The No Tool Zone

Management barking orders to front-line staff is the visual I get when visiting organizations of all shapes and sizes.  Management is supposed to manage and workers . . . well, they work.  Unfortunately, management has not changed much in the role they do over the past 100 years or so. Management is not quite as blatant as past years (e.g., no beatings or yelling).  But the premise of management thinking has not changed.

Gone are the days when workers became managers or at least not as prevalent.  MBA graduates skip the work piece and go right to management . . . without knowledge of the work.  A travesty with inglorious repercussions to improving things.  Sadly, this is today’s management.

However, there is a new way to manage that offers hope.  Instead of the pathetic management style that entraps or disables work, there are those few that can embrace enabling work.  This begins with understanding doesn’t come from a book, but with knowledge of customer demands and purpose.  This leads to a realization that decision-making is best left to those with knowledge.  As knowledge comes from the work and not spreadsheets.

Ultimately, this means that workers have the best knowledge, but management has the ability to change the system in which they work.  Improvement of any system requires unprecedented cooperation between workers and management.  Workers identify what disrupts flow and management removes these barriers.  Simple as that, except that managers are too involved with wasteful activities to recognize or listen to what barriers exist.

Management as an enabler requires different thinking about the role of management.  It is not big IT projects that perpetually create more failure demand and add costs or changing the system based on assumptions, ideologies or history.  It means a role that understands what gets in the way of customers trying to purchase your product or service.

There is no lack of those things that create hurdles for customers and they cost companies extraordinary amounts of money.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Much to my chagrin, my blog has been down for five days.  That is five, count’em frustrating days.  I wasn’t notified by my hosting company (ProVim).  There were no phone calls and no emails, yet, they claim to have attempted to contact me.  I worked furiously through the weekend to find answers and only found more frustration.

I did find that my website was being hosted by theplanet.com when I searched whois.  They are now called Softlayer.com and ProVim the third party.  In a chat session to Softlayer (a contradiction in customer service terms) refused to help me based on legal grounds.  They wouldn’t even contact the third party (ProVim) to help resolve the issue. I abhor service companies that can’t provide service or won’t do everything possible to help solve an issue.  This thinking is selfish, I would never do business with Softlayer.com – they look inside out from their perspective and not outside-in from the customer’s perspective.

As for ProVim, they are a small company and growing by acquisition by what I read.  They are acting like a big company meaning it is hard for customer’s to get answers.  More bureaucracy, they had to open a ticket number to resolve my issue – my issue was labeled “medium.”  Sounds like how someone might order chicken wings then representative of my problem from my perspective – and that perspective would be a customer’s perspective.

Ultimately, I had to rely on the good ol’ boy network to apply pressure . . . are we really in the new millenium?  After a bogus attempt to resolve my issue by an executive, someone with knowledge actually understood the problem and resolved it.  So, five days of frustration ends with someone with knowledge to solve the problem.

A lesson to all of us that value is created on the front-line in the eyes of the customer.  We don’t care about balance sheets and income statements and especially we don’t like our problems labeled “low” or “medium.”  We care about our lives not yours and we hate IVRs, ticket systems and unanswered phone calls.  Try designing a system that serves us and not you.  Revenue and business improvement result and you won’t have to buy businesses to grow.  The management paradox is that customers are dying to do business with organizations that sollve their problems and not those that worry about their own.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Over the years I have heard this phrase more often then I care to mention.  I hated it when I was 23 and I hate it at my current vintage age.  This term makes as little sense as the grammar it contains – and you know how bad I am at grammar.

The truth is our service systems have long been broken . . . and to some extent always will be broken.  There is no end to improvement and accepting the current state as stable is, well, both ignorant and obstinate.  Take the cover off your eyes, man.  Your service systems lack anything close to what a customer would call perfect.  And be thankful they are as such because otherwise life would be b-o-r-i-n-g.

New breakthroughs and new thinking will have infinite life for those that don’t accept the status quo.  That feeling inside that lets you know the blood is pumping through your veins is excitement and our dissatisfaction propels the world forward.

