Quality and Innovation

My almost-4-year-old and I watched “The Jetsons” together today. In this episode, Elroy started out by solving an incomprensible math problem on the blackboard. Grade school, in the Jetsons future, was apparently much more advanced than today’s! After Elroy solved the problem, he returned to his seat where the boy next to him (the class clown) was shown distracting the other kids, making rude comments, and watching a rerun of “The Flintstones” on his hand-held mobile device.

It was almost 10 minutes later when I realized – “Hold on! They didn’t have iPods or iPhones back in the 60′s when this show was made!”

It didn’t dawn on me until much later that the blackboard Elroy used was hopelessly antiquated. If the animators could envision our ubiquitous mobile devices, even without the wealth of information they can access through the Internet, why not networked communications? Why not the very simple whiteboard?

Liebenau (2007), in a study by the London School of Economics intended to identify better ways to prioritize emerging technologies in the UK between 2007 and 2017, captured the problem of technology assessment in The Jetsons as part of his work. For example, he notes that both the Flintstones and the Jetsons portrayed suburban life from the social, cultural and moral perspective of the typical 1960′s American family – only the technologies were different. The most critical variables were unchanged:

They left alone most of the really interesting things: social and interpersonal life; spatial and temporal relations (even though the Jetsons used rockets they still travelled around the strict equivalent of their own neighbourhood); and work. They only tinkered with shelter, sustenance and security (everybody was always safe, although they occasionally crashed their stone-wheel cars and personal rockets). Where their imagination ranged more widely was with communication (where the Flintstones used a squawking bird for a factory whistle and the Jetsons used wrist-watch telephones – an image already common in futuristic comics of the 1920s like Dick Tracey). They probably meant to portray significant differences with regard to food, although that was less well thought out since the Flintstones merely ate huge joints of meat and the Jetsons ate processed gloop excreted from kitchen machines. They also had some imaginative notions of play, but both families had leisure time (and tastes) typical of aspirations of the American lower middle-class suburbanites they were… Whereas they captured the idea of the transformation of food, they did not imagine the associated social and commercial context brought about by fast food take-aways and eating at shopping malls.

Nor did they capture changes in the form and function of work – George labors at Spacely Sprockets, a manufacturing firm, during “normal business hours” each day and kicked off his shoes when he got home, greeted by a dinner made by Rosie, the robot helper. Fred heads to Slate Enterprises to operate the “heavy equipment” (dinosaurs) until the bird-whistle blows at the end of the day and he can go home. Their relationships with Mr. Spacely and Mr. Slate are identical, and mirror the hierarchical structures of the predictable, scientifically managed organization. Although George Jetson is often seen using a videoconferencing facility like Skype, he is never seen using this to attend a meeting at work or to otherwise get something done asynchronously.

The reason I find this scenario interesting is that it highlights the challenges we face today when we are assess the implementation of a particular technology in a specific context, or when we attempt to gauge the impact of emerging technologies on people, on the market, on relationships, or on society as a whole. We change our technologies, and then those technologies change and shape us, continuously impacted by the social, economic and cultural context.

In his weekly radio address, President Obama announced today a renewed intent to cut wasteful spending, and the upcoming announcement of even more decisive cuts. He also noted the appointment of Jeffrey Zients, a former executive and Director of Sirius XM, as the Obama Administration’s Chief Performance Officer. His official title will be deputy director for management of the Office of Management and Budget. Zients replaces Nancy Killefer, who rescinded her nomination in March.

There have been criticisms of Obama’s handling of the budget so far. For example, critics bristle at the thought that Obama approved the fiscal year 2009 budget with earmarks (this is covered in an article by George Stephanopoulos on March 1, “Obama Will Sign Omnibus Despite Earmark Pledge”). But the fiscal year 2009 budget – executed in March 2009 – is retroactive. It is intended to cover operations of the government and all government-funded agencies (including research facilities, and university-driven research and development) from October 1, 2008 through September 30, 2009. Failure to pass that budget would have meant a swift and immediate crisis, catalyzing a domino effect of layoffs in the highly specialized industries. This could have a nontrivial and long-reaching impact on national competitiveness by depressing not only technological innovation, but also by cutting off practical opportunities for university students and researchers to contribute to innovation as they receive mentorship and training.

