You’ve tried ignoring it.

However, it is already costing you time and money, and it might cost you customers.

The problem is not going away and looking severe enough to eventually affect the whole business, which is what is making you seriously worried. 

You’ve tried quick fixes, but nothing works. It appears insoluble. Eventually, you have admitted to yourself you just don’t know what to do.

What you need is a different approach. A way to finally get you out of this mess.

There is a way.

It’s a way of dealing with problems and improving the way work is done that has been proven for almost five decades, which really works.

A3 Storyboard

Amazingly A3 Storyboard and process puts dealing with your problem on a page. There are three essentials to using the A3 Storyboard. Obviously, one is an A3 (42cm x 29.7cm) sheet of paper, which maps and summarises your journey step-by-step as you work out a way forward.

In addition, as the Problem Owner, it is essential you have two conversations. The first is engaging in conversations with people who are directly involved with the issue, including customers and suppliers. In these you will need to have your open-minded coaching head on!

The second is having a coaching conversation with your boss, a colleague or a coach. It is really important that this is a true coaching conversation with the other person asking “good” questions that challenge your approach and thinking.

The benefit of coaching is it creates the space and time for you to really think about the whole situation.

As you can see below, there are two sides to the A3 format. On the left is the “what is happening and why” side and on the right is the “way forward”.

Step 1 Title

The first thing you need is a title that is unique, short, sweet and to the point. It needs to be easily recognizable as identifying this particular problem.

Step 2 Background

Next you describe the background to the issue in, ideally, two bullet points that must link to some higher level “aims” such as the strategy, business plan, some operational need or perhaps some personal developmental issues.

So far so good. It has been quite straight forward. Now it gets a little more challenging.

Step 3 Current Situation

Critically, the current situation must draw on the knowledge and observations of those directly involved with the problem or issue. Get the facts!

To fit the information on this one-page visual images are a great help. These can include diagrams, charts and graphical presentation of measured data. A bullet-pointed problem statement is also useful in describing the situation.

Step 4 Goal/Ideal Future Situation

Next you arrive at a good but challenging part of the process. This is drafting a single bullet-pointed sentence stating the goal or ideal future situation. It needs to be agreed with all those familiar with the current situation, fit with the strategy, business plan and satisfy customer needs.

By the way, why not call it a ‘target’? Put simply, life can be more complex than you are expecting, so it is possible that you might not get a perfect cause and effect as a result of your change or improvement.

Just like a soccer goal, the ‘ball’ could go anywhere within the net! Be prepared for the change or improvement not to work. However, whatever the outcome, be prepared to analyse and learn from it. Knowing what does not work is valuable too.

Step 5 Root Cause Analysis

So far so relatively conventional. The final section on this left-hand side requires digging to really understand the underlying or root causes of your problem situation. As stated above, involve those people directly connected with the situation. Ask what is actually happening, good and bad.

As this step requires really digging down and it is useful to ask the “5 Whys”. Starting by asking why, at the surface, does this appear to be happening? What appears to be causing this. Then why might that be. Go on asking why anywhere between 2 and 10 times until you are sure, based on what you know now, you have found the underlying or root cause of your problem situation.

To record your analysis or outcomes from conversations, it may help others to understand the situation by using some form of visual method such as a fishbone diagram, plotting data in a graph or perhaps - if it is a process - a flowchart or value stream map.

The advantage of this visual approach is that it summarises and shares the results of the analysis in a highly space efficient way and communicates your findings more quickly.

There are many visual methods of analysis; however, with care, the so-called questioning method is effective and can also be made more visual.

Now you are ready for the right-hand side.

BTW: Problem Owner & Revision Dates

Heading the right-hand side is the admin box shown in grey in the image for you to enter your name or initials, as the problem owner, and the dates of every time the A3 is added to or revised.

Step 6 Recommended Countermeasures

First on moving to the right-hand side of the A3 process, you next focus on generating recommended ways forward. Again, input from those in the situation is essential.

With those directly involved with the situation, you need to ideally generate at least three possible countermeasures for the root cause. These then need to be assessed and compared to enabling selection based effectiveness, cost and risk.

At this point you might be asking why the proposed ways forward are called countermeasures rather than solutions. I’m afraid this is where stark reality is encountered. Any situation is the result of multiple influences and interactions. It is difficult to predict what the outcome of a change will actually be.

Step 7 Implementation Plan

Having chosen a way forward, you next need an implementation plan, which details who will do what, when, ideally using a Gantt chart and possibly including any special instructions indicating who is responsible for certain actions.

As you may already know, a Gantt chart commonly used in managing projects that shows activities against time. On the left of the chart the activities are listed and on the right a series of bars represent times for the start, duration and finish of the activity.

Step 8 Follow Up

Having created your plan, you will need to include actions to evaluate the effectiveness of the chosen countermeasure and implementation plan. Ideally this will include some form of data measurement.

There may be indications for follow-on activities and contingencies should risks have been identified in Step 6.

Step 9 Just Do It

Before you heard about the A3 Storyboard and process you had not been able to deal effectively with problems, issues, challenges or change. The quick-fixes you tried were ineffective and the ‘costs and risk’ to your business may have seemed serious.

Now you have your completed A3 Storyboard it provides a roadmap to guide the project and engage your team, colleagues and bosses. You can now have greater confidence in the steps required for working out ways that will be effective in resolving the current situation. So, just do it!

With the aid of your A3 roadmap you can better engage your team in dealing with problems and in addition present a more professional image to your bosses.

With use across five decades, including by industry leaders across the sectors, you can be confident that A3 will enable you to be more effective as a manager and still have a job! Yes, you can do this.

Next Step

Choose the problem, issue or challenge you need to deal with, the team members who are involved with the situation and someone to act as your coach.

Other A3 Formats

In addition to this problem-resolution format three other formats are common: Proposal Story, Status Story and Info Story.

An important thing thing to remember is that the A3 Storyboard and process can and should be varied according the the issue being dealt with. The fundamental point about A3 is the Conversations, Thinking, Reflection, and Learning not necessarily the format.

Yes, who are those guys?

And anyway, why should they be of interest to managers today?

First, let us go back to 1847 Vienna. Women were dying in maturnity clinics due to puerperal or “childbirth” fever. Physician and scientist Ignaz Semmelweis noticed that the incidence of death of mothers in one clinic was twice that in another.

The one with the higher maternal mortality rate taught medical students, whilst the other taught midwives. He eliminated a number of possible reasons for the difference. Then his friend, who was another physician, died after being accidentally stabbed by a student during a post mortem examination.

An autopsy revealed a similar pathology to the women who were dying. Semmelweis concluded that a higher percentage of women were dying due to "cadaverous particles" that he and the students carried on their hands when going from autopsies to examining patients in the first maturnity clinic.

He instituted strict hygene using an anticeptic solution when moving from autopsies to making examinations. The result was the mortality rate in the women plumented. Over time Semmelwies and his students tried to share their new knowledge with the rest of the Viennese medical profession without success.

Sadly, Semmelweis had no success gaining acceptance of his findings, his career nose-dived and he was treated as an outcast, eventually dying a broken man in 1865 in an insane asylum. Partly his lack of success in the acceptance of his findings was due to not being able to provide a deeper theoretical explanation for what was happening.

Publication of Semmelweis’ practical findings did spread around Europe. However, it was not until 1870 that Louis Pasteur’s work offered the theoretical explanation for Semmelweis' observations: the germ theory of disease. Scientific thinking, proper observation and experiment, had eventually won through.

A Germ Theory of Management

Coronavirus is not the only germ about today 150 years after the discovery of infection. The early stages of Covid-19, were characterised by entrenched political views, especially as we saw in the UK and USA. These seem to echo those behaviours of early 19th century surgeons.

This lack scientific thinking in dealing with a challenge has killed tens of thousands.

We also see this lack of scientific thinking in the behaviours of much of today’s top management. It kills companies in the private sector and people, directly or indirectly, who are receiving public sector services.

150 years ago, Semmelwies had faced entrenched ideas and practices in medicine and a resistance to new ideas. Today we still face resitance to change in entrenched management practices. Thirty years ago this led the late Dr Myron Tribus christening this latter issue as the ‘Germ Theory of Management’.

Unfortunately, not much seems to have changed since.

Typical of these fixed management mindsets are that command and control mangement is still rife and too many decisions being made arbitrarily or based on assumptions, misunderstandings and biases. Add to to these shortermism and top management often being driven only by the mantra of shareholder value.

Just when it seemed that ways were changing with the advent of algorithms and big data, we got the financial crisis of 2008. It has been said that one problem was management fixated on short-term thinking, which may have influenced the analysts’ short time horizons when using data in analysis and algorithms.

There is plenty of explanation backed by theory and practice for a better way to manage. However, whilst good in some places, too much of management has not accepted that there is a better way.

What is required in today’s fast-changing world is management thinking scientifically. That is, managers making decisions based upon knowledge from understanding the behaviour of tangible things by observation and experiment.

The Virus of Variation

The problem of poor decision-making by management is particulary serious when it comes to using data properly. Why? Well there’s a germ on the lose in your data. ALL real-world data is messy and variable as in the graph below. We call this effect the Virus of Variation.

In the real-world, as someone once remarked, “Some days are better than others”.

So how do you make an effective decision based what the data might be telling you? In the case that these numbers represent weekly sales data, you can image a CEO not being at all happy that they reached an all-time low.

Real-world data such as this will vary randomly because whatever is being measured will be influenced by complex relationships between internal and external factors acting on the system or process. So think of the measured data has having the virus of variation cuased by these multiple influences.

An aside here. When a radio is tuned between stations you hear a hissing sound that engineers call noise. You get this in all electrical and electronic systems. When you tune in to a station and are receiving it you are getting the signal sent by the radio station.

If you were to look at the hiss on a screen you will see a random wiggly line. On signal there would be a more orderly patern. The wiggly line above shows that this real-world data is noisy.We’ll use signal and noise a bit later.

The treatment for the virus of variation starts with management thinking scientifically and basing decisions for action on evidence. Data provides that evidence; however, it must be analyzed properly. A good start is by plotting a series of data points in a line graph as above, which puts the latest number into a context.

The line graph of data against time above shows considerable point-to-point variation over time. And yes, some weeks are better than others! But how much variation is routine and to be expected from this process as it is now and how much is exceptional requiring management attention?

Fortunately some clever folks came up with what we’ll call decision lines to help us identify the usual or routine behaviour of the data from the process and those that are unusual or exceptional. And below they are applied to the line graph shown above.

The red and green decision lines now give you references for the data points. The green line is the Average for this data set. The two red dotted lines we’ll call the Upper Decision Line and the Lower Decision Line. A line graph against time with these decision lines is called a Process Behaviour (PB) chart.

Without going into the mathematics and statistics behind the calculations, we’ll just say that 99 to100% of the data points will be between these two lines if the process and its data is stable and predictable.

We’ll leave that maths and stats for another day. Alternatively you can talk to me off line.

Now we have the decision lines telling us that as long as the data points are randomly varying between the two red dotted line then the process or system is stable and predictable. There is a signal for action because something exceptional has ocurred shown by one of these two events:

1. A data point is outside either the Upper or Lower Decision Lines

2. If there is a run of eight points on one side of the average

Ideally the PB chart is run in real time. Immediately there is a signal due to rule 1 or rule 2 it should be investigated to find the cause. In the PB chart above, you can see examples of rule 1 outside the decision lines highlighted in red.

You will also notice that the first nine points are below the average. The process was working differently then. And actually towrds the end there another eight below the average. Why was that?

If this PB chart was constructed with historic data it would be time to ‘Go and See’ why that was by talking directly to those working with it.

If you use a PB chart you can learn:

• If it is safe to take action on or to make a prediction from a set of performance data from a business process.

• You can separate signals for action from the noise of random variation in performance data.

• You will be able to tell whether any process change that you have made makes an improvement or not.

If you take action based on a single point alone or within tabulated data you will miss an important learning opportunity. You are actually just guessing. This is as true whatever the sector or process. The virus of variation is infecting your data and will defeat you!

Bottom Line

The question is will you go on like those surgeons in mid-19th century Vienna killing their patients or will you acknowledge what the Germ Theory of Management is telling you. That is, if you are seriously interested in improving performance, as a manager you need to be thinking scientifically.

By putting your data in PB chart you both present and analyse data providing an evidence base for performance improvement. You can get all sorts of specialist software to do this, but you can also use a spreadsheet. And, it is so simple that you can even use good old pencil and graph paper. Good eh?

