The No Tool Zone

Many a business that seeks improvement starts with business processes to improve and miss the huge opportunities to fix how they design and manage  work.  Near the top of the list is what I call the “Inverse Influence Factor” . . . where the influence of how systems (including processes) are put together by those that are further away from the work.

The Inverse Influence Factor (IIF) is defined by decisions that are made further from the work.  Defined – The farther from the work one is in the hierarchy or roles, the greater the influence on the work and the design of the work.  This would seem illogical to most and it is, but it is practiced in business and government on a daily basis.

Why would the supporting casts of finance, information technology and human resources wield more control over systems then those that operationally perform the service?  Add management with their “big picture” thinking and the affects of decision-making on the work can be devastating.

The existing business improvement fads of recent ignore the need for change in these areas pressing ahead for process improvement using kaizen events.  These fads completely miss or ignore the fact that IIF is at play.

The problem with ignoring IIF is the people that make decisions in traditional organizations have no knowledge of how things operate.  Improvement rarely comes without knowledge about how services are delivered.  Management and supporting roles lack perspective and they happily move forward with process improvement, because they don’t have to change.  Change is (after all) for the little people from their perspective.

The truth is that no improvement comes without systemic change.  And with the largest area of need for change being the design and management of work, there is much to address. When we fail to address these the results are anemic or non-existent.

Systems demand that they be run by the people with knowledge of the work.  Not from people that have theories and ideologies separated from the work.

Improvement begins with getting knowledge about work or leaving the decision-making in the hands of those that do and/or understand the work. This is a course correction for many service and government organizations that plan first and think later.

If the IIF is in play in your organization, waste and sub-optimization will prevail in your system.  Influence should come from knowledge, not hierarchy.

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Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

The performance review is back in the limelight.  Indiana teachers are rated 99% as “effective” according to the Indianapolis Star.  The Star bemoans the fact that this is not possible in business and that this needs to change when students don’t pass 25% of the statewide exams.

Dr. Tony Bennett calls it a “statistical impossibility.”  But if Dr. Bennett understood statistics he would understand that performance is driven by the education system and not individual teachers.  Teachers can claim 5% of the performance and the system (administrators, parents, technology work design, structure, etc.) can claim 95% of the performance.  So why are we spending our resources to improve the 5%?

Expect targets from the state department of education as they have for number of school days and graduation rates.  Teachers jockeying to “look good” rather than be good.  Teaching to the test rather than showing how to become better learners.

Maybe the better question is how many times in business we have to take tests about our knowledge in business.  Performance appraisals don’t help in business and won’t help in education.  It is a form of coercion, and brown-nosers . . . not innovation wins this game.

Great irony that later in the article Dr. Bennett’s goal is to make all teacher’s ratings “effective.”  I thought he said that was a statistical impossibility?

If Dr. Bennett wants to improve education he needs to improve the education system.  And with the theories he is promoting, improvement becomes a statistical impossibility.

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Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I see this quite often in both business and government . . . a change to the operational definition in a number.  The change in operational definition is often used to show improvement or to advance some political thinking.  This is more manipulation than improvement or real change.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics has change the operational definition of the US Unemployment statistic.  The change is including the unemployed for 5 years rather than two years.  This means after five years the unemployed don’t get counted.  This will increase the unemployment number as more will be included.

This does not mean the new five year measure is better or worse, but just different.  Comparison purposes will not be relevant following this change to the operational definition.  The government may believe that the new number is more representative than old . . . and may be right.  But we now have lost a consistent measure to know whether the economy is getting better or not.

Manipulation of business or government measures are used to achieve bonuses, describe things as better or worse than they are, and a number of other reasons.  One doesn’t have to look far to see how measures get exploited for causes.  Even the Dow Jones adds and deletes companies that changes the measure of the financial markets.

Consistency in measuring is important so there is knowledge on the true status of an organization.  Otherwise, we are only fooling ourselves about whether things are improving or not.

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Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I have been reading everything I can get my hands on about airport security.  I travel constantly and see policy-driven TSA agents try to make us safe by using the latest technology.  However, I and many other travelers seem less safe.

Rules, procedures and edicts rule at the airports.  Hierarchy and control are the order of the day.  Mix in some expensive technology and we all feel less secure.

Why?  We eliminate the first line of defense by shutting their brains off.

Not to copy, but certainly a different approach is the Israeli security system at airports.  Interviews with questions conducted by the best technology of our time . . . people.  Tough questions that can throw off  anyone that intends to harm people on flights.

This approach is far from the technology and procedure driven approach that the US takes.  The US approach can not absorb the variety that terrorists bring as no method is used twice.  Procedures are always a step behind and when the bad guys figure them out the result is bound to be catastrophic.

Give me the agent that asks tough questions and can absorb the variety that is brought to the check stations.  Less technology and more personal touch (without touching) will make passengers more comfortable too.

We can start 2011 by making our skies safer with more relevant agents working our airports with a system that is designed around them and not the technology.

