Why Having More Meetings Is Not The Answer

One of the participants in my Conclusion Trap class was grappling with a persistent problem at her company: their website regularly crashed after upgrades. She believed that one of the primary drivers of the problem was poor communication between two teams. The solution was obvious—schedule additional meetings between those two teams.

Along with spending more money on technology, adding meetings to everyone’s already overburdened schedule is an example of conclusion jumping at its finest.

Fortunately, before instituting a new set of meetings, she took the time to deeply understand the situation during our class.

What do companies typically do when there’s poor communication? Schedule more meetings. But that’s another example of jumping to solutions without really understanding the root causes of the issue. Meetings are simply a Band-Aid for a systemic, structural problem.

This is precisely what my student discovered when she dove more deeply into the situation. She saw that the root cause of the poor communication was not a lack of meetings. It was that the critical teams report up through different groups. Here’s her 5 Why analysis:

Would more meetings have helped? Sure. (Because, you know, that’s just what everyone wants. More meetings.) But that’s another administrative burden that would just slow the company down. Better to improve the ineffective organizational structure and eliminate the need for extra meetings. Which is what the company did, and now the website doesn’t crash.

As Peter Drucker wrote, meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization. While they’re a necessary evil, they should be rare: 

“But above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule. An organization in which everybody meets all the time is an organization in which no one gets anything done. Too many meetings always bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational components. . . if people in an organization find themselves in meetings a quarter of their time or more -- there is time-wasting malorganization.”

Jumping to conclusions is an unavoidable part of the human condition—even more so at work, where there’s so much time pressure. But by avoiding the conclusion trap, by spending time understanding the problem before you rush to action, you can find more effective, less expensive, and more durable solutions.

Problem Framing Is More Consequential Than You Might Think.

In 1971, President Nixon declared a “war on drugs.”

In 2017, President Trump declared a “public health emergency” to battle the opioid crisis.

These two declarations were essentially about the same thing: dealing with the financial, emotional, and social scourge of drug abuse that was destroying individuals and communities. But the framing of the problem—a “war” versus a “health emergency” makes a huge difference in the countermeasures that citizens, politicians, and communities are ready to consider. 

If you’re fighting a war, you’re thinking about military action. You’re going to mobilize soldiers, deploy aircraft and other weaponry, and erect barbed wire barriers. If you’re responding to a health emergency, you’re thinking about hospitals, counselors and social workers, treatment centers, and medical interventions. The countermeasures are radically different. 

This is one of the exercises I’ve used with a corporate client that’s enrolled my Conclusion Trap workshop. Based on my latest book, this workshop helps participants become better problem solvers by improving their ability to frame problems. 

To the extent that anyone outside of General Motors remembers Charles Kettering, he’s most famous for saying, “A problem well-stated is a problem half-solved.” Which sounds great—except that he never defined what a well-stated problem is. As my students discovered (and you can see from the example above), the phrasing of the problem has enormous consequences for the kind of countermeasures you develop. This kind of exercise helped them move from weak problem statements such as, “The problem is that we’re too busy to meet the milestones set by the project manager,” or “The problem is that we don’t have enough time to write and test the necessary code.”

If you’re interested in learning more about the program (which is run remotely, in five 75-minute sessions), let me know and we can talk in detail about how to make it work for your organization. 

What is a Healthy Company?

What is a healthy person? We can argue over specific metrics, but we’d all agree that we have to account for physical as well as mental/emotional health. What is a healthy organization? As with 

individuals, there will be disagreement over metrics, but clearly we have to consider financial performance, internal stakeholders (employees), and external stakeholders (community). Healthy organizations recognize the importance of all three areas, and while a specific decision might prioritize one over the others, in aggregate, healthy organizations make decisions that, on average, address all of those needs. 

Financial Performance
Milton Friedman is the primary exponent of the belief that a company’s sole purpose is making a profit: “There is one and only one social responsibility of business—to use its resources and engage in activities designed to increase its profits,” he wrote in 1970. In the past decade there’s been a backlash to that one-dimensional view, most notably by the Business Roundtable. In 2019, the organization announced that corporations should be governed to benefit all stakeholders— customers, employees, suppliers, communities and shareholders.

But many companies have long subscribed to this more holistic—and I’d argue, healthier—mantra. As Jim Collins wroteabout visionary firms such as Merck, 3M, General Electric, Boeing, and Disney in Built to Last, 

Profit maximization does not rule, but the visionary companies pursue their aims profitably. They do both. Profitability is a necessary condition for existence and a means to more important ends, but it is not the end in itself for many of the visionary companies. Profit is like oxygen, food, water, and blood for the body; they are not the point of life, but without them, there is no life. 

Often people will point out that many of these companies have run into trouble since he wrote the book. And that’s true—but frequently the cause of their troubles was due to straying from this holistic vision and instead, chasing profits. The causes of Boeing’s 737 Max fiasco are numerous, but it’s unquestionable that the decisions made all stemmed from the desire to maximize profits for the plane. Similarly, one of the primary drivers of GE’s fall from grace was the reckless pursuit of profits from its financing operations.

Healthy companies pursue profit relentlessly, but only as a means to an end, not the end itself. 

Internal Stakeholders—Employees
Companies typically proclaim that “employees are our most valuable resource.” Unfortunately, their actions don’t always conform to those lofty pronouncements. Whether it’s unsafe working conditions during COVID at a meatpacking plant or unrealistic performance quotas at an Amazon warehouse, employees are often treated as disposable commodities. Even in the more genteel and less physically risky world of white-collar work, sexual harassment, unequal pay, and limited growth opportunities abound. 

Healthy companies don’t just post platitudes about employee respect on motivational posters on the cafeteria walls. They actively create cultures that strive to support and contribute to the lives of their employees. Barry-Wehmiller, a $2B manufacturer of capital equipment, is committed to what it calls “Truly Human Leadership.” This philosophy emphasizes respect for employees and is central to their management. As CEO Bob Chapman says,

When somebody comes into our organization and agrees to join us, when we invite them into our organization, we become stewards of that life. And the way we treat that person will profoundly affect that person’s marriage and the way that person raises their children and interacts with our community.

An industrial machinery maker is the kind of company where you would expect to see old-school, bottom line-driven thinking driving organizational decisions. Yet nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, the company explicitly states that it measures success by the way it touches the lives of people.

External Stakeholders—Community
Healthy decisions about a company’s external stakeholders go beyond just following the rules and not poisoning the air or water with industrial contaminants. (Even Milton Friedman added the caveat that firms must compete without “deception or fraud.”) But the deindustrialization of large swaths of the country over the past 40 years have shown the danger of just meeting that bare minimum. Private equity firms that loaded companies with debt, stripped assets, and outsourced manufacturing left depressed, opioid-ridden communities in their wake. The private equity owners made out fine, but the larger communities were devastated. 

