Month: November 2008

Posted on

How Strong Is Your Immune System?

Each day you are exposed to an unimaginable number of viruses and bacteria. Any one of them has the potential to overwhelm your body and kill you. But your immune system detects the foreign body, responds, swarms the source of infection, defeats it, and learns so that your immunity is actually strengthened in the process.

Some people, for various reasons, have weak or suppressed immune systems. They suffer from chronic infections. Even if their immune system keeps the infection under control, it is not strong enough to eliminate it. Things which someone else might not even notice take a daily toll on their energy and life.

Your immune system represents your body’s strength to deal with the unanticipated and the unexpected.

In your organization, people encounter unanticipated and unexpected things every day. A small inconsequential defect causes some inconsequential rework. A missing part causes a search and expedite. Each of these things, in turn, propagates more variation, like expanding waves, into the system around it. The variation becomes an infection in your processes, and it has the potential to grow without bounds.

Most organizations have very weak immune systems. They are chronically sick, and expending incredible amounts of time and energy dealing with these “infections.” Because each “infection” is, at best, accommodated rather than eliminated, they tend to accumulate. More and more of the organization’s energy is expended coping.

In the work place this means that the success of the process becomes totally reliant on the vigilance of each individual, working pretty much alone, to see problems and control them enough that some form of output can continue. Worse, many organizations build elaborate systems to assign blame when one of these thousands of opportunities for problems is missed.

Ironically, a lot of “blitz” type kaizen activity actually makes the the system more sensitive to these kinds of problems. If there is no corresponding effort to strengthen the response (swarm, fix, solve) to these problems, it is no wonder that things slide back pretty quickly.

Variation is an infection. And like the viruses and bacteria we are exposed to every day, it will always be there. It is only your ability to quickly detect variation, rapidly contain it, and then deal with its cause that strengthens your organization’s ability to deal with the next one.

Posted on

Article: Teaching Smart People How To Learn

Greg Eisenbach, in his Grassroots Innovation blog, cites a article that gets to the very root of organizational learning, respect for people, and a myriad of other issues.

The article, Teaching Smart people How To Learn was written by Chris Argyris back in 1991. What struck me about it is that it packs a double-whammy to our “lean” community. Most of us are change agents in some form or fashion, whether with direct operational control, or as either internal or external consultants. The hit comes from the fact that the example dysfunctional organization are consultants themselves.

So in that aspect, we all need to read this and take a long, hard look in the mirror.

The other aspect, though, is that everything here extrapolates to the very organizations we are trying to influence. A couple of key points jumped out at me.

Change has to start at the top because otherwise defensive senior managers are likely to disown any transformation in reasoning patterns coming from below. If professionals or middle managers begin to change the way they reason and act, such changes are likely to appear strange—if not actually dangerous—to those at the top. The result is an unstable situation where senior managers still believe that it is a sign of caring and sensitivity to bypass and cover up difficult issues, while their subordinates see the very same actions as defensive.

I can certainly relate the above from personal experience. It is damned difficult to be open and honest in an environment which does not value openness and honesty!

But then the dilemma hits, because there I am “blaming the client” for my own lack of effectiveness. Instead, it is my responsibility to look at what what I actually did, vs. what I wanted to do; look at my actual results vs. my planned results, and apply scientific thinking. To paraphrase back to 1944, “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”

The good news is that in the article, Chris Argyris not only points out the problem, he gives an example or two of managers leaders who have overcome it. But they did so only through hard introspection and challenging their only assumptions about themselves, their organizations, and their leadership style.

My last challenge here is this: When we talk about “respect for people” are we talking about behavior which avoids the issues so nobody’s feelings are hurt… or are we talking about being truly respectful and getting the truth out into the open so we can all deal with it?