Thank you for reading this blog. Hope you have enjoyed it and found it useful. If you have any other questions do please use the button above. Also do please share this blog with your friends, colleagues and connections. Looking forward to sharing my next blog with you.

PS

I also offer a FREE 45 minute Discovery Session if you personally want to change things and might like me to coach you through solvable problems. [Solvable problems are those where everyone involved understands that they will have to make changes to resolve problems.]

PPS

If you would like to read more about the implications of The Germ Theory of Management by Dr Myron Tribus two sources are avaialble. In the UK a booklet is available from The Deming Transformation Forum. In the USA a paper on it is included as one of four contained in ‘Avoiding Man-Made Chaos’ published by SPC Press.

You only have to look out of the window to see summer fades into autumn and inevitably into winter. So some change will be experienced by every business, organisation, institution, society or individual. Some embrace change and some resist doing anything differently, maintaining the status quo.

So You Think Targets Work?

You may be used to the conventional wisdom that if you want to increase performance, i.e. make a change, then the way to do it is to set a target. Usually managers make these up! Oh yes they do!

Faced with these, usually arbitrary, targets people may initially put in extra efforts but in the longer term they will resort to either fiddling the numbers or distorting the system. You don’t think so? Are you sure?

Someone I know was doing consulting work in a UK local authority. He was puzzled by the performance statistics, which were being reported to Whitehall.

Somewhat hesitantly he asked how the numbers were arrived at. He was stunned to be told, “We make them up!”

Back in January 2017 I wrote a blog that told the case of a furniture retailer. The sales people, who were set sales targets, at the month-end could be seen doing some very uncustomer-friendly things to meet the targets.

In the end this retailer stopped using targets, started improving their customers’ experience and ended up with the highest sales per square foot in their sector.

It can happen in manufacturing. Executives were puzzled why production output figures bore little relationship to deliveries and invoiced sales. The value of stock in the warehouse didn’t tie up either.

It was discovered that finished goods were being taken out of stock and passed down the production line again at the end of the month to meet output targets.

In the end human ingenuity knows no bounds. People faced with targets, especially those typically made-up S-T-R-E-T-C-H ones, will fiddle the numbers or distort the system.

Instead of targets there is a third choice, which is to improve the whole system. Engage people’s ingenuity to improve your organisation, as a whole system, bit by bit. We’ll come back to that ‘whole system’ later.

So how do you improve your organisation?

It Starts with Leadership

First, top management actually have to lead.

As I say in an article that I co-authored on the Chartered Quality Institute website, leadership is about people, including yourself. Effective leadership unlocks the potential of everyone in your organisation. It engages that ingenuity of your people to collaborate together to get work working better.

In the article I refer to Dee W Hock, who may be one of the most effective leaders that you have never heard of. Hock led the transformation of the failing BankAmericard to become VISA International.

Summarising what Hock sees as effective leadership, it is firstly integrity or values-led. Thus by example to release the leadership in everyone to build mutual respect and trust. In such an environment people can feel able to tell the truth and admit mistakes.

That’s an important point. We probably learn more from our mistakes.

If, as in the example above, production output is lower than expected, what could have been learned to improve productivity and hence competitiveness? The presence of targets distracts from the learning and improvement opportunities that lead to better competitiveness.

How Ya Gonna Stay Competitive?

Well Ghostbusters might not help. However, target-mythbusters might! ;-)

The mythbusters might start with leadership as we said above. They might point out that you have to accept the challenge of a world that is in a state of constant change. How dare it! And so to maintain competitiveness you and your organisation must change too.

Learning and using that knowledge to improve is what effective leaders encourage to maintain competitiveness in the face of change. There are very few environments more competitive and complex than Formula 1 motor racing. Leadership, learning and improvement have always been essential for success.

Back in the early 2000’s Ferrari was dominant at least in part due to the technical leadership of Ross Brawn, in partnership with Team Principal Jean Todt. Michael Schumacher did a bit too!!

Later, in 2008, Brawn joined the Honda F1 team, which became his eponymous team when Honda withdrew due to the world financial crisis. The Brawn team won the F1 World Championship in 2009.

The Brawn team was bought by Mercedes for the 2010 season. Even with a great leader like Brawn the lack of investment during 2009 meant the Mercedes F1 team did not win a World Championship immediately. However, it continued to improve and grow in competitiveness.

What was not apparent at the time was the amount of work that was being done in the background in preparation for the new regulations of 2014. Although Brawn left at the end of 2013, I would argue that just like with Honda before, his leadership in preapring for the new regulations contributed to subsequent success.

Brawn’s departure was due to a disagreement over his role, which left Toto Wolff and Nikki Lauda as the leaders of the team. Whatever the disagreement, the build up to the new regulations and the subsequent leadership resulted in six consequetive F1 World Championships for the team.

In Toto Wolff, it turns out, Mercedes F1 had another excellent leader. You don’t win six championships in such a highly competitive sport without great leadership and continual improvement. As Wolff says reflecting on their supremacy,

Every season we have done it, but it has been difficult for various reasons.

So there was an onging need to overcome difficulties, to improve. In an interview with Wolff for Autosport Plus, Wolff says the honesty within the team enabled them to face challenges and difficulties over the long term. There was no ‘blame game’.

As W Edwards Deming put it in Point 7 of his famous 14 Points for Management:

Institute leadership

Organisations as Whole Systems

There a tendency to break organisations separate silos and worse set separate targets for each silo. Naturally this leads to each silo taking a shortsighted view, possibly also to competition, and to hell with the consequences for other departments.

This is the last thing you want to do if your aim is deliver excellent value and service to your customers at the highest quality for the least cost, as fast as possible.

Like it or not an organisation is a set of interacting relationships. It is much more than the sum of the parts. Any barriers or disconnects that you create will stop the organisation working at its most effective. Cooperation is the key.

Leadership is required for an organisation to operate as a whole system. As organisations grow it is inevitable that boundaries will develop. It is the leaders’ job to keep the focus on the needs of the customers and find ways to encourage cooperation across boundaries.

Almost thirty years ago Jack Welch, CEO of US corporation GE, recognised the problem and advocated a “boundaryless organization” and to facilitate or encourage that he introduced what was later called the GE Work-Out process.

Work-Outs were structured meetings that brought together all those involved in a particular issue across hierarchies, levels, departments and locations. There would be a neutral facilitator from some internal consulting group.

The critical feature is that people are meeting face-to-face. Electronic and onlines means may help to a limited extent. Being in the same room makes a difference.

The point here is not necessarily the Work-Out process itself. It is just to illustrate that it has been found necessary for people to work together on an issue. The A3 process and report was found necessary by Toyota from 1978 onwards as another way of engaging people across boundaries.

Many other ways of enabling communication within organisations, like Open Space, several other large group techniques and Action Learning.

Bottom Line

The usual arbitrary targets are POOR ways of increasing or even maintaining performance. The critical element is leadership. Your external environment is forever changing, which means leadership is required to encourage and facilitate change within the organisation in response.

Boundaries will inevitably develop in organisations as they develop and grow. Leaders must remain vigilent and do nothing that turns these boundaries into concrete silos. Countermeasures such as Work-Outs, the A3 and other group working have been developed to increase collaboration and cooperation.

Thank you for reading this blog. Hope you have enjoyed it and found it useful. If you have any other questions do please use the button above. Also do please share this blog with your friends, colleagues and connections. Looking forward to sharing my next blog with you.

PS I offer a FREE 45 minute Discovery Session if you personally want to change things and might like me to coach you through solvable problems. [Solvable problems are those where everyone involved understands that they will have to make changes to resolve problems.]

The Visual Management of Improvement

Say Hello! to Hughie

The idea of Hughie is to help you make a connection with looking at a bigger picture and as well as the detail to improve productivity, i.e. the way work gets done at every level in your business or other organisation.

Question: Are you seriously interested in working towards excellent productivity? If “Yes!” you have much in common with many UK businesses and other organisations, including the public sector. The thing is it’s about taking a thinking and learning approach, which can be difficult when you’re buried in the detail.

OK. In a previous blog I took a swipe at cost-cutting. I guess if you know no better it’s what you have to do to survive. Unfortunately arbitrary, across the board cuts are not the answer. The most effective way to increase productivity is to “get down and dirty” because the devil IS in the detail!

BUT having said that, somewhat surprisingly, whilst the devil is in the detail, it pays to understand the wider situation in which work is being done, i.e. more than the immediate detail, You’ve go to be able to “hover above” your problem situations to better see what is actually happening and, especially, why.

Why bother? Well because

Everything is connected to everything else

As the great Leonardo Da Vinci once said.

You might ask, “So how does this affect me and improving productivity?” Let’s just take a simple example of an everyday problem using the classic 5 Whys method from my ebook Simple Manage.

Why is the report late? - There was no paper in the printer.

Why was there no paper in the printer? - There was no paper in the stock cupboard.

Why was there no paper in the stock cupboard? - The delivery of stationery items had not arrived.

Why had the stationery delivery not arrived? - The new low-cost supplier’s van had broken down.

Why did the new low-cost supplier van breakdown? - Their van broke down because they had missed a service to save money resulting in a blocked fuel filter.

The all too frequent reaction of someone in “authority” might be to “shoot the messenger”. Instead it would be better to get into Hughie to “hover above” to get a bigger picture of the whole situation, eg. use 5 Whys. This would help you to better see cause and effect relationships.

Looking into the situation further one might ask, Was price the only consideration for selecting a new stationery supplier? What were the selection criteria? Was risk considered? and so on. If you are aiming for excellence then there must be greater rigour in every aspect of the organisation’s workings.

Hover Above - Look at a Bigger Picture

Since I’m talking about SEEING and Visual Management I’d like to help you do this by introducing you to the Flow & Feedback (2F) diagram below. It helps you to “Hover Above” and see more , i.e. put a situation in context. I’m not going through it in detail now, just look at some critical features and how they help you work towards excellent productivity.

First there’s an element present throughout the whole of the 2F diagram. Although not stated, people are present throughout every stage of the diagram.

You and Your People

Whether it’s a cast of thousands or just you working in your business, people are the heart of it. “Hover Above” or, if you prefer, step back to appreciate your people and yourself. It is only when everyone is working in the same direction that you will be able to really push the boundaries on productivity.

Two key elements for releasing people potential are:

♥ Respect people, especially yourself

♥ Continual personal development

These may sound obvious, although possibly not for those with their noses stuck purely in the detail (especially when that’s just the bottom line). There are multiple influences on productivity. However, by showing respect and encouraging ongoing personal development you have two powerful keys to begin to unlock greater productivity.

Customers

Customers are the people who are actually shown in the 2F Diagram. They are the critical part of your business, they are your COMPASS. Without customers, consumers, service users, clients, patients, etc. you don’t have a business or a reason for existence for any other type of organisation.

⮙ EVERYONE in your organisation must focus CUSTOMERS - Are they? Are you?

⮙ Focus on delivering VALUE to customers

⮙ Value helps customers with their JOBS TO BE DONE

Imagine getting in a helicopter without a compass. Sure you may be able to follow familiar landscape features. But what happens when the landscape - or market place - changes or is unfamiliar? You’ll easily get lost if you are not looking at your compass, i.e. guidance from your customers and their needs at that moment and in the future.

Your Purpose: Meeting Customer Needs

So what is it that you actually DO for customers? Forget fancy mission statements. How do you help customers with their ‘jobs to be done’? This enables you to be very clear about the business you are in. This in turn helps you to minimise distractions and dead ends.

Excellent Productivity

At this point you may be asking, What does all this have to do with excellent productivity?

To which my reply is productivity of what for who? We’re back to customers again. And here’s a really important question that everyone in the organisation should be asking themselves ALL OF THE TIME,

‘Is what I am doing right now adding value for the customer or helping someone else to add value for the customer?

This is the secret key to excellent productivity.

Value-Add & Support Processes

Know very clearly which of your activites add value (those are the ones customers are willing to pay for, given the choice) and those that support them. Whilst eliminating waste is useful, I suggest it is even more powerful to really focus attention on whether activities or processes really and truly add value for customers.

“Busy-ness is not good for business”

Use Feedback to Improve

How can you find the driving force to continually improve the business processes that create value and support the delivery of that value in the form of your your products and services? The answer is look for your customers’ PAIN!

What’s working and what is not? What can you learn from both what’s working and what’s not? And you guessed it, ask the customers! When speaking to your customers ask for feedback without denial.

How many cases do we see in the media where organisations, particularly bureacracies, have been in denial, trying to bury bad news, internal challenges or customer problems? How much better might they be today if they had acted at the time?

