Blog posts on evidence based management

Posts selected fromManagement Blog - Engineering Blog - Investing Blog and other blogs

• Pilot on a Small Scale First - Good Advice We Often Ignore

  Piloting on a small scale is best. It is what I recommend and encourage. I just think seeing the failure to pilot as a cause of the widespread problem is too simplistic. Why did we fail to pilot needs to be the next question - don't stop at the failure to pilot as the root cause. From there you will nearly always discover, unless maybe you are Toyota or the Kaizen Institute or something :-) that your organization consistently fails to pilot before adopting on a wide scale. Then you need to dive into that issue...

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• The Tendency for Lean Experts to Distrust Technology

  Technology also is often seen as this wonderful simple quick fix by executives - letting them avoid the gemba and just put hope in a essentially magic bullet solution.

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• Interview on PDSA, Deming, Strategy and More

  A really big key between people that use PDSA successfully and those who don’t is that the ones that do it successfully turn the cycle quickly.

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• The Education System

  “I read them. Not to grade them. No, I read them to see how I am doing. Where am I failing?”

  W. Edwards Deming.

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• George Box Webcast on Statistical Design in Quality Improvement

  There is great value in creating iterative processes with fast feedback to those attempting to design and improve. Box and Deming (with rapid turns of the PDSA cycle) and others promoted this 20, 30 and 40 years ago and now we get the same ideas tweaked for startups. The lean startup stuff is as closely related to Box’s ideas of experimentation as an iterative process as it is to anything else.

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• Scientific Inquiry Leads to Using Fluoride for Healthy Teeth

  I love stories of how we learn for observing what is happening. We don’t always need to innovate by thinking up creative new ideas. If we are observant we can pick up anomalies and then examine the situation to find possible explanations and then experiment to see if those explanations prove true.

  When working this way we often are seeing correlation and then trying to figure out which part of the correlation is an actual cause. So in this dental example, a dentist noticed his patients had bad brown stains on their teeth than others populations did...

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• Beehive Fence Protects Farms from Elephants

  This is another cool use of appropriate technology. One of the problems with Elephants in Africa is when they go into farm fields and eat crops and destroy crops. The elephants and bees project is helping farmers deal with that problem.

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• The Importance of a Work Culture That Values and Supports Critical Thinking

  Critical thinking is tremendously important. I have come to think it might be the most important precursor to management improvement (evidence based management, continual improvement...).

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• How to Start Applying Deming’s Ideas on Management

  There are many different ways to start applying W. Edwards Deming’s ideas on management. There isn’t a cookbook on what should be done first. This is helpful in that you can avoid trying things that would be very difficult given the current state of your management system. However, it is also very challenging in that you have to decide what to do yourself instead of just following a recipe.

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• A Bad System Will Beat a Good Person Every Time

  So what was Dr. Deming trying to convey with this quote? It wasn’t an attempt to get people to give up trying because failure was certain. It was a attempt to get people to understand the importance of the system and the futility of trying to focus on blaming people for failures.

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• Quality Comes to City Hall

  Changing to a culture that has a Deming perspective on customer focus is not easy. When you succeed though the way people think is profoundly changed. The City of Madison police department even did customer surveys for those they arrested and used the results to improve the process in ways that make sense. Obviously there are restrictions on what you can do to please those being arrested but this is really always the case – you can’t give all your products and services away for free even if that would make customers happy.

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• A College Degree Isn't an Acceptable Hiring Screen

  Our company had just hired a new HR person that started "showing their worth" with new rules such as the dictate that all hires must have a college degree.  Thankfully our team agreed to hiring him was wise and the CIO decided that dictate was nonsense and we hired the applicant.

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• A Powerful Tool: The Capacity Matrix

  One of the things that I learned about at that seminar was using a capacity matrix to improve student learning. It is one of those ideas that when you hear about it, immediately you realize this is a vastly superior method to those current used. I am cynical/experienced enough to know that just because much better methods are available, and explained to people, is no guaranty they will be used.

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• A Programmers Take on Agile Software Development

  I am also a strong proponent of agile software development. Information Technology projects have a poor success rate. The best method, I have found, to provide better software solutions is agile development (and I find a grounding in management improvement techniques is useful – customer focus, process improvement, systems thinking, understanding variation, data driven management…)...

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• Who Inspires Your Management Thinking and Action?

  My largest influence by far is my father, William Hunter. Here is a good example of why: Managing Our Way to Economic Success, Two Untapped Resources: potential information and employee creativity. In another post I also wrote about my early influences related to quality management as I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin.

  From an early age I learned to experiment, appreciate and understand data, respect people and continually improve.

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