Reality Check in Japan

Making assumptions about the world around us is human nature. We have a sense for how the world operates and we interpret information and events based on our experiences and expectations. Peter Senge, author of The Fifth Discipline, calls these assumptions “leaps of abstraction.”

We make leaps of abstraction at work all the time. We assume we know what our customers require, what engages our employees, the source of a problem, and our marketplace and competitors. Because our assumptions may not, in truth, reflect reality, acting on them can cause all sorts of problems, and learning the truth through sound data and information can challenge our most dearly held beliefs.

This is what happened recently in Japan. Japan has a reputation for producing many of the world’s oldest people due, it has long claimed, to superior diet and a commitment to the elderly. It assumed it excelled in this area—until police found the body of one of the country’s centenarians, a man believed to be 111, who had been dead for more than thirty years.

The shocking discovery challenged a long-held belief, prompting officials to verify the status of the other centenarians in the country. According to an article in the New York Times by Martin Fackler, one of Tokyo’s oldest citizens at 113 had not been seen since the 1980s. City officials tried to visit a 125-year-old only to discover that her registered address had been turned into a city park in 1981.

To date, authorities have been unable to find 281 Japanese…

Data from a New Perspective

We have all seen more than our shares of charts and tables. Data in columns and rows. If we’re lucky, a trend chart. Numbers filling pages filling handouts filling binders.

That’s why it is always delightful to find a new way of presenting information, as Doug McCune has done with crime in San Francisco. He took real data, aggregated it geographically, and artistically rendered it as elevation. More crime mean higher elevation. You have to see the maps to understand their impact. Click here to see the hills and mountains of San Francisco created by larceny, narcotics, assault, vandalism, warrants, prostitution, vehicle theft, and robbery.

As McCune points out, the features are pretty consistent across all of the maps. It looks like the northeast center of the city easily has the highest crime rate across all types of crimes. The most dramatic map is the prostitution map with its twin peaks casting shadows over the city.

It made me think of how an elevation map could be used to show an organization’s data. For example, if you measure quality at different points in a process, you could map the process and use the quality measures to create elevation along the route. If you work for a utility, you could use outage data to create elevation maps that showed where most outages occur in the area you serve. Sure, you already have the data and everybody knows that bigger numbers mean more outages, but visualizing those outages can have a powerful impact.

Governments could use elevation…

Baldrige ROI

The Baldrige blog describes a slide shown by Jerry Rose, the head of quality at Cargill, at the recent Quest for Excellence. Cargill has had two businesses win the Baldrige Award and one has received the Award twice.

Rose’s slide divides Cargill businesses into three groups: those with a high degree of Baldrige deployment, those with partial deployment, and those just beginning to use Baldrige. The businesses with a high degree of deployment have achieved 30% cumulative earnings after taxes vs. budget. The businesses with partial deployment achieved 13%. The businesses just beginning their Baldrige journeys had -12%.

Rose summarized the results: “Deciding to embrace the Baldrige program in your company is a commitment to a journey. It takes time, it takes dedication, and it takes resources. What I know for sure is that there is a huge return on your investment.”

To see more results that support this Baldrige ROI, click on these articles:

• Baldrige and Quality Results
• Baldrige and Workforce Results
• Baldrige and Customer Results
• Baldrige and Financial Performance

Communicating Performance on Key Measures

Wainwright Industries manages by fact. One visit to Mission Control and you believe it.

Wainwright dedicates one conference room at its headquarters in St. Peters, Missouri, to displaying the information and analysis that drives its award-winning continuous improvement efforts. It calls the room Mission Control.

The walls display a plethora of charts and graphs, including trends for quality and performance indicators and, for each customer, monthly satisfaction index scores, trends for quality measures, stretch targets for exceeding customer expectations, and weekly customer feedback reports.

Wainwright developed five key strategic indicator categories from its strategic business planning process: safety, internal and external customer satisfaction, Six Sigma quality, and business performance. “We focus on safety first and making money last,” says plant manager Mike Simms. And the focus has paid off. “We went from $100,000 in Workers Compensation claims in 1991 to zero in 1994,” Simms said, “and our number of recordable accidents dropped from 66 to 12.” At the same time, putting business performance last did not mean it suffered. Over the same time period, Wainwright’s gross profit as a percent of sales jumped from 8.7% to 14.2%.

Mission Control displays key quality indicators for each of the five categories, all of which link to the company’s mission, vision, values, and objectives. The Mission Control indicators are recordable accidents, associate suggestion rate, internal and external customer satisfaction, internal parts per million, sales, and net income. Trends are updated and reviewed regularly. “I go into Mission Control every day,” said Don Wainwright, chairman and chief executive…