Productive Helicopter View Takeaways

Look, whilst there are any number of methods, techniques and tools for improving productivity, the most powerful keys to excellent productivity are you having a thinking and learning mindset and can imagine getting into Hughie to “hover above” the situation to SEE a bigger picture of the influences at play on your problem.

Whilst you are doing that:

♥ Take care of you & yours

⮙ Focus on your customers

⮙ Be clear about your Purpose: meet your customer needs

£ Be clear whether activites truly add value or support adding value

+ Use feedback to improve

If you would like to develop your company’s productivity improvement skills talk to me about my project-based A3 Business Improvement Training. It’s highly practical and at the end issues in your business will have been tackled at the same time as building knowledge and skills in improvement.

If you have any questions or would like to make an appointment to discuss my 1-2-1 A3 Coaching Six-Pack do contact me via the button below. Please do include your email address, which I will only use to send information to you relevant to your inquiry.

Thank you for reading this blog. Hope you have enjoyed it and found it useful. If you have any other questions do please use the button above. Also do please share this blog with your friends, colleagues and connections. Looking forward to sharing my next blog with you.

PS I offer a FREE 45 minute Discovery Session if you personally want to change things and might like me to coach you through solvable problems. [Solvable problems are those where everyone involved understands that they will have to make changes to resolve problems.]

As a manager do too many days feel like ‘Groundhog Day’? Do you seem to be solving the same problems over and over again?

How would it be if over time there were less and less of these recurring problems. In addition, wouldn’t it be great if you are then better able to deal with the new issues that life will inevitably throw at you?

THE SCIENCE

The good news is that you can do this by developing your skills in the science of improvement. The tough news is that it takes some learning.

“Whoa!”

I hear you say, “I didn’t get where I am today by doing science.”

Hmm? Really?

Frankly life today is too complex for simply relying on pure intuition, guesswork, ‘flying by the seat of your pants’ or ‘shooting from the hip’. This type of approach is what has got you to where you are now.

AND. It really is a big ‘AND’; underlying these you and I have a massive problem in ourselves because we all have thinking ‘blind spots’. According to Terry Heick these so-called cognitive biases reduce our thinking accuracy and result in inaccurate–and often irrational–conclusions.

Psychologists, it’s based on science, have identified over 180 of these and everyone has some combination of these human biases.

OK. First let’s just look at the word science in very simple terms. Combining a few definitions, it’s about knowledge from the study of the nature and behaviour of natural things based on facts learned through experiments and observation. Natural here means real, tangible or visible.

MORE SCIENCE – Is your mind set?

Research by Professor Carol M Dweck and others has shown we may all hold unconscious assumptions about our ability, which might be affecting our openness to learning. It’s called mindset and there is a whole spectrum of responses.

At one end of this spectrum, people unconsciously assume they have inborn ability that their success. Dweck calls this a ‘fixed mindset’. At the opposite end, people have a ‘growth mindset’, which means they can achieve success through persistence, changing what they are doing and an openness to learning, both formal and informal.

Most people are unaware of their mindset, which is usually only noticeable in their behaviour. Usually it is only in the face of difficulty or mistakes the difference is noticeable.

In the face of difficulty, a fixed mindset people tend to show helplessness and vulnerability. They tend to avoid that difficulty in future. They may stereotype, label and even lie to protect their self-image. However, a growth mindset tends to be more resilient in the face of difficulty. As well as persistence they can look for new processes, skills, knowledge and strategies.

A BETTER WAY

Firstly, let’s think about an everyday problem that you may encounter. Let’s say one of your customers has experienced a problem with your product or service. In other words, in some way, it has not lived up to what they were expecting.

What’s your normal reaction? Deny that there is a problem – using a typical ‘political’ response perhaps? Find someone to blame within your organization or perhaps blame the customer?

Instead ask, “What’s actually happening and why is that?”

How could you find out?

If you could find out what’s happening and why, particularly the facts, surely this could lead to preventing things going wrong again in future. There may also be learning that means you could improve your product or service and gain competitive advantage by making it better, faster, costing less or all three.

Especially the last one, because mistakes cost money directly or indirectly.

The idea is if we can really get to the underlying our root causes of our problems, we can make changes that will stop them recurring. In life there is seldom purely one cause for a particular outcome or effect. Very often there can be a chain of causes.

IMPROVEMENT PROCESS

A proven way to apply scientific thinking in organizations is the Deming Wheel. People know it as the Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) Cycle and Plan-Do-Check-Act (Plan-Do-Check-Act). Deming was very clear that it should be Study and not Check. Study makes it very clear that proper investigation is necessary, rather than a tick in a box.

Below you can see the cycle laid out.

I recommend that you start at Study so that you have a sound, factual foundation for your project and the decisions that you take. Indeed, I usually refer to it as SAPDo to really emphasize starting with Study.

The current conditions might be better understood if you use visual methods such as process mapping along with visual analysis of data using Process Behaviour charts (AKA SPC or 6 sigma). With that understanding further analysis can be carried out with the 5 Whys and the Fishbone Diagram.

Once you have sound facts then you can have more confidence that the conclusions you have drawn on the situation will lead to effective decisions.

Improvement is a topic that I have written about before. Next, to find out more, you could read about the A3 Report. This can really help your improvement project by adding structure to it. You can read more in my blog about it.

BOTTOM LINE

• It’s tough making decisions as a manager in complex world

• Managers need to make effective decisions upon which they can take effective action

• We can benefit from developing a growth or learning mindset

• We are all biased, so we need the help of scientific thinking

• Use the SAPDo cycle to drive your improvement projects

If you would like to develop your improvement skills talk to me about my project-based A3 Business Improvement Training. It’s highly practical and at the end issues in your business will have been tackled at the same time as building knowledge and skills in improvement.

If you have any questions or would like to make an appointment to discuss my A3 Coaching Six-Pack do contact me via the button below. Please do include your email address, which I will only use to send information to you relevant to your inquiry.

Thank you for reading this blog. Hope you have enjoyed it and found it useful. If you have any other questions do please use the button above. Do please share this blog with your friends, colleagues and connections. Looking forward to sharing my next blog with you.

Tragically my cartoon from August 2018 of the airliner above was sadly prophetic. My LinkedIn article made the point that too often cost-cutting directly or indirectly destroys the capabilities of organisations to deliver value to customers or service users.

Sadly in October 2018 there was an air crash in Indonesia and another in March 2019 Addis Ababa of the same type of aircraft. We are still waiting for official reports on the causes. Could the crashes be due to cost-cutting?

Indications in the press seem to point to possible problems with the flight control system. You can read for yourself speculation that there might be technical problems with the system. There is also speculation on whether the absence of manual overrides contributed to the accidents. Further speculation concerns the training received by the aircrews.

RISK ASSESSMENT

Such tragedies only go to highlight the need for high quality design of a product or service. That design needs to take into account the consequences of failure of the product or service. Failure Modes & Effects Analysis (FMEA) is essential no matter what the price of the product or service

Design for low cost of products and services, including the means of production or service delivery, needs to be rigorous just as much as for high priced items.

The problem is that when organisations are in trouble or driven by dubious ideology or greed, there is always the temptation to arbitrarily cut costs no matter what the consequences.

FINANCIAL CONSIDERATIONS

However tempting a contract may be it is clearly unwise to put the survival or your organisation at risk. That seem doesn’t stop businesses quoting below cost just to win a contract. Unsurprisingly the ‘race to the bottom’ is all too common in many markets.

If there are markets for certain low priced products and services what possibilities are there to eliminate costs? As I have said before, there is huge waste in too many organisations.

The research published in 2002 by Cardiff University clearly show half or more waste in activity.

If you want to cut costs there is MASSIVE potential if you do evidence-based improvement. Just cutting costs arbitrarily across the board will almost certainly affect things that you should be doing to support value-adding activity and even value-adding itself!

QUALITY COUNTS

The long-term survival and success of any organisation depends upon customers’ satisfaction. What is cost-cutting, especially of the arbitrary type, going to do your customers’ satisfaction? Take a look at the Kano Diagram below:

For me this summarizes the whole situation at a glance. It is clear that if you do not meet or ideally exceed customer expectations you are laying yourself open to the risk of eventually going out of business. And the fundamental truth is that customers’ expectations rise.

ENVIRONMENT

Just to cite one example; think of all the rain forests that have been cut down so that palm trees could be planted for the production of palm oil. The object of that exercise being for food manufacturers to cut costs on their products.

UK CHANCELLOR OF THE EXCHEQUER

Dear Chancellor,

Whilst it may make the books look good, arbitrary cost-cutting is destroying the UK. The dogma that says you have to make cuts anyway is not incontrovertibly true. Do not waste the potential of our fellow citizens, make life miserable and cause the avoidable deaths of some.

All the years of so-called austerity should have been invested the people and building a stronger economy.

THE BETTER ALTERNATIVE

Instead top management should be committed to inspiring, encouraging and supporting an internal ecosystem of continual (or if you prefer it continuous) improvement. That ecosystem should also include openness to innovation.

Building that ecosystem is needs to be developed over time and it cannot be rushed. Start with improvement projects that are visibly fully backed by top management. Critically there must be an emphasis on learning whether projects have succeeded or not.

BOTTOM LINE

Just don’t do arbitrary cost-cutting anyway, but…

Avoid arbitrary cost cutting especially if:

1. There is ANY reason that people’s lives or health are at risk

2. It will affect the financial sustainability of your organisation or its suppliers

3. It will affect the customer or service user’s satisfaction or perception of your quality

4. It will affect the environment

5. You are the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer

Instead build an improvement and innovation ecosystem.

“You like potato and I like potahto
You like tomato and I like tomahto
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto
Let's call the whole thing off”

Song by George & Ira Gershwin (1937)

You say continuous, I say continual

No! Don’t let’s call the whole thing off! Improvement is much too important for that. I’m talking about the debate as to whether to say continuous improvement or continual improvement.

Is it Continuous Improvement or Continual Improvement?

There seems to me to be a never ending debate over the use of continuous and continual when referring to ongoing improvement in your business or any other type of organisation. Really they mean the same thing.

There is an important distinction to this though.

As a follower of that great management and quality thinker and teacher Dr W Edwards Deming, I use continual. Deming suggested that the important difference, according to his mathematical dictionary, was that continual meant ongoing but discontinuous.

But why?

As a follower of that great management and quality thinker and teacher Dr W Edwards Deming, I use continual. Deming suggested that the important difference, according to his mathematical dictionary, was that continual meant ongoing but discontinuous.

Well, adding value for customers and giving them a great total customer experience is what should be continuous and the first part of daily work. Continual improvement is the second part of daily work that keeps your total customer experience fresh.

I’m going to be using continual.

Why do Continual Improvement anyway?

So why should your business or other type of organisation do continual improvement?

Whichever way you spell it this should be viewed firstly as a fundamentally different way of managing and working in your business. It aims for excellence not minimum standards, which should then lead you to having a competitive advantage.

“Competitive advantage you say?”

Yes, and it is not how you do continual improvement, i.e. the tools and techniques, that is important. It is this why that is crucial if your business is going to be successful, resilient and sustainable over the long term.

Continually improving aids the delivery of products and or services ever better, faster for less.

Whilst the tools and techniques can be really helpful, the most important thing is a thinking and learning mindset that uses them. It should go without saying that this needs to be accompanied by an openness to change.

Are you open to change; constantly evolving everything to do things ever better?

Why? Because the world around you, including customer needs and the marketplace, is constantly changing around you.

Yes, but

“Ah yes! But we do project-based improvement.”

Good! However, too many project-based improvement projects look like the red line below when compared with continual improvement and occasional. You’ve got to keep it going; keeping the thinking and learning going.

Over time in a conventional situation performance is highly likely to degrade. This can be due to a number of factors, such as equipment can wear out, people not working to process and perhaps management priorities changing...

Once a step of continual improvement has taken place the revised process must be standardized. This means it is documented and it is ensured that any personnel working in the process are always properly trained and the skills maintained over time.

The diagram above implies ongoing steps of improvement will be accompanied by increased knowledge leading to awareness of new opportunities to improve. Eventually increasing knowledge can lead to the opportunity to innovate.

This greater knowledge can provide a better basis for innovation. This is especially true if people working in a process are engaged and their contribution encouraged. Indeed they should be encouraged to drive the continual improvement.

What actually is it?