Healthy companies understand that they have a vital role to play in the health of the communities in which they operate. More significantly, they see that investing in their communities leads to the highly sought after “win-win.” James and Deborah Fallows, in their book Our Towns, point to the numerous small cities where companies collaborate with local governments and non-profits to improve education. For example, in Greenville, South Carolina, GE, Michelin, BMW, Duke Energy, and many other companies have helped create the A.J. Whittenberg Elementary School of Engineering. Yes—an elementary school for budding engineers, pre-K through grade 5 (10 years old). The school is located in an economically distressed part of town, with high poverty, unemployment, crime, and single parent households. But these companies aren’t investing in the school out of some sense of corporate altruism. They’re investing because this is the source of their future workers. While they’d certainly be financially healthier today if they saved their money, they’d be shortchanging their long-term success if they allowed the surrounding community to decay. 

What makes for a healthy company? It’s a lot more than a healthy balance sheet, although that’s certainly a necessary—but not sufficient—precondition. Healthy firms make decisions that improve the health of all stakeholders, both internal and external. They make decisions with a long term perspective, not just the next quarter’s earnings. And in a world rocked by the COVID pandemic, that’s a welcome dose of medicine. 

I'm Teaching an Open-Enrollment Time Management Class on Apr 17-18

How often have you started your workday with a clear plan and objectives. . .but by the time you pull your head out of your inbox it's lunchtime (or later), and you haven’t actually accomplished anything important? Do you lose precious time hunting for files or emails? Do you wake up at 2am panicking about something you forgot to do?

It doesn't have to be that way. Imagine finishing the day with your desk clean and your mind clear. Imagine being able to drive your strategic priorities rather than always putting out fires.

I’m teaching (via Zoom) a time/workflow management class at the Stanford Continuing Studies Program on Apr 17-18. The material is adapted from my Shingo Research Award-winning book, A Factory of One, which shows you how to apply lean production principles to individual knowledge work. I’ll be including plenty of new material as well. I’m also soliciting issues from students in advance of the class to ensure that I address the challenges that are most relevant to you.

Learn more about the class at the Stanford CSP website here. And of course, if you have questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly.

I hope you can join me.

One Easy Way to Squander Time, Money, and Credibility

Just in case 2020 wasn’t challenging enough for you, here’s a brilliant example of how to waste time, money, and credibility in 2021.

The HR department at a company approached me recently about teaching employees process mapping. This company recognizes the utility of process mapping in continuous improvement and decided that a class would be a good place to start. 

Sounds sensible. But with all due respect to the Society for Human Resource Management (SHRM), I can’t imagine a bigger waste of time or money­ than this class. Not because training has no value—of course it does, in the right circumstances—but because this class was completely disconnected from any process that needed improvement or business goal. Training done for training’s sake, without linkage to some sort of goal, is like a cattle rancher taking vegan cooking classes: intellectually interesting, but kind of pointless. 

In my experience, the half-life of classroom knowledge is somewhat shorter than the time it takes employees to walk from the conference room back to their offices. Without a connection to a desired business outcome, training becomes a strictly academic exercise that will be forgotten after the next bite of a danish. And even with a connection to a business outcome, you’re in race with the danish. 

Even worse, the credibility of the HR department takes a serious hit when they mandate training in this way. It’s a very short trip from a half-day in the classroom to the managerial flavor of the month and the accompanying cynicism and eyerolls.

If you’re going to ask your team to attend any kind of training, you’ve got to link it—meaningfully and immediately—to a personal or business benefit. Otherwise, you’re just wasting your money and everyone else’s time. 

Pay Attention to the Trenches, Not the Stars

Prior to the Super Bowl last Sunday, you couldn’t pick up a sports section without reading about the duel between Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback of all time, and Patrick Mahomes, the best quarterback in the game today. But it turns out that the battle between the two big name quarterbacks was much less important than the battle between the Chiefs’ offensive line and the Buccaneers’ defense.

The Chiefs’ offensive line lost its starting tackles (those are the two big guys on the right and left end of the offensive line), forcing them to not only use backup players, but to shift the players into different positions. Perhaps the Chiefs could have survived one of those changes, but together, they sounded the death knell for the Chiefs’ title hopes. Mahomes was pressured on 29 of 56 (52%) of his dropbacks, the most of any quarterback in Super Bowl history. By contrast, Brady was pressured on only 4 of his 30 (13%) dropbacks during the game.

Now, there were all kinds of other problems that doomed the Chiefs: dropped passes, penalties, poor punting, etc. And the Buccaneers played incredibly well. But given just how good Mahomes is, the fact that he seldom had time to throw the ball might have been the biggest factor in their loss.

The lesson for leaders is that the key to your success doesn’t lie (solely) with your stars — the rock star head of sales, the engineering wizard, or even (gasp!) the visionary CEO. Yes, they’re important. But you need to pay attention to the unsexy work done by unsung people in the trenches. Without the people doing the grunt work of cleaning hospital rooms, entering orders, doing preventative maintenance on machines, picking, packing, and shipping boxes, etc., the organization’s stars won’t shine. They’ll be buried, just like Mahomes, with no time to work their magic. And without well-designed processes, these workers can’t do their jobs effectively.

Patrick Mahomes had the best-selling licensed football jersey this year. I’m thinking that next year, Chiefs fans might want to start buying their offensive linemen’s jerseys.

Pay attention to the trenches. That’s where the game is won or lost.

Why Your Productivity Hacks Don’t Hack It

(Note: a modified version of this article first appeared in the Harvard Business Review. You can read that version, with more links to related articles, here.)

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Leaders in organizations are always seeking to improve employee productivity (including their own). All too often, that quest goes no further than time management training provided by the HR department. Those classes cover the pros and cons of Inbox Zero, the Pomodoro technique, the Eisenhower matrix, Getting Things Done, and countless other approaches that tantalize us with visions of the promised land of peak productivity. Given that people are still overwhelmed by work, buried in email, and unable to focus on critical priorities, it’s safe to say that these productivity hacks don’t hack it. 

The problem isn’t with the intrinsic logic of any of these approaches. It’s that they fail to account for the simple fact that most people don’t work in isolation. They work in complex organizations defined by interdependencies among people—and it’s these interdependencies that have the greatest effect on personal productivity. You can be an email ninja, but with the explosion of email (not to mention instant messages, Twitter direct messages, Slack messages, and countless other communication tools), you’ll never be fast enough to deal with all the incoming communication. Similarly, your personal urgent/important Eisenhower categories fall apart when the CEO asks you to do stop what you’re doing and handle something right now. 