The current state of business that succumbs to targets, incentives, and assumptions leads us to the “ain’t broke don’t fix it” crowd.  A pathetic lot that reminds me of the McCarthy and witch hunt eras of yesteryear.  “Did I hear you say no targets?”  Burn them at the stake or accuse them of heresy or even communism that should keep them cowering.  Copernicus hid his revelation that the earth was not the center of the universe until his death in fear of being mocked or killed.

Do we still live in that era?

Universal “truths” that aren’t are hard to swallow and so we wallow in the stagnation of old theories.  Like a pig to mud.  Claiming brilliance, instead of admitting we wreak the odor of decay.  New thinking is only hazardous to careers, not profit.  Those that venture outside to experiment with method most often are labeled failures until they start their own companies and defeat last generation’s thinkers.

Toyota in manufacturing, Apple in technology while the rest fight to protect their dying markets, thinking and profits.  An isolationist attitude in a global market.

God bless the dissatisfied.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

A recent white paper has the LEI (Lean Enterprise Institute) folks admitting that only 2% of lean programs succeed.  Yet, with the masses of people that make up the lean community you would think that number was 98% of lean programs succeeding.  I was surprised that the number of failures wasn’t higher than 98%.

This begs the question of why the hype for a fad with such a high failure rate?  Shouldn’t it go the way of other fads that we at least had fun with like the Yo-Yo, Klackers and yes . . . even disco.

Jeff Liker and Mike Rother now have a new Japanese term for us to learn – Kata.  Surely an attempt to shore up the missing element of lean called thinking.  Why is it always a new Japanese word?

The thinking though is still lost on process improvement, routines and standardization.  Not to leave out “target conditions” that Liker and Rother claim that a “clear path” to the target makes it OK to use results management and extrinsic motivators vs. those that have an unclear path need an iterative approach devoid of results and extrinsic motivation.  W. Edwards Deming must be looking down and shaking his head with such foolishness.

The truth is lean doesn’t work because it is based on copying – something Dr. Deming warned us about many times.  We can not copy Toyota or the Japanese. Organizations and governments require more than copying to get ahead or they will always be behind . . . You can’t catch up copying it requires new and better thinking.

We have our own fundamental thinking problem is the US.  Addressing this requires understanding our industrialized, mass-production design of work and how it works against improvement. In service, manufacturing has different problems and perpetuating poor thinking by a fad that succeeds 2% or less is certainly the wrong direction.

When the chips are down . . . the buffalo move on.  It’s time to move on to better thinking.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I read an article today in Quality Digest about Dr. Don Wheeler (An Interview with Donald J. Wheeler).  I had the pleasure of getting a solid back ground in SPC from Dr. Wheeler and from a local (Indianapolis) statistician named Tim Baer.  I won’t pretend to have their knowledge, but through application of statistical theory I have learned that there is no other way to know whether improvement efforts or experimentation are making things better.

W. Edwards Deming challenged us in many ways.  He warned us not to copy the Japanese (because we could never catch up).  The perpetuation of Dr. Deming’s ideas requires a solid understanding of statistical methods.  Rarely, do I walk into a service organization and see the use of control charts (or process behavior charts as Dr. Wheeler references them).

The truth is there is no way to know whether things are getting better without the use of SPC.

That is correct – there is no other way!  So this begs the question of why their use is so uncommon amongst those that mine, analyze and use data.  If they did they would understand why targets are so damaging.  Or why the system governs performance and not the individual.  These are things you come to understand when you understand variation through the use of SPC.  My Myth Buster series at IQPC explains why – click here.

To me, operating without solid knowledge of SPC is a mistake that is very costly.  An organization trying to achieve business improvement must know when things are betting better or falling apart.  Sometimes you find out that things are worse when it is too late.  This requires an early warning system for a business tsunami that can wipe you out.

Using data in appropriate manner is hard to find these days in service organizations.  SPC is the only tool worth learning.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I recently read an article by one of the management fad proponents that even though they used tools they were a systemic thinker.  Further review and reading determined they provided no evidence of systemic thinking in the work they had done.  Where is the evidence?  None existed.

The use of tools offers problems I have written about before.  I wrote about it in my recent Quality Digest column – Are You a Sheet or Shelf Thinker? Tools limit thinking and create a barrier to systemic and breakthrough thinking.

