Guess the Procedure, Win a Prize

A job site requested some crucial items from head office but wasn't getting a timely response. Repeated phone and email inquiries got no action, and work at the site ground to a halt waiting for these items. It turned out that the coordinator at head office was waiting for her superior to tell her it was OK before releasing the items to the site. She "couldn't send that without authorization, the site manager should know that."

Digging further, there was no procedure at this company for how the site was supposed to request this kind of item from head office. A previous supervisor had yelled at the coordinator when she had sent items to site that he hadn't approved of. So, to protect herself, the coordinator had, within her own mind, made up a procedure that required her direct supervisor to tell her, in person, to go ahead with such shipments.

Creating a spontaneous procedure is a great initiative, it helps get the job done more easily the next time. But people have to know about a procedure in order to follow it. And, since fear had made the coordinator more concerned with protecting herself than with serving her (internal) customer, she never bothered to tell the site what she was waiting for.

So, lot's of learning points:

1. People will make up procedures, where the company has none. They have to in order to survive. We need to tap into this initiative and have some way to capture, document, and spread the use of these procedures.
2. Procedures need to be known to all parties invovled.
3. People should work for their customers, not for their boss. The coordinator was focused on how to stay on the boss's good side, rather than on how to help the site move the job forward. This is management's responsibility to drive fear out of the workplace.
4. Communication helps, lack of communication hurts. The coordinator didn't tell the site what the next step in "her procedure" was, she just put things on hold until she heard from her boss.

Procedures can be beautiful. But they have to be documented, understood by all involved, and focused on adding value to the customer.

Too Soon, Too Eager, Too Pushy

A few incidents observed at a networking event this week demonstrated some frequent communication mistakes:

Too Soon

A sales guy was introduced to an executive from a key potential client, a new contact with whom he had no previous relationship. Very early in the conversation, the sales guy asked directly for a meeting to talk about becoming a supplier. The executive visibly winced and his body language completely changed. Within a few seconds, the executive cut short the conversation and moved on to talk to someone else.

Too Eager
The owner of an industrial supplier was introduced to a possible client, who asked a simple question about what the supplier does. Grasping the opportunity, the owner started listing off all of his company's capabilities in considerable detail. The client's eyes soon glazed over, and then started to search the room for someone else to talk to.


Too Pushy
Another business owner started grilling an executive with aggressive qualifying questions designed to lead the executive down a sales path. The executive tried repeatedly, with decreasing civility, to deflect the conversation to more general conversation, but the owner doesn't hear or see any of the signals, and continued to push his agenda.

Convincing More Convincingly

A food-processing company was preparing a communication plan to help with the rollout of some new processing equipment. As part of this effort, management considered all of the methods for getting the word out to the employees; the comprehensive plan included monthly newsletters, informative emails, personal conversations and staff meetings, and management felt confident that the plan would effectively tell employees what was happening. The wording chosen for all of these messages was positive and upbeat, emphasizing the benefits of the new system, with carefully selected quotes to show how good everything would be.

This is typical of many communication plans:

1. Figure out the message you want to convey, to executives, to middle managers, to staff, to customers.
2. Spin the message so it's unfailingly positive and enthusiatic
3. Choose media for delivering that message.

This is also typical of why many communication plans, and many change efforts, don't work all that well.

Whenever things are changed in your organization, it affects people. So, in good faith, we try to prevent resistance by improving communication, by keeping people informed. We increase the quantity of information that we send out. We focus on the positive aspects of the change. We try to convince people that the change will be good. We do more and more talking, in whatever form, to try to be more and more convincing.

To uncover and address resistance to change, we need to acknowledge that change truly does impact people. Very few changes are all butterflies and rainbows. The people doing the jobs are the experts at their jobs, and will have valid suggestions, valid fears, and valid concerns. Communication plans should focus as much on making sure people are heard as on keeping people informed.

