt time in manufacturing Taiichi Ohno (in the Toyota Production System) was trying to make cars at the rate of customer demand.  But in service industry we do not have this problem.

The use of takt time in service is to maximize productivity of the individual and not to focus improvement  efforts on the system as both Mr. Ohno and W. Edwards Deming advocated. 

John Seddon points out the three things that make takt time flawed for service.  In my words, I summarize these thoughts.

1. Demand is the greatest opportunity to improve.  Takt time ignores the fact that in service we have failure demand (demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer), instead it treats all demand as work to be processed.  This paramount to being efficient with waste.
2. The variety of the work.  We are not processing standard pieces of material like manufacturing.  Each demand is unique in the way it comes in and how it is handled.  To treat each service transaction the same is to create more failure demand.  Focus of the work by the worker is on the standards using takt time and not the variety.
3. Command and control is perpetuated.  The use of takt time is used to wield control over the worker in service.  Something Mr. Ohno would have disliked, yet, lean tools and their users ignore saying things like “we have to convince management first.”  The problem is they are perpetuating the problem.

The takeaway from what John Seddon is (and has been) sharing with us is that service is different than manufacturing.  Service is different by the variety of demand offered at the points of transaction and building standardized systems where variety is great is a costly mistake.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.

There are been fewer mergers and acquisitions in recent months . . . and that is a good thing.  Too many organizations and government entities have swallowed whole the economies of scale thinking that in a management paradox has led to higher costs.

The culprit behind is a shared services strategy that is fundamentally rooted in economies of scale thinking.  Government entities and for-profit companies desperate for cost savings look to combine services to achieve them.  The problem is not the scale, it is the flow.

Blindly combining IT, HR or contact centers seems to be where organizations have been duped in to thinking that this is a good idea.  The problem with this approach is rooted in the design.

Most organizations destroy flow by their design through the functional separation of work.  Phone calls have been centralized into contact centers to achieve such scale economies and back offices built to do processing.  Technology entraps the worker through such poor design thinking and locks in the waste.

For any organization (public or private) a better way is to study demand before taking on scale thinking.  This can’t be done at the 50,000 foot level, but by studying demand where transactions occur between the worker and customer.  Too many assumptions are made based on “you have a contact center and so do I, let’s save money by combining the two” thinking. 

If the demands are the same (rarely the case) their may be opportunity, but contact centers, IT, back offices and HR are typically fraught with waste.  This waste comes in the form of failure demand (demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer – Seddon).  As much failure demand as organizations have in it, we miss the opportunity to redesign the system to design out the failure demand.  Do we even need that back office?

The functional design is an inhibitor to flow.  Poor flow leads to higher costs as hand-offs and queues lead to poor service.  The insightful study of demand can aid in a better design as we can design failure demand out and design in services that accommodate “what matters” to customers and constituents.

Better design for increased economies of flow will decrease costs, not economies of scale thinking.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at tripp@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columist (Quality Digest and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.