Blog posts on learning organization

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• The Art of Discovery with George Box

  Great video of George Box on the process improvement process.

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• 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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• 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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• Teaching Students How to Use Better Management Practices

  I wrote a blog post about critical thinking perhaps being the most important catalyst to successful adoption of continually improvement management practices.

  A system that promotes critical thinking and puts continual improvement first is one that is well on the way to better management practices...

  Teaching the quality tools in combination with critical thinking is a powerful approach. Students that learn to use quality tools to experiment to achieve quality results from system will be well suited to the modern workplace.

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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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• Toyota Special Report: Thinking Production System

  This short article is peppered with many great quotes as section headers:

  • In TPS, the T also stands for Thinking
  • To cut lead-time, cut out all the bits that don't add value.
  • The line must stop if there is a problem.
  • Ask yourself Why? five times.
  • Develop people who can come up with unique ideas.

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• Systemic Workplace Experiments

  ... good old PDSA at work – try things on a small scale and then institute those experiments that succeed on a wider scale.

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• People Copy Examples and Wonder Why They Don’t Succeed

  Learning from what others do well can be effective if done properly. To improve your practices you can see what works for others and then abstract the principles for that success and then determine how to adopt those principles to your situation.

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• W. Edwards Deming and the Leander Way

  Often people will say Deming isn’t just the tools. That is certainly true. But using tools and data to make improvement efforts concrete is important. 

  As Deming said, best efforts are not enough, you have to know what to do. But he also said, “Best efforts are essential.” Tools are not enough: and like best efforts, using them without understanding the management system can do damage. But tools are also essential and Leander’s experience shows a long term effort to integrate quality improvement tools into the management system to achieve long term continual improvement.

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• Cliff Norman and Ron Moen Discuss the History of the PDSA Cycle

  Ron emphasized the importance of the iterative nature of learning supported by the PDSA cycle. The importance of iterating the PDSA cycle multiple times is something that I find most organizations would benefit a great deal from. Another API consultant spoke on this importance at the 2006 Deming conference.

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• Interview of Bill Hunter: Improving Quality and Productivity in Organizations

  Bill discusses the parallels to how a manager applying management improvement principles is very similar to an educator facilitating adult learning. Rather than an authoritarian approach where the boss tells subordinates what to do a manager helps employees achieve better results by supporting their efforts.

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• Google: Experiment Quickly and Often

  this is basically piloting changes on a small scale, analyzing the results and repeating that quickly. Quick, frequent experimentation with iteration is a tactic all organizations would benefit from.

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• Jobs to be Done

  If you see your job from the customer’s perspective you may change the scope of your offerings. You can add services that help the potential customer chose you. In the book, they explore the example mentioned in the article in more detail. They also discuss how an online university changed their processes to address the issues their potential customers faced in the “hiring” process. They changed, not the “product” (education), but the processes supporting potential students making the decision to hire Southern New Hampshire University.

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• Robots for Health Care from Toyota

  Most often innovation efforts take the form of understanding the jobs your customers are using your products and service for now and developing new solutions to delight those customers. This is difficult for companies to pull of successfully.

  Occasionally innovation involves meeting completely new needs of customers. For example Toyota started as a loom company and is now known as a car company. Making such a radical change is not often successful.

  Will Toyota be able to add robots to the products it produces successfully? I believe they have a chance. But it won’t be easy.

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• Technological Innovation and Management

  Organizations need to be designed to be robust and to cope well with the increasingly rapid pace of transformative innovation. This again reinforces the importance of management improvement practices that I have been writing about here (on the Curious Cat Management Improvement blog) for more than 10 years. Organizations that do not delight customers, know the jobs to be done that their customers have, focus on the future (long term thinking), understand how to use data, have well designed processes that allow those at the gemba to know what to do and know how to rapidly adjust based on new realities and possibilities are at great risk.

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