As legendary statistician and management consultant W. Edwards Deming argued in his book Out of the Crisis, 94% of most problems and possibilities for improvement belong to the system, not the individual. I would argue that most productivity improvements belong there as well. Personal productivity systems are certainly useful, but the most effective antidote to low productivity and inefficiency must be implemented at the system level, not the individual level. 

Here are four countermeasures that will help reduce the systemic load on personal productivity:

1. Tier your huddles: Many highly productive organizations have instituted a system of tiered daily huddles, with a clear escalation sequence for all problems. The first huddle consisting of front line workers begins at the start of the workday. The next huddle, consisting of supervisors, follows 30 minutes later. Managers meet 30 minutes after that, followed by directors, VPs, and finally the executive team. Problems are addressed at the lowest possible level. If a decision can’t be reached, the issue is escalated to the next level. This system improves the linkage between the C-suite and the front lines; it accelerates decision making; and perhaps most importantly, it improves productivity by reducing the number of scattershot emails about a variety of problems. 

2. Make work visible: Most of the work in an office environment is invisible—it’s buried in people’s computers or their heads. As a result, it’s difficult to know what people are working on or whether they’re overloaded and unable to take on more tasks. Physical or virtual task boards (such as Trello, Asana, Airtable, Zenkit, etc.), where every task is represented by a card specifying who is handling it (and its status) enables a more equitable distribution of work. It also eliminates both countless status check emails and the need to cover that topic in meetings. The principle investigator of a medical research lab I worked with instituted just such a system, and found that work got done faster and with dramatically less effort. 

In a related fashion, making downtime visible is equally helpful. In working with the Boston Consulting Group, Harvard’s Leslie Perlow found that implementing “predictable time off” (i.e., afternoons or evenings totally disconnected from work and wireless devices, agreed-upon email blackout times, or uninterrupted work blocks) led to greater job satisfaction and better work-life balance without compromising client service. In this case, “predictability” serves the same purpose as “visibility”—it allows workers to see what colleagues are doing, and to react accordingly. 

3. Define the “bat signal”: Batman fans will remember that Commissioner Gordon summoned Batman with the image of a bat projected in the night sky. The bat signal was reserved for times of crisis (as when the Joker was on the loose), not when a scofflaw failed to pay a parking ticket. As Marshall McLuhan famously said, “the medium is the message.” Unfortunately, most organizations don’t have a similar way of indicating an issue is a true emergency. With no agreement on what communication medium to use, workers are forced to check all digital messaging channels to ensure that nothing slips through the cracks. That’s toxic to productivity. Companies can make work easier for people if they specified channels for urgent and non-urgent issues. 

A medical device manufacturer I worked with set up the following communication protocol to clarify what tool to use in each situation. The benefit was dramatic, as they were liberated from the need to check all incoming emails for urgent issues. They could focus on work requiring deep, uninterrupted thought, secure in the knowledge that they only needed to pay attention to text messages or phone calls. Note that it’s not important what communication protocol they chose; it’s simply important that they had a system. 

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4. Align responsibility with authority: Workers are often made responsible for tasks but aren’t given the authority to deliver results. This misalignment leads to frustration, stress, and overburden. For example, at a $500M footwear company I worked with, the founder and CEO—long removed from his role in product development—decided that he didn’t like a particular style his product team had designed. He diverted a container that was en route to the US with $400,000 worth of shoes to Africa, where he unloaded everything at a loss. The VP of product development was not only demoralized, he had to scramble at the last minute to adjust for the CEO’s decision. The rule is simple: if an employee is responsible for an outcome, she should have the authority to make the necessary decisions, without being forced into an endless string of emails, meetings, or presentations. 

WL Gore’s “lattice” structure of management is an excellent example of an organization that has implemented this idea. The $3 billion company broadly distributes leadership responsibility throughout the organization, allowing employees to make “above the waterline” (i.e., low-risk) decisions on their own, and only requiring approvals for “below the waterline” (high-risk) decisions. While it might be difficult for another company to copy Gore’s management model, it’s an example of the kind of thinking that can improve individual—and organizational—productivity.  

The pursuit of individual productivity healthy and worthwhile. However, unless you work independently outside of an organization, the benefits of most productivity tricks will be limited. To make a real impact on individual performance, you have to work at the system level. 

The Conclusion Trap Workbook Is Out (and it's Free)

Response to my latest book, The Conclusion Trap, has been strong, but I’ve heard from some readers who that they’d like a workbook to accompany it.

Done.

You can download the Conclusion Trap Workbook here. For free. Gratis. No charge. $0.00 dollars.

In it, you’ll find a recap of each of the four steps, along with questions, and recommendations you can use to experiment with the approach in your work (or personal!) lives.

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Give it a try, and let me know how you’re using it at work. It’s a pdf, so it’s easy for me to make changes, edits, and improvements in response to your input.

Merry Christmas, happy holidays, and all my best for a safe and peaceful new year.

New Workshop: Avoiding the Conclusion Trap (and Other Pitfalls)

Need a break from the tedious bickering over the presidential election? Can’t stand the thought of talking heads bloviating about the cataclysmic importance of the upcoming Georgia senatorial election?

If so, join me in January for a workshop on better problem solving. I’m joining forces with the fantastic folks at the Iowa Lean Consortium for a 4-part, 4-week workshop based on my new book, The Conclusion Trap.

Why Do You Need This Workshop?
Organizations (and individuals) frequently struggle to make good decisions. They spend money, invest in new technology, and invest enormous amounts of time and effort reorganizing in fruitless efforts to solve thorny problems. Why?

Years of training and reinforcement in school and at work, time pressures and deadlines, and inherent psychological biases cause us to jump to conclusions before we even understand the problem we’re attempting to solve. 

This online workshop will help you make better decisions by eliminating that tendency.

What Will You Learn?
We’ll learn a powerful, four-step process that ensures that you deeply understand a problem before pursuing any given solution. 

Some of the key concepts you’ll master:

• the difference between facts and data

• what it means to “go & see”

• how to frame a problem constructively, and why you really need to choose your words carefully

• how to think backwards

• best practices for finding root cause

What’s the Format?
The workshop is online (of course). It runs over four weeks — a single, 1-hour session each week, so that the time commitment is manageable. Each session is devoted to one of the four steps, with a week between each to allow you time to practice the concepts in your own workplace.

This is an interactive workshop that requires your participation. It’s not a passive, “check-Twitter-while-you-watch-a-webinar” experience. In each session, you’re expected to work through case studies and discuss them with your classmates. We’ll also devote a portion of each session to reflection and analysis of your experiences implementing the ideas at your workplace. 

