Is Avoiding Failure the Same as Success?

Looking through a Request for Proposal for help with a technology implementation, I'm struck by the fact that less than half a page, out of twenty, is dedicated to the scope, to describing what it is they hope to accomplish. That's less than 3% of the document dedicated to defining success, to defining what the desired outcome is for the project.

The other nineteen and a half pages are filled with "Thou shalt do this!" and "Thou shalt not do this!" commandments; the impression I'm left with is that this organization has probably had a lot of problems in the past and they're trying to prevent those same problems from occuring again. Now, that's fair enough; learning from past problems is a key part of improving a process.

The problem is, in the half page that deals with the scope of work, it's not really clear what it is they are trying to achieve. More than 97% of the document is trying to prevent failure, but the document never really manages to define success. Even if none of their anticipated problems happens, the odds are pretty good that the project won't really meet their goals, since little effort has been made to communicate what their goals really are.

When you're trying to get somewhere, sure it's important to avoid accidents and mechanical trouble. But it's even more important to have a clear vision of where you're trying to get. How much of your RFP process should deal with scope, and goals, and vision? I don't know, but probably a lot more than three percent.

Home Concerts and Productive Conversations

In the music business, many musicians like Kim Fontaine and Jay Semko of Saskatoon are doing more home parties rather than bar gigs, preferring the intimate casual exchange in someone's home to the performance feel of a public gig.

Similarly, it seems that more and more of what I'm doing is based on conversation rather than presentation. Interviews, interactive training, facilitation - all of this is heavy on conversation and dialogue, rather than one-way output of information. I've come to prefer this, as have clients.

Building on this, I'm introducing a new service today: Ten Conversation About Productivity, For Leadership Teams. This is a series of ten in-depth, facilitated conversations about improving productivity. With the management team from an organization, we explore the leading approaches to "getting more done", and discuss how they fit with your organization. The biggest challenge is figuring out how to do this without just demanding more from your already hardworking employees.

Enough With the Standing Ovations!

At an investment company's recent Client Appreciation Night at TCU Place in Saskatoon, the entertainment was good, but not great.

The warm up act was Jimmie Walker, who played Kid Dynomite (J.J. Evans) on the seventies comedy show Good Times. For some reason, Jimmie kept mentioning Moose Jaw as Saskatoon's main rival (it's Regina), went on for a while about the imminent post office strike (it's a teachers' strike, dude), talked about the lousy economy (while Saskatchewan has been booming). A little out of touch with the local scene! There were a few chuckles and smatterings of applause, but noone seemed to really get into it.

The main act was Michael Winslow, the cool sound-effects guy from the Police Academy movies. He made some pretty remarkable noises with just his mouth and a few effects pedals (the Jimi Hendrix solo was great), but also spent a whole lot of time on lowbrow "man walking out of theatre footsteps" and "man taking a leak" bits. Again, a few chuckles, a few impressive moments, but mostly mediocre filler.

Yet, at the end, the crowd of a couple thousand feet was up on it's feet for a standing ovation! Why? Why is it, that no matter how average the event, we feel obligated to honor the performers with what used to be reserved for only the best? Why pretend it was excellent when it wasn't? Don't we value excellence anymore? Have we lost our ability to identify excellence?Are we trying to be so darned nice that we never criticize mediocrity?

I've been noticing this in the world of business awards lately. Now some award recipients are truly deserving, and I mean no disrespect to those individuals and companies who are honored for their accomplishments over the years. Just staying in business for 25 years is actually a pretty amazing accomplishment.

I'm more concerned with all of the awards competitions that are mostly about "Ain't We Great". Three companies apply, or are nominated, and one gets the award as the "best this or that" in the city, or the province, or even the ENTIRE COUNTRY! One Saskatoon technology company proudly displayed an Excellence in Quality Management Award in their lobby, yet the company was a chaotic mess, with inconsistent products, huge turnover and terrible morale. They looked good on paper, and had a great award application, so with this public award as the supporting evidence, management was vocal and proud of their track record.


