Jun 28, 2010 | Management, Personal Rant, Strategy
Now there is an explanation for the common situation where a person fails to see what to others appears to be blindingly obvious.
The Dunning-Kruger effect provides the psychological evidence supporting what most of us see often, and that is that our (and others) incompetence in an area masks our ability to recognise that incompetence. The “we don’t know what we don’t know” effect at work.
When you think about it, the absence of the skills we need to recognise a right answer when we see it, are the same as the skills required to produce a right answer in the first place. This makes sense when you read it twice.
Our exertions as we consider complex issues, from the future of the financial depredations of the GFC on the economy, to climate change, what to do about our involvement in Afghanistan, to the personal questions we all face, are all about making decisions today on the basis of our understanding of the best information we have available, but often misunderstood, misinterpreted, and often misused or ignored.
We therefore most often make those decisions in relative ignorance, seeking easy, saleable “solutions” to problems where we are ignorant, but unaware of it, or unable to concede it.
How scary is that?
Jun 24, 2010 | Management
Working with a relatively new client recently, I was very impressed with the data that was available, but bemused by the almost total absence of productive use that was made of it.
It became obvious pretty quickly that most of it was produced by rote, and there was no real thought given to the costs of producing the data, how it would be used, and the value that it would add, it was just done, because it had always been done, the original reasons for collating the data lost.
The exception was a suite of reports provided to the MD and executive team that went into minute detail, and took several people 2 weeks to produce each month, and created great angst because it provided a platform for allocation of blame, and caused great focus on the month gone, with little or no regard to what may happen in the future.
To assist making a change, we went through a process of rating the data on 4 simple parameters:
- Are we collecting data that will be used to answer questions that are worth asking?
- Does the data assist us to look forward, or is it just about yesterday?
- Do the individual pieces of data contribute to developing the larger picture of what is happening internally, and externally that we should know about, and what gaps are there?
- Is the data just quantitative, or is there a qualitative component that is adding to the story?
This simple list created some vigorous discussion, both about the relevance of the list itself, and the scores given to the data collected, but the outcome is a much smaller, user friendly suite, tailored to the needs of different functional management, that takes much less effort to assemble, enables intelligent review of performance, and is the basis of planning and decision making.
Jun 21, 2010 | Management, Sales, Social Media
In this digital age, the first contact in most situations is digital, where the marginal cost is approaching zero.
This simple fact has changed the sales cycle, as this contact can evolve into an offer to become closer, or it can become a barrier, but each party understands implicitly that the rules have changed.
The question now is not one of how quickly can a sale be closed, or indeed, the process brought to an end, there is more dancing involved, largely because the dancing is cheap, non threatening, and easy. For a sales organisation, there are a few simple questions:
- What sort of digital tools do we need to engage key prospect groups?
- How much time and effort should be spent on developing a sale before we reach the go/no go point?
- How much do we need to give away?
“Give away” now more often than ever strays into the arena of proprietary IP, as efforts to differentiate and add value in a commoditised world accelerates
Jun 17, 2010 | Management, OE, Operations
It is pretty easy copying the machines, layouts, and the physical things that go towards producing something, and there are consultants by the thousand who will help if you need it.
What you cannot duplicate easily are the management systems that are deployed. You might get some, or even most of them, but copying their deployment in your circumstances, they will not work the same way. All the connections will not be the same, this is why you can read all you like about Toyota, or 3M, or Google, go and see the way they do things, and copy all you can, but it will not work the same way when you get it home.
Time and time again, I am asked to assist deploying the tools of Lean, 6 Sigma, TPS processes, and other tools, and to an extent it will deliver positive outcomes, but never as much as there is potential so long as it is an outsider driving the delivery.
This stuff has to be internalized and modified to suit the culture and processes in a business, and by the modification, carve your own path. Therefore, I find that most times, when there is a genuine wish to change, and thereby improve, rather than just a financial imperative to reduce costs, which is often the starting point, I find myself digging around in the bowels of organizations, looking at accounting systems, performance measurement, customer facing processes, and innovation processes, in an effort to modify behavior to accommodate the philosophies of improvement, and deploy the appropriate tools in a manner tailored to the needs of the organisation.
Jun 16, 2010 | Management, OE, Operations
The variety of approaches to problem solving appear to form a continuum, that looks a bit like:
- The “workaround” where you find a way around the problem, hoping by magic it will go away.
- Further along the continuum we have some sort of score chart which logs the progress of the symptoms of the problem without actively looking for the cause.
- The next stage is an effort to solve the problem and put in some sort of remedial action,
- Then we have a continuous improvement project that seeks to identify problems and improvements on a continuous basis.
- Finally we have a Kaizen culture, where the standard is revised and improved on a continuous basis by those with the hands on responsibility for the process, with the active support of all around them in the organisation.
I often see the first step, usually the second, sometimes the third, very occasionally the fourth, but I have never seen a culture that actively feeds (rather than just supports) continuous improvement as a underlying value in the business.
Where do you fit?
Jun 15, 2010 | Management, Operations
The oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico is one of disastrous proportions immediately, and into the long term as the environmental impacts become clearer.
However, there are other consequences not talked about yet, that of the impact it will have on the willingness of enterprises to undertake risk, the costs of insurance, and the impact of renewed regulatory zeal on the operations of enterprises in the pursuit of zero tolerance of risk.
The impact of any renewed regulatory zeal goes further. Last week, in a conversation with a local council officer about the absurd imposts before a simple enhancement of a public space in the local municipality could proceed was , “If there had been better regulations in the Gulf, the oil spill would not have happened, I am just trying to ensure nothing like that happens here”.
Hello…..wake up, the simile is nonsense, but perhaps it just provides another excuse to avoid the responsibility to do anything, together with the horrible possibility, from a public bodies perspective, that something they do, or condone, does not work out as planned, and somebody must be held to account, and it better not be them!.
Managing the balance between risk, reward, and the consequences of a failure just became much harder.
