I am cleaning out some old notepads. One page has the notes I took during a 4pm production status meeting during my first “get to know you” visit to this company.
In a box on my notes page it says:
“More information is not going to help until you begin to define how you expect things to run.”
What I had observed is their focus on the previous 24 hours metrics, with lots of speculation about “what happened” to account for the lost production. They were focused on incidents and, honestly, assigning those incidents as causes. Where they came up short, they were seeking more information about lost production incidents.
But everything I have written is just to give you a little context for the scribbled box on my notes a few years ago.
Today? They fixed it. This was one of the most dramatic culture shifts – from “find who to blame” to “let’s solve the problem” I have ever witnessed.
Reflection:
What are your daily meetings like? Are they focused on the stuff that went wrong yesterday? Or are they focused on where you are trying to go in the near future?