Not all management approaches are equal, either, nor are they all excellent. Bullying isn't good management. Winging it isn't good management. Loudership is not good leadership. And chaos is not really a business strategy.

So, don't give an ovation unless the show was truly excellent. And don't pretend that your management team is excellent, if it ain't.

What's Your Problem?

If you're in business, you need to know what your problem is; what is the problem that you are in the business of solving?

T. Harv Eker, high-octane creator of Secrets of The Millionaire Mind, says that an entrepreneur is someone who solves problems for a profit. Good definition. The more problems you solve, the more profit you make. The bigger the problems you solve, the more profits you make.

When you realize this, and look at your business in terms of solving customer problems for a profit, you can't get to problems fast enough. Bring them on! Seeing problems as opportunities for profit is quite a bit different from seeing customer problems as a nuisance to be avoided.

One household appliance company kept hearing laments from their customers about how hard it was to get rid of their old clothes washers and dryers. Apartment dwellers especially had a problem, with no place to store their old appliances until they could hire someone to eventually haul it away. While the company had ignored this customer problem for years ("We're in the new appliance business, not junk hauling!"), an employee suggestion led them to consider the opportunity it presented.

They were delivering the new appliances anyway. They had capable staff onsite with the equipment needed to move appliances. They had space on the delivery truck, since they had just unloaded the new appliances. The staff were returning to the truck empty handed. The truck was returning to the depot empty. The company decided to offer a removal service, charging a small but highly profitable fee to haul away the old appliances at the same time as they delivered the new ones. They built a relationship with a recycling organization and a used-appliance outlet to get rid of the old equipment. The customer problem was solved, the company's profits increased.

How many more problems might they be able to solve?

• Customers have a problem unpacking, installing and connecting the new appliances. It's often pretty complicated and needs a good handy man to complete. Solve that problem with some cross training and a few tools, and you have an on-the-spot installation crew. More profit opportunity.
• Customers have another problem getting rid of all the packaging and large cardboard boxes from the new appliances. Solve that problem by taking the packaging back in the mostly empty truck. More profit opportunity.

So, next time your customers complain, or share a problem with you related to your business dealings with them, think about how you might solve that problem and turn it into profit. Because that's what entrepreneurs do.

You DO Make Widgets

As you strive to explain why your business is different, have you ever found yourself saying "We don't make widgets here!" Do you feel that your business is more complex, more demanding than the simple manufacture of products?

Especially in service organizations, the tendency is to think that production of a product is "so much simpler than what we do here!"

But the reality is that every organization makes widgets, every organization makes products, and products are the only things that you can provide to a customer.

A quality manager at BMW's South Carolina plant got it right when he said "Of the 58 products BMW creates at this plant, only three are vehicles. We also create Invoices, Purchase Orders, Plant Tours, Dealer Seminars, Audits, Phone Conversations, Warranty Claims ... everything we do results in a product, and every product has a customer."

When you define your output as a product, you can identify who your customer is for that specific product. Then, knowing that customer, you can start to become customer-focused, continually making your product better and better, from the customers' point of view.

So what are your products?

Robin Lawton of  International Management Technologies presents a useful model for identifying your products. A product must be:

• A deliverable [ie. must be a noun, not -ing]
• Very specific
• Packaged in countable units
• Made plural with an “s”

So, though you might be looking for coaching, coaching itself is not a product. Though coaching is a noun, nouns that end in -ing are not useful product definitions. You can't count the number of coachings and you can't make it plural with an "s" - "I would like three coachings please" doesn't make any sense.

So, the actual product you might be interested in is a weekly coaching session. You can count the number of coaching sessions, you can discuss what a productive coaching session might look like. You can define your expectations for a weekly session, and you can identify features and benefits you'd like to see in a coaching session.

As part of coaching, a followup call might be a related product. You can count the number of followup calls, and you can identify what makes a good followup call. Similarly for an agenda, an assigned task, a task list, or a productivity suggestion. These are all products.