At the end of this four-week series, you’ll be better at generating insight before you take action when you grapple with problems. Over the course of the workshop, you’ll practice these tools on an actual problem at your workplace with real time coaching. By the end of the workshop, you’ll have solved the problem (or at least you’ll know how to solve it). And in the future, you and your team will waste less time, effort, and money on countermeasures that never address the real underlying issues.

What Do I Do Next?
Well, obviously you register. Get more info on the workshop and sign up here. Or email me if you have other questions.

I hope to see you in January!

Avoiding Bureaucratic Snapback

Last week, I wrote about how the pandemic lockdown and work from home have made employees more productive by removing some of the bureaucratic barnacles that keep them from doing high value work. 

But how do we ensure that the administrative “drag”—bloated meetings, excessive documentation, repetitive approvals, etc.—don’t snapback with a vengeance when we return to the office? Many older managers have preconceived notions of telework as a refuge for slackers, and will push for a return to pre-Covid work routines. Similarly, many established companies with exhaustive employee manuals will want to go back to following pre-Covid policies.

To fight back against the gravitational pull of the old ways of working, we have to conduct a thorough assessment of how work has been done over the past year. That doesn’t mean an encyclopedic, 115-slide PowerPoint deck. It means simply reflecting on what worked well during work from home; what didn’t work well; and most importantly, why we had those results.

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Every organization is different, of course, but on the positive side, many of my clients have mentioned the following: faster decision making, improved team coordination and communication, and better work-life balance. On the negative side, they’ve complained about lower engagement with the overall company, difficulty of scheduling meetings with senior leaders, and anxiety about the future. My best clients are examining those responses and figuring out how to protect the positive and mitigate the negative. . . without returning to the status quo ante.

What new policies and processes will you retain after the Covid vaccine allows you back in the office? What will you jettison?

The Lockdown Unlocks Real Work

Peter Drucker once quipped that, “Much of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to work.” Recent research from the Boston Consulting Group confirms that employees can do better work when they’re liberated from much of the bureaucratic cruft that passes for daily management. 

According to BCG’s analysis, productivity at companies that have shifted to remote work has increased between 15% and 40%. As they put it, “the lockdown has unlocked real work” by reducing or eliminating the complicatedness of the traditional work environment. Long commutes? Four-hour meetings? Low-value travel? Elaborately defined, documented, and monitored processes and procedures? Gone, gone, gone, and gone. Thrust into crisis mode, employees (and managers), responded as you’d expect: getting rid of the administrative garbage that pollute their days and sharpening their focus on taking care of their customers and critical business functions. 

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With too little structure, you have chaos—no one knows what needs to be done, who’s responsible for doing it, or even what the goals are. At a $500M footwear company I once worked with, the founder and CEO—long removed from his role product development—decided that he didn’t like a particular style his product team had designed, developed, and purchased. He diverted a container that was en route to the US with $400,000 worth of shoes to Africa, where he unloaded everything at a loss. The sales, marketing, product, and customer service teams were stuck at the 11th hour (well, the 12th hour, actually) adjusting for the CEO’s violation of structure.

Too much structure creates inefficiency, and eventually bureaucratic paralysis—typically manifested as excessive (and often low-value) meetings, the necessity of obtaining approvals from multiple tiers of management, an overload of initiatives and KPIs, and a nearly suffocating volume of email. By now it’s practically a business fable, but when Alan Mulally took the reins at Ford in 2006, senior management actually had “meetings week”—five days each month in which executives held non-stop meetings. The preparation for that week, combined with the burden of having the leadership team unavailable for such a long period of time, hamstrung Ford’s ability to react to operational issues in a timely manner.

Obviously, working from home presents a different set of challenges. Coordination among groups can be more difficult, spontaneous interactions disappear almost completely, and interpersonal connection vertically within the organization can fray. But as I’ve written about before, just as the Covid pandemic provides an opportunity to assess and redesign work processes, it also provides an opportunity to lighten the administrative and managerial burden on our workers. 

Don't Let This Happen to Your Work From Home Colleagues (Copy)

A client of mine has started to bring some of their employees back into the office. They’re not ending their work from home policies, but increasingly higher ranking staff are coming back to the mothership, particularly for important meetings.

This shift makes sense for many reasons, but it’s having three unfortunate side effects. First, the work from home employees are beginning to have middle school flashbacks, where they’re definitely not part of the cool crowd, and they have to eat lunch at the cafeteria table with the dweebs. Second, they are, in fact, being left out of many discussions and decisions — not out of malice, but simply out of benign neglect. When everyone is working from home and meetings are conducted by Zoom it’s easy to remember to bring everyone to the virtual table. But when you’re in the office, it’s even easier to forget your cohorts who are laboring at home and just have the meeting with the people who are physically present. Third, the remaining work from home employees are missing out on the incipient burbling of water cooler conversations. This is bad for morale and bad for business.

This is an area where some simple visual tools can help:

1. Put photos of all employees from the team in the conference rooms typically used for their meetings. The photos will serve as a reminder of the people who aren’t present, making it easier to remember to either bring them into the meeting via conference call, or update them after the meeting.

2. Hang flip chart paper and markers on the walls of hallways or rooms where casual, ad hoc conversations commonly occur. Give the paper a title like, “Water Cooler Updates,” and encourage people to scribble interesting ideas, comments, discussions, issues, etc. on the paper with a note stating who it’s for. On a weekly (or semi-weekly) basis the manager should hold a department all-hands meeting and share the water cooler updates with the team.

Obviously, these aren’t perfect solutions to the “out of sight, out of mind” problem. But the divide between the work from home tribe and the work at the office tribe is likely to get worse as we continue to adapt to life during Covid. These two visual tricks are a way of blunting the effect of the problem, building greater team cohesion, and increasing team alignment.

Don't Let This Happen to Your Work From Home Colleagues

A client of mine has started to bring some of their employees back into the office. They’re not ending their work from home policies, but increasingly higher ranking staff are coming back to the mothership, particularly for important meetings.

This shift makes sense for many reasons, but it’s having three unfortunate side effects. First, the work from home employees are beginning to have middle school flashbacks, where they’re definitely not part of the cool crowd, and they have to eat lunch at the cafeteria table with the dweebs. Second, they are, in fact, being left out of many discussions and decisions — not out of malice, but simply out of benign neglect. When everyone is working from home and meetings are conducted by Zoom it’s easy to remember to bring everyone to the virtual table. But when you’re in the office, it’s even easier to forget your cohorts who are laboring at home and just have the meeting with the people who are physically present. Third, the remaining work from home employees are missing out on the incipient burbling of water cooler conversations. This is bad for morale and bad for business.