Having said that continual improvement is about thinking and learning, what principles is it based upon. In summary these are as follows:

• A focus on delivering ever better value to the consumer

• Takes a holistic/systemic approach, viewing work as interrelated processes

• Aims for excellence

• Puts people first whilst taking a scientific, evidence-based approach to improvement

• Replaces conventional ‘problem solving’ with ongoing, methodical improvement

• Uses the visual management tools

How do you do continual improvement?

At the heart of continual improvement is the Deming Wheel or Study-Act-Plan-Do (SAPDo) Cycle. You saw this in the graphic at the start of this article and here it is again:

You may have seen or even use it in the form of Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) or even Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). There are two reasons why I recommend SAPDo.

The first is the unfortunate implications of using ‘Check’ in PDCA instead of ‘Study’. Check, particularly in North America, check means put a tick in the box. Continual improvement is absolutely NOT a box ticking exercise!!!

The second reason for using SAPDo, putting ‘Study’ first, is that you actually have to notice what is happening or have noticed something is or has happened. Again we are talking about a thinking and learning mindset.

Added to this is that usually we are, as psychologists might say, ‘always and already in the middle of life’. Stuff is happening all around us. Are you aware and noticing? It is this awareness that can lead you to competitive advantage. So start with ‘Study’.

A continual improvement process

Here is the table from the beginning of this article again showing the steps in the process below.

Even more powerfully this process should be used in conjunction with the A3 Report. I covered this in my blog of 13 May 2019. Below is the example of an A3 Report that I used in that blog:

SAPDo+A3 Step 1: Study

In applying SAPDo, as we saw in the May blog, study covers the left hand side of the A3. It starts with a description of the problem situation, which may include a Process Behaviour (PB) chart. PB charts help use measurement as rational basis for action.

A PB chart is a way to properly analyse serial data. I have covered this before in my blogs. Basically it is a graph of data against time. You add to this three decision lines. Most importantly, these are calculated from the data.

Some people refer to a PB chart as a Statistical Control Chart and it is also used in Six Sigma. And too many people try to make this more complicated than necessary, IMHO. Hey, it’s just a graph of your data with decision lines!

However, used properly a PB chart can be, with careful thought, one of the most powerful drivers of continual improvement, making continual improvement part of your daily work.

The central green line is the arithmetic mean or average. The two red dotted lines are the boundaries within which 99 to 100% of the data will fall IF, and it is a big if, the process is stable and predictable. If not it needs immediate improvement.

You can see a PB chart in the Problem Situation section of the A3 Report example. Can you see the two red points above the top decision line and one below? This process or system is not stable and predictable!

If you would like my simple worksheet for calculating the decision lines do please contact me.

At this point it is really helpful to map (flowchart) the process.

In the bottom left of the A3 is the Problem Analysis, which is digging down to identify and understand the possible root causes of the problem. This can be helped by using the 7 Quality Control tools.

Two of these, the Pareto chart and the Fishbone Diagram, are shown in the problem analysis box. Other methods such as the 7 Management & Planning tools, Quality Function Deployment and Design of Experiments may help.

The example A3 shows the root causes that have been identified at the bottom of the problem analysis box. I’m going to write a future blog on the diagnosis of root causes.

“But…” I hear you say, “I have no points outside the decision lines!” Great start!

The next things to look at are whether the average is where you need it and whether the variation, the distance between the upper and lower decision lines, is acceptable.  If you are then looking to improve performance and or quality still follow the steps below.

SAPDo+A3 Step 2: Act

Once the root cause or causes have been identified someone has to make a decision to put in place countermeasures or make changes, on a stable process or system, in some way to improve performance and or quality.

SAPDo+A3 Step 3: Plan

In the A3 example I have combined ‘Act’ with the next stage ‘Plan’ SAPDo stages in the top right hand Corrective Action Plans box. There you can see an indicative Gantt chart for an implementation plan for countermeasures to the four root causes.

Depending on the complexity of the countermeasures, and quite often obtaining the resources then required, clearly there may need to be many more detailed steps in the Gantt chart.

In this example there is an assumption that the same data would be used as in the initial problem situation. Naturally if no data was available initially or there were problems with it, then new measurements would need to be specified and taken, along with any necessary additional testing.

SAPDo+A3 Step 4: Do

In the ‘Do’ stage of SAPDo the changes are made and the process or system is then run for a period of time to evaluate the effectiveness changes. Clearly sufficient data must be collected to enable proper assessment of the effectiveness of the changes.

SAPDo+A3 Step 5: Study

Looking at the example A3 you can see a PB chart in the ‘Apply and Results’ box. In this example it is clear that a significant improvement has been made. In this case the whole system was changed.

Normally one might see much smaller changes that would be indicated by signals in the PB chart. These would lead to the decision lines being recalculated and then run on to monitor the ongoing performance of the revised process or system.

All this is provided that the changes have worked!

SAPDo+A3 Step 6: Act

And if the changes have not had the desired effect decisions have to be made on alternative countermeasures, perhaps incorporating any new insights that have been learned from running the previous ones.

Ideally of course the changes will have made an improvement. The question then is can changes be made to further improve the situation? In reality the learning should never stop and neither should improvement. That’s why it’s called continual improvement!

Bottom line

• Change must be constant to keep the total customer experience fresh. Therefore you have got to keep on doing something!

• Using continual improvement emphasizes improvement is ongoing but discontinuous; it is adding value that should be continuous.

• The starting point for continual improvement is your values in action, which support directly and indirectly continual improvement of the total customer experience.

• It is the second part of daily work.

• Continual improvement is a central element of achieving ever-better, faster for less with your products and or services.

• Use an improvement process to ensure effective projects.

• Drive all improvement activities using the SAPDo cycle.

• An A3 improvement report makes an improvement project visible to everyone.

• A methodical way to help understand cause and effect can be based on the fishbone diagram.

If you have any questions or would like to make an appointment to discuss our Coaching Six-Pack do contact us via the button below. Please do include your email address, which we will only use to send information to you.

Thank you for reading this blog. Hope you have enjoyed it and found it useful. If you have any other questions do please use the contact page. Do please share this blog with your friends, colleagues and connections. Looking forward to sharing my next blog with you.

What happens in your organisation when things go wrong? Do the fingers start pointing? Does the situation become the blame game? Whose fault was it?

Blaming someone when things go wrong solves nothing. All it does is to reinforce a climate of fear, which is probably part of why the blame game is being played in the first place. The question is, does the organisation want to survive or not?

Seriously we really are talking about survival here. Because if the root causes of problems are left to go unresolved they will eventually destroy the organisation.

Responsibility for the existence of the blame game and failure to address problems promptly and effectively lies firmly at the door of management. Managers are responsible for the whole organisational system and therefore it is they who should look in the mirror.

There any number of reasons why managers have allowed or even generated a climate of fear where nobody is taking responsibility. Too often it is managers themselves who are the ones pointing the finger or trying to find out whose fault it was.

Sometimes this is due to managers having fixed mindsets rather than learning or growth mindsets. Dr Carol S Dweck has researched and written extensively on this subject. Her book Mindset is a million-copy bestseller.

People are usually not aware of their mindset; however, you can usually see it in their behaviour. Whether someone has a fixed or growth mindset becomes clear in the face of difficulty, problems or failure.

As Dweck says people with a fixed mindset feel that every situation calls for a confirmation of their intelligence, personality, or character. They evaluate every situation as to whether they will succeed or fail, look smart or dumb, be accepted or rejected or feel like a winner or a loser?

People with a fixed mindset faced with difficulty show a tendency towards helplessness and vulnerability. So they will tend to avoid difficulty and perhaps look to shift the blame elsewhere. They are prone to stereotyping, labeling and even lying in order to protect their self-image.

With a growth mindset people have perseverance and resilience in the face of difficulty. They may seek out new processes, skills, knowledge and strategies in order to solve the problems that they encounter.

Dweck says of a growth mindset carries with it the belief that,

‘…the hand you’re dealt is just the starting point for development. This growth mindset is based on the belief that your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts.’

A growth mindset leads to a less stressful and more successful life.

When it comes to a culture of blame in an organisation a way out is for managers to work on their mindset if, that is, they intend to stay. Because the alternative is to move on before all the problems that they have been ignoring come home to roost.

So I suppose it depends how strongly a manager has been conditioned into a fixed mindset whether they are willing to begin to work on developing towards a growth one. Perhaps a start may have been made if on reading this article you begin to recognized a fixed mindset in someone.

It is not easy to tackle such an issue on ones own. This is where some outside help is useful. Perhaps there is a friend or significant other who can be trusted to help reflection and moving on. Another alternative can be to use a coach.

A coach helps first by creating the space and time that enables a manager to reflect upon their situation to work out their way forward. A coach helps and supports the process of reflection by asking good questions and reflecting back to the manager what they are saying.

And when it comes to something as deep-rooted as mindset the coaching conversation really helps people to truly address their challenges. It is too easy, particularly when just thinking about feelings, for one’s mind to windmill on and nothing changes.

Let us return to the issue of blame and moving away from it. A start can be made by utilizing Dweck’s work. Instead of looking for error-free perfection and reaching goals from everyone right “now”; start thinking in terms “not yet”.

So by saying ‘not yet’ a manager would still be aiming for goals. They would begin to understand that they’re on a learning curve. This gives them a path into the future.

Alongside this, management can start to model another new behaviour when things go wrong or people make mistakes. In these situations the new behaviour is first to move away from trying to implement the first solution that comes to mind .

This is moving towards an improvement ethos, which involves proper analysis of a situation to discover the root causes of the situation. From there changes can be implemented supported by processes, procedures and training.

The vital key to all improvement work is to engage with as many people as possible who are working with, in and around the situation. Only in that way will real root causes and truly effective countermeasures be arrived at.

And if things don’t work out perfectly this time it will only be a case of ‘not yet’.

If you have any questions or would like to make an appointment to discuss our Coaching Six-Pack do contact us via the button below. Please do include your email address, which we will only use to send information to you.

LEARN MORE

Thank you for reading this blog. Hope you have enjoyed it and found it useful. If you have any other questions do please use the contact page. Do please share this blog with your friends, colleagues and connections. Looking forward to sharing my next blog with you.

Your Keys to Better Decisions

Wouldn't it be great as a business owner, director or manager for you to make better decisions? In the face of all the change in the world today that's really hard. Wouldn't it be great if there were ways to make better decisions?

In an ideal world decisions would be taken on the basis of expert intuition. Trouble is everyone has biases. Someone has even catalogued over 100 biases!!! Who or rather what are you going to turn to? Many would naturally turn to the numbers or data to evidence decision making. So far so good.

Ah data; businesses and organisations everywhere are collecting it. However, are they making the best use of it to improve their activities? Usually they aren't because as Daniel Kahneman points out people operate with biases even on data.

A very basic problem is the wide misunderstanding of the difference between using data to count or to analyze. Proper analysis of data gives you the basis for effective decision making and action, ideally also as a basis for ongoing improvement.

Now I have blogged on that before and I think it is worth repeating. This time though I will take you through the simple steps so that you can extract meaning from your organisational data, which can be what some call Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

The graph in the image at the top of this blog might give you a clue that the effective way to analyze your data is graphically. The graphical way to a better, more effective decision is shown in the following four stages:

1. Collect and record your data in time-order sequence

2. Put data in a time series - so you can tie each item of data to real world events

3. Add the three special decision lines - these differentiate between signals and noise - more on that later

4. Look for signals for action - data contains both signal and noise. The latter is filtered out using the decision lines

Stage 1 - Collect Your Data

We'll take some data or numbers that you might expect to see in any organisation, which for the purposes of this blog are the number of monthly visits to an e-commerce business's website.

The Managing Director (MD) makes it very clear that he is not happy with the last two months being way below budget. July was the worst month for a very long time. Although there was some recovery in the August figures.

The new Marketing Director, Matt, produces more data to better understand the situation looking back over the previous 2 years. Here they are in a table:

Monthly Website Traffic

At the sight of the this the MD starts to fume,

"We're going nowhere! Look at that July figure! This is completely unacceptable, it's all over the place. People had better shape up or ship out!"

Looking at this data in a table at first it isn't easy to see any trends. You can see the MD’s point. True February 2017 was a fabulous month with 148,000 visits, which Matt has heard might have been due to a social media campaign mounted by his predecessor after a disappointing December 2016.

Otherwise it is hard to see patterns. Recent performance has been relatively poor. As someone once remarked, “Some month’s are better than others.” Actually that is the point. With so many influences at play in the real world you must expect some variation between data points.