To get you started thinking about the products you produce, about your widgets, consider this list:

Advertisements, Answers, Blueprints, Campaigns, Contracts, Courses, Decisions, Deliveries, Diagnoses, Greetings, Innoculations, Invoices, Interviews, Job Postings, Plans, Policies, Prescriptions, Procedures, Product Returns, Recipes, Repairs, Reports, Schedules, Shipments, Strategies, Surgeries, Visits,

Learning to think of your output as a product, or widget, can be very helpful on your path to improved productivity and improved quality.

You DO make widgets. Be proud of that!

Does Your Communication Fail Safe?

We often need to communicate important information to other people in business. As we try to prevent problems and improve reliability of our processes, it's interesting to look at what happens if our communication fails. Does it fail in a safe way? Here's an example from the medical profession...

Patients at risk of blood clots often end up being prescribed Warfarin, an anti-coagulant, commonly but inaccurately called a "blood thinner". When a patient is taking Warfarin, they need regular blood tests (called INR tests) to make sure the dosage is right, with an INR value between 2 and 3. If the INR is too low, say 0.5, there's a high risk of dangerous blood clots. If the INR is too high, say 5, there is a high risk of dangerous bleeding. So, the patient needs feedback from their doctor based on the results of these regular tests. Usually this amounts to "stay on the same dose", "reduce the dose by X mg/day", or "increase the dose by Y mg/day". And, here's the process, at least in parts of Saskatchewan...

1. The doctor recommends a schedule for regular INR blood tests, say about once a week.
2. The patient goes to a lab when it's convenient, and gets an INR blood test done.
3. The lab sends the results to the doctor.
4. When the doctor receives an INR test result, they check the INR number. If it's too low or too high, the doctor phones the patient to adjust the dosage.

Simple enough, right? If there's a problem with the test result, the doctor makes an adjustment. When there's a problem, we deal with it. When there's not a problem, we do nothing.

One patient had a blood test done (and it turned out the INR value was 4.8 putting them at a high risk of dangerous bleeding). But, the lab either failed to send the results to the doctor, or the doctor's office lost or misfiled the test results. Whatever the reason, the doctor didn't get a test result, so the doctor didn't check the results, so the doctor didn't inform the patient.

Since the patient was only expecting a call if there was a problem, the patient thought everything was OK.

Since the doctor only responded to lab tests actually received, the doctor thought everything was OK.

Since the lab thought they'd sent the results to the doctor, the lab thought everything was OK.

As designed, this communication process did not fail safely. There was no guarantee that a problem result would get attention. There wasn't ever a confirming message sent to say "the test result were received and are OK."

To fail safely, one possible strengthening of the process would be to ALWAYS notify the patient with results within 1 day of the test, (dosage OK, increase dosage by X, or decrease dosage by Y). So, if the patient had not heard back within one day, they would not assume that the dosage is OK, they would assume that something went wrong with the communication process. Many other remedies could also help this process,

The point is, we can apply this thinking to many types of reporting and communication. If we only get a "signal" when there is a problem, we never know for sure if everything is actually OK. Someone might just have failed to communicate the signal. And that's not safe.

Planning Paralysis

How many projects are sitting on your desk, unstarted, because you can't find the time to make a plan?

In the ideal world of project management, you create a plan listing all the steps needed, in order, to get you where you want to go, with timelines, responsibilities and required resources all figured out down to the last nickel. (And a nickel might mean 5 cents, 5 hundred bucks, or 5 grand, depending on the size of your venture). In the real world that most managers live in, they can't find the time to make this comprehensive plan, so the project sits, unstarted, for weeks, months, years.

For some projects, like building an oil refinery in 18 months, you'd be crazy to start without a solid project plan. But for many projects that are sitting on manager's desks throughout the world, a comprehensive plan is not that important. The important thing is to start.

So, figure out the first thing you could do to make some progress on the project. Call someone, gather one piece of information, take one small step, give direction to one minion. You need a general idea of where you're going, but more importantly, you really need to start making progress.