Systems thinking (and more specifically, the Vanguard Method) is about method and innovation.  It addresses the management thinking that has to be challenged because of the assumptions that lead service organizations in the wrong direction.  The functional separation of work, targets, financials, hierarchy, technology, information are but a small sample of items that need to be challenged.

So, part of systems thinking is about addressing not just the design, but the management of the work.  Management thinking drives the design.  The management fads claim to do this too, but look for the evidence . . . lots of hat, but no cattle.  Pathetic and misleading.

Managers have a choice too, they can pick assumptions or knowledge.  Knowledge requires context to all those management reports with meaningless data.  One can only get that in the work.

Toolhead activities support status quo in management.  Most don’t know better, but many believe that someday if they see the benefit of tools management will buy-in over time.  The benefit never comes in sufficient quantity to convince management and management relegates the improvement fads to lower and middle management or the front-line.  A dead-end for sure.

Unless efforts to optimize systems include management . . . it is better not to start.  Systems thinking includes everyone and everything, not just the elitist or toolheads wreaking havoc on the systems.  This is not business improvement, it is more waste and sub-optimization in the system.

Good video of former toolheads that have found a better way:

I used to be a toolhead but I am alright now (short video 4 mins) from The Systems Thinking Review on Vimeo.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Long before process improvement there was an industrialized mindset that set the stage for all businesses to follow.  Influenced by the likes of Frederick Taylor (scientific management theory) and Henry Ford industrialized design became the norm, copied by service.    This perpetuated a myth that we still see in service design today.

Two pieces of thinking still dictate the design of service today.

1. The functional separation of work
2. Incentives to the individual to improve performance

Naturally, process improvement began to optimize the functions that had been designed into service.  But optimization of each function leads to sub-optimization.  Process improvement became . . . well, sub-optimal.  Business improvement in the way of design was overlooked  in favor of optimizing what they could functionally control.

Customers know how to see an organization.  They see one entity, a system if you will.  This is seen as “outside-in from a customer’s perspective.”  All those internal processes vanquished by a customer that brings variety and a different perspective.

However, the service design was built from both industrialized thinking and inside-out giving customers poor service.  Customers have to overcome targets, incentives, financials and management reports that hide the truth.  But customers have to navigate these things every day.

The waste is enormous with industrialized design.  Individual incentives focus management on the worker and not the system design.  The worker is focused on the incentive and not the customer.  All bad things in the eyes of systems thinkers . . . and customers.

Focusing on process improvement always seems plausible until we see how little is really “improved.”  A redesign of our systems and thinking is in order.  This will take methods to unlearn what we have learned or passed down to us from previous generations of management.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

The shocked looks on people’s faces when I talk about the 95/5 Rule or the resistance to my writing on such a thing is noteworthy.  Usually, it is HR folks and executives that provide the banter.  This isn’t surprising since many of these same people have been doing it wrong for a long time or maybe even promoted based on “individual performance.”

The reality is that the system dictates performance.  Individuals put in bad systems will lose every time.

So, what is a system?

It’s structure, work design, culture, technology, management thinking, measures, compensation systems, training, etc.  that govern performance.  And all systems are different, that is why they can’t be copied into best practices and the one best way mentality.

This does not mean that the individual is unimportant.  In fact, the individual is crucial to performing good service.  Systems need to be set up to enable the individual not disable them.  Unfortunately, work design and management thinking don’t usually allow this to happen.

Most organizations believe that performance comes down to the individual and so they (erroneously) see their systems up around individual performance.  These assumptions around the individual prevent breakthrough performance and create huge and costly waste.  This comes in the form of costly appraisals and assessments of individual performance.

The damage of an emphasis on individual performance doesn’t end with just appraisal systems . . . careers are damaged every day by this thinking.  I see individual performance in management and worker being labeled and then released for their performance.  Can we first fix the systems workers work in before ruining them?

Whenever I work with organizations and the systems are squarely what is being worked on, you can almost hear and feel the collective sigh of relief. They happily go on with the task of fixing the system and improving performance because everyone wants to work in a better system.  The whole tone and culture changes to something positive.

I rarely find bad individuals, but I find bad systems in almost every service organization.  It is evident in the service their customers experience.  Management doesn’t see the damage of bad systems because they don’t know how to look.  They can’t understand unless they go to the work and get knowledge about how bad these systems are in delivering service.