There is a lot more to collecting data, especially if you are using some sort of measuring equipment. We'll cover that in a future blog.

Stage 2 - Make Your Data Visible

In this blog we are going to make the data visible. Yes, I know you can see numbers in table! However, it is hard to see patterns and trends, also whether particular data points are truly exceptional. Exceptional values at known points in time can give us clues as to why the system behaves as it does.

The Quality Manager, Rebecca, intervenes at that point.

“Matt showed me this table of data earlier and I have taken it and firstly plotted it in a line graph against time as you can see in these copies.”

Line Graph of Two Years' Monthly Website Views

The MD explodes,

“What the flipping heck happened in February 2017? I’ve been telling you we could do better than last July. Heads will role if something doesn’t change and pretty smartly!”

At this point, highly diplomatically, Rebecca intervenes ,

“Yes boss, in the past the company has clearly shown on at least one occasion that the company can do better. Unfortunately it has not repeated since. Perhaps we can use the charted data to understand why.

Stage 3 - Add Three Decision Lines

At this point Rebecca hands round a second graph

“I have taken the line graph a stage further and added three decision lines to help us better understand what has been happening and how to improve in future. This is called a Process Behaviour Chart”

Process Behaviour Chart of Ecommerce Traffic

After handing a second sheet, Rebecca continues,

“It is certainly clear that February 2017 shows we can do better; however, this is a highly unusual event. Over time, mostly the rest of the data varies randomly around an average of 86,042 per month, as shown by the green line.”

The MD says,

“Yes, yes. I get the average, although I am less than happy about the amount that traffic is varying above and below. But what I want to know is what are theses two red dotted lines?”

Rebecca replies,

“They are calculated such that if a system or process is operating in a stable and predictable manner the likelihood is that 99-100% of the data will fall between these two red dotted lines. Data should also be randomly scattered on either side of the average.”

Stage 4 - Look for Action Signals

The aim should always be to make better decisions about what action to take. From the above there are two rules that are used to detect exceptional events, which are worth investigating further to understand the underlying or root causes as a basis for action:

1. Any data points above the upper decision line or below the lower decision line

2. Any runs of at least eight points on one side of the average, i.e. signalling that something highly significant has changed in the system or process signalling a change in the average

Rebecca says,

“February 2017 is outside the upper decision line and confirms that it is an exceptional event, as per Rule 1. We need to dig down and find out what happened, because we would hope to find something that enables us to increase traffic permanently to that level.”

“For the rest the point-to-point variation is much lower and between the upper and lower decision lines. The chart, though, does show something different happened in the eight months between August 2017 and March 2018, as per Rule 2.

“It is statistically highly unusual to have eight points in a row on one side of the average. This is even though the pattern of the data return to the wider variation afterwards.”

“We have two clear signals for action: February 2017 and the eight months from August 2017 to March 2018. Whilst there are methods for understanding these two situations, has anybody got any ideas what was different?

There was a pause.

The HR Director says,

“Well. If, as recall, the August to March period sounds like that might be after the Marketing Director, Alex, and Social Media Executive, Derek, left and we took on a part-time temporary employee. And in March 2018 is when you joined us, Matt.”

Matt says,

“Yes and the part-time temp left us at the end of June after being replaced by a new permanent full-time Social Media Executive.”

“Interesting”

Says the MD, who goes on,

“So are we saying here that there is a link to the effectiveness of our Social Media that might account for the poor performance? But what happened in July?”

The HR Director says,

“Well Laura, our new permanent Social Media Executive, was being onboarded during July.”

“She seems very capable and is already suggesting changes to our whole digital marketing strategy and plans.”

Said Matt.

The MD then went on,

“OK. That all seems very logical. I am keen to see what Laura and yourself come up with for our digital marketing. But I want to go back to February 2017. What happened there?”

There was silence. Paul, the Finance Director cleared his throat.

“Erm… Wasn’t that about the time that Alex, our former Marketing Director was getting carried away with all that Chamber of Commerce Award PR and stuff?”

Silence. Everyone looks at Paul and then at the MD.

“Ah… Yes… “

Says the MD, who goes on,

“Um… That was just before there was that disagreement about the Marketing budget at the Board meeting, which led to Alex and Derek putting their notices in."

More silence. Rebecca, the Quality Manager, breaks the silence,

“So might we have found the the root causes that explain the two action signals shown in the Process Behaviour Chart? It is looking like Social Media and digital marketing in general plus PR are key to maintaining and improving performance.”

Let’s leave the meeting there as they start to get their heads around all that. It looks like the MD could benefit from getting his head around what digital transformation expert Warren Knight calls digital leadership.

BOTTOM LINE

We can conclude from this story

1. That one piece of data taken out of context has no meaning, in fact it’s just counting

2. Decisions taken on this basis are no better than guesses, especially when human bias is taken into account

3. Effective decisions require analysis of data in the context of other data points

4. A Process Behaviour chart, a time series chart with decision lines, enables you to separate exceptional events that are signals for action from among the real-world noise in the data

If you would like to have a go at creating a Process Behaviour Chart contact me for a FREE worksheet for the decision lines through the button below. Please include your email address, which we will only use to send it to you.

Thank you for reading this blog. Hope you have enjoyed it and found it useful. If you have any questions do please use the contact page. Do please share this blog with your friends, colleagues and connections. Looking forward to sharing my next blog with you.

Ever wondered why your attempts to increase performance seldom seem to succeed in the long term? The secret is in that well known saying:

Two heads are better than one

Your knowledge, expertise and experience may make you an expert; however, every situation is unique so you may not be aware of all the influences at play. Involving the team members directly working in the area concerned gives you access to more information.

In addition conversation is a much underrated way of generating insights, making connections and generating solutions. Even the act of speaking your own thoughts out loud very often helps you clarify your thinking.

To get maximum benefit from expressing your thoughts you need to have created a safe environment where people can reflect back to you what you have said. You also need to have a learning mindset of being open to that feedback.

There is a problem with unstructured conversations and meetings. The tendency is for problem talk alone to amplify the issue and make it appear more complex. This is where the A3 Report comes in to provide structure to problem solving, continual process improvement and increasing performance.

A3 Report

The first thing to stress about the A3 Report is that it brings structure to activities in a variety of formats to suit the project or activity. What is important is that it’s primary purpose is to communicate visually on one piece of paper!

In Toyota Motor Corporation, where it originated, even the top man uses it! Wow! Now let’s think about this for a moment. Instead of multi-page reports, memos and recommendations, they use just one page!

You really have to be clear about your point and make your case or plan really, really clearly and focused to achieve that. This helps to concentrate minds to solve an issue.

There really is no set format for the A3 Report, other than the size of the paper, and that it generally follows the SAPDo cycle, see below. The example below is just a starting point. Whatever format you start out with should be adjusted as needed.

The book The Toyota Way Fieldbook, by Jeffrey K Liker and David Meier, shows four common formats under two story types:

PROPOSAL TYPE STORIES

Proposal Story

REPORT TYPE STORIES

Problem-Solving Story

Status Story

Information Story

The A3 Report is fundamentally built upon the Deming Wheel of Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA) and the visual, collaborative workplace. We recommend starting at STUDY, i.e SAPDo, to emphasize an inquiring and learning mindset that is asking “What IS happening?”

Before I continue an important word about SAPDo. It is so much more than simply an improvement technique. When Dr W Edwards Deming presented this from 1950 onward in Japan, he presented it as part of a way of thinking and managing.

You can and should apply SAPDo everywhere.

Back to the A3 Report and looking at the example below you will see that the left-hand side comprises the problem situation or background followed by the analysis. The right-hand side usually contains the implementation plan, the results and future plans.

The above example is intended to demonstrate the simplicity of the A3 Report. You will notice the use of bullet-pointed lists along with all the images that might be expected in a format that is intended to be visual. The convention is to use up to four bullets.

Let’s now look at each section in turn.

Section 1

Four bullet points summarize the problem. Notice the use already of the Process Behaviour chart to visually put the most recent data point in context. Interestingly it also shows that it has not always been bad news in the past.

The visual display of data actually reveals that there has been occasional outstanding performance in the past, which you can see clearly offers the opportunity for learning about how to improve the current situation.

Collaboratively engage with as many people as possible to really understand the issues. It is especially important to understand things from your customers or service users point of view.

Section 2

In this section the analysis can use any of the Seven Analysis Tools to visually present data that has been collected to understand the current or ‘as is’ situation. In this case a Pareto Chart and a Cause & Effect Diagram (aka Fishbone of Ishikawa) have been used.

Again these analysis techniques all benefit from engaging with as many others as practical.

Section 3

This simplified version of a project plan or Gantt chart serves to show actions decided upon as countermeasures to the issues revealed by the analysis. Gain a consensus on the way forward with as many people as practicable who will be affected by the possible changes.

Section 4

Once again a Process Behaviour chart visually shows the dramatically improved performance achieved by changing the system. You can include other data also in a visual or graphical format, e.g. financial benefits and so on.

Section 5

Finally this section shows possible future courses of action, opportunities or plans, which naturally will lead to further A3 Reports.

By using the A3 Report as a focus for incremental improvement you stand a much better chance increasing performance in the long term. Ignore the temptation to treat solving each problem as a one-off, use it as the foundation for building a culture of ongoing improvement

Finally, I would like to re-emphasize the role of the A3 Report in engaging and communicating with others throughout the organisation. It makes maximum impact with colleagues and management with the minimum amount of paperwork.

BOTTOM LINE

The goal of the A3 Report is, on one piece of paper, to visually communicate , gain consensus, solve problems and get results. It does this by

• Thinking and communicating information effectively, i.e. in a “Lean” way

• Collaboratively solving problems and improving systems and processes

• By being highly visual, with written information in no more than four bullet points

• Using a format that fits the story/situation whether it is for a proposal, problem-solving, status update or information purposes

Ultimately the power of the A3 Report comes not purely from the report itself. Instead it comes from the opportunity to develop a culture of a learning mindset that is needed to make the A3 thinking part of your organisational system.

Hope you have enjoyed this blog and found it useful. If you have any questions do please use the contact page in the menu. Do please share this blog with your friends, colleagues and connections. Looking forward to sharing my next blog with you. Thank you for reading this blog.

PS If you are interested I can share a simple template for an A3 Report in Microsoft Word if you contact me.

How much is it costing you to recruit and replace staff due to high staff turnover? The turnover and replacement of staff can be hugely costly to your business.

According to XpertHR's 2017 annual survey of labour turnover the average UK employee turnover rate in 2016 was approximately 10% a year. This varies drastically by sector and of course by the types, levels and skills of the jobs people are in.

The cost of replacing leavers depends upon their particular job, estimates ranging between £10,000 and £50,000; higher paid staff costing considerably more. Overall then, replacing leavers is costly, plus the loss of knowledge, expertise and experience.

Common sense tells us that staff are more likely to leave when they are unhappy. One of the most significant factors influencing staff satisfaction is a lack of an environment or community of trust within the business. Trust is more than just rules.

So why would you drive people out of the business and lose all their knowledge, expertise and experience that is vital to sustaining your success? Admittedly it is not easy to maintain, let alone create, a community of trust within a business.

According to Warren Buffett,

It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it.

Let’s look at six factors that influence the creation and maintenance of a trusting working environment.

1. IT STARTS AT THE TOP

Frankly if owners, directors and managers do not behave in a manner that inspires trust they deserve what’s coming to them in terms of staff turnover, the associated costs and the loss of knowledge, expertise and experience.

It’s not easy. It’s especially difficult if trust has been destroyed by business-as-usual practices including blame, secrecy, disrespect, discrimination, micromanagement, egocentricity and broken promises; especially the latter.

More fatal to the business there is often an absolute focus on the short-term to the detriment of quality and the total customer experience that drives customers away. Too often this is justified as meeting the demands of the stock market.

OK. Not every business leader has any or all of these mistakes, but just as harmful is the passive “We’ve always done it this way”.

Enough of these “negative waves”! What else can you do to build a community of trust in your business?

If you are serious about employee retention and building trust just look in the mirror. Inspiring your teams starts with you setting a good example. Do you walk the talk? You cannot expect people to behave in a certain way if you don’t do it yourself.

2. RECOGNIZING PEOPLES' UNIQUE STRENGTHS AT ALL LEVELS

Your people are your business. Recognising the uniqueness of people does take conscious time and effort. These both are absolutely necessary to build trust. People’s natural ability to deal with particular roles will vary. Critically success depends on everyone.

