Quality and Innovation

Yesterday, I posted about TRIZ, a 1940′s era device for stimulating innovation. I’ve always had this visceral feeling that we need a new, more modern, more right brained approach to innovation along the same lines as TRIZ, but with the art and panache of the 21st century – and with Eric S. Townsend’s new collection of business-stimulated haikus, I think we’re on to something.

Eric, a self-defined “supercreative” in business and search engine optimization, runs Eric S. Townsend Marketing, a firm dedicated to general marketing, internet marketing, corporate identity, branding, publicity, and totally-needed stuff like that. Only Eric is not from this planet. At times, I think he channels the Pleiadeans (which might not be a bad thing, considering what’s needed to be ultra-competitive in the era of the post-economy).

Eric’s new book features 206 pages of business-related haikus – riddles that might help stimulate you to new directions in business growth and accomplishment. I suggest that the Bizkus are used for brainstorming and in quality circles. Set a meeting time, get some stakeholders involved, identify a problem that you need to solve – and then randomly open up the Bizkus book and read – these things are meant for oral interpretation. Discuss, as a group, what you think the implications may be – or may be not.

Some of the bizkus are totally hard to figure out. But aren’t all problems in business? As a result, this approach has GOT to help you right-brain yourself out of current issues, and into emerging opportunities.

I give Eric’s Bizkus three thumbs up. Leave me comments if you decide to use it to stimulate innovation in your organization… I’d like to hear about your experiences. I’d also love to facilitate an article for Quality Progress on new approaches to stimulate innovation too, so let me know if this tool (or others like it!) serve such a purpose for your place of business. (Note: if you purchase the Kindle version, Eric will give you the PDF for an extra $1.29. I think you have to email him to make this happen.)

A couple weeks ago, the students in my ISAT 654 (Advanced Technology Management) class at JMU asked about where and when Just-In-Time (JIT) manufacturing actually started in the United States. Although I still can’t identify the FIRST company to adopt this approach, I was also curious about how the adoption of JIT in the US grew from the Toyota Production System (TPS).

Just-in-Time (JIT) is only one element of lean manufacturing, which is a broader philosophy that seeks to eliminate all kinds of waste in a process.  Although JIT is often considered an enterprise-wide philosophy of continuous improvement, I’d like to focus on the mechanistic aspects of JIT – that is, the development and operations of a production system that employs continuous flow and preventive maintenance. In an effectively implemented JIT production system, there is little or no inventory – which includes Work-In-Process (WIP) – and production is tightly coupled to demand.

The origin of JIT can be traced back to Henry Ford’s production line, in which he was keenly aware of the burdens of inventory. However, Ford’s production system generated large volumes of identical products created in large batches – there was no room for variety, and the system was not coupled to demand levels.

In post-war Japan, Taiichi Ohno (“Father of JIT”) adapted the system at Toyota to handle smaller batch sizes and more variety in the parts that could be used to construct assemblies. In 1952, work on their JIT system was initiated, with full deployment of the kanban pull system by 1962. This was the genesis of the Toyota Production System, an elegant (and sometimes elusive) socio-technical system for production and operations. This approach bridged the gaps between production and continuous improvement and became the basis for lean manufacturing as it is known today.

After the oil crisis in 1973, other Japanese companies started to take note of the success of Toyotaand the approach became more widely adopted. The JIT technique spread to the United States in the late 1970’s and 1980’s, but due to inconsistencies in implementation and a less mature grasp on the human and cultural elements of the Toyota Production System, western companies experienced limited success. The Machine that Changed the World by James Womack made the JIT+TPS concept more accessible to US companies in 1990, which led to the widespread adoption of lean manufacturing techniques and philosophies thereafter.

JIT is very sensitive to the external environment in which it is implemented. For a review of Polito & Watson’s excellent 2006 article that describes the key barriers to smooth JIT, read Shocks to the System: Financial Meltdown and a Fragile Supply Chain.

(P.S. Why the picture of butter? Because JIT, when implemented appropriately, is perfectly smooth and slippery and thus passes The Butter Test.)

In July, Paul Graham posted an article called “Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule“. He points out that people who make things, like software engineers and writers, are on a completely different schedule than managers – and that by imposing the manager’s schedule on the developers, there is an associated cost. Makers simply can’t be as productive on the manager’s schedule:

When you’re operating on the maker’s schedule, meetings are a disaster. A single meeting can blow a whole afternoon, by breaking it into two pieces each too small to do anything hard in. Plus you have to remember to go to the meeting. That’s no problem for someone on the manager’s schedule. There’s always something coming on the next hour; the only question is what. But when someone on the maker’s schedule has a meeting, they have to think about it.

For someone on the maker’s schedule, having a meeting is like throwing an exception. It doesn’t merely cause you to switch from one task to another; it changes the mode in which you work.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.

This concept really resonated with us – we know about the costs of context switching, but this presented a nice concept for how a developer’s day can be segmented such that ample time is provided for getting things done. As a result, we attempted to apply the concept to achieve more effective communication between technical staff and managers. And in at least one case, it worked extremely well.

