Live example of systems improvement

March 28, 2011 at 2:54 pm | Posted in Blogroll, Systems Improvement | 1 Comment

Recently, I and my wife visited our doctor for consultation. While we were waiting, I tried to make use of the bonus time to read a book and make some notes. I was so absorbed in what I was reading that the pen slipped off from my hand to the floor. With one eye on the page, I groped around to locate the pen and pick it up. As i was lifting my hand holding the pen, I felt pain and there was a scratch on my forearm. I noticed that a corner of the glass top of the center table kept near my chair had chipped off and the sharp edge had caused the cut on my hand.

My first reaction was one of anger. But it quickly gave way to how it could be avoided in future for others. I saw the doctor’s assistant passing by. I called him and showed him both the chipped corner of the table as well as my hand. I expected him to do nothing, at least not immediately. But to my pleasant surprise, he rolled up his sleeves and requested me to help him to pick up the table to rotate in such a way that the chipped corner was turned to the corner of the room where it was unlikely to hurt anybody. The table was heavy and both of us were finding it difficult to lift and turn it around. The receptionist who was sitting nearby rushed in to join hands and three of us together to accomplish the task in no time. All of us felt happy with what we had done; smiled at each other and went our way.

Later when I was thinking of this incident while driving back home, I realized that this small incident had many elements of what system improvement is all about.
• Problem of one person was converted into opportunity for benefit to many in future.
• Rather than passing the buck or shrugging off that it is not my responsibility, the focus was on what can be done about it.
• A person who noticed that her help could be useful jumped in without being called.
• The task accomplished gave satisfaction to all concerned.
• There was no thought or attempt to take any credit.

Isn’t system improvement really about small things handled well collectively here and now?

Organizational excellence – Performance challenges

March 21, 2011 at 10:12 am | Posted in Blogroll, Organizational Excellence | Leave a comment

Earlier I had mentioned about the book “Radical management” by Stephen Denning. Recently, I found some interesting thoughts related to performance challenges which are worth sharing; hence I am quoting them below.

One such area is lack of transparency. It requires seeing the workplace as it is, rather than as we would like it to be, and be willing to do something about it. In organizations where there is no transparency, false statements that support the power structure of the hierarchy get precedence over true statements that put the power structure in question. Everybody in a power structure tends to go on acting as though right is wrong and black is white because their own role in the structure depends on defending it.

The executive management plays a key role in creating the transparency. In organizations where the management questions the integrity of the person asking uncomfortable questions, it is difficult for any team to discuss issues openly. They will be seen as rocking the boat and not being team players. As a result, most teams go with the flow and lose any possibility of achieving high performance. A few courageous teams may speak out about the issue and point to the truth. But those teams are rare, and their life expectancy is typically not long.

As I had mentioned earlier, the book uses concepts from Scrum and applies them to organizational activities of a wide variety. Some of the practices that help transparency are daily standup meetings, identification & removal of impediments and simple visual displays that everyone can see. They make covering up far more difficult. For organizational activities, based on different ways of organizing the teams and the nature of work the frequency of standup meetings may vary. But the basic intention is to keep everybody updated about progress & risks in meetings of short duration and it greatly helps.

One of the three practices cited above, namely the identification & removal of impediments is very critical to tackle the performance challenges. In organizations that aspire to delight the clients, managers and workers must become more open with each other about the impediments that prevent high performance. They cannot consistently delight the clients if discussing impediments is discouraged or if people are telling each other what they want to hear or only so much as they need to know. It requires total openness about any impediments to the work: everyone levels with everyone else.

Another important issue is how we deal with failures. Wrong managerial attitude towards failure can create a self-fulfilling prophesy. By punishing failure, failure becomes even harder to find. In big bureaucracies, failures can go on for months, years, even decades, without being rectified. Over time problems build up behind the scenes and then suddenly they explode in the open. What is required is to accept the inevitability of failure and put arrangements in place to learn rapidly from failure and progress towards success. Making failure so visible can make individuals and organizations uncomfortable, particularly those who have been living with no accountability for a long time. But once they see that right attitude towards failures is essential and beneficial, they tend to fall in line.

I am also reading another interesting book “The Three Laws of Performance” by Steve Zaffron & Dave Logan. It deals with other important aspects of performance challenges and ways to overcome them. I hope to share those inputs soon.

Stability instability paradox

March 14, 2011 at 10:02 am | Posted in Blogroll, General, Systems Thinking | Leave a comment

This week I read in Times of India, Sunday edition, an interesting article by Shaun Gregory where he talked of “Stability instability paradox”. I looked up on the net for what exactly it means. I found that Wikipedia has put it succinctly as “The stability-instability paradox is an international relations theory regarding the effect of nuclear weapons and mutually assured destruction. It states that when two countries each have nuclear weapons, the probability of a direct war between them greatly decreases, but the probability of minor or indirect conflicts between them increases. This occurs because rational actors want to avoid nuclear wars, and thus they neither start major conflicts nor allow minor conflicts to escalate into major conflicts—thus making it safe to engage in minor conflicts”.