Then, after you take that first step, you see if it's taken you closer to your objective, or if it's a little off target. Based on what you learn, you adjust your direction and take the next baby step. This simple breakdown of a journey into little cycles of Step, Adjust, Step, Adjust, Step, Adjust can take you through to completion of a project, without ever having to define an intricate, detailed, step-by-step project plan. This works surprisingly well.

So, take a look at your desk, figure out which project would make the biggest difference to you over the next weeks, months, years, and take the first step. It's time to get started.

Just Say No To Inflexible Software

A company purchased a business management software package. Their expectations were whipped into a frenzy by the sales material and hype, with high hopes that it would streamline their work processes and gain huge efficiencies. It was "integrated", "specific to [their] industry", "web enabled" and "customizable".

Unfortunately, in retrospect, these terms mean:

• "integrated" within itself, and only well-suited to a company that happens to run exactly the way the software is designed to work. No integration with other packages, limited import-export functionality, and no automation capabilities.
• "specific to [their] industry" but not nearly as advanced and flexible as the software that most other industries are using. If it's a choice between industry-specific and flexible, choose flexible.
• "web enabled" means they have a web-browser based interface to do specific, limited tasks. The interface is not customizable, and is clunky and user-unfriendly.
• "customizable" means that you can pay them to customize it, but can't do a darn thing with it yourself.

State-of-the-art for modern software is easy-to-use with flexible customization and seamless web and mobile interfaces. If software can't match the way you do business, you're going to have to create all kinds of workarounds, you're going to be writing down all kinds of clunky step-by-step manual procedures, and you're going to hate it. You're not going to get the productivity gains that the brochures lead you to expect.

Work on your processes first, get rid of the waste, the overprocessing, the handoffs, the defects, then find some software that can automate it. If you do it the other way around, that clunky old dinosaur software is going to bite you.

Ten Improvement Models for Leaders Who Don't Know How To Improve

If you want better results from your company, but you really don't know how to systematically make things better, here are ten models you can use to flail away at improvement:

1. Get people to work harder. Generally done through some combination of begging, bullying, and bribing.
2. Work longer hours. Crank up the number of hours that you and your people work.
3. Hire more people. Throw more bodies at the problem.
4. Downsize some people. Growth and profits through emaciation.
5. Add some technology (the mythical silver bullet). This gizmo ought to fix things.
6. Set targets and hold people accountable. I don't know how to improve things; maybe they'll figure something out.
7. Set big bold stretch goals. And then hope some magic happens.
8. Work smarter, not harder. Which isn't insulting at all to those who've been experts at their jobs for fifteen years.
9. Fire anyone who makes a mistake. Only for perfect managers or hypocrites, of whom I've met several.
10. Hire only the best. We need a hero, because we don't know how to succeed without heroes.
11. Reorganize. Changing who people report to will somehow fix what we do.
12. Counting. Make decisions based only on the numbers you can measure.

I realize that was twelve, not ten, but there are so many of these desperate-feeling improvement models that it's hard to stop. These models all seem powerless, relying on hope and wishful thinking, relying on "something" happening; something magical, or lucky, or wished for. Yet these models are all used. Commonly. Ineffectively.

When the temperature outside goes above zero again (it's -40 today with wind chill), we'll look at ten improvment models used by leaders who DO know how to improve.

Too Much on Your Plate?

You're a busy executive, and you want to be effective and powerful, creating positive change in your organization. But lately it seems that there's just too much to do. There aren't enough hours in the day, and you never see your family because of all the work-life balance seminars you've been attending.