This is an area where some simple visual tools can help:

1. Put photos of all employees from the team in the conference rooms typically used for their meetings. The photos will serve as a reminder of the people who aren’t present, making it easier to remember to either bring them into the meeting via conference call, or update them after the meeting.

2. Hang flip chart paper and markers on the walls of hallways or rooms where casual, ad hoc conversations commonly occur. Give the paper a title like, “Water Cooler Updates,” and encourage people to scribble interesting ideas, comments, discussions, issues, etc. on the paper with a note stating who it’s for. On a weekly (or semi-weekly) basis the manager should hold a department all-hands meeting and share the water cooler updates with the team.

Obviously, these aren’t perfect solutions to the “out of sight, out of mind” problem. But the divide between the work from home tribe and the work at the office tribe is likely to get worse as we continue to adapt to life during Covid. These two visual tricks are a way of blunting the effect of the problem, building greater team cohesion, and increasing team alignment.

(Value Stream) Map Your Way to a Better Post-Covid Future

At some point, the COVID pandemic will pass, whether that’s due to a vaccine, a 2-minute test, or herd immunity. But if you want to thrive in the post-COVID world, you’ve got to start working on operational improvements now. After all, if you’re walking to the starting line while your competitors are already settled into the blocks, you’ll never catch up. Value stream mapping is the tool that will help you become faster and more nimble—both now, and in the World 2.0.

What is value stream mapping?

Value stream maps (VSMs) show both the material and the information flow in any kind of end-to-end process such as order to cash, or new product introduction. By revealing the handoffs, the delays, and the defects within and between processes, they act as an X-ray into the otherwise invisible workings of your operations, enabling you to address long-hidden problems that make your organization slow and unresponsive. 

Two of my clients, a mid-sized manufacturer of girl’s dresses, and a small producer of camping accessories, have taken advantage of the COVID-induced business slowdown to map key processes. Their maps revealed numerous steps with long lead times, poor information flow, and high error rates—all clear opportunities for improvement that had heretofore been hidden. Both companies are already seeing benefits in the form of lower costs and shorter lead times.

Here are three examples of how their maps have helped them see into their processes more clearly and make changes to become more efficient.

Sample development
The dress maker designs dresses in the US and uses contract factories in Asia for manufacturing. Design and development is an iterative process that broadly works like this: 

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Depending on the complexity of the item or the idiosyncrasies of the fabrics, there might be a third or fourth round of samples. 

Each shipment adds 2-4 days of lead time to the following step: the actual transit time, as well as the time spent waiting for FedEx to both pick up and deliver the package. In total, the back and forth shipping of samples could add weeks to the product development timeline. When the VSM made the non-value-added wait time shockingly clear, the leadership team integrated video into the process to eliminate shipping. Now when a sample is complete, the design and development teams review it with the factory by video conference, and the factory can immediately begin work on the next round. This not only cuts weeks out of the process, it increases clarity and reduces communication errors. Even better, the president of the company estimates that they’ll save several hundred thousand dollars in shipping charges alone over the course of a year. 

Selling and merchandising
Value stream mapping revealed an additional drag on the company: the sales process. As with most companies, the sales team would take dress samples on the road to visit accounts. Flying around the country is both costly and time consuming, but it’s the way business has always been done, and it’s seldom been questioned.

COVID travel restrictions made those customer visits impossible. Consequently, like most companies, they began making customer presentations online, through video. But they made an important change to the sales process—rather than having the salespeople show the line, the merchandising and design team made a “canned” presentation for the customer. The salespeople still served as the voice of the customer, maintained the relationship with the accounts, set up the meetings, and managed the orders, but it was the designers who merchandised the line for the accounts. 

The VSM highlighted an obvious inefficiency in the old process: the designers explained the line to the sales team, and then they had to relay the design inspiration and vision to the customer. In essence, it was a game of telephone, with predictable results. The designers’ overall vision wasn’t communicated clearly through the intermediary of the sales team. Even more problematic, when faced with any buyer skepticism, the salespeople would suggest bringing back older styles, which compromised the design consistency of the overall line. Design may not be important in industrial equipment, but it’s everything in fashion. 

The VSM helped the company identify—and separate—the different types of information flows that are needed for success. The direct line from designer to customer has increased customer understanding and appreciation of the brand, it’s improved the designers’ morale, and it’s redirected the sales team’s efforts in a more productive way. 

Picking, packing, and shipping
The camping goods manufacturer used a VSM to attack a different problem: their inability to meet the shorter shipping window of their biggest customer, Amazon. Amazon ordered once per week, on Mondays. In the past, Amazon allowed the company up to four days to deliver its order. But now Amazon was demanding that orders be received within three days (by Wednesday) or face a penalty charge. With the current process, there was no way to meet the new conditions.

Here’s a simplified version of the VSM for processing Amazon’s order (or any order that arrives via EDI):

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The map made several problems immediately visible:

1. Resorting and reprinting the order created unnecessary errors. 

2. There was a long delay between receipt of the order and approval to build, because the Director of Operations was in a regular Monday morning meeting for three hours.

3. The three-day lead time to build products killed any chance of meeting Amazon’s requirements. 

Of course, when everyone looked at the VSM together—both literally and metaphorically from the same side of the table—the problems were obvious, as were the solutions. 

The discussions that arose out of the mapping process revealed that the picking team didn’t need the order to be resorted and reprinted. The Director of Operations pushed his weekly meeting back by one hour so that he could approve the build plan as soon as it was ready. And the company scheduled small batches of manufacturing every weekday (instead of one large batch of production on Wednesdays), so that they almost always had stock for the Amazon order. Now the company ships Amazon’s order on the same day, or at worst, the following day. 

Key VSM Terms
Value stream mapping is blissfully light on jargon. You don’t need to be an expert in statistical analysis to evaluate the quality and efficiency of the process you’re mapping. The three key terms are: 

• Lead time (L/T): Lead time is the time from when work is handed to one person until the time it’s handed off to the next person. Lead time includes all the periods of inactivity, including machine downtime, changeovers, waiting for a batch process (like FedEx pickup or a database update), interruptions, etc. 

• Process time (P/T): Sometimes called “touch time,” process time is the time it would take to complete the task if the person faced no delays—no interruptions, no computer crashes, no searching for parts, no waiting for information, etc. 

• Percent complete and accurate (%C&A): Equivalent to “first-pass yield” in a manufacturing environment, this is a measurement of the quality of the work done at each step in a service setting. %C&A is evaluated by the downstream person, not by the person doing the work. In an office/admin/service environment, directional correctness is more important than statistical precision: it doesn’t really matter whether the mortgage application is correct 80% of the time or 85%—we know there’s room for improvement. 

