Blog posts on organization as a system

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

• Don’t Empower

  Using the term, "empower", implies that it one person empowers another person. This is not the correct view. Instead we each play a role within a system. Yes there are constraints on your actions based on the role you are playing. Does a security guard empower the CEO to enter the building?

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• Toyota, Lean and Management Consultants

  ...Serious attempts will also be frustrating at times and can also fail but most organizations won’t even commit to attempting serious change. Most will just look for some items from current fads to dress up how they have always managed.

  That management consultants will also jump from fad to fad, without conviction, is not news. Deming called them “hacks” in the 1980’s. Bob Sutton’s excellent article calls 90% of management advice crap...

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• Be Careful What You Measure

  Behavior can be changed by what is measured. The problem with arbitrary numerical targets (to take one measurement related example) is not that attempts to achieve those targets won’t have an affect. They very well may have an affect. However they may not lead to the desired result. When focused on improving a number (which can happen when focused on measures – especially as the focus on those measures is tied to bonuses, favorable treatment…) the focus is not necessarily on on improving the system. Often distorting the system is the result.

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• Keeping Track of Improvement Opportunities

  Often deciding you will not do something (and not waste time and energy on things you won’t ever do) is the biggest step toward focusing on the most important items. Focusing on important, whether urgent or not, tasks often requires avoid seemingly urgent – but in comparison unimportant tasks.

  However, I like the idea of keeping a list of items that are pretty low on the priority list for several reasons. Sometimes they can be incorporated in another project without much effort (they are not worth doing on their own but while doing something else it can make sense. With a visible list (wiki technology is good for this) everyone can know what has been thought of and given low priority – they might be sparked by an idea either to give reasons why that should be a higher priority or as in brainstorming to propose another idea… You can look at the list when thinking about a redesign and incorporate whatever might make sense....

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• Louisville Slugger Uses Deming Management Practices

  “You would have thought that in 123 years of making baseball bats we would have figured it all out,” says plant general manager Frank Stewart. “But as you well know, in the business of improvement, you are never there. It’s always, what can I do better? What can I improve today?”

  Continual improvement is a critical practice to adopt as a standard practices (more of Deming’s 14 obligations of management). They moved production from a plant in New York to their headquarters in Louisville...

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• Bad Management Results in Layoffs

  Layoffs are a failure of management.  If the company has not been executing a long term strategy to respect people and manage the system to continually improve, manage for the long term, working with suppliers... it might be they have created an impossibly failed organization that cannot succeed in its current form.  And so yes it might be possible that layoffs are required.

  ...

  At exactly what point some layoffs are necessary and how much other stakeholders are squeezed to avoid layoffs is not simple to answer (just as employees are squeezed to avoid suffering by other stakeholders).  I think to have any pretense of good management systems while resorting to layoffs management must say what specific failures lead to the situation and what has been done to fix the system so such failures will not re-occur.  Those explanations should seem to be among the best applications of 5 why, root cause analysis, systems thinking, planning... that you have seen.  Layoffs should be seen as about the most compelling evidence of failed management.  Therefore explanations attempting to justify the layoffs have as high a barrier to overcome as any proposed improvement to the organization/system.

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• Continuous, Constructive Feedback

  The correct strategy, communicate and coach continually. Have defined process that are clear to everyone. Have clear expectations for what people are suppose to do and have methods to make problems visible so they can be addressed...

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• Good Project Management Practices

  This post is in the style of my Good Process Improvement Practices and Practical Ways to Respect People posts.

  Good project management practices include

  • Deliver a working solution quickly; add value as you have time. Don’t aim to deliver a final product by the deadline and risk missing the deadline. Deliver a good solution early, adjust based on feedback and add more as you have time.
  • Prioritize – do fewer things, and do them well.
  • Limit work in process (WIP) – finish tasks, avoid the problems created by splitting attention across numerous tasks.
  • ...

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• Interactions Among the Four Fields in Deming's System of Profound Knowledge

  ... 2 quick examples
  
  Distorting the System to meet a target
  
  This certainly is about the interaction of understanding variation (in this case people not understanding data well enough and being mislead), psychology (how people respond to pressure to meet goals), theory of knowledge (not understanding the difference between the proxy value of data and the underlying truth) and systems thinking (how a system is likely to react to meet goals - distorting data and distorting the system, and using simple measures where those things work to get numbers).
  
  Create a System That Lets People Take Pride in Their Work ...

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• Effective Change Management Strategies and Tactics

  Create systems focused on continual improvement with built in checks for frequent assessment, reflection and adjustment to the changes the organization attempts to make.  This effort should be iterative. 

  Building the capacity of the organization to successfully adopt improvements will directly aid change efforts and also will build confidence that efforts to change are worthwhile and not, as with so many organizations, just busy work.

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• Advice for Managers Who are Just Starting Out

  Read the Leader’s Handbook by Peter Scholtes and use it as a reference to guide your actions on a weekly basis.

  Learn to experiment and iterate quickly. Your main aim should be to manage the management system (which may mean the management practices used within your scope of authority or influence). As you start it will involve a significant amount of managing projects, to demonstrate your ability to deliver results, but that should be used to transition to building a strong management system.

  In conjunction with quick iteration and adoption of improvements your focus should be on coaching people to help them be more effective (among other things on helping them learn how to effectively practice evidenced based decision making and continual improvement).

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• The Best Form of Fire Fighting is None at All

  The best form of problem solving is to avoid problems altogether.

  At the point you have a “fire” in your organizaiton you have to fight it. But it is better to create systems that avoid fires taking hold in the first place.*

  This is a simple idea. Still many organizations would perform better if they took this simple idea to heart. Many organizations suffer from problems, not that they should solve better, but problems they should have avoided altogether.

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• Peter Scholtes on Teams and Viewing the Organization as a System

  Peter includes a description of the creation of the “organization chart” (which Peter calls “train wreck management”) that we are all familiar with today; it was created in the Whistler report on a Western Railroad accident in 1841.

  Almost a direct quote from the Whistler report: “so when something goes wrong we know who was derelict in his duty.” The premise behind the traditional organizational chart is that systems are ok (if we indeed recognize that there are such things as systems) things are ok if everyone would do his or her job. The cause of problems is dereliction of duty.

  ...

  This is an absolutely great presentation: I highly recommend it (as I highly recommend Peter’s book: The Leader’s Handbook).

  Without understanding a systems view of an organization you can’t understand whats at the heart of the quality movement and therefore everything else you do, management interventions, ways of relating to people, will reflect more likely the old philosophy rather than the new one.

  
  Points like this are very true but difficult to understand until you come to view organizations as systems.

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• Understanding and Misunderstanding Variation

  ... one of the central aspects of Deming’s ideas on management: that we need to view the organization as a system. It is not as simple as adopting a couple practices and getting the same results another organization gets from those same practices. The interactions between the existing organization and the new practices will be different. This makes management challenging but it also makes our jobs of improving management continually interesting and full of opportunities to learn.

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• Applying W. Edwards Deming’s Ideas in Software Development

  In her presentation at the Deming Research conference, Poorani Jeyaseker explains how the management system drives behavior that is not useful to the organization. The business team asks for estimates for software development. Those estimates are treated as promises. The management system creates a punishment mechanism for missing estimates by over 10%. Of course this creates fear and pressure to make sure work can be completed within the 110% * estimate. So logically the estimates are padded (both to account for the natural variation in how close estimates are to final results and for the existing culture that means changes will be made to requirements without the estimate being adjusted)...

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