More about Zients from the White House Blog:

Zients has twenty years of business experience as a CEO, management consultant and entrepreneur with a deep understanding of business strategy, process reengineering and financial management. He served as CEO and Chairman of the Advisory Board Company and Chairman of the Corporate Executive Board. These firms are leading providers of performance benchmarks and best practices across a wide range of industries.  Currently, he is the Founder and Managing Partner of Portfolio Logic, an investment firm focused primarily on business and healthcare service companies.

On April 9, 2009, Computerworld published a highly “Digg-ed” post entitled “Why Goofing Off Boosts Productivity”. This article highlighted some recent research results from the University of Melbourne that demonstrated the utility of occasional Twittering and Facebook-ing from work, and suggested some additional anecdotal reasons why “Internet slacking” might be productive.

Productivity has been described in many ways, for example as the ratio of output to input , task completion through David Allen’s Getting Things Done, or focus on business results using the concept of the Results-Only Work Environment.

But it is easy to forget that quality and sustainability also play a role in productivity as well. Jorgenson & Griliches (1967), for example, explicitly define productivity as the ratio of total input quality and quantity to total output quality and quantity. Hawken, Lovins & Lovins (1999) consider total-resource productivity in Natural Capitalism, a measure that emphasizes the efficiency with which a production process uses its energy, natural resources and other inputs. That is, you can’t be productive if you are creating a lot of waste – and you are optimally productive if the outputs of your process are useful inputs to someone else’s process!

Problem-solving capacity, in my opinion, represents one of the key elements in total resource productivity – and one that we routinely overlook. As a result of the process of working, can you simultaneously accomplish results and emerge feeling refreshed and renewed? The human psyche and capability to achieve is the ultimate renewable resource, and “burnout” is the indicator that you may be sacrificing total-resource productivity for higher levels of “more traditional” productivity.

The same theme was touched on in an April 8, 2009 post by Dan Markovitz called Why Isn’t Thinking Time Part of Your Standard Work? Although it is acknowledged that thought without action may not be productive, he notes that action without thought can be wasteful as well:

Action without thought leads inevitably to one of the seven forms of muda. It’s very hard to actually stop doing and start thinking, but that’s the real way to eliminate waste and create value. There’s a recent story about a computer room at Toyota’s Torrance headquarters that was getting too warm. Most people would get that email and immediately turn up the air conditioner. You know, respond immediately to the email. But these guys did a root cause analysis and found that the real problem was a blocked air duct. The symptoms didn’t go away immediately, but the real problem was actually solved. It just required some time to think.

The lessons here are interconnected: a) quality and “people-sustainability” are factors in total resource productivity, and b) time to think and reflect contributes to quality in the problem-solving process. Not building “reflective time” into a project schedule or a GTD/ROWE process can negatively impact results when the whole system is considered.

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Hawken, P., Lovins, A. & Lovins, L. H. (1999). Natural Capitalism. Little, Brown, & Co.: New York.
Jorgenson, D.W. & Griliches, Z. (1967). “The Explanation of Productivity Change”. Review of Economic Studies 34(99): 249–283.

Public awareness of the danger of bird strikes to aircraft has greatly increased since the January 15 incident in which Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger expertly guided the crippled US Airways Airbus to safety in the Hudson River. On Friday, April 3rd, USA Today published a debate on airline passenger safety due to bird strikes. The newspaper presented the case that even though large bird populations are rising, and thus the risk of catastrophic collisions is also increasing, the federal government is responding by trying to hide the data. In late March, the FAA proposed blocking access to its bird strike database managed by Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University on the basis that public access to the terribly complex records would “stifle reporting”. The opposing view, published by USA Today as excerpts from the FAA’s proposed rules, basically established the position that “voluntary reporting is good enough”.
But according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB, 1999), less than 20% of bird strikes are reported annually. How do we raise the profile of reporting, and encourage pilots and aviation workers to comply?