The 95/5 rule isn’t so much a rule as a way of thinking.  Whether you believe the real number is 70/30 or 80/20 or even 60/40 the system still dictates the performance.  All you have to do is look.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Having just participated in the International Deming Conference . . . I thought I would take a few days to reflect on the keynotes and sessions I attended.  It was a fast two days so unpacking my thoughts was necessary.  There was some good and some bad as in any conference especially with representation internationally.

I found myself disappointed in 2 of the 3 keynotes.  Dr  Vladimir Kvint is a well-traveled Russian that name dropped a number of famous US and Russian names that he had interacted with over the years.  A number of things were alarming to me, but this quote from his paper and slides was especially egregious:

“A fundamental idea of communism and a staple of all command economies is the equality of wages, salaries, and other forms of compensation regardless of a worker’s output.

This practice removes effective incentives for worker efficiency, innovation or leadership, and often even integrity.

When motivation is removed from the process of production, the result is low-quality labor goods, services, and subsequently, a much lower quality of life”

Pinch me, am I really at the Deming conference? Did I walk into the wrong room?  No, I can see Dr. Joyce Orsini and Dr. William Latzko in the room.  I sat wondering if they would let this go on.  Makes me wonder what Dr. Deming would have said.  Incentives are form of motivation, yes . . . the wrong kind.

An absolutely great keynote the next morning from Robert Browne from the Great Plains Coca-Cola bottling company.  He was fantastic.  Two wonderful quotes:

“The hardest part of change is changing your mind.”

“Changing culture is harder.  I can explain it to you, but I can’t understand it for you.”

I had moments where I thought I was talking to John Seddon listening to Bob Browne.  He spoke about getting rid of all the accountants that were focused on costs and how much money that saved him.  It took Mr. Browne years to refine his improvement method, something that the Vanguard Method can speed up for service organizations.

As brilliant as Mr. Browne was, I was frustrated with Dr. Thomas Kelly.  Never heard of him, but he came armed with a speech on solutions.  He had all the answers, but no knowledge.  He was challenged on his opinionated solutions and his response boiled down to bold and courageous moves require some controversy.  I kept asking myself, “By what method?”

I was shocked at some of the wrong thinking that continued into the first day.  ISO and technology presentations that were certainly not Deming.  But more alarming, the papers provided zero evidence that their thinking even works.  Dr. Latzko saved that day from keeping the first day a complete wash.

The second day came with more speakers that actually understood Dr. Deming’s teachings.  Jam Myszewski was difficult to follow (english was not his first language), but had some good information from his research.  Unfortunately, I missed Gordon Hall’s Theory of Knowledge presentation.

My presentation was very different than all others.  I went through the model for “check” and talked about recent engagements by Vanguard and myself.  Anyone interested in this presentation can email me for a PDF of the paper, those that have read it describe it as a good summary of the Vanguard Method.

That is my thoughts about this conference.  No “lean” presentations or practitioners which I found strange.  There would have been no Toyota, Taiichi Ohno or “lean” without Dr. Deming.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

You always hope that when fads present themselves that they live a short life and leave little carnage in their wake, but you can still see organizations that are ISO certified and displaying the banner proudly.  Yes, we are certified ISO company and we continue to have the best documented processes in our industry . . . that create concrete life preservers.

Often you see these companies be more expensive then their competitors and in this case it doesn’t mean a better product or service.  The hoards of people hired to document and audit add to costs.  These costs have to be accounted for somewhere.

Redesign of the work is in order, not documenting a poorly conceived system of processes.  Many point to the benefit of seeing their system and the interactions, but few identify that this design is actually flawed and full of waste and sub-optimization.  In service, only a redesign based on customer demand will help to provision a good outcome.

Workers and managers in the work understanding organizational performance end-to-end from a customer perspective gives them knowledge.  Process improvement does not go far enough, it might give you a percentage or two if your lucky, or create more waste if you are unlucky.  The whole system design with mass-production and Tayloristic thinking is perpetuated and huge improvements are missed.

Real improvements don’t come from standardization and documentation in service.  They come redesigning our thinking about the design and management of work.

Join me for the International Deming Conference in New York City on March 21 – 22.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at info@newsystemsthinking.com.  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.