Case: Ron DuPlain (@rduplain) and I frequently work together on technical projects. I am the manager; he is the developer. More than we like, we run into problems communicating, but fortunately we are both always on the lookout for strategies to help us communicate better. We decided to apply the “makers vs. managers” concept to meetings, to see whether declaring whether we were having a maker’s meeting or a manager’s meeting prior to the session would improve our ability to communicate with one another.

And it did. We had a very effective maker’s meeting today, for example… explored some technical challenges, worked through a solution space, and talked about possible design options and background information. It was great. As a manager, I got to spend time thinking about a technical problem, but temporarily suspended my attachment to dates, milestones and artifacts. As a developer, Ron got the time and attention from me that he needed to explain his challenges, without the pressure of knowing that I was in a hurry and just needed the bottom line. As a result, Ron felt like I was able to understand the perspectives he was presenting more effectively, and get a better sense of the trade-offs he was exploring.

We had the opportunity to meet on the same terms, all because we declared the intent of our meeting up front in terms of “makers” and “managers”. Thanks Paul – this common language is proving to be a powerful concept for achieving a shared and immediate understanding of technical problems.

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.

John Hunter shared some excerpts from Warren Buffett’s 2009 Letter to Shareholders. I particularly liked this one part where he reflects on the outcomes of economic modeling and forecasting:

Investors should be skeptical of history-based models. Constructed by a nerdy-sounding priesthood using esoteric terms such as beta, gamma, sigma and the like, these models tend to look impressive. Too often, though, investors forget to examine the assumptions behind the symbols. Our advice: Beware of geeks bearing formulas.

I’d like to amend this: Beware of geeks bearing formulas who a) can’t tell you what every part of the derivation means, b) don’t know the model’s underlying assumptions, and c) don’t know what “threats to validity” are. (And if you’re the geek in question, be able to explain how your models and forecasts work!!)

Models can be a great way to capture the dynamics of social and technical systems, and simulations can help us explore how these systems will evolve over time – but how those models are initialized, and the simplifying assumptions they use to generate results, are just as important as the answers they propose.

Are you an expert? According to tradition and research, it takes 10,000 hours of focused effort and a dedication to continuous improvement to become one. On October 2, 2007, Bill Harrison described the phenomenon well:

I’ve been immersed in a fascinating book called This Is Your Brain On Music. The author, Daniel J. Levitin, is a musician/recording engineer/producer turned neuroscientist. Despite the unfortunate title, the book is a serious exploration of the connections between music (from both a listening and playing perspective) and the brain… The emerging conclusion is that experts in many fields (sports, literature, composition, performance of every kind) need about 10,000 hours of practice time to achieve world-class levels of proficiency. 10,000 hours is the equivalent of 3 hours a day, seven days a week, for a period of 10 years. These studies do not address the differences in the efficacy of practicing for different people (which is known to vary widely).

It might seem like this is a revelation from modern neuroscience, but the idea is not new. New research only serves to support a concept that is ages old. Time magazine notes that the concept appeared as early as 1899, citing the academic journal Psychological Review. Herbert Simon, a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence and socio-technical systems who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Economics in 1978, “said that to become an expert required about 10 years of experience and he and colleagues estimated that expertise was the result of learning roughly 50,000 chunks of information.” More recently, this idea has been popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers: The Story of Success – it’s also described on the gladwell.com blog.

The concept of the 10,000 hours has been described at many levels of detail. For example, in July 2006, Philip E. Ross wrote about “The Expert Mind” for Scientific American. In this article, he described work by K. Anders Ericsson of Florida State, a collaborator of Herbert Simon’s, in a very accessible way:

Ericsson argues that what matters is not experience per se but “effortful study,” which entails continually tackling challenges that lie just beyond one’s competence. That is why it is possible for enthusiasts to spend tens of thousands of hours playing chess or golf or a musical instrument without ever advancing beyond the amateur level and why a properly trained student can overtake them in a relatively short time.”

“Even the novice engages in effortful study at first, which is why beginners so often improve rapidly in playing golf, say, or in driving a car. But having reached an acceptable performance–for instance, keeping up with one’s golf buddies or passing a driver’s exam– most people relax. Their performance then becomes automatic and therefore impervious to further improvement. In contrast, experts-in-training keep the lid of their mind’s box open all the time, so that they can inspect, criticize and augment its contents and thereby approach the standard set by leaders in their fields.”

These can all be summarized by the following statement:

Focused Attention + Reflection + Knowledge of What Constitutes High Quality

+ Commitment to Improvement  =  Expertise

There is no reason why this principle cannot be applied beyond individuals – this statement provides practical lessons for the development of group expertise, organizational expertise, and the expertise of a society or civilization. (Granted, the way to measure 10,000 hours would vary between individuals, groups, organizations and societies – this is an open question.)

So, are you an expert? Is your organization an expert in its domain?