This question was answered by Dekker & Buurma (2005) in a paper to the International Bird Strike Committee in Athens. After all, the catastrophic failure of aircraft due to bird strikes is an international problem that readily crosses international boundaries and cultures, so it should not be a surprise that this issue has been taken up by aviation analysts worldwide. They recommend that we need to do the following to reduce the risks to human populations from bird strikes to aircraft:

• We need to establish effective standards for defining what a bird strike is,
• We need to decouple the reporting procedure from the international governance structures (FAA-like agencies as well as insurance providers), so that pilots and airline employees do not have to fear recrimination for their reports, and
• We need to promote behaviors that encourage awareness and reporting, such as targeted inspections, clear guidelines, ensuring that the reports actually reach the databases, acceptance of the paperwork required by reporting, relieving time pressure so that there is available opportunity for reporting, and remove the reasons why people are fearful to report.

More details are provided in Dekker & Buurma’s paper at http://www.int-birdstrike.org/Athens_Papers/IBSC27%20WPII-1.pdf:

Quality assurance. Ultimately, bird strikes are the currency with which the effectiveness of preventive measures is settled. This applies to all aspects of the bird strike problem: improved impact resistance of aircraft, wildlife policy of airfields (and their surrounding) and operational procedures of airliners…

For the simple reason that the civil aviation authorities do play a double role (condensation point for information and authority that supervises all other parties) the relations are contaminated and dominated by juridical arguments. This means that there is a tendency for national databases to be biased in such a way that liability is excluded. This in turn means that the existing databases do contribute only in a limited way to the scientific, educational and quality assurance goals. If mandatory reporting is to be successful it has to be organised in a different, non punitive way.

Enhanced reporting “could be realised by unlinking the national bird strike databases from the supervising authority… [and then] the emphasis will change from juridical to scientific and educational.

The solution seems simple – remove the punitive penalties for reporting, and possibly institute incentives for accurate reporting. This could create jobs and open opportunities for researchers to investigate the problems more openly. What do we have to lose?

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NTSB (1999). National Transportation Safety Board. Safety Recommendations A-99-86 through –94.

(This is being reprinted from one of my October 2008 posts due to overwhelming and unexpected positive response!)

Productivity is totally dependent upon whether or not you actually want to be doing something. Psychologists and management scholars call this intrinsic motivation, but when it pertains to the workplace, I call it my “work mojo”. For the past couple months, I’ve been trying to figure out “how to get my work mojo back”. In the meantime, I haven’t actually stopped to think of what I mean by that.

Here’s what Merriam Webster has to say about “mojo”:

Main Entry: 
mo·jo 
Pronunciation: 
ˈmō-(ˌ)jō
Function:
noun 
Inflected Form(s): 
plural mojoes or mojos 
Etymology: 
probably of African origin; akin to Fulani moco'o medicine man
Date: 
1926
: a magic spell, hex,  or charm ; broadly : magical power <works  his mojo on the tennis court>

What I WANT is to feel invigorated by what I’m doing, feel completely capable dealing with all of the stuff on my to do list, and to feel like it means something to others – that’s what I think would get my work mojo back. So the Merriam-Webster definition fits pretty well – How can I get my magical power back at work? Ron said he feels the same way about his productivity on personal projects, and would really like to get his “personal project mojo” back as well. We brainstormed about it over lunch and identified four elements for the Mojo Maintenance Toolkit which can shape your own personal quality system:

1. boundaries (in both space and time)
2. vacation (in both space and time)
3. objective affirmation
4. subjective affirmation

First, let’s talk about boundaries. It’s called a “day job” for a reason – if you are chipping away at your office to-do list during evenings, weekends, and when you wake up in the middle of the night, you are not setting good boundaries for yourself. If you’re multitasking when you’re on a family outing, or checking your email on your Blackberry while you’re stopped at a traffic light, you are not setting good boundaries. I’m particularly guilty on this count, and have taken some concrete steps to set better boundaries: a) my work email does not forward to my Blackberry, only my personal email (so if a few key people really need me, they can get to me) and b) I don’t do “work work” on my home computer any more. If I leave my work computer at work, that’s it – I can see it again the next day, and the work will have to wait. (There’s quite a bit of separation anxiety that comes when you try to do this. Don’t be too hard on yourself.)