Here are a few time-management morsels for you to chew on, as you struggle to bite off the daunting pile that's on your daily plate:

1. Can We Just Stop Doing It? When a problem arises, we often add additional tasks, approvals, reporting, and steps to our processes to deal with that problem. Then, when the problem goes away, we keep on doing those extra steps forever even though they're adding no value. One executive had started personally reviewing all purchase orders when his company was in financial crisis, but had continued this practice even after the crisis had long passed and the system had been dramatically improved. The reviews were cumbersome, acted as a bottleneck, and didn't add any value, but he kept on doing it. Then he stopped, freeing up hours of his time each week, and eliminating the bottleneck.
2. Can We Change How We Do It? You've prided yourself on always answering your phone quickly, to show that you're focused on your customer and on providing good service. Unfortunately, you end up constantly being interrupted, even during meetings and important matters that need your undivided attention. The loss of productivity is huge, but you've "always done it this way!" One sales executive was able to go from frantic to calm, simply by training himself to turn off his phone (yes OFF, not Vibrate) and turn off his computer (yes OFF), when he needed to focus. He was shocked at how quickly people adapted to his slightly slower responses, and at how much more he could get done in a day.
3. Can We Do It In a Different Order? One work process required an initial two-minute approval, a walk to the photocopier, then some additional work by another department, then another three-minute approval. The result was three little inboxes, with three little piles of work waiting for the next step, and three little handoffs. Some minor changes allowed the photocoying to be included in a previous step, and allowed the two approvals to be combined into one three-minute approval. This saved one little inbox, one little pile of waiting work, one little handoff, and some walking. Multiplied by a hundred repetitions a week, this saved the approving manager an estimated five hours a week.
4. Can Someone Else Do It? A small insurance company would divert a certain type of policy to a senior manager rather than moving it through their regular process, because it needed "specialized knowledge". Since the manager was busy doing management stuff, these policies would sit and wait, weigh on his mind, and then he'd do a marathon session to get through it. By teaching the "specialized knowledge" to the people who did the regular policies, they were able to process these just as effectively, and without delays. The change saved hours each week for the manager, reduced failure demand on the regular staff - customers used to phone repeatedly to check progress on these special policies. Everybody won, including the customers.

Ask a few of these questions about all the tasks that you're juggling, and see if you can't free up a bit of time.

 
Good luck with what's on your plate.

Is There Really a Top Priority?

How do you do time management in a real, messy company? In a real, messy management job?

Do you sort your tasks into A, B and C priorities, and then choose one of the A tasks and start hacking away at it? Then, when that one's done, you start hacking away at the next one. Or, more likely, you get interrupted by a crisis and get drawn back into the world of daily fire-fighting before you've made much progress on any top priority items.

One assumption that many people make is that they can somehow identify the top priority task, as if there is some universal rule that states "There will always be a single top priority." Unfortunately, that ain't the way it works.

It is very likely that there are two or four or five equally important areas you need to work on, four or five comparably-important tasks. The consequence of this is that you need a time management strategy that isn't based on finding the one top priority, but one that allows you to effectively make progress on several important priorities at the same time.

Think about it.

A Tale of Marketing Success

Here's the story, as best we can figure out, of how we came to make a recent sale. What can we learn about marketing from this story?

• Four years ago, we offered a public presentation. Person A from ABC Company attended, and we kept in touch.
• Two years ago, at a business networking event, I had an interesting conversation with Person R from PQR Company and we kept in touch.
• One year ago, we offered a different public presentation, and Person B from ABC Company attended.
• Person B from ABC Company talked to Person A from ABC Company about our presentation, and Person A was reminded of how much they had enjoyed our approach.
• Potential Client X had never heard of us but asked Person A if they knew of anybody that did Such-and-Such. Person A referred Potential Client X to us. Trust begins.
• Potential Client X then spoke to his supplier, Person R, who mentioned his interesting conversation with me a year ago. Trust builds.
• Potential Client X then checked our website and read our blog. Trust builds.
• Potential Client X then happened to see an email ad we regularly send out. Trust builds.
• Potential Client X then phoned us, inviting us to work with him. Trust explored.
• Potential Client X then became actual Client X, and we went on to do some good work together. Trust confirmed.