Best practices
Mapping a value stream is as much art as skill. Nevertheless, there are several best practices to keep in mind. 

• Mapping is a participatory exercise requiring involvement with both front line workers and executives. Front line workers are needed because they’re the experts—they know how the process actually runs. Executives are needed because any change will require their approval, and it’s important that they understand what the mapping team has learned. 

• Walk through the value stream to see how the work actually flows through the company. You want to map the reality, not what’s supposed to happen or what you think is happening.

• Don’t judge! The VSM is designed to show the messy reality of work as it’s currently done. Don’t criticize people if work isn’t being done “right.”

• When evaluating the VSM, look for the following signs of improvement opportunities:
  o   Large discrepancies between process time and lead time.
  o   Low % complete and accurate (i.e., high error rate).
  o   Dead-end or disconnected information flows.
  o   Inventory buildups between steps.

Mapping a value stream can be laborious and time-consuming. It often takes several days (and several passes) to create an accurate current state map. And it takes additional time to devise improvements in those processes so that that the value stream flows faster and with fewer errors.

But COVID presents a tremendous opportunity for improvement. The pandemic has involuntarily forced massive change upon everyone. Workers have lost all the props and crutches—their workstations, in-baskets, pencil sharpeners, coffee buddies, pet peeves, and their cannot-love-withouts—that anchored them to the old way of work. This seismic shift means that people can no longer say, “But we’ve always done it this way. I can’t do without that step.” Without those anchors, resistance to change is significantly lower. There’s nothing to hold onto, because the old way of working no longer exists.

Thriving in the post-COVID world will require organizations to be more nimble, and to execute more quickly and with fewer errors. The pandemic has clearly changed our way of working dramatically, and perhaps permanently. But that also means it’s an accelerant to change, and a golden opportunity to move forward—if you have the will and the stomach.

Originally posted 9/29/20 in Industry Week magazine. 

Are You Setting the Right Trajectory?

Books devoted to problem-solving emphasize the importance of deeply understanding the problem before implementing countermeasures. Many of them (including mine!) cite Charles Kettering’s maxim that “A problem well-framed is a problem half-solved.” But what, precisely, is a “well-framed” problem? I’ve written before about some of the obvious errors to avoid—couching a solution in the form of a problem, and relying in generalities instead of specifics. Now let’s talk about the importance of word choice. 

Full disclosure: As a college English major and former high school English teacher, I’m predisposed to focus on the power of language. But this isn’t just a matter of quibbling over semantics. Words matter. They set the trajectory of our problem-solving voyage. A small change in word choice can lead us to an entirely different set of countermeasures, just as surely as a small change in angle will send a satellite hurtling into outer space instead of useful orbit.

Here are two major considerations that will dramatically affect your problem-solving. 

What’s the Subject?
A company I’ve worked with has long been frustrated by its lack of progress in creating a culture of continuous improvement. Many employees participate in the company’s green belt program and complete one project, but only about 1% of them do a second project for a yellow belt. 

Consider these three problem statements:

1. Only 1% of our green belts go on to do a second project.

2. Our managers don’t nurture a culture of continuous improvement.

3. Our company only completes 10 yellow/black belt projects each year.

All three capture the same basic issue affecting the company—it’s not getting as many improvement projects as the leadership team wants—but the phrasing of each makes an important difference in how you approach the problem. 

The first problem statement puts the focus of our inquiry on the green belt employees. We look at their motivations and their choices. The second problem statement puts the focus on the managers. It causes us to look into how managers decide what needs to be done in their areas. The third problem statement focuses on the company as a whole—what’s assigned a high priority, how resources are allocated, and what kind of work is recognized and rewarded. 

The shift in focus leads to different kinds of countermeasures. If we focus on the employees, we could change the performance evaluation and compensation system to encourage them to take on more projects. If we focus on the managers, we might coach them on the need to provide time for their team to take on additional work not directly related to their core responsibilities. If we focus on the company, we’d likely get the CEO to reconsider how much time she expects employees to spend on improvement; develop a KPI to support project completion; and increase the visibility and esteem of successful project completion. 

How Do You Measure the Problem? 
Let’s say the problem you’re dealing with is a low level of innovation. Here are three possible problem statements:

1. We’re not as innovative as our competitors.

2. We only bring one new product/service to market each year.

3. Only 5% of our revenue comes from products developed in the past three years.

The first problem statement is vague and poorly defined. Even so, it leads you to an inquiry into measurement. How do you measure innovation? How do your competitors measure it? Are you measuring the number of new products and services, or the value/revenue of those new products and services? If you only bring one new product to market each year, but it’s always a home run, does it matter? Is quality more important than quantity? What metrics are your competitors using?

The second problem statement leads you to investigate the process by which innovations are brought to market as well as the culture around innovation. How many new ideas died in committee? What criteria are used to determine whether or not to bring something new to market? Are people afraid to fail, or do you have an environment that rewards risk-taking? Do people get credit for innovation (or attempted innovation), or do the highest-ranking people typically get the credit? 

The third problem statement leads you to consider the pricing, promotion, and placement of new products and services. Perhaps your innovation engine is purring smoothly, but the sales and marketing function lacks the skills and experience to leverage something new. The sales team at one company I worked with is uncomfortable bringing out new designs. They rely heavily on older items they’re more comfortable selling, and as a result don’t give the new products a fair chance to establish themselves in the market.

To be clear, there’s nothing wrong with any of the frames for these problems. However, it’s important to realize that the word choice in your problem statement has a tremendous impact on both the trajectory of your problem-solving efforts and your probable countermeasures. Next time you’re faced with a problem, try changing the subject or the measurement and see how it affects your perspective.

COVID: A Golden Opportunity to Move Forward

At some point, the COVID pandemic will pass, whether that’s due to a vaccine, a two-minute test, or herd immunity. But if you want to thrive in the post-COVID world, you’ve got to start working on operational improvements now. After all, if you’re walking to the starting line while your competitors are already settled into the blocks, you’ll never catch up. The good news is that people have lost all the props and crutches—their workstations, in-baskets, pencil sharpeners, coffee buddies, pet peeves, and their cannot-love-withouts—that anchored them to the old way of work. This seismic shift means that people can no longer say, “But we’ve always done it this way.” Without those anchors, resistance to change is significantly lower.

Read how value stream mapping helped two companies improve their processes in my new Industry Week article here.

Jumping to a Solution (Gun Crime Edition)

Effective problem solving hinges on the ability to frame a problem properly. Not for nothing do people repeatedly trot out Einstein’s (purported) quote that “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I’d spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” Spending 92% of the time trying to understand the real problem is a good countermeasure to the very human tendency to leap to solutions. 