As managers, we need to learn to listen to our people, to uncover and validate their concerns. Consider H.B. Karp's Positive Approach to Resistance, which is founded on two well-supported assumptions:

1. Resistance is real. People will always resist, knowingly or not, those things that they perceive as not in their best self-interest.
2. Resistance needs to be honored. It must be dealt with in a respectful manner or it will resurface.

As part of your communication plans, consider learning and implementing Karp's positive approach to resistance. This includes four separate steps, each of which should be completed before moving on to the next:

1. Surface the issues. Make it safe to voice concerns, and use active listening and interviewing techniques to draw out all the concerns.
2. Honor the resistance. Make it clear that it is OK to resist, it is natural to resist, and that surfaced concerns are legitimate.
3. Explore the issues. Strive to fully understand what the concerns are, rather than discounting them or explaining them away. Try to truly see what it looks like from the others' point of view. Then ask for help to figure out how to move forward in a way that would be least distressing, and most positive.
4. Recheck. Close the loop and re-examine the feelings and concerns about the issues, and about the path forward. Often, the resistance issues are no longer important, because they have been heard and understood. If not, rechecking sets a new starting point for followup sessions, in which you can continue to explore and resolve the resistance positively.

If all this mumbo-jumbo is Greek to you, consider the words of Epictetus (Stoic Greek Philosopher) - “We have two ears and one mouth so that we can listen twice as much as we speak.” Your communication plans should include more listening than talking, surfacing the issues rather than pretending that they don't exist.

A Specialist, But Not at Communication

An elderly patient was referred to a specialist for a medical consultation. The specialist was obviously knowledgeable about his profession, but was sadly lacking when it came to communication. His use of medical jargon made it essentially impossible for the patient to understand what he was trying to say.

Precise medical terms like "residual thrombus burden", "recanalization" and "inferior vena cava" mean specific things to doctors, but mean nothing to the general public. If he'd talked about a hardened blood clot, about re-opening bloodflow through a vein, about a large vein that carries blood back to the heart, the patient might have had a chance.

Communication is not about using impressive, precise, technical words. Communication is not about presenting an idea the way you think it should be presented. Communication is about helping someone else hear the message, about presenting the idea in a way that they can understand it. This means using simple language, appropriate to the audience, and asking open-ended questions to make sure they understand it.

Become a specialist at communication, and you will become far more effective at whatever else it is you happen to do.

You've Got to Listen

A small SK software company has a truly great product that could save large industrial companies millions of dollars. The company has made great efforts to convince some large customers that their product is truly great. They've sent out information about their product, they've done presentations, and they've itemized the benefits of their software. But the company has not made any significant sales.

The company has truly failed to communicate. They've "spoken" lots, but they've truly failed to listen. That's four truly's so far (five now), and I truly mean every one of the them (six!).

This company, as personified by its founder and owner, actually seems incapable of listening to others. Have you dealt with people like this?

• Suggestions from salespeople on how to improve the sales model are brushed off as whining;
• Suggestions from customers on how they'd like to test the product before buying are brushed off as cheap;
• Suggestions from colleagues on how the company might better present the solution are brushed off as unnecessary.

In the owner's mind, the product speaks for itself, and is perfectly suitable, as is. The sales people should just get out there and sell it, and any customer that doesn't buy it ain't too smart.

There is still a chance that this company will succeed. But there's a greater chance that this company, and this great product, will become obsolete without ever making the impact that it should.

No matter how smart you are, make sure you learn to listen.

It is truly the most important part of communication, and the most important part of running a business.

Truly (eight!)

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 Good Service Mean Self-Service?

A recent Saskatchewan health care experience prompted thoughts about what "good service" means. I got good service, in the sense that the problem was diagnosed, medications were prescribed, and lab tests were performed and interpreted. But, when compared with what happens when I take my car in for service, or when I order food at a restaurant, or when I recently had a house built, I'm shocked at how much management and execution I was required to do myself.