So which part of our marketing strategy produced the sale? Did he phone because of the email ad, or because of the website, or because of the blog, or because of the casual reference from his supplier, or because of the direct referral from Person B?

What about the public presentations? The people from ABC Company who were at our presentations didn't buy from us (yet!). But those people referred Potential Client X to us.

What about the networking? The person from PQR Company didn't buy from us (yet!). But he provided a reference to Potential Client X.

When measuring the effectiveness of these marketing activities, what should we attribute this sale to? In your own marketing activities, can you really truly say with certainty which marketing initiative produced the sale?

It's probably more complicated, more inter-related than you think, and your measurements probably don't contain the real answers. Measurements can definitely be useful, but sometimes you need to act based on theory - do the methodical things that you know will bring success, and keep doing them, tweaking them, and refining them, until they do bring success.

Does Your Data Collection Have an Exit Strategy?

A review of the reports that were being collected by a small retail chain revealed that four out of six reports that were regularly generated to coordinate inventory were not used by anyone for anything. It appears that there were initially good reasons for creating each of the six reports, but along the way, those reasons had become obsolete. A culture of blame fostered a just-in-case behaviour throughout the organization. Consequently, noone was willing to stick their neck out and say "We don't need to do this anymore".

Eliminating these four extraneous reports and the associated data collection and data entry saved an estimated six hours per week at five different branches. So, about one full-time position was freed up by eliminating a task that was adding no value.

What data are you collecting that is no longer useful? What reports should you phase out? How much wasted time can you free up?

Take a look.

An Ode to Rapid Improvement Projects

There's a part of your business that's not doing well;
The people are great but they're going through hell.
They just can't keep up and they beg for more staff, but when
You think of hiring you just have to laugh:
"We can't hire more - we have to cut costs
But we have to do something before it's all lost."
Rapid improvement is something we need
Our people can do it! Swift Fox can lead!

Thanks to the Blatant Self-Promotion division of Swift Fox for this little ditty.

Home By Six

A manager in the Toronto office of a large insurance provider was having an odd problem with his staff. The overall corporate culture was one of long hours and competitive posturing between employees. If John started working until 6:15pm, Steve would one-up him and stay until 6:45pm. When Heather worked until 7:00pm, Janice would then stay even later. Soon, everyone was in the office until eight, nine at night.

In their daily work, none of their clients or insurance suppliers were working at these hours, and the manager was aware enough to realize that these long hours were not really about getting the work done. Gathering the staff together, the manager laid it on the line:

1. You need to get your work done in the regular work day. If you can't, you need help with time management. We'll provide training and support. If that doesn't help, we need to examine our work flows and our capacity.
2. If you don't want to go home at the end of the day, there's something wrong with your personal relationships and work-life balance. Our EAP provides free confidential counselling and coaching. Use it.
3. "Home by Six" is now policy, and we'll help you achieve that, as part of our daily work.

We often talk of work-life balance, of respect for people, of the importance of family, of the need for rest and recuperation, yet how many of us live it? How many of us really encourage this for our staff?

You can demand more from your people than they can sustainably provide, and over time you will deplete them and have to replace them. This is a valid business model.

Or you can create a culture where life balance is truly valued, and still get the work done. If you are having retention problems, with high levels of stress and anxiety, perhaps something like "Home by Six" would work for you.

He Was Terrible - Will Never Use In The Future

After a recent presentation about quality to a large group of Saskatchewan health care leaders, the feedback forms about my presentation ranged widely, from "What I Liked Most" about the workshop, to "What I Liked Least". I've learned to expect variation, and, striving to improve, I try to learn and adapt based on all the feedback I receive.

The most critical feedback comment I received after this presentation was:

The message of giving patients what they want, when they want it is not realistic. He was terrible - will never use in the future.

Now this one threw me at first, as the insecure side of me reacted to the "He was terrible" part. I quickly re-read some of the other "He was great" comments to restore myself, and then thought about this one for a while. I'm certainly open to adapting my speaking style, or my audience participation exercises, or the ways I present information, but that didn't seem to be what this commenter was saying.

