Ask What, Not Who

Several years ago I did a Baldrige assessment for a well-known service company. It was quickly apparent that a siege mentality permeated its offices with leadership blaming the production facility for problems and production blaming leadership and everybody blaming the customers, who generally disliked the company. When I presented my evaluation of the company’s management system, I told leaders they had a “culture of blameology.”

The most common question in response to any problem was, “Whose fault is it?” As a result, people kept their heads down. Nobody took initiative. Everybody avoided responsibility. Unhappy and unmotivated employees spent more time looking over their shoulders than focusing on what was in front of them.

So the first task was to change the question. Instead of asking whose fault a problem was, the more effective question is, “What’s the process?” W. Edwards Deming and Joseph Juran liked to point out that 80 to 90 to 95 percent of an organization’s problems are problems with the system, not with the people working in the system, so if you really have to blame someone, blame the people responsible for the system. Blame leadership. That won’t solve the problems but at least you’ll be holding the right people accountable.

You solve problems by understanding and improving the processes that produce them. This is a process issue, not a people issue. As someone once said, if you put a good performer up against a…

Find Your Bright Spots

I’ve been reading Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip and Dan Heath. It’s well-researched, well-written, and thought-provoking, and I highly recommend it.

One of the brothers’ recommendations is to pursue the bright spots in your organization. In an interview in McKinsey Quarterly (March 2010), Chip Heath says, “The principle of bright spots is that you shouldn’t try to be more like Apple; you should try to be more like yourself at your best moments.” As the Heaths write in their book, figure out “what’s working and how can we do more of it.”

The Baldrige Criteria address this by asking how you manage organizational knowledge to accomplish the rapid identification, sharing, and implementation of best practices. To many organizations, identifying best practices means benchmarking. Chip Heath is not a big fan of benchmarking. In the interview, he says, “If you believe that organizations differ in their cultures, capabilities, and structures, there’s something fundamentally odd about saying that you want to be more like another company that has a very different culture, structure, and set of capabilities.”

While most formal benchmarking processes try to address these differences, a lot of time can be wasted trying to fit someone else’s best practice to the way your organization operates. Your own bright spots should be easier to replicate because you already know they work in your culture and structure. The Heaths offer suggestions on how to recognize and…

Process Management Review

I realize there’s a lot of stuff on this site that may obscure what you’re looking for. If you want to read about process design, management, and improvement, these articles will interest you. Just click on the name of the article to go to it.

• 10 Critical Questions: Process Management. Questions you can ask to evaluate your work system and how you design, manage, and improve your key work processes.

• Identifying Key Work Processes. Where to look for your key processes.

• 3 Steps to Finding Your Key Processes. Questions you can ask to determine your most important internal value creation processes.

• The Process Matrix. A good way to identify your key work processes, requirements, and performance measures—and to see what’s missing.

• 5 Powerful Process Questions. How Brevard Public Schools create a system of process management and continuous improvement.

• The Power of Process. Cargill Corn Milling’s Best Practices Model.

• Process Management: DMAIC for Everyone. You can use the DMAIC process to identify, analyze, and solve process issues.

• My Personal Baldrige: Process. Steps you can take to apply process thinking to your job.

Process thinking and a systems perspective are key characteristics of Baldrige Award recipients. If you know what your key processes are and systematically improve them, your management will deliver a competitive advantage.

The Next Big Thing?

A couple years ago a consultant friend asked me what I thought the next big thing would be after Six Sigma and Lean. I didn’t have an answer, but BusinessWeek thinks it knows.

It’s called jugaad, and it’s “fast becoming the latest buzzword in academic and management consulting circles” (“From India, the Latest Management Fad,” Reena Jana, BusinessWeek, December 2, 2009).

Pronounced joo-gaardh, jugaad is a Hindi slang word that means innovation to meet a customer’s immediate needs using scarce resources. Literally translated, it means “put-together contraption that moves.” In India, it’s commonly used to describe vehicles made out of whatever materials are available, most notably water pump sets that are converted into engines. According to Wikipedia, “the brakes of these vehicles very often fail and one of the passengers jumps down and applies a wooden block as a brake.”

If you don’t think that’s much of a threat to replace Six Sigma, you’re not thinking big enough. McKinsey consultants have begun discussing jugaad principles with their clients. Even Best Buy and Oracle are using jugaad to create more economical products and services.

We’re probably lucky they don’t build cars.

Still, the idea behind jugaad—innovation that is affordable and scalable—sounds appealing. Distancing it from its shoddy reputation will require a new horde of experts who can create a methodology that incorporates Six Sigma standards, Lean efficiency, and jugaad innovation.

Umm, excuse me while I call my consultant friend about that next big thing.

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