If the "good service" of health care were applied to the others, it seems like I would be asked to buy and install parts in my car, peel potatoes and cook the steaks at the restaurant, and whittle my own kitchen cabinets from a block of wood. Well, it wasn't that bad, but still surprising.

I don't say this to bash health care, since I'm very grateful for the caring assistance I received. But to anyone who thinks that Saskatchewan health care has come anywhere close to truly providing good service, I'd have to disagree.

Perhaps the best health care can aim for is to provide good technical expertise, preferably with a cheerful disposition, while requiring the patient to do things that they really don't have the expertise, experience or even the ability to do. But I think we can do better than that.

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.

One Thing Crucial to Success

A panel of successful business leaders was asked for the single thing that was crucial for success; some advice for young entrepreneurs looking to follow in their footsteps.

One said "Passion"
Another "Integrity"
A third "Tenacity"
A fourth said "Attitude"

The list went on, and in the ensuing discussion, they all made it clear that there is no silver bullet, no prescription for success. It takes all of these things plus hard work, luck, leadership, relationships, and vision. But a message that became clear, and that pulled it all together, was this:

You have to learn to give, before you try to take.

Of the lessons they'd learned, all the positive ones centered on using your gifts to truly serve the needs of your customers. All of the negative lessons centered on times that their companies forgot that.

Learn to give, to serve, to share your gifts with customers, to help solve their problems. The more you focus on giving, on serving, the more successful your business will be.

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.

The Backbone of Your Organization

From one vertebrate to another, a backbone is a wonderful thing. Compared to slime molds, jelly fish and malpractice lawyers, our backbones give us integrity; holding us together and providing a unifying structure on which we can hang all our other nifty bits and pieces.

Working with companies to map and improve their work processes, it's clear that a good, solid process map can serve as a very effective organizational backbone.

First, you map out the things that you do, step-by-step-by-step, to do good things for your customers. Then, you examine every step of this step-by-step-by-step sequence of events. Then, you think about all the things that can and could and should and shouldn't happen at each step...

• Standard Work - Do the people involved in this step all do their work the best known way possible? How do you know? What typically prevents them from doing the work correctly? What gets in the way?
• Pride of Work - Do the people feel proud of this step? Do they enjoy their work? Is it mind-numbingly boring? Is it stimulating? What can you do to improve it?
• Customer Requirements - What are the requirements of the next step in the process? And the step after that? Do the workers know those requirements? Does the next step understand this step?
• Communication - What does this step communicate to the next? What do they fail to communicate? And vice versa?
• Training - Do the people know how to do this step? Is the training material correct? Is the work activity done correctly? What parts of this step are likely to be done wrong?
• Quality - Does this step produce stuff that meets specifications, that meets customer requirements? Are we following our stated work processes? Could we prove this to a customer? To a regulator?
• Regulations - Does this step conform to all applicable regulations? Some steps may have no regulations, some may have many? Do the people doing the work know what regulations are applicable?
• Standards - Are we following the applicable standards in this step, both internal and external? What could cause a non-conformance at this step?
• Capacity - How much can this step produce? How much does it need to produce? Is it a bottleneck? Is it consistent?
• Variation - What causes results to vary at this step? How much variation is there? Is this part of the system in control or does it fluctuate wildly due to special causes?
• Safety - How can a person hurt themselves in this step? What opportunities for injury can we address? What are the ergonomics of this step? How can we improve them?

• Errors - What kind of errors could happen here? What are the consequences of an error here? Does this step produce a lot of rework? Can we disrupt the possibility of an error here?
• Ethics - Do our people face ethical dilemna's in this step? Privacy issues? Inappropriate temptations? Couldn't we anticipate these and address them in advance?
• Waste - Does this step add value for our customers? Is this waiting or transportation really necessary? Are we producing more than the next step can handle? Does all that frenzied motion really make our service better? Can't we identify these wastes and get rid of them? Can't we make our backbone stronger?
• Risk - Does this step expose the organization to risks, whether liability, injury, financial, security, technical, intellectual property, or maybe even a really big explosion?
• Reporting - What do we truly need to know about this step to manage our company? What do we measure? What should we measure?
• Money - What are the costs and investments associated with this step? Can they be identified? Verified? What about contributions to revenue? What about added value? What about efficient use of resources?