Take an airline check-in desk agent. Not everyone is able to deal with passengers in that brief contact. However, as Jan Carlson former CEO SAS Airlines writes in his book ‘Moments of Truth’ the encounter can colour passenger opinions of the whole airline.

People have strengths even in the most basic role. In two previous jobs, one in a large corporation and another in an SME, experience showed me that even the apparently routine job of the janitors can be a key to an operation running smoothly.

Given the opportunity to contribute and play to their strengths people can contribute to amazing results. Recognizing people’s unique strengths means you actually have to care about people.

3. RESPONSIBILITY AND OWNERSHIP

Inspiring a community of trust in a business starts with leaders and managers taking responsibility and ownership for moving in that direction. Ownership of actions conveys positivity instead of the negativity and blame associated with accountability.

It is essential that owners, directors and managers at all levels take responsibility and ownership of their work. Behaving in this way should inspire everyone in the business or any other organisation for that matter to do likewise.

Giving responsibility is one of the cornerstones of building a community of trust and one of the keys to employee engagement. Giving responsibility says, “We trust you to do a good job that will contribute to our future success”.

It should go without saying that a person given responsibility must have the know-how to do the job. The person must never be ‘cast adrift’. Ongoing coaching support is essential, as are continuing reviews and feedback.

The downside of giving responsibility is that things will almost always go wrong at some point. It is critical in that case to avoid blaming and instead help the person learn from their experience to prevent it happening again.

4. OPENNESS AND HONESTY

Trust is built by sharing information by being open and sharing as much information as you can. Having taken responsibility and ownership above, openness and honesty means all levels admitting not knowing all the answers and acknowledging mistakes.

Openness and honesty also means acknowledging and sharing the bad news. Perhaps there has been a big change in the marketplace, possibly an innovation by a competitor. Bad news could mean acknowledging a legislative or ecological change.

Clearly promises should be kept. Changes in circumstances may make it impossible to keep a promise. When that happens it is critical to tell people as soon as possible that the situation has changed and it is not possible to keep the promise.

5. LISTENING AND TALKING

Communication is an essential part of trust within organisations, a point echoed by billionaire entrepreneur Richard Branson who pulls no punches when he writes:

Communication makes the world go round. It facilitates human connections, and allows us to learn, grow, and progress. It's not just about speaking or reading, but understanding what is being said -- and in some cases what is not being said. Communication is the most important skill any leader can possess.

To be truly effective communication has to be two-way. Proper attention is necessary when listening as well as talking between all parties and levels within an organisation. Really hear what the other is saying; ensuring that you pick up nonverbal communication, the body language.

You know the saying; you have two ears and one mouth and should use them in that ratio. What trust do you have in someone who does not really listen to you?

6. LEARNING AND DEVELOPMENT

It should go without saying that ongoing learning by everyone in a business or other organisation is essential to survival in today’s fast-moving, high-tech world.

What contributes toward building a community of trust is managers really engaging in Personal Development Reviews (PDR) with each member of their team. This is not traditional appraisal, which is usually a manager judging their team members.

PDRs are about jointly carefully considering how to develop a person’s capabilities for the present and future. It should show that a manager cares. Management must really embed PDRs and ring-fence the budget, which will really contribute to building trust.

—

Here’s the bottom line. If you are part of the leadership of a business, inspiring and building a community of trust in your business is your responsibility and it is one that you must truly own. The payoff will be increased performance, profitability and a sustainably successful future.

It’s not easy. It’s especially difficult if trust has been destroyed by business-as-usual practices like blame, secrecy, discrimination, disrespect, micromanagement, etc.

Six practices that can help you develop a community of trust are:

1. It starts at the top, especially honesty and transparency

2. Recognizing peoples' unique strengths at all levels

3. Responsibility and ownership

4. Openness and honesty

5. Listening and talking

6. Learning and development

In the end you do actually have to genuinely care about other people to inspire trust.

Hope you have enjoyed this blog and found it useful. If you have any questions do please use the contact page in the menu. Do please share this blog with your friends, colleagues and connections. Looking forward to sharing next month’s blog with you. Thank you for reading this blog.

Are you feeling pain in your business or is it just below par? Is it fit and healthy enough?

When watching the documentary series Ambulance on BBC One TV, you hear the 999 Call Handler in an ambulance call centre start by asking the question “Is the patient still breathing?” How healthy is your business?

Well. Is your business still breathing? Is there a positive cash flow? Is there a flow of orders? Do customers return and bring their friends?

These and many more measures are the vital signs of your business. Too often businesses ask for help only when they are in crisis when the options for progress and time are more limited.

When your business’s vital signs are starting to look poor, take action early. Yes, it’s hard to ask for help, especially when society seems to expect business owners, directors and managers to have all the answers.

Equally when a business does ask for help, is there the expectation that the outside help, whether consultancy, mentoring or coaching, will tell them what to do?

But is that the best way forward? Will those responsible for taking action really own and carry out what is being recommended?

OUTSIDE HELP

An outside view can actually bring in new ways to understand what’s happening and the action to take . There is the risk though that an outside consultant might bring either their favourite solution or what’s in fashion.

This might not be the best way forward when you think about it, because every business and the people in it are unique. In addition, of course, as i say, the client may not own what is being recommended.

When you ask for outside help it is useful to know that there can be three different types of outside help, which Edgar Schein described in his book Process Consultation Revisited as:

• Purchase of Expertise Model

• Doctor-Patient Model

• Process Consulting Model

PURCHASE OF EXPERTISE MODEL

In the purchase of expertise model, as the name suggest, new knowledge is brought in by the external expert. For example, help might be requested with digital marketing.

Digital marketing is a rapidly changing field with things like Artificial Intelligence and Virtual Reality making it hard to keep up, hence the need for outside help.

Such experts would be bringing in the required up to date knowledge. Provided the organisation takes responsibility for its learning and the implementation of the new knowledge, this can be a useful course of action.

DOCTOR-PATIENT MODEL

The doctor-patient model brings with it greater risks. In this model the client approaches the consultant very much in the manner of a patient with some ailment going to see their doctor.

As in the medical case the consultant investigates the symptoms, possibly carrying out an in-depth investigation interviewing people across the company and, where available, studying performance data.

Based on this the consultant makes their recommendations for action as a doctor would prescribe treatment for a patient. This advice may be absolutely correct based on the evidence that is shared with the consultant.

Unfortunately the extent to which the doctor-patient model works is dependent a number of factors:

• Has the client identified the correct area for the consultant’s work?

• Are people willing to reveal accurate information about the situation?

• Do those in the company believe in, accept and own the proposed course of action?

• Do both the consultant and the company properly understand and accept the likely outcomes of recommendations

• Is the company willing or able to take action on the recommendations? Might they be too near a precipice? Is the business still breathing?

A BETTER WAY - PROCESS CONSULTING

If you are not looking for specific knowledge or expertise then Process Consulting can be a more effective course of action to deal with problems.

The word ‘process’ here refers to the interpersonal interactions between the client and the outside helper. Importantly in process consulting as the client you own your problem and continue to own it throughout the project.

SOLUTIONS-FOCUSED COACHING

Solutions-Focused Coaching is a way of doing process consulting. Central to solutions-focused coaching is that it is very much focused on what works for the client in their situation, today.

You and your business or organisation are unique. You want to build on what you have achieved, working to ensure this continues over the long-term. Solutions-focused coaching positively and practically achieves your desired future.

That is, the future you really want.

Experience has shown that resolving problems by focusing on the solutions is simpler, quicker and cheaper than focusing excessively on the problems. Often effective solutions can be developed in six sessions, sometimes less.

Focusing on cause and effect in man-made systems and equipment maybe a useful way to solve problems. However, as problems get more complex or if they wholly or partly involve people, then complexity can cloud the issues.

Also the more a problem is talked about the more complex and difficult it can appear due to the emergence of the multiple different points of view.

Rather than the usual approach of focusing on what you do not want, i.e. the problem, you focus on what you do want or are trying to achieve, the solution, which is why it is called solutions-focused coaching.

The critical point is that if something is working in a complex, often human, situation the more likely it is that doing more of it will create more success.

This is because whatever is happening results from all the complex relationships and interactions in the situation. It is very practical and in saying this, a solutions-focused approach also only deals with solvable problems.

Solvable problems can be defined, have outcomes that can be measured and, most importantly, everyone involved accepts that they will be doing something differently.

Here’s the solutions-focused process:

Although the usual sequence is problem – platform – (miracle question) – ideal future – resources – small actions – review, if for some reason this is not working we do what works.

In more detail the steps are:

Defining the problem, particularly what you are trying to achieve

Then the platform is how you would know you had moved forward, e.g. might you have some measure or key performance indicator

If possible the critical next step is visualizing what the ideal future would be or look like after the solution has been successfully implemented

It is all too easy to become buried in the problem or the current situation. Sometimes it may be difficult to imagine the ideal future. It may then be necessary to ask the Miracle Question

The miracle question consists of imagining that everyone goes home for the night, with everything remaining the same, when during the night a miracle occurs and in the morning the ideal future has occurred

What does your ideal future look like?

This leads to the next step, which is estimating on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is your ideal future, how close you are to it; often 2 or 3 is typical, let’s say 2.5

Next, what small step can you take to get you from 2.5 to 3? What resources can you use that are already working in your situation? They may be called or doing something else

When this has been carried out and, hopefully successfully, recognize and appreciate the shift that has occurred

Now what small step can you take to move from 3 to 3.5? And so on

This might all seem slow compared with the business-as-usual approach of endless discussions about the problem and rushing solutions that may not work because they do not have the sign-up of all those involved.

The point is that more time is spent moving towards the ideal solution. Progress may not be even, sometimes there might be only a small step forwards, at other times there might be a massive step.

The important thing is that as the improvements are applied, learning is taking place, which brings us to the final step:

Reflect upon what has happened and what has been learnt that can help move towards an even better future

The essence is, therefore, quite simple, although it benefits from some subtlety in use. It boils down to:

Finding out what is already working and doing more of it

Stopping doing what does not work and doing something else, often what is already working elsewhere in your organisation

Personally I continue to use solutions-focused coaching to help directors, managers and business owners because it works in solving issues with their relationships, teams, business operations, partners and organisations.

What is more it often resolves issues overall in a shorter, finite time, which is often faster than business-as-usual approach of having endless debate and applying ill-conceived compromises.

Also solutions-focused coaching is a useful technique for you as a manager to use in your work as you encounter issues and challenges with people and problems at every level of your organisation.

CONCLUSION

Is your business still breathing? Do you have an issue or problem that is causing you pain? If it looks like you need specialist expertise, call in an expert, making sure you retain control of the project and implementation.

If your pain appears to be within your normal field of knowledge and operation, and especially if it’s a people issue, consider taking a solutions-focused approach, either doing it yourself or with an outside coach.

This approach enables you to maintain control of the resolution of the issue, usually getting to a solution faster and, importantly, doing what works for you and your organisation at this time. It may already be working somewhere!

If you have found this article useful do please take the time to share it. If you would like to talk to me about things that you want to achieve: do please contact me through the contact page on this website or email me directly on alanclark@keybiz.com.

Well are you?

It’s tough to work closely with your team all year and then have to judge them. You are right to dread it, even hate it. Having striven all year to build up trust and rapport, the organisation is forcing you to be critical of them. Now let me think… is that REALLY going to increase their motivation, creativity and performance? Hmm… Maybe not.

You are right. Performance appraisals do not work

Staff performance appraisals have long been a widespread practice, which doesn’t make them any more worthwhile or less damaging to both people and performance. That great management guru, Dr W Edwards Deming railed against ‘Evaluation of performance, merit rating, or annual review’. It was one of what he called the deadly diseases of organisation due to the Western style of management. So concerned was he about the practice that he devoted nineteen pages of his classic book Out of the Crisis to its ills.

Just STOP doing performance appraisals

Here’s why…

So what’s wrong with Performance Appraisals?

You mean apart from making you feel bad, either as a manager or as the subject of appraisal? Do you really like judging or being judged? I thought not. Likely when you experienced appraisal you have felt you were being blamed when many factors were outside your control that affected what you were able to achieve. Appraisals, the rating and ranking that can follow and, annoyingly, the often linked bonuses or pay rises, fail to recognise that too many factors affecting performance are beyond an individual’s control. These include the effects of random chance, i.e. just plain bad luck. So how will your team members be feeling about appraisal?

It’s a Whole-System!