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Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

All systems are different.  Like snowflakes, which I have seen a lot of lately, no two are the same.  They are different by structure, thinking, work design, measures, customer demands, and much more.  The cracking of your system’s code requires study.

The act of understanding performance will lead you to your own unique conclusions on what is best for your system.  Copying other systems for best practices leaves service organizations under-performing.  Too many improvement efforts are lost by trying to avoid “reinventing the wheel” when the wheel never fit the purpose in the first place.

Management has a head full of ideas that they believe will improve their system.  But not until they challenge and discern the current list of assumptions and the real result of current thinking can they move on.  The question of current  performance should be  . . . “do my current list of assumptions and theories about the design and management of work provide me knowledge in the form of evidence that it is or isn’t working?”

An inability to ponder how knowledge is gained is just shooting in the dark when new assumptions and theories are added.  As Dr. Deming would say off to the Milky Way we go!  It becomes a crap shot.

Too few service organizations have the correct measures to judge their performance.  They focus on financial metrics or functional metrics that drive both waste and sub-optimization.  But don’t begin with measures.

Measures need to be derived from purpose and without establishing the purpose of your system any direction you go will lead you nowhere.  Service systems need to understand why they exist . . . and the reason is related to customer demands.  Studying customer demands will allow you to define and refine the purpose of your system.

The relationship between all elements of your system and performance is inextricable.  What you will discover if you are honest with yourself is that the thinking that has driven your current performance needs an overhaul and to test new ideas related to customer measures and purpose.

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Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

My original post on the 95/5 Rule has been a popular and aggravating one.  Most managers believe that performance comes down to the individual.  This fundamental thought leads to more poorly designed systems than almost anything else.  We see it in business, government and education.

A system is comprised of all elements.  They include the structure, equipment, work design, measures, thinking. IT, customer demand, etc.

Let’s take a look at a service worker and what the system controls and what an individual controls in their work.  If we look at an HVAC technician (tech) that fixes furnaces, we can see what the tech controls and what the system controls.

Volume of customer demand –  This comes down to the system, the tech can not control the volume of work.

Type of customer demand – This again can not be controlled by the individual this is delivered by the customer out side of the control of the individual.

No one at the house – Not within the control of the individual

Traffic jams – Dictated by the system and not by the individual.

Poor weather conditions – System

Wrong parts – Typically the system will provide parts for a service van.

Waiting for parts – The cribs where inventory is located is run by someone outside the technician.

The same thinking can be applied to any service worker.  They rarely can dictate their own performance.  The system – good or bad – drives performance.  This is within management’s control, not the individual.

Workers in contact centers have to overcome poorly designed work, entrapping IT, great variety of phone calls, IVR systems, rules, procedures, scripts, etc.  All things they have little say in the development and the worker is at their mercy.

Yet, we build HR systems to “objectively” evaluate the performance of the individual with appraisals.  Management with forced compliance through “compliance or process police” that monitor the worker.  Both are sources of great waste in the bureaucracies they build.

It must be maddening to the worker that has to endure management that focuses on them rather than the system that dictates their performance.  The worker becomes compliant and submissive to management and supporting roles like IT, HR and finance when they are the only ones providing any value work.

How did management allow such behemoth systems full of waste to be built?  It has taken time and well-intended, but misguided thinking.  It won’t take to long to reverse the course, if you are willing to change your thinking.

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Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

I say this with great sarcasm before I get all the emails and comments, but left to clueless executives (thank you, Alfie Kohn) wreaking havoc on education it is bound to be mentioned.

So, if the US is #15 in Reading, 23rd in Science and 31st in Math in global PISA rankings and being being beaten by Canada and Shanghai than let’s just hire those teachers.  This worked for manufacturing, you know,  cheaper labor and a core competency the US lacks.  We can run education into the ground just like everything else we have touched since the Japanese industrial miracle.

Let’s be honest we (because we are all in this together) just don’t get it.

The State of Indiana is promoting teacher evaluations and merit pay to improve education.  This thinking surely will increase costs and make us less competitive as it has in every other industry.  The same state that brought us how to screw up welfare eligibility in a billion dollar blunder was bound to lead the way in poor “business thinking” for education . . . surprised they didn’t suggest outsourcing.

Dennis Van Roekel, who is president of the National Education Association offers some reason, but lacks method.  Teacher autonomy in the classroom to experiment with method offers some hope.  Too many cooks in the kitchen trying to “fix” education and most of these lack knowledge of classroom experience.  They need a normative experience to get perspective by spending time in a teacher’s shoes.

Management have long promoted the thinking that unions are the enemy, but  unions didn’t give us the banking crisis.    Misguided incentives gave us that.  Who paid?  The worker in jobs.  Canada and Finland are successful (as Van Roekel points out) with strong unions.  I like the idea that the teachers unions should step up and lead rather than fight.

Declining international scores are a function of the education system and not some witch-hunt to find bad teachers.  This is a cynical approach . . . and naive.  Performance is driven 95% by the system and 5% the individual, put a good teacher in a bad system and the system will eventually win.  Further, thinking drives how we design systems.