The list goes on. At every step of what we do, there are things that we want to happen and things that we don't want to happen. A good process map can be the backbone on which we hang all these other nifty bits and pieces - our Quality Management System, our Safety initiatives, our Lean improvement efforts, our variation-reduction and process control, our ethics and privacy practices, our financial analysis or our business process modelling.

So, unless you work for Slime Mold Structures Inc., the Jelly Fish Facilitation Co., or the Wees Krew Yu & Laff Lawfirm, take a look a process mapping as a first step in understanding, controlling, and improving your business.

Be Here in Fifteen Minutes, Or Else

A large phone company had a waiting list for the new iPhone 4. Customers on the waiting list had paid a $100 deposit and wanted the new phones as soon as they were available. In the interest of fairness, the company decided that they would call the people on the list, and give them fifteen minutes to get to the store to pick it up, or it would go to the next person on the list.

Angela and Doug, long-time customers of this company, both happened to be on that list. Angela, a surgeon, was interrupted in the operating room by her receptionist who had received the call at the office. Doug, a pilot, received the call while he was enroute from Calgary to Denver. In both cases, the company rep insisted that "If you want the phone, you need to be here within fifteen minutes." In both cases, their first responses were not fit to print. In both cases, their subsequent suggestion that a spouse or colleague pick up the phone was rejected. Both eventually got their phone, but not without several more phone calls and escalating complaints.

A very good lesson in how not to listen to the voice of the customer.

Building Relationships, One Coffee Percolator at a Time

I just got a hand-written Thank You card in the mail from the Handy Group of Companies in Saskatoon. We had rented a 36-cup coffee percolator from their Special Events department for a family birthday party a few weekends ago.

This was a very nice gesture, and indicative of how they've built their business. Consider that our entire rental cost about ten bucks and the hand-written card probably cost about two, including time and postage. Now this company does rentals for large-scale parties and all sorts of tools and construction equipment and would routinely have rental contracts worth thousands of dollars. Yet for my ten dollar coffee pot, they still invested the time and energy to send a Thank You note. Hand-written no less.

This is a great example of how to value your customers. Rather than looking at the tiny size of my purchase, this company saw an opportunity to build a relationship. They looked beyond the value of the individual transaction to the lifetime value of a customer. That's what makes it worth sending a Thank You note for even a ten dollar purchase.

How Making a Product "Better" Destroyed a House

A new house was built for clients who intended to rent out the property for ten years and then move in themselves. The design called for triple pane windows, extra insulation and an air-to-air heat exchanger to provide fresh air and control humidity.

The various tenants who lived in the house over the years routinely turned off the heat exchanger because, in their mind, it cost too much to run, as the fans were running continuously and they didn't want to pay for the electricity. As a result, the house was always very humid inside in the winter. Well within the ten years, the entire house had to be gutted and disinfected right down to the studs due to moisture, condensation, rot and mildew.

The company that builds the heat exchanger systems include controls that allow the user to switch it on and off, set the fan speed to high or low, and set the desired humidity level. These are all features intended to make the product better.

If the customer is a homeowner, who lives in the property and cares about the condition of the property, the flexible controls add great value. For a rented property, where the tenant cares only about how much they're paying for utilities, the flexible controls are terrible - the tenant shuts off the system to save money on electricity. They don't care if the building rots; they're only there for a few months or a few years - it's not their problem. In this particular case, the better control system, with additional features and flexibility, ended up costing the property owner almost $230,000 in unwanted, unexpected home repairs. The heat exchanger company wasn't held legally responsible, because the occupants failed to use the system correctly.