This paradox was noticed after the Second World War and was proved again & again during the days of the cold war. It still continues to be the basis for nuclear strategic planning of most countries. However, with emergence of certain new nuclear states there is a twist. Those countries which view nuclear capability as a deterrent would be averse to any possibility of major conflict. But the bar for these new states is much lower and they like to engage in managed instability to tilt the balance in their favor. This creates a big challenge for others. The author of the article has brought it out well but not offered any solution.

That aroused my curiosity and set me thinking. Is this phenomenon limited to just the nuclear domain or has a wider significance? I believe it does. We see umpteen examples of both types of situations in organizations, families, friend circles, societies and even in politics. If both the parties in a conflict have lot to lose, when there is a major escalation, they remain in balance and minor conflicts and arguments continue with not much damage to either. But when one of two sides is so structured that it is either not affected much or doesn’t really care, then the other side is in a tight spot. The most common example is of terrorism. The terrorists are so thoroughly brain-washed that they stop seeing the reality and live in their own world. An interesting version of this is of extreme patriotism.

These are glaring examples but we see plenty of cases in other walks of life. What is the way to deal with them? When the threat continues and becomes unbearable, the frustration forces the person to act violently and he would either win because now he is in the same category as the other or he may become a martyr. You may recall seeing many such cases in novels, films and TV soaps.

But this is an extreme option which is adopted more by need for survival rather than by choice. Are there better options? Can we apply systems thinking to get over this dialema. I am not aware nor can think of any at this stage but I am very keen to know if you have come across a solution either from your experience or have read somewhere. If you let me know, I will share with others, because I feel it is a major problem and each of us faces it from time to time in varying degrees.

Organizational excellence – Importance of avoiding traffic jams

March 7, 2011 at 9:36 am | Posted in Blogroll, Organizational Excellence, Systems Thinking | Leave a comment

We all have faced traffic jams and cursed when being caught in them. Occasionally they may form because of an accident, a demonstration (chakka-jaam) or VVIP movement. But quite often they take place without any apparent reason. Mathematicians have studied this phenomenon and call it phantom traffic jam. They found that traffic flows start slowing once the utilization level reaches 50 percent and significantly after 80 % utilization. The mathematical equations that describe traffic jams are very similar to those used to describe detonation waves produced after an explosion. Once a jam starts to form, it happens very quickly. Once it is formed, it’s almost impossible to break up.

What’s the significance of these findings to what happens in the organizations? Just as the vehicles moving on the roads are involved in traffic jams, work movements through different individuals and departments are part of work jams. The reasons and solutions are similar in both situations.

Because it is very tough to break an already formed jam, only solution is to slow / stop the incoming traffic till the jam gets a chance to resolve itself. In organizations also if something is not moving satisfactorily we push it harder and throw more resources at it. But the solution lies on giving a chance to the work jam to free itself.

When we know that jams don’t wait to start forming till it reaches a level of full capacity utilization but much earlier, it makes sense not to push too much work in the system, watch for early signs of jams starting to form and withhold putting further work in the pipeline.

When a traffic jam starts to form, everybody is in a hurry to get ahead of others resulting in every available nook & corner getting tightly packed so that nobody can move. Each person wants to fulfill his objective regardless of the effect it is having on the whole system and in turn adversely affecting everybody including him. Same is true in organizations because it is human nature but it gets aggravated when there is strong monitoring, motivation and encouragement for local optimization at the cost of the larger system interests. Solution lies in the problem itself. It helps to measure, motivate & incentivize for local contribution to larger goals.

When I had reached this point yesterday, I noticed a telecast of 1992 hit movie “Roja” on TV. Madhu (Roja) was in a verbal fight with Naseer (Colonel Rayappa) to get her husband Arvind Swamy (Rishi Kumar) released who had been taken hostage by the extremists. The colonel was telling her to look at the larger issues but she was adamant that all she cares for is to get her husband released. This forces the colonel to think out of the box and come up with a creative solution which helps fulfill both her objective as well as the larger ones. Here I was, having written just a few minutes back that “each person wants to fulfill his objective regardless of the effect it is having on the whole system and in turn adversely affecting everybody including him”. Was there a contradiction? For a possible answer I looked my last week’s blog post about importance of diversity. There was a type of diversity called “Diverse preferences” which is not considered good since it leads to “heated exchanges and sometimes even deadlocks”. Now here was a case where preferences which were strongly diverse had led to a better outcome. I am thinking that the key is how the participants handle it. If they allow their ego to control and blind their thinking, the result would be harmful. On the other hand, if they are open to others’ viewpoint while still being passionate about what they believe in and taking in new experiences with an open mind then there is an opportunity for breakthrough solutions. There is another interesting aspect. Probably Roja’s adamancy & persistence helped to weaken the compartmentalized thinking in the government agencies.

Lastly, as the sudden narrowing, sharp turns and rough patches on the road creates uneven traffic flow and accelerates creation of jams; similarly hierarchical boundaries and desire to protect own turf, suspicion about and rivalry with other functions and power politics all contribute to creating and sustaining work jams resulting in great damage to the organization.

Awareness of the mechanism of work jams, the contributing factors and possible solutions would greatly help us in keeping the work flowing smoothly and without hindrance. This is true for manufacturing industries where materials are flowing; it is even more serious in knowledge industry where not only the transactions but even ideas need to flow smoothly and speedily.

I would really appreciate any thoughts / experiences from you that either support or challenge what is said above.

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