A recent article in Bloomberg City Lab highlights the difficulty of not jumping to conclusions when framing a complex problem. The author points out that as homicides and gun crimes rise in some US cities, many in the media, law enforcement, and even the government have blamed protestors in their framing of the problem:

• [The problem is] “the anti-police rhetoric that’s permeating our country.” (Detroit Police Chief James Craig)

• [The problem is] “a great amount of disrespect and hatred of police officers in our country right now.” (Michigan U.S. Attorney Matthew Schneider)

• [The problem is] “all the rhetoric of defund the police, get rid of the police, abolish the police.” (NYPD Chief Terrence Monahan)

• [The problem is] that “in many of these communities, gun violence has increased in the aftermath of George Floyd’s killing in Minneapolis, and the widespread protests against police brutality and racial injustice that followed.” (TIME magazine)

This kind of framing allows a solution to masquerade as a problem, resulting in an intellectual cul-de-sac. The only way to deal with the situation is to reverse the problem statement by (somehow) getting rid of the angry rhetoric and banning protests. 

Is rhetoric part of the problem? Possibly. But it completely ignores the far-reaching effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, which certainly had some effect on communities across the country. Moreover, while protests and inflammatory language might indeed be playing a part, violent crime was already going up in some cities before the protests started. 

Framing the problem this way has significant consequences. It means the difference between policy countermeasures aimed at supporting community institutions, instead of the current federal strategy focus of bringing in more police. 

How else could the problem be framed? As I’ve written before, a good problem statement leads to open vistas rather than intellectual cul-de-sacs. It results in deeper inquiry, and consideration of multiple countermeasures. In this case, better framing might look something like this:

• “The problem is that citizens don’t view the police as allies, but as enemies.”

• “The problem is that shooting incidents in Atlanta in May were 27% higher than last year, while every other crime category was lower.”

• “The problem is that for the first time, violent and non-violent crime statistics are moving in opposite directions.

Notice how these alternatives don’t push us to a specific countermeasure. Rather, they push us towards deeper investigation. They encourage us to ask “why” instead of leading us inexorably toward a specific solution. And that’s important, because as H.L. Mencken said, “For every complex problem, there is a solution that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

I’m not a social scientist. But I’m writing about this example because I think we can see the same kind of thinking permeate the problem framing in most organizations. It’s pernicious and not easily recognized. Seeing this kind of thinking outside your organization is a good way to increase your sensitivity to the issue, and improve your own problem solving abilities. 

Leadership in World 2.0 is Going to Look a Lot Like World 1.0

Bah humbug!

I’m tired of hearing about how much business and leadership is going to change in the “World 2.0.” It’s not. The fundamental principles of good business transcend the effects of COVID-19, the shift to work from home, new technologies, and all the other changes we’re living with now. 

To be sure, if you own cruise ships, an airline, or a live concert venue, you’ll have to deal with serious changes to your business models for a while. Until we have either a vaccine for COVID-19 or inexpensive and rapid testing (results within 15 minutes or less), the fundamentals have truly changed. But notwithstanding the very real disruption caused by the pandemic, if you’re not in the experience economy—and most of us aren’t—it’s not, in the words of the Hamilton musical, “the world turned upside down.”

If you look closely at the advice that’s being trotted out in leading business publications, you’ll see that aside from mentions of the pandemic, these articles could have been written a year ago or a decade ago. Adam Bryant, in strategy+business, informs us that if we want remote work to be effective,

leaders have to communicate more and be extra vigilant about removing as much ambiguity as they can from their exchanges with staff, particularly in email, in which the recipients don’t have the benefit of hearing the sender’s tone. Leaders have to ensure that what is clear to them is also clear to others, in language that doesn’t leave people scratching their heads.

Anyone who has dealt with the interpersonal brush fires arising from all caps emails over the past decade—and who hasn’t?—knows that this is not a new problem. And what leader hasn’t been told ad nauseum that it’s impossible to over-communicate with the troops. 

Stanford business school professors Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao helpfully remind leaders that in these trying times leaders should avoid passing the buck; show compassion to employees; offer predictability to the company; watch their body language; create community; build psychological safety; and look for new business opportunities. It may be true that it’s more difficult to do these things when employees are remote, but show me any company that thrives when leaders won’t take responsibility for their decisions, create an environment of fear, or ignore new market openings. 

Not to be left out of the rush to platitudes, the Darden business school at the University of Virginia enjoins us to “get back to BASICS,” their acronym for Bonding, Agility, Safety, Inclusion, Compassion, and Strategic Alignment. 

Even McKinsey gets in the banal insight game with the observation that speed is more important than ever in the post-COVID-19 era. To that end, they offer the following gobsmackingly obvious advice: 

• Speed up and delegate decision making. 

• Step up execution excellence. 

• Flatten the structure. 

• Unleash nimble, empowered teams.

• Learn how to learn. 

Presumably, these recommendations are offered to those leaders who otherwise were planning on slowing down decision making by populating towering bureaucracies with sclerotic teams who don’t like to learn.

The changes business leaders face today are not as cataclysmic as the move from the barter system to capitalism, the invention of the microprocessor, or the rise of globalization. Office workers may work from home more often, but offices will be fundamentally the same, just with better ventilation, more space for workers, and Keurig K-cups instead of open coffee pots. Manufacturing plants will still have human beings assembling products, even if they’re wearing personal protective equipment. And with or without Zoom meetings, leaders will still have to communicate, execute on their plans, and unleash the creativity and intelligence of their employees. 

Bill Belichick, the legendary coach of the NFL’s New England Patriots, was asked how he was adjusting his training camp to the new health protocols of the COVID-era. He answered,  “I don’t think it’s monumental. But certainly there are adjustments, none of which are, I would say, particularly inhibiting.”

The challenges you’re facing are real. However, they’re not so extraordinary that you can’t surmount them with the same grit, determination, intuition, and commitment that have enabled you to succeed up to now. Stick to the basics, and you’ll be fine in the World 2.0—and even the World 3.0.

Want To Be On The Leading Edge? Forget About It.

Don’t be seduced by the siren song of the leading edge. While it’s a nice concept, it’s not nicknamed “the bleeding edge” for nothing. All too often, companies that strive for first mover advantage bleed their products—or their entire organization—to death. 

Peter Golder and Gerard Tellis’s seminal study of 500 brands in 50 product categories reveals that almost half of market pioneers fail. In fact, the greatest long-term success belongs to companies that enter a market and become leaders about 13 years after these first movers. MITS introduced the first personal computer in 1975. Bell Labs brought out the first color TV in 1929. 3M had the first copy machine in 1950. Good luck finding any of those products today.