In reality everyone is part of a greater whole-system of interconnected influences that affect performance. High performance is the outcome from interactions of people with their environment and who are working together effectively communicating, cooperating and, especially, collaborating. The environmental influences will be from both within and external to the organisation. So while people can make a difference themselves, it should be obvious that individuals are therefore subject to multiple influences beyond their control.

The problem with appraisal is that it is an outcome of the widespread practice of Mechanical Management, which believes in reward and punishment. Do X and you get Y. When you apply this to people in organisations it will be counterproductive. In fact whilst you may see some visible results what you will not see are the unexpected side-effects; like fiddling the numbers or system and demotivation.

Primarily, and most obviously, people are not machines. They are thinking, feeling, and social beings. They do things for their reasons not for yours. If you beat them up they WILL go into self-preservation mode and become demotivated. Person is set against person and team against team. Hardly a situation that delivers the motivated, creative, innovative and high performing teams you want. What an organisation should encouraging, as mentioned above, are communication, cooperation and collaboration that lead to creativity, innovation and, ultimately, high performance.

OK, so not everyone receives a bad review. However, just as the whole-system of influences can produce a poor rating the same factors may combine to create positive conditions. Yes there are high performers who have produced outstanding results. They may well have developed the knowledge and capabilities to work more effectively. I would suggest that they present the opportunity to learn what conditions others need to also deliver high performance. Our learning should also take into account that people are different from one another. There is no one-size fits all in people’s capabilities and aptitudes. Indeed I would argue that it is the variety between people in a team that can lead to great outcomes. One must consider very carefully before rating people as high performers. Will it bring the team closer together or drive them further apart harming communication, cooperation and collaboration?

If appraisal is part of outdated mechanical management thinking what is the alternative?

The real work of a manager

The primary job of an effective manager is to behave and inspire in a way that lifts their team. To be effective you don’t have to be an expert or specialist, although relevant knowledge of the field can make a difference. Great sports coaches, film directors or orchestral conductors might not be star players or performers themselves. However, firstly they are able to bring together a team of people with the relevant knowledge, experience and skills. They then help them work well together in the right conditions; those that release their highest creativity and or performance. And it is in particular with respect to helping people to work well together and creating the right conditions for people to give of their best that performance appraisal fails most.

What makes people tick

We’ve looked at the negative effects of performance appraisal and the blame, stated or implied by a poor appraisal outcome. Let’s listen to what someone feels like in a positive working environment?

"I feel trusted and valued, so that part is very good.

"When you enjoy what you do, you become better. When you're having fun with it, it is much easier and you do better. At least I do.”

The words of Formula 1® (F1) racing driver Kevin Magnussen who drives for the Haas team. In the 2018 season he achieved his best position in the drivers’ World Championship of ninth after five years in the series.

When you look at Magnussen’s results earlier in his F1 career they took a dive in 2015 after a promising start in the McLaren team in 2015. The poor performance was not a function of his driving but that of the new Honda engine, which was returning for its first season in F1 to new regulations after nine years away. No amount of appraisal could compensate for a poor performing engine.

Magnussen was replaced at McLaren-Honda by double World Champion Fernando Alonso. Even with all his ability and experience Alonso could not compensate for a poor engine and, as it turned out, a really poor car.

As an F1 fan I am also going to be interested to see what affect newly appointed Ferrari Team Principal Mattia Binotto will have on the that team in 2019. Jonathan Noble, in a 17-Jan-2019 article on autosport.com, said that in earlier roles Binotto created a more horizontal system in which all staff had a greater say in how things were done, and were more able to contribute to the decision-making process. He trusted those underneath him releasing their abilities rather than them fearing blame.

As a manager your team can develop and progress when you provide effective leadership. An essential part of this is that whilst being responsible for all areas you show trust to all members of your team.

Business, education and public sector organisations succeed through cooperation not competition. As the examples above illustrate one can see, however, that even in competitive sport a positive environment and enjoying what you do is an advantage.

What you can do to improve the situation

“Your job is personally helping colleagues, of all levels, to develop by using a coaching and mentoring approach”

If you want motivated, creative and high performing people in your team the outdated mechanical management thinking, as I say, is best avoided. As you begin to recognise your people, and your bosses, as thinking, feeling and social beings you might consider the advice of Leonardo Da Vinci,

“Develop your senses - especially learn how to see. Realize that everything connects to everything else.”

More and more today managers are using whole-system thinking to see the world as a place where, as stated above, everything connects to everything else. This recognizes that there are multiple influences and consequences, both seen and unseen. Critically causes and effects are often separated in time and sometimes space so the relationships or connections are not always visible.

How will developing your whole-systems thinking ability help? Bluntly it should immediately cause you to stop looking for someone to blame when things do not work out as expected. It helps to start really listening and learning about what is happening. More than likely if you are experiencing low performance, some undesirable effect or mistake then it is quite possible that it originates from some external cause and not your team. Once you accept the implications of whole-systems thinking you may be open to seeing the source of some event or behaviour may be the higher level environment external to your organisational system. It may also be down to you! Do you need to do things differently?

Nonviolent Communication of Feedback

When you actually see, hear or experience something yourself that you need to feedback to one of your team, do this as accurately, clearly and as soon as practically possible. That feedback should be in the form of the title of Marshall B Rosenberg’s book Nonviolent Communication. This is a topic that deserves greater space so I’ll reserve that for a future blog.

Summary

• Consider whether performance appraisals are really helping… well are they? Possibly, for the record substitute an ‘Annual Piece of Paper’ (APoP) that they write.

• Develop a blame-free environment

• Think in terms of the whole-system

• Start coaching your team members to help them develop

• When you give timely feedback – especially recognizing good work – thank them

• Communicate non-violently when things are not working out; there is learning to be had

Expect the unexpected!

In a perfect world organisations progress towards some vision of an ideal future following carefully developed strategies and plans. Unfortunately in the real world today businesses and other organisations face complexity and ambiguity that make unexpected changes essential for survival.

When these influences make unexpected changes necessary they can have serious effects on the motivation and morale of people at all levels. As a result performance suffers despite the most well-developed strategies and plans being in place. By understanding what their people might feel managers can interact with them in a way that helps them adjust to the new situation.

When inevitably the unexpected happens how can a manager best support their people?

First let’s try to understand what people might be feeling. Back in 1969 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross proposed what has come to be known as the Grieving Cycle. This was inspired by her work with terminally ill patients. Kübler-Ross’s work was criticized for a lack of empirical evidence. However, as George Box once said, ‘All models are wrong, but some are useful.’ Later development of her work by William Bridges and Anna Maravelas suggests that the grieving cycle, as shown below, can be useful to managers dealing with change.

A manager can use this model to help them think about dealing with the situation as a journey. This starts from the shock of hearing about changes due to some unexpected situation. Next people may encounter various initial emotions, hopefully reaching acceptance of the situation. Eventually they would build back up to new beginnings where people are performing effectively in the new situation.

Experience suggests that all four emotions of denial, bargaining, anger and sadness may not necessarily take place or be in the order shown. At some point people may tell and even repeat ‘war stories’ of how minor difficulties were overcome in the past. Critically a manager needs to be present to listen and must never minimize the feelings being expressed. Saying something like ‘This is hard isn’t?’ recognizes people’s emotional difficulties. A time can come when people accept that change is happening and it is then time to restate the change and share the vision, ideally inspiring, of the new future everyone will be working towards.

In dealing with these situations it is useful for a manager to think of their approach as coaching. It is worth noting that as in one-to-one coaching, the models are there for guidance. If something is not working then something different should be tried. In the case of people not moving on perhaps involving them in clarifying the vision may help. When people are stuck at an early stage, hearing an inspiring vision of the new or revised future again may help them begin to come to terms with the change.

The key is to be present, to keep listening and recognizing people’s discomfort however tough that is for you as a manager. You may find it helpful to be supported either by senior colleagues or possibly an external coach.

In conclusion, in the world today it seems that having to deal with the unexpected change is inevitable. Many people in the workplace can struggle with this emotionally, reacting and behaving in unexpected ways that cause performance to drop. The grieving cycle can provide managers with insights into how their people may be feeling and act as a starting point to help people deal with those feelings. Coming to terms with the changed situation may require managers themselves to adapt. Ultimately by supporting people, possibly including taking a coaching approach, managers stand a better chance of returning performance to original or even better levels.

Postscript

There are a couple of implicit assumptions above. One is that strategies and plans are being developed with full involvement at all levels in the organisation, as in Strategy Deployment (or Hoshin Kanri) approach. The second is that having developed strategies and plans they are actually used and worked to. Sadly it is not unknown for strategies and plans to be developed and then filed with due ceremony without being acted upon until the next planning cycle begins. The danger in not working to strategies and plans is that unexpected events can have even greater impact on people at all levels than might otherwise be the case.

#Change #GrievingCycle

Did you see that piece in the news earlier in the year? Without wanting to upset any accountants out there, the question was whether current UK financial auditing practices were giving effective warning of possible financial problems. The article by accountancy professor Prem Sikka cited Carillion and BHS as examples.

The question then arises why the managers themselves did not spot they had a problem from their numbers. Unfortunately the managers in these and many other cases are not alone. A fundamental problem is that too many business owners and managers are not aware that there are better ways to use performance data or Key Performance Indicators (KPI) as they are often called.

The least useful way to present "the numbers", as they are often referred to, is to put a whole lot of different types of data in a table. You might add budgetary figures and even the numbers from the last reporting period. Crucially this presentational approach is purely that, a presentation. It cannot as such analyse your numbers. OK you might comment on the ratios of various numbers. But what does any of this really tell you about what is happening? Not a lot.

World leading statistician Dr Donald J Wheeler says,
'Data has no meaning without a context'.

The simplest and most useful context is to look at how your numbers change against time. A simple line graph will do this for you and help you link data points to real-world events.

Without looking at your latest number in the context of other data over time you are just treating it as a piece of count data. That is, how much or how many, which can have its place although it doesn't help to better understand how an organisation and its processes work and can be improved. It is, however, more useful, when managing a business or any organisation, to use your numbers in the form of analytical data, which means properly analysing it. In this way you get a sound basis for decisions supporting management action to improve performance. So what is this proper analysis?

If you have your numbers in a graph against time, as above, you are already one step closer to proper analysis. The time axis links your numbers to real-world events, hence possible causes, and it may be possible to see any trends that are present. 

Talking of trends take the UK retail sector. As everybody knows Christmas produces a  strong trend in retail sales. As did the January sales until some bright spark came up with Black Friday sales! It is essential for managers to be aware of these seasonal effects and other patterns or trends and how they are varying. It's much harder to spot trends in a table of data.

When real-world events produce unusual effects in the performance of a process managers need to know as soon as possible. The key here is to plot your numbers in real time as soon as they are available, otherwise you might as well be trying to drive around only looking in the rear view mirror!

The above a graph was of despatch data showing that possibly there was a falling trend in performance over the first three weeks or so. Was the drop off on day nine significant? How would we know? A proper analysis would be to use a Process Behaviour (PB) chart.

A PB chart has been a proven data analysis method for a very long time. It is known by many other names, mostly variations on Shewhart Control Chart, a name which acknowledges the man who developed it, Walter A Shewhart. What Shewhart did was to add three decision lines to a line graph of the data being studied. Below is an example of the three lines added to our previous line graph of daily despatch data.

The green line is the average for this set of data, which immediately gives your eye a reference point that can be useful for identifying possible overall patterns and trends. The two red dotted lines were Shewhart's real breakthrough. He said that if your process was stable and predictable (what he called in statistical control) you might expect future points to lie anywhere between these two lines providing the process being studied did not change. Any data point outside these two lines would be caused by some exceptional event different to stable and predictable running of the process that is worth investigating. We call this rule 1.

So in the PB chart above data point A is outside the lower red dotted decision line and would have been worth investigating immediately at the time because something exceptional had occurred. Perhaps a machine or vehicle had broken down or the supply chain had failed, the latter perhaps even due to a weather event such as a typhoon or tsunami!

One of the other interesting times that you can learn from a PB Chart is when you get a run of eight or more data points above or below the green average line. This is highly unusual for any system or process and we call this rule 2. In the PB Chart above you can in fact see nine points at B all above the average. This is telling us that on average over these nine days the process was more stable and operating at a higher average. Why was this? What had changed in the operating conditions or the supply chain over this period?

So by drawing a line graph and then applying these three decision lines you can create your own PB chart and get more from your numbers, which will give you a better understanding of your organisation. With this knowledge you should be in a position to improve performance and, who knows, one day you might achieve World-class performance! And you don't necessarily need a fancy computer programme to do this. You can even do it with a piece of graph paper and a pencil!