The message here, as far as I could see, was that giving patients "what they want, when they want it", was not realistic. Granted, there's plenty of room for misinterpretation, since it was a very brief comment with no opportunity for discussion or clarification. Still, this is a deeply disturbing comment coming from a health care leader.

If we don't give patients "what they want, when they want it", what do we do instead? What is "realistic" for the health care industry?

1. Not give patients what they want. Perhaps we should ignore our patients' desires for good health, for effective interventions, for relief of pain and symptoms, for respect, for information, for good service. My mom wanted an appointment with her doctor this week; the clinic's schedule wouldn't allow it. Maybe that's a good thing?
2. Give patients what they don't want.  Perhaps we should try to increase the number of hospital-acquired infections, clinical errors, or prescription drug interactions. A study published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society found that one out of thirty senior hospital admissions were due to adverse drug reactions.
3. Give patients what we want. Perhaps we need to reschedule their appointments more at our convenience, make them walk further around the hospital, drive to an even-more-distant specialty hospital, and put a few more people into each bed while we're at it.
4. Not give them help when they want it. Face it, patients are whiners. The whole idea of wanting health care when you're sick is just so needy. Perhaps it would be better to extend wait times even further, and add more handoffs and waiting rooms to each procedure along the way.
5. Give them help when we want to. Perhaps it would be better to require people to pre-schedule their visits to the emergency department, or maybe spread out their influenza infections throughout the year. Or, like a recent friend's experience, send notice of a scheduled specialist appointment at an arbitrary date in about six months, then push it back two months, then push it back another three months.

What scares me most about this critical comment is the suggestion that good customer service in the health care industry is not realistic. In every other industry, customer service (giving customers what they want, when they want it) is critical to business, a differentiator between success stories and business failures. Yet somehow it's "not realistic" in health care? I don't think so.

In today's StarPhoenix, Mark Lemstra wrote that Health care needs ideas, not more money, I couldn't agree more. And some of the old ideas and attitudes might have to go, to make room for new ones.

Have You Built a Tower of Babel?

To mess up the ambitious plans for construction of the Tower of Babel, God "confounded the language of all the Earth."(Genesis 11:5-8). In a bit of a mischevious intervention, God divided the people by getting them to speak different languages, where before they had spoken one. Without the ability to communicate, they were unable to coordinate their efforts. There was no possibility of getting the job done at all, let alone getting it done on time or under budget.

In the 1967 sci-fi short story "Babel II", available in War Games, Harry Crosby (aka Christopher Anvil) describes a world where the technology has gotten so complicated, where the degree of professional specialization has become so extensive, that none of the professionals can understand each other, and no-one understands completely how the technology works. Their attempts to build an Esmer-drive starship are doomed!

In your company, it's very likely that the people in purchasing have no idea what any of the stuff they're buying is used for, or how to tell a good flux capacitor from a bad one. Your people in operations probably have no idea what finance means when they talk about "Net changes in non-cash working capital items related to operations". As we divide our companies into departments, into specialists that speak different languages, we build a Tower of Babel where people are truly unable to understand each other.

As you examine the sequential steps that your organization takes to satisfy your customers, you'll see many handoffs from one department to another, from one language group to another. More often than not, the handoff is not well understood by either group. A complete order, for the sales department, means they got a deposit or purchase order from the customer. A complete order for the shop means all the line items are correct and all required materials are in stock. A complete order for shipping has no back orders and clear delivery instructions and address.

When we try to improve, it's common to work within a department, trying to make our work as efficient as possible. We aim to meet our departmental targets in the belief that this will achieve the company targets. We work to improve our individual departments in the belief that this will improve the organization. Paraphrasing a little more of "Babel II": All the departmental curves showed progress. It was natural to assume this meant company progress. But what about the connections between the departments, between their managers and between people generally. It would be possible to carry this specialization so far that nobody understands anyone in any other line of work, and then what will we have?