Vacation is the second ingredient required to keep your mojo alive. To appreciate something, you need to be away from it. Totally, completely, mentally and physically away. I appreciate my job much more after I’ve been away from it for a while. I appreciate my coworkers much more when I haven’t seen them in a while. I appreciate the weekends the most after a long, productive week. I appreciate my kid more when I’ve picked him up after a long day at school (and I have the sense he appreciates me more as a result too). Reflection is a natural part of growth and learning, and you need to give yourself time to gain perspective – to let all of your thoughts and ideas percolate into well-rounded solutions.

Objective affirmation is the next ingredient. You need to measure your progress, and be able to reflect on it, to get a sense of accomplishment. There have been times when I’ve sat in my office, (figuratively) crying into my coffee, beating myself up because I feel like I didn’t get enough done. But when I take a look at the status reports from myself and my team over the past few weeks, or progress reports that cover a longer amount of time, it’s pretty clear that we get a lot of stuff done – it’s just not obvious unless we can see our world today is different than our world was a few weeks, months of years ago.

Subjective affirmation is the final (and most insidious) of the keys to cultivating your mojo. In addition to being able to see and feel that you’re moving forward and getting things done, if you don’t have the feeling that the people around you appreciate your contributions, your level of inspiration is bound to wane. (Occasionally, the rewards from doing the task itself might be enough to negate the need for subjective affirmation – but this is not commonplace.) Do people really care about what you’re doing? Do they value the contributions you make? Or do they think you’re an idiot who can’t get anything right? Do they just not like the job you were hired to do (ie. it makes their job harder)? A solid, healthy team will provide a lot of subjective affirmation; a fractious organization will not. Additionally, the subjective affirmation really has to come from people who have no vested interest in your success or failure. Subjective affirmation from my most trusted colleagues and my boss is nice, but I know they’re on my side (I’m lucky to have a fantastic boss). But what about everybody else?

The concept of subjective affirmation extends beyond the workplace as well, though. Ever feel like doing the laundry is a thankless job? It might be, because you get no subjective affirmation as a result of doing it. You can objectively measure your progress every time you put the folded shirts in the drawer, but if no one seems to care, it’s unlikely that the thrill of the job itself will continue to motivate you.

Morale is a consequence of all four of these “mojo factors” aligning among the individuals in a team or organization. To get your own morale up, see if you can find ways to achieve each of the four.

I am pleased once again to host John Hunter’s Management Improvement Carnival, featuring some interesting or noteworthy articles that have been posted over the past couple weeks. Be sure to check out previous installations of the Carnival to get a broad sample of the most recent blog posts that are relevant to managers who are interested in quality, innovation and process improvement.

• Small is the new big. Sustainable is the new growth. Trust is the new competitive advantage. All of the rules of business have changed, and the seismic shift is both electrifying and frightening. But there are opportunities to be embraced, and many of them are summed up in this HBS blog article entitled Why Small Companies Will Win in This Economy
• There is a great post from March 8 by June Holley, talking about self-organizing to achieve systems-level innovation. She notes that because theory is lacking, this process might be protracted, but to get to the point of understanding theory we need some more “real life” examples and case studies of how we self-organize in our organizations well – and not so well.
• Is environmentally friendly insulation higher or lower quality? Reflections on the Building Material Emissions Study discuss its outcomes. How we deal with the interplay of quality and social responsibility will become an even greater issue over the next several years as our ability to grow unbounded is checked against the availability of resources – check out this study to see what related studies might be on the horizon.
• Sustainability 2.0 Doesn’t Add Up by Samuel Mann is an interesting read, reflecting on the notions of sustainability, social responsibility, psychology, and organizations. I’ve included it here for its broad coverage of some interesting topics and vignettes.
• And did you know that neuroscience may provide some insights into how to stage your process improvement efforts and your initiatives that focus on innovation?
• And don’t forget to try out Gmail Autopilot, the newly released utility that will help you autorespond in very meaningful ways to your mundane emails and even your money laundering spam from foreign countries. It’s a technology advancement so advanced it’s unbelievable!