If you would like a simple worksheet to help you calculate the decision lines do please use the contact page on this site.

#PBchart #DataAnalysis #ImproveKPIs

Are you finding it hard to achieve high performance?

It is really hard to get the high performance needed in the business world today. You have to be aggressive, drive people hard to get the performance you need and not accept any excuses.

Well… no.

The seems to be a trend these days for promoting or hiring aggressive people in management. The mistaken belief is that it is the only way to achieve and manage for high performance. When actually the people in any organisation are it’s competitive advantage and the key to truly high performance, which is only released when they are properly led and managed.

Trouble is those hiring or promoting often don’t understand what makes an effective manager. This is not surprising when you look back at the UK Chartered Management Institute’s report Management 2020, which showed a shocking lack of management training in this country.

So taking an aggressive, no-nonsense approach to management out of ignorance is perhaps to be expected. Any thinking manager might first reflect upon what it would be like to be treated like that themselves. Would they give and continue to give their highest performance?

No of course not. Like anyone else they would become apathetic, just take the money and go home at 5 o’clock without a backward glance. The hard-nosed approach often results in high levels of staff churn, which should be of serious concern if managers are truly interested in their costs.

Actually it was ever thus. The young thrusting manager, or as they might be called today, talent, have always been the dream of lazy and ignorant senior management. This is often also the get rich-quick brigade who also follow the lastest quick-fix fashion or fad.

These days there is a massive body of literature on how to be an effective manager and how to achieve the highest, sustainable performance by truly engaging with everyone in the organisation. Critically this means recognising that you are a manager of real people. Management is a skill that needs to be learned by applying that body of knowledge in the workplace with coaching and mentoring support from more senior managers or perhaps external professionals.

Best practice shows that the foundation for a thinking manager would be building trust and cooperation with and within the team that they are responsible for. Not possible by being aggressive. And as Simon Sinek says, being responsible means recognising and giving credit to others when things go right and taking the blame when things go wrong. Would your typical aggressive manager do that? I think not.

Are you as an effective, thinking manager as you might be or do you know some who is not? The answer is to get help possibly from a professional coach or mentor. This is true even if there has been more formal management education or training because the real learning and development takes place on the job over time. Critically it includes learning from mistakes.

If you would like to find out more about achieving high performance by developing effective management skills through the support a coach or mentor give me a call.

Ever wondered whether your only issue with redesigning your business to improve performance is finding a big enough hammer or chainsaw? The current 'wisdom' when performance is poor or inadequate can seem to boil down to taking drastic measures. In reality true experts in business improvement will advise understanding the problem before selecting the most relevant and effective solution.

As we near the end of our journey around the Flow & Feedback (2F) Diagram we come to Processes for Design and Redesign of the whole business system, including focusing on individual processes within it.

The implication of the words design and redesign is that a rational process is involved. Intuition and experience may guide you, although it must be backed up with evidence and reason. However, quick-fixes, ideology, cant and dogma only damage your business. Those skilled in improvement of performance and quality will tell you that the key to it is the Study-Act-Plan-Do (SAPDo*) improvement cycle. You can apply this to an individual process or the whole organisation, indeed this 2F diagram is based around it.

*You may recognise this as Deming's PDSA cycle or even PDCA.

We like SAPDo because, usually, everyone of us is always and already in the middle of life, as some psychologists would say. Therefore it seems to us that to start at Study prompts us all to find out 'What is actually happening?', which provides better evidence for effective action. An evidence base for this means a sound understanding of how the work is working and customers are behaving. To do that requires a methodology and, ideally, good measures of performance and quality.

Once you have studied and have reliable performance and quality measurements you can develop your solutions for

(a) The cause of a particular drop off in performance and or quality

(b) Possible opportunities for performance and or quality improvement

Then you have to decide how and when to Act. It is true that sometimes a cause for a particular drop off in performance cannot be identified. The decision may then be to continue to monitor the situation until there is more data or perhaps the recurrence of a problem.

Then you need a Plan to implement the changes to the organisation or a particular process that you have decided upon. This must include how you continue to measure performance and perhaps quality to decide whether the change was an improvement.

So then you Do it, running the revised organisation or process in as near true operating conditions as possible. And after a representative trial period you are back to Study to see whether the change actually was an improvement that you can adopt, adapt or abandon it. Indeed you may find it necessary or desirable to repeat the cycle a number of times to achieve a particular outcome. Real life doesn't always come up with neat answers, solutions or outcomes. The really important thing is that everyone is open to learning and searching out a better way to make the working work and customers happy.

So hang up your hammer and or chainsaw. There are better ways to improve performance, that is, if you are truly interested in increasing performance.

Contact us if you would like to ask any questions about opportunities for improvement in your organisation.

Are you a leader of leaders? Ah leadership. Some might say that a leader needs to be a dictator. Some that a business leader needs to be a bit of a demagogue skilled in the art of politics who plays on people's desires and prejudices.

Truly effective leaders gets the right things done at the right time for the right reasons and take action based on facts or evidence. They know the benefit in creating leaders out of those who follow, which is being a leader of leaders. The point about the right time is particularly important. You cannot be everywhere at once. In business, as in life in general, timing is everything.

When a critical situation arises can it really be right for everything to wait while you get there or information is passed up the traditional chain of command and for a decision to come back down? Remembering what we said about the importance of situational awareness in the last blog, might it be better if people at the scene are empowered to take action?

To be those other leaders, everyone in the business must feel this is our business. That is, in both senses of the word. That is people both feel that they are truly part of the company or other organisation and, when they see a situation develop, that they are responsible for ensuring the necessary action is taken.

In the Flow & Feedback (2F) Diagram, below, the foundation for effective leadership anywhere in the organisation are the aims: the values, purpose and vision. A clear idea of what the organisation stands for, what is does for customers and where it is headed give leaders at any level strong guidance for taking timely, effective action.

Next time we will look at the next to last step in closing the feedback loop in the 2F diagram. That is, taking action to improve the situation that we call 'Processes to design and redesign the system'. Does that sound a bit dramatic? Well, you know what they say:

“If you always do what you’ve always done, you always get what you’ve always gotten.”

So see you next time, when once again I will draw on both my book Picture Your Business and on our new ebook Simply Manage. Picture Your Business is available from me priced £12.00+P&P. The latest version of the companion 2F Worksheet is now available free in MS Word or PDF on request from me either via a Linkedin message or emailing me.

Ever wondered why you got that nasty surprise in your business due to outside events? It's a real tough one. On the one hand experts are telling you to keep scanning the horizon for the unexpected and on the other hand you must keep delivering on that great total customer experience.

Being aware of what is happening around you is called Situational Awareness. It applies both to what is happening literally around you and to the wider context or situation in which your business is operating. Situational awareness covers awareness of what is happening around you relative to where you are, where you are going (your vision) and the risks to your business from people or events around you on your journey between the two.

Your knowledge and experience do help you to understand what is happening around that might impact the successful development of your business. However, in addition to having to focusing on delivering a great customer experience, there are plenty of other distractions about.

So it helps to have a way of systematically recording and reviewing what is happening outside your business, which is where the Flow & Feedback (2F) diagram can help. BTW We are still looking at your business organisation using the Study phase of the Study-Act-Plan-Do (SAPDo) learning and improvement cycle in 2F.

In the top right hand corner of the 2F diagram above it talks of processes for understanding customers and context. A process that can give you situational awareness of your context or outside world is known as a PESTLE analysis. PESTLE is a mnemonic to help you remember to look around at your outside world under six headings. These are P for Political, E for Economic, S for Social, T for Technology, L for Legal and E for Environmental forces. Below is simplified example of this analysis from our ebook Simply Manage for a web tech company. It uses the 2F Worksheet format. It may be simplified but the idea is to start you thinking about your situation.

What forces are you noticing around your business? Have any of them changed? What might that mean for what you need to do to reach where you are heading (i.e. your vision)? 

So what action are you going to take having Studied what's happening? In my next blog as we continue to explore the 2F diagram I will be looking at leadership. Once again I will draw on both my book Picture Your Business and on our new ebook Simply Manage. Picture Your Business is available from me priced £12.00+P&P. The latest version of the companion 2F Worksheet is now available free in MS Word or PDF on request from me either via a Linkedin message or by emailing alanclark@keybiz.com.

In our journey around the Flow & Feedback (2F) diagram in search of competitive advantage we are still in the Study phase of the Study-Act-Plan-Do (SAPDo) learning and improvement cycle.

But first a reminder of why we are all here:

To give a great total customer experience

And from that, a thought about enterprise excellence, which is when:

Everyone in a business or any other organisation really understands,
and takes responsibility for, keeping value flowing to their customers.

In this particular blog, as I continue to look at the 2F diagram step by step, I want to introduce you to how it can help you systematically improve performance and quality for your enterprise to become excellent. It is also worth pointing out that by improvement I mean both continual incremental improvement and innovation. This applies both at an organisational level and in detail at the process level.

Some people when talking about enterprise excellence give the impression that once you have achieved it then that’s it! Unfortunately the world is not standing still, which means that conditions will change over time inside and outside your business, in customers and in the supply chain. And anyway experience shows that decisions, about improvement and everything else, are compromises. Therefore later, further improvements are probably possible. And if you can see an opportunity to improve then so can your competitors.

We have been looking at using data properly processed in a PB chart as evidence to better understand performance throughout the organisation in both the value-adding and support processes. In this way we can make effective next steps of improvement to get and keep competitive advantage.

Let's now look at what your performance data might look like in a PB chart before you begin to improve your system of work or processes. In the graphic at the top, (A) is typical of many unimproved systems or processes. Unimproved systems or processes in the real world are often highly variable; sometimes to the extent that performance or quality in customers’ eyes is unacceptably unpredictable. This is a competitive disadvantage! Examples might be your customers experiencing highly variable outcomes in things like response times to enquiries or requests for quotation, in delivery times, in variable quality or in variable performance of specific characteristics that are important to them.

The two green dashed decision lines in PB charts help you to understand the degree of variability and predictability of your systems and processes. It is the spread or distance between these two lines that tells you the degree of variability of the performance measure you are looking at. Basically, relative to the average (red) line the narrower the distance the better. Points outside the two green lines alert you to exceptional or unusual events that signal unpredictability in the system or process. They are signals for action. The advantage of a PB chart is that you know when the event occurred so you have a better opportunity to understand why it occurred and put in place countermeasures or improvements.

In the food industry I came across an example of seven inch sausage rolls that were noticeably shorter. I kid you not! Result: unhappy customers. Definitely an uh-oh moment in the graphic at the top. In fact the sausage rolls were all of the correct weight. The problem was with a change in the consistency of the pastry before it was baked. Once this was sorted performance returned to the proper level.

You might see data points above the top green line of PB chart as in (A) above, which are a nice surprise of exceptionally high performance. For example, production output or the yield of a manufacturing or chemical process plant might be higher than usual. It is as important to understand why things have gone exceptionally well as it is why they have gone exceptionally badly. You can learn from such opportunities to improve the supply of your products or services.

Having used the PB charts to understand the reason for either wide variations or exceptional events, possibly combined with insights from other methods, you proceed around the SAPDo cycle. First deciding, in Act, what remedial or improvement action to take based on the evidence. It helps then to carefully Plan the test conditions and length to ensure that you are properly testing whether your change was an improvement. Then you are into the Do stage actually running, if possible, live. It then pays to return to the previous conditions to make sure that what you have observed in the test was not due to some other factor. And so you are back to Study comparing performance to see whether the change was an improvement. If not, it’s off around the cycle again with another change.

When your improvements work and they move you from (A) to (B) it usually brings the decision lines closer together and raises the average. This means that there is higher average performance, less variability and hence more predictability. You should not stop there. You and your whole organisation need to continue to look for opportunities to improve. Although future gains might be smaller, as suggested by (C), they are nevertheless critical to keeping your organisation's performance the best it can be.

The 2F diagram can represent a team, a department, a unit or a whole organisation. Remember, the SAPDo learning and improvement cycle can be used at a detailed activity or process level just as much as the whole business, which is implied by the 2F diagram itself. Continually renewing your understanding of and improving how your business or any other type of organisation is performing can be your trump card.

As we continue to explore the 2F diagram we will next look at outside influences on your business. We’ll draw on both my book Picture Your Business and on our new ebook Simply Manage. Picture Your Business is available from me priced £12.00+P&P. The latest version of the companion 2F Worksheet is now available free in MS Word or PDF on request from me either via a Linkedin message or by emailing me.