John Seddon’s roots in interventionist psychology is helpful and good, but is a bit outdated.

During his time, interventionist psychology believed that one must change thinking, then behavior changes – which is what you also cite above. I believe that to some extent.

But today, interventionist psychology flips that around to the following: change behavior first, then the feelings and the thinking will follow.

In the case of prison inmates and drug addicts, they must change their behavior first, then the thinking and the feelings will follow. Trying to change a drug addict’s thinking while they are addicted is a losing battle because the object of change is itself tainted – the mind.

In the case of couples therapy, one must behave loving and caring for their spouse, then the feelings and thoughts of love will follow.

Interventionist Psychology has changed and my examples above are the current practice – and, it makes complete sense and rings true against my experience.

A lot of what you say makes sense and your criticism of the lean subculture is great, and I find myself agreeing with some of it.

But, the Vanguard Method and its main underlying assumptions is in question.

Lean is aligned to the current tenets of interventionist psychology: change behavior first, then the feelings and the thinking will follow.

Thoughts?

What, on God’s green earth, is a ‘failure demand’? You pepper this term around constantly but it makes absolutely no logical sense.

Is someone demanding failure?

@Tripp Babbitt

Makes no sense whatsoever.

“A demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer.”

Based upon this statement, there is no demand on the customers’ behalf until the provider has failed to provide something not demanded, or failed to do ‘right’ something which was not demanded.

Now, there exists is a demand that something be done, or done in a right manner.

This really stretches the King’s English, Tripp. Really.

If what you really mean is that the provider did not meet the customer’s expectation and the customer is demanding rectification, then you have described a process and a procedure.

@Tripp Babbitt

Tripp, could you share a graphic representation of that ‘decent’ model with the rest of us?

Thanks in advance.

@Sunfluent

Perhaps this is why you didn’t understand what Tripp was saying Synfluent, the kind died some years ago, and we have moved onto a Queen now. Perhaps you are out of date?

Nothing tricky about FAILURE demand.

I can tell that you work in mining as you appear to have little understanding of service organizations.

FAILURE DEMAND is a key and important method to understand how well your service is delivering to the customer.

Perhaps you should take it slowly and break it down into the constituent bits.

Failure = i.e. didn’t work
do something = carry out an action that they wanted
do something right = carried out an action but it wasn’t the right action
for a customer = the person demanding service

@Howard Clark

You just described a process and the syntax remains defective.

I don’t ‘work’ in mining. I own the mines and we are very much a service industry. We aren’t manufacturers of coal; we are providers.

@Tripp Babbitt

A process is a set of actions carried out with an anticipated goal or result produced. A procedure is those said actions expressed in an ordinal manner.

@Howard Clark

Okay, great.

When I see a process, what does a systems thinker see?

When I see a process, I envision a box with an input arrow on the left side; an output arrow on the right side and moderators and mitigators entering the box on the top side and exiting the box on the bottom side. Flow moves from left to right and is time based.

All inputs and outputs are dimensioned.

That’s about it.

Perhaps I can explain failure demand for Synfluent with an example with which we can all relate: potholes. I once managed an organization that was responsible for maintaining the streets in a large Midwestern city. When I arrived, I found that there was really very little maintenance going on. The organization was driven by a customer call center that took “requests for service” from the public. Their main performance metric or standard was how many requests could they solve in a given time and they weren’t very good at that. They were so inefficient at organizing their work that more failure demand calls came in following up on when the work would actually be completed. In addition, with hundreds or thousands of motorists using the same roads, there would be multiple calls for the same problem. Most all of these “requests for service” were in fact “failure demand” using Tripp’s definition. Had the organization focused their effort in maintenance activities like cracksealing roadways, improving drainage of roadways and resurfacing roadways in a timely manner, there would be no “requests for service” related to potholes.
We solved the problem from a few different angles. First, we improved the speed of the repair service with improved routing. Second, we changed operational procedures so that when one pothole in a block was identified by a request for service, the crew had the authority to repair all of the potholes within the given block. They weren’t allowed to do this before because the managers wanted to get credit for each and every request that would be generated by the multiple potholes. Second, we established an aggressive cracksealing program to prevent the potholes from occurring in the first place.
Now here is how we tie all of this back to Tripp’s article; we used Lean principles to solve this problem, it was a discrete project. However, we didn’t change the thinking in the entire organization. Once I left this organization, the cracksealing standard was tossed out the window (this is hard work that can only be done under perfect weather conditions) and I suspect that the organization is back to the firefighter mentality of waiting for a “request for service” before dispatching crews to repair potholes.