The education system decline corresponds with our move to centralization of education at a national and state level with damaging programs like No Child Left Behind.  We have become a nation of standardized testing and we keep getting feedback from the tests that education is in decline, which leads to more testing.

Let’s start shutting down these government education agencies and start investing in the value work . . . teaching.  Or we can outsource to some country that knows what they are doing.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Tripp Babbitt is a speaker, blogger and consultant to service industry (private and public).  His organization helps executives find a better way to make the work work.  Read his articles at Quality Digest and his column for CustomermanagementIQ.com  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about our intervention services at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

In working with a new group of managers, there is one predictable reaction when they perform check on their organization . . . they want to react and fix the problem.

Both of these actions are always the wrong thing to do.  Reacting to problems management sees when understanding their organization as a system is the worse thing you can do.  Workers are sharing information about demands they receive and what they do and some trigger-happy manager wants to fix it.  After all, that is their job to make decisions and tell people what to do . . . even if they don’t understand that the system dictates performance.

Most when told ahead of time will heed the warning when they are performing check not to interfere, but they all want to and it is evident in body-language and the line of questioning they pursue.  The need to take action is overwhelming.

The management paradox is they don’t enough knowledge to make any decisions about anything especially a solution.  If they did they would probably understand that tampering with systems without data can make things worse . . . much worse.  This is certainly A reason why the design of work is so poorly conceived.

So, here is a suggestion.  If you really want to improve your system perform “check” . . . but in so doing ask questions that will give you knowledge.

• What is the purpose of the system from the customer perspective?
• What are the demands that customers place on the system? (type and frequency)
• Are these demands value or failure?
• What is the customers nominal value?
• What is the capability of the system?
• Why does the system behave in this way?

The last question is usually a function of poor management thinking that leads to sub-optimization or waste.  So why are managers – the source of the problem – trying to jump to solution?  A question every manager should ponder.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columnist (Quality Digest, PSNews and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.

Best example of lunacy in a hospital or any service organization is the constant and predictable spend to renew their image.  I woke up this morning reading an article about Clarian Health (a hospital) change its name to Indiana University Health.  I have seen such ” interesting” marketing ploys before and all manifest themselves in poor thinking.

The first time was land ago with EDS when they changed geometric shapes and later the position of the letters.  This during a time when layoffs were occurring and pay reduced.  Untold millions to change coffee mugs, T-Shirts, Banners and building signs in the name of a better image.

Try this one on for size . . . how about actually IMPROVING the service you provide instead of mesmerizing the naive with pretty colors and flashy lights.  That would be amazing.

There is a history that this works better.  Remember Tylenol and the public relations nightmare that followed some tampering that led to deaths?  They fixed the problem instead of changing the name like ValuJet did.

For service organizations, there is a mind-boggling amount of improvement that can be made by redesigning the work to actually provide customers with service.  Just more companies chose the marketing route (what ever that means) instead of what can provide them free advertising . . . unparalleled and unrivaled service that customers want, but instead get rebranding.

So, next time save me the fresh starts and doesn’t baffle me with BS and instead dazzles me with brilliance . . . better service.  Money wisely and well spent.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columnist (Quality Digest, PSNews and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.

I am currently engaged in a massive intervention with a large company and the great thing is that we are developing a critical mass of people that can transform a service organization of significant size.  This organization may be the next Toyota for service.

How far can they go?

I don’t know, but they see the opportunity for improvement and it is massive.  I have great faith that the many consultants we have using the Vanguard Method will have an impact unrivaled.  Right now, we have unprecedented support from senior management and many at this level are fully engaged.  I am as excited for management and workers as I am those I am working closely with.

The analogy of climbing a mountain comes to mind.  An appropriate analogy as one of my colleagues will be climbing Kiliminjaro on the break.  Will the altitude turn her back or the pain, fatigue or something else.  I don’t know the outcome of the climb, but she has prepared to make the climb to the summit with preparation.

The fact that the organization has many challenges ahead with moving thousands of workers and managers to new thinking, but I am hopeful from what I have seen.  Nine operational areas have begun interventions and an important support area too.  That, of course, would be IT.

I have long dogged information technology as somewhat of  a worthless cause.  The complete disregard for the core business areas by traditional IT is bothersome.  More business analysts and project managers than those that can actually add value to the work.

IT will need to understand that their job is to support the core flow, not BE the core flow.  No room for prima donnas when it comes to improvement . . . everyone must understand their role.

This service organization has all the trimmings of a command and control organization with shared services and outsourcing to domestic and foreign partners.  You would be amazed at how long it takes to correct or secure services from these agreements.  Surely, this is not saving money.

I don’t know how far it is to the summit, but so far I feel good about this engagement.  That doesn’t mean that everything has gone smoothly, but we have a great chance to work with these folks to breath rarefied  air.

Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion!  Click on comments below.

Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here.  Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at [email protected].  Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.

Tripp Babbitt is a columnist (Quality Digest, PSNews and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.