However, if the company truly cared to understand their customer and the uses of their product, they would realize that in a rental property situation, the luxury of being able to switch off the unit (to save electricity) is not a feature, it's a weakness. By making the product "better" in their minds, they made it worse for this property owner, and did costly damage to the property.

The customer who specified the unit was an architectural draftsman at the construction company, on the recommendation of a Mechanical Engineer. The customer who bought the unit was a purchaser at the construction company. The customer who paid for the unit was the property owner. The customer who actually used the unit was the tenant who rented the property.

Do you really understand who your customers are and what they truly need?

Three Lessons from a Client Visit

At a high-end high-tech firm, a complex project for a large client had gone sour. An emergency trip was arranged for the three most-involved and most-knowledgeable technical staff to go to the client site in an attempt to get the project back on the rails. With one senior technical lead and two junior technicians, they were to clarify the issues, do some in-depth testing and diagnostics, and attempt to come up with a solution during the three-day onsite visit. The meeting was arranged, flights and accomodations were booked and the agenda finalized.

Shortly before the trip, the project manager for these services initiated a conversation with the client's project manager and, out of the blue, decided to:

1. Reschedule the meeting for a day earlier, adding $1,200 to each of three plane tickets, and
2. Change who was going, removing the lead technical person, the one guy knew the most about the issues and most likely to come up with the solution. In his place, they sent a new services manager who had been with the company less than a week. The reason given was so that the client could "put a face to the name" of this new manager.

Since the lead technical person would have driven the entire trouble-shooting project, teaching and guiding the other two, the visit ended up being completely unproductive. Management arranged numerous meetings for the three visitors to meet and greet key people, several long lunches and meeting were held, and zero progress was made on the technical issues. The technical people were completely frustrated and disillusioned.

The service manager and project manager reassured the client that they were "taking the problem very seriously" and were "doing everything possible to find a solution" and were quite proud and vocal about how good the optics were that we "sent a high-level team down to address your issues".  So, the client was able to put a face to the name of the new services manager, but changed the name of the company to "mud," as the technical problem was almost completely ignored on this trip.

Three management mistakes in this scenario, and three resulting lessons to learn:

1. Managers didn't respect the Gemba. Managers need to support the people who are doing the actual, customer-focused, value-added work. In Lean terminology, this is the Gemba, the place where the real work happens. The customer needed a technical intervention, this should have been a technical trip, and the team should have been a technical team. Management face-time is important, but not at the expense of actually solving customer problems and meeting customer needs. This change was disrespectful to the technical team, disrespectful to the customer, and put management wants ahead of the Gemba, of the real work.

2. Managers imposed decisions on workers. The workers were trying to solve a technical problem. The project had anticipated some problems and there was budget for technical trips like this. The client and the technical staff agreed that further remote trouble-shooting wouldn't get them anywhere (they'd been trying to solve this problem remotely for several weeks with no success). Management unilaterally changed this to a management visit, making the trip completely ineffective, and stretching out the customer problem even further. Damage to morale within the technical staff was huge.

3. Managers created barriers, rather than removing them. Effective managers work to consult with staff, and remove barriers, provide resources and help workers get what they need to get the job done. In this case, the managers created barriers and literally prevented the work from being done. Top-down, command-and-control thinking is damaging and ineffective - there are better ways.

The problem remained unsolved for several more months, as this trip had eaten up the remaining travel budget for the project. Eventually, the crisis escalated enough to prompt a repeat trip with the original technical team. On that trip, they were able to solve the problem.

Look Ma, No Order Form

A mid-size national company prided itself on customer service. The company was willing to do things for its customers that larger competitors wouldn't do. They believed that their willingness to bend over backwards was the key to their success, and this was probably true. But it was also clear, based on employee suggestions, and very clear when looking in from the outside, that their almost religious commitment to being flexible was actually making their service worse in ways that management wasn't able to see.