In follow-up work, Tellis shows that even now there’s little evidence to support the idea of first mover advantage: MySpace and Friendster were ahead of Facebook, Books.com was online before Amazon, AltaVista (among others) beat Google in search, and Sony, Blackberry, and others hit the shelves before Apple in mobile music, smartphones, and tablets. That’s quite a collection of corporate carcasses. 

Forget about the leading edge. Instead, focus on becoming faster and more nimble, so that you can get to the head of the market quickly, when the timing is right. That means eliminating the bureaucratic barnacles that encrust so many organizations. Here are a few areas that are probably creating lethal operational drag on the corporate ship.

Problem: lack of clarity around strategy. Jim Womack, author and founder of the Lean Enterprise Institute, describes this classic problem as “the loud voice of the CEO at the top becoming a faint whisper by the time it reaches the front lines of the organization.” At this level, managers are consumed with the chaos of daily operations, and seldom have any understanding—or bandwidth—to execute on the lofty strategic goals pronounced in the C-Suite. 

Solution: Hoshin kanri (often called strategy deployment, or policy deployment) is typically misunderstood as a form of strategic planning. It’s not. It’s a powerful way of translating strategic objectives into concrete plans at each level of an organization. Perhaps more importantly, hoshin creates both horizontal alignment among functional silos, and an interlocking cascade of goals, projects, and tasks vertically within each silo. In my consulting work, I’ve seen business unit managers unable to achieve the market share goals mandated by the CEO because they couldn’t get the IT support for new product development software; Finance and HR support to hire the necessary material scientists; and Operations support to rapidly qualify new suppliers. Hoshin clarifies those needs at the beginning of the year and ensures that those internal resources are aligned. 

Problem: Right people, wrong seat. Leaving aside the problem of underperformers, there’s the very real problem of putting talented, motivated people in the wrong job. The star salesman lacking organizational traits gets promoted to VP of Sales; the gifted but painfully introverted  machinist who becomes plant manager; the talented financial planner without leadership skills who is put at the head of the new client service division—all supremely wonderful employees who are misplaced and put in a position to fail. 

Solution: carefully assessing the skills and traits required for each key position in a company, rather than simply promoting based on résumé, tenure with the company, or prior career path. This assessment goes far beyond a simple Myers-Briggs (or similar) test, and requires close attention and cooperation with the HR department. It also requires a willingness to continually reassess the needs of the company at each specific position, and remove people whose skills don’t match those needs. As Patty McCord, former head of HR at Netflix once explained, “We are a pro sports team, not a kids recreational team.” When you’re not the best at that position anymore, or the company doesn’t need the employee to contribute in that role anymore, it’s time to move on.  

Problem: misaligned decision rights. As organizations grow in size and complexity, the CEO often becomes a bottleneck for decisions, or worse, gets involved in decisions that she shouldn’t be making at all. At a $500M footwear company I once worked with, the founder and CEO—long removed from his role product development—decided that he personally didn’t like a particular style his product team had made. He diverted a container that was en route to the US with $400,000 worth of shoes to Africa, where he unloaded everything at a loss. 

Solution: shifting decision rights downward, to the appropriate level of responsibility. WL Gore is excellent example of an organization that does this. The $3 billion company has what it calls a “lattice” organizational structure, which broadly distributes leadership responsibility throughout the company. This structure allows employees to make “above the waterline” (i.e., low-risk) decisions on their own. Approvals are only needed for “below the waterline” (high-risk) decisions. Although it would be nearly impossible for another company to copy Gore’s management structure, it’s very much within the capacity of a leadership team to create clear guidelines for the kinds of decisions people at each level of a company can make.

These three problems—lack of clarity; people in the wrong seat; misaligned decision rights—create significant organizational drag that slow you down. The good news is that they’re entirely within your control to eliminate. So stop obsessing over being on the leading edge. Instead, focus on being faster and nimbler than any of your competitors, so that you can take advantage of new markets when the timing is right.

Craftsmanship, not Kaizen?

“Everyday improvement, everybody improvement, everywhere improvement.” That was Masaaki Imai’s, ahem, improvement on his earlier English translation of kaizen (which you can see in this video). Sadly, even though we’ve been preaching from this hymnal for more than 30 years, most organizations have a long way to go before the kaizen spirit is truly woven into its DNA. 

Perhaps there’s a better way to get people to embrace the concept.

In a new strategy + business article, Theodore Kinni argues that we should “restore craft to work.” Kinni uses Richard Sennett’s description of craftsmanship from his book The Craftsman:

Craftsmanship names an enduring, basic human impulse, the desire to do a job well for its own sake. Craftsmanship cuts a far wider swath than skilled manual labor; it serves the computer programmer, the doctor, and the artist; parenting improves when it is practiced as a skilled craft, as does citizenship. In all of these domains, craftsmanship focuses on objective standards, on the thing in itself.

Kinni argues that companies have been undermining craftsmanship since the Industrial Revolution. That’s probably an overly broad claim, but it’s certainly true that the deskilling of assembly work in mass production, along with a growing gulf between management and labor, and a focus on stock price, hasn’t led to an appreciation of craftsmanship.

If we step away from the linguistic flotsam and jetsam that consultants and leaders too often dump on their employees—the “burning platforms,” the “lean transformations,” the “value stream organizations”—we could more easily use that “enduring, basic human impulse to do a job well” to ignite the kaizen spirit that resides in all of us. We might actually get our organizations to follow Imai’s injunction for improvement everyday, everybody, everywhere. 

As Kinni points out, “the drive to find ingenious ways to do work better, faster, and/or cheaper is an integral element of craftsmanship.” He suggests that leaders should 

recognize, and reward, craftsmanship. You get what you pay for. So, why not pay for a job well done? Maybe workers should be paid based on quality rather than volume.

Recognizing quality and improvement is a great idea, but I don’t agree with the idea of payment. Paying for improvement is a dicey plan. It can lead people to distort the system or distort the data, and typically substitutes extrinsic motivation (i.e., money) for the intrinsic motivation (joy in doing a good job) we’re trying to promote. Toyota famously pays very little for kaizen—and they seem to be doing a pretty good job at getting people to improve everyday. But payment can simply be public recognition—at Barry-Wehmiller, all of the team members at a location are invited to an elaborate award celebration, which often involve the winner’s family and special gifts reflecting his or her personality. And winners get to drive a unique vehicle (originally a Chevy SSR) for a week. 

I don’t know if focusing on “craftsmanship” will increase awareness and practice of improvement. But in the spirit of kaizen, it’s worth a try.