What we'll have is the typical modern company, where departments speak their own languages and work to improve within themselves, but the real flow of work and value never gets much better.

Rapid Improvement Projects

Are there areas of your business that continually struggle? Are your people having trouble keeping up with your customers’ continually increasing requirements? Maybe growth has strained your systems beyond their capacity. Or perhaps a slowdown has made you realize how out-of-control everything has been. Regardless, it’s gotten to the point that you have to make some changes, and you have to do it now.


You don’t have to figure it out yourself. By pulling together a cross-functional team that includes people who work in the area, people from other involved departments, and outside eyes from valued customers and suppliers, a Rapid Improvement Project can help your people to:

• Map out the current process, warts and all.
• Recover from the shock of seeing your current process.
• Learn to see wastes in the process.
• Map out a future version of how the process could be, should be.
• Identify specific changes to help make the leap from here to there.

Using principles and tools from Lean Enterprise and Systems Thinking, a Rapid Improvement Project empowers your people to address a struggling area of your operation. Along with some pre-interviews and preliminary data gathering, a Rapid Improvement Project can often accomplish in a day what has been dreamed of for years. And, because your people create the improvement, it tends to be an enlightening, positive, and productive experience.

The idea is not to create a perfect process in a day. The idea is to get the right people in the room, get everyone looking at how the work really happens (not how you think it does), and identify changes to make it immediately more efficient. It’s not magic, and your ugly old frog might not instantly turn into a handsome prince(ss). But it is a strong, quick and reliable method for improving whatever it is you do.

This is Not Good Enough

Sometimes you grow too fast, or you lose focus, or you lose some good people, or [insert your crisis here], and all of your talk about Customer Service and Quality goes out the window. For whatever reason, your customers end up getting it in the shorts, even though you swore you'd never let that happen.

Sometimes you have to get tough and tell your people that "This is Not Good Enough!" It may be a supplier, it may be an employee, it may be a manager, or it may be your whole company that needs to hear this message. If your company is facing a harsh reality, your people need to understand that, so they can do what needs to be done.

Speaking at an NSBA dinner meeting, Wally Mah of Northridge Development Corporation candidly spoke of the problems they faced during the intense Saskatoon housing boom in 2008. Paraphrasing his comments, "We failed our customers. We let the busy trades dictate our schedule and decide on the quality of the homes we were building. It came to a crisis. So we gave one of the owner's wives the final word in quality control. She would go to the trades and say 'This is not good enough; you have to come back and fix it.' That way it wasn't just an employee talking, it was an Owner. We had to do this to regain control, to regain the trust of our customers."

W. Edwards Deming told leaders to Drive Out Fear and Eliminate Numerical Goals from our management toolkit. Yet he also made it quite clear that communicating the facts about harsh realities that might be facing a company was totally justified. In words he might have used - "Unless our quality improves by 20% in the next six months, we will be out of business."

Yes, work on your systems. Yes, engage everyone in continuous improvement. And, yes, tell your people when your company faces a harsh reality, so they can pull together to do what's necessary.

However, if you find yourself repeatedly in crisis, and repeatedly telling people that "This is Not Good Enough," you need to read Deming's Out of the Crisis. If your people are always "Not Good Enough", it's likely your management approach that is "Not Good Enough". There are better ways.

It's Turtles All the Way Down - Coaching the Coaches

Do you need a coach? Can you use a consultant? Do your people need outside training? Consider Stephen Hawking's book A Brief History of Time, which starts something like this...

A well-known scientist gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "That's rubbish; the world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant turtle." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the turtle standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever", said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

While the origins of the turtle story are uncertain, the idea applies well to personal development for all of us.

As Swift Fox, I offer coaching services, yet I personally use coaches to help me keep on track. I offer business consulting services, yet I hire other consultants to help me learn and grow my business. I offer training services, yet I often attend training courses, sometimes on the same topics that I teach. I mentor business owners, yet I have mentors myself.

We can all use a little help. Even those who are in the business of providing help.