As part of being flexible and offering good customer service, management refused to provide an order form for use by their customers. In this company, orders were received at a centralized sales center from customers all across the country. This company, with one hundred million dollars annual sales, prided itself on accepting orders in whatever format the customers wanted to send them. So, their customers would place orders by phone, fax, email or online, in free-form text, with whatever information they wanted to include, differing from order to order and from customer to customer. There were no guidelines, no attempts at standardization. When asked about the possibility of providing an order form to help streamline the order process, management's response was "There's no way we'd do that to our customers. We believe in good customer service!"

So, some orders would list specific product codes, others would describe a product in words, others would say "same as last order", despite the fact that six different people from that customer site might order product and it was rarely clear which "last order" they were referring to. Some orders might include desired shipping dates and delivery methods, others would not. Some orders might include a purchase order or payment method, others would not. Many would have incomplete addresses or contact information, or would miss some other key pieces of information that were necessary to process the order.

So, on many, many orders, the Service Agents would have to call back, clarify, guess, interpret, assume, look up information, and fill in the gaps that customers left when submitting their orders. Fully one quarter of each Service Agent's day was taken up with trying to complete and clarify missing and required information on incoming orders. They would inevitably have to involve the customer in this process, often repeatedly, in order to resolve all the issues.

How much easier would it have been for the customers, and for the Service Agents, if the customers knew up front what information was necessary when placing an order; if they had a simple, straightforward order form to guide them? Customer service would have been much smoother, with less telephone tag and back-and-forth communication.

This company was certainly successful, but they could have been so much more successful, with a lot less stress and busywork. In their mind, good customer service meant "doing whatever it took to rework the customers' orders and fill in all the required information." This approach just ended up creating more work for both customers and Service Agents.

How much wasted effort could have been avoided with even a little bit of standardization?

You Can't See Your Doctor

A lovely lady, approaching eighty years old wanted to see her doctor to talk about some immediate health troubles that were concerning her. But she hated calling, and hated going in to the clinic, so she kept postponing it.

"Whenever I phone them, it's so frustrating. It says push this button, then push that one, then I talk to someone but they won't let me see him for for three weeks. It hurts today! If I go to the clinic and wait, I don't know who I'll get and I have to tell them the whole story. At the desk, they won't even tell me if my doctor is working that day! Sometimes I wait and he ends up being the one that I get. It's OK to see another doctor, but I really just want to see my doctor. Why can't they even tell me whether he's working or not?"

If you're sick today, you want to see your doctor today. We get so concerned about "optimizing our time" and "filling the schedule" that we end up giving really bad service to our patients. We need some slack in our day, so we can handle the unpredictable demand. And it turns out that the unpredictable demand is actually quite predictable.

If you're struggling to provide quick service to your patients, clients or customers, check out the work of Dr. Mark Murray with Advanced Access in health care, and of John Seddon's approach to Lean Service with the Vanguard Method. Turns out, you can see your doctor.

It Takes Time to Fill in a Hole

Once you get a reputation for something, it tends to be self-fulfilling, self-reinforcing. If you've repeatedly provided good service, or if you've repeatedly been late for appointments, or if you've repeatedly told your wife you'd take out the garbage but then repeatedly forgot, that will be the impression they have of you. Whether your reputation is "good" or "bad", whether it's your personal reputation or that of your company, once you form an impression, it tends to be durable and hard to change.

If you've always provided good service with a reputation for accuracy and completeness, and you then make a mistake on one order, your customers will tend to give you the benefit of the doubt. They will still think of you as providing good service, as doing accurate and complete work, - "they're a good company, they just made a mistake." On the other hand, it you've routinely screwed up previous orders, the new mistake will just reinforce their impression of you - "they're always making mistakes on my orders."

If you've repeatedly been late for appointments, they'll expect you to be late next time. Even if you happen to be on time or early for a couple of appointments, it'll take a long time to change their overall perception of you.

If you remembered to take the garbage out twice in the last ten opportunities, your wife will be pretty cynical the next time you say "Sure honey". She's looking at whether you usually remember or whether you usually forget, and two out of ten means you usually forget. Even if you remember perfectly the next five times, that's still only seven successes out of the last fifteen opportunities; that's still less than half; from her point of view, that's still someone who usually forgets.

You may not like it, since you've been perfect on the latest five opportunities, but that's the way reputation goes. Once you dig yourself a hole, it takes a long time to fill it in. For good reputations, this works to your benefit; that's the whole idea of branding - people tend to see you in a favorable light because you've lived up to your brand promise in the past. For bad reputations, this durability works to your disadvantage; they'll interpret everything you do in the light of your past failures, unless you finally win them over with your persistent, repeated demonstrations that you actually have changed.

Protect your reputation in every interaction. If you dig a little hole, it may only take a short while to fill it in. If you dig a deep pit, it'll take forever.

Hearing Voices - Why Hallucination is Good for Management

So you want to be a good manager, a great leader; what do you do? The key to Good management, yes, even to Great management, is the ability to hallucinate, to hear voices that nobody else can hear.

First, the Voice of the Customer. If you can hear the voice of the customer, you're doing well. Actually, it would be more accurate to say the Voices of the Customers, because there's more than one type of customer, and they have more than one thing to say. There are your Actual Customers, those who buy your solutions. Then there are Brokers, those who connect you to your customers, act as some kind of middleman, and help your Actual Customer buy your solutions. Then there are Fixers, who help your Actual Customers when something goes wrong with your solutions. And, each of those different kinds of customers will tell you about What Outcomes They Want, What Outcomes They Don't Want, What Features They Want in Your Solution, and What Features They Want in your Selling Process. So, Three types of customers times Four types of wants equals Twelve different voices, just from your customers.

Then, there's the Voice of the Process. If you can also hear what your processes are telling you, you're doing really well. If you can understand the data you collect about what your processes are capable of, what's normal for your systems, what you can expect from them in the future, you're among an elite group of companies. Most managers respond to randomness in their results as if something significant has happened. And most managers ignore clear cries for help from their processes, because they don't know how to listen. So, two more voices here, one saying "something special is happening" and the other saying "everything's under control". We're up to fourteen.

Finally, there's the Voice of your Employees. Once you become CEO or President, it's almost guaranteed that you'll never hear the truth again. The higher up in management you go, the less likely you are to hear the truth. Your employees are almost certainly scared to share the truth as they see it, because they're justifiably worried about the possible consequences. They've seen what happens to people who stick their necks out, open up, and are candid about the risks and opportunities they see. But if you can manage this; if you can find a way to truly hear your employees' voices; to get them to share their thoughts and ingenuity and creativity with you - you set yourself amongst the super-elite few of the world's elite organizations.

The world's best companies aren't necessarily the largest companies, or the ones in the news. Often, companies are in the news simply because they are large or because chance has favored them with exceptional luck this quarter. But if you can hear the Voices of the Customers, the Voices of the Process, and the Voices of your Employees, you are well on your way to becoming one of the world's best companies, with engaged employees working in stable processes that are truly focused on the customer.

So if someone calls you crazy, maybe that's a good thing. Maybe you're hearing all of these voices, the voices no one else can hear, and you are becoming a truly great leader of a truly great company. Or, maybe you actually are a slobbering nut job like everyone says you are. Only you can know for sure.

It Wasn't Minty Fresh at the Dentist

The flouride rinse at the dentist was supposed to be mint flavoured, but tasted terrible and made patients gag. The hygenist had heard several complaints about it, so it wasn't just one person's opinion. A little further investigation discovered that the purchaser for the clinic had found a cheaper brand and bought that instead of the usual. The clinic had saved a few bucks, but turned off customers.

As Deming said, many of our most important costs are unknown and unknowable. It's hard to measure the dollar value of good tasting flouride, but that doesn't mean you should ignore it.

What important things are you ignoring because you can't measure them?