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.)

According to dictionary.com, one of the definitions for rubric is “any established mode of conduct; protocol.” But the context you’ve probably heard this word in is education – where a grading rubric or a scoring rubric is used to evaluate a complex artifact like a student essay.

In my opinion, it’s time to move the concept of the rubric from the classroom into the mainstream, because it can be applied as a very practical general purpose quality tool! (Hear that, Nancy Tague? I think you should write about rubrics in your next edition of the very excellent book The Quality Toolbox. Let me know if you’d like me to help make this happen.)

A rubric is basically a grid with 1) levels of performance indicated along the top row, and 2) criteria or dimensions of performance listed down the leftmost column. Each cell of the grid contains a descriptive statement that explains how the level of performance in that column might be achieved for a specific dimension:

For example, here’s a rubric that one group constructed to evaluate the quality of the mind maps that they were producing. The performance levels are organized from high performance in the top left (smiley face giving a thumbs up) to low performance in the top right (smiley face that looks like he’s about to pass out):

The dimensions of performance are neatness and presentation, use of images/symbols, and use of color. The descriptive statements in each cell provide specific examples of how the performance level might be achieved, e.g. “has failed to include color in the mind map” is an indicator of a low performance level for the dimension of “use of color” – which is very understandable!

The concept of the rubric as a performance assessment tool is relatively new! Griffin (2009), in a brief history of the rubric, notes that since its introduction in 1981, “the scoring rubric has evolved into a more precise, technical, scientific-looking document. It carries a tone of certainty, authority, and exactitude.” However, she notes, the utility of a rubric will depend upon the thought and consideration that goes into its construction. “A rubric is a product of many minds working collaboratively to create new knowledge. It will, almost by definition, be more thoughtful, valid, unbiased and useful than any one of us could have conceived of being as we worked in isolation.”

Advantages of applying a well developed rubric include:

• Provides a common language for sharing expectations and feedback
• Helps to clarify and distinguish the differences between various performance levels
• Helps to focus an individual or group’s ATTENTION on relevant aspects of each desired quality characteristic or skill area
• Provides a mechanism to more easily identify strengths and opportunities for improvement
• Helps lend objectivity to an evaluation process that might otherwise be subjective

Disadvantages:

• Different rubrics may need to be devised for the different activities or artifacts that are to be evaluated using the rubric
• Not all evaluators will apply the rubric in exactly the same way – there is a subjective element at work here – so people may need to be trained in the use of a rubric, or perhaps it would be more effective in a group consensus context where inter-rater variability can be interactively discussed and resolved
• Creating a rubric can be time consuming
• The rubric may limit exploration of solutions or modes of presentation that do not conform to the rubric

Using Rubrics for Quality Improvement

Rubrics are already applied in the world of quality, although I’ve never heard them go by that name. The process scoring guidelines for the Baldrige Criteria are essentially rubrics (although the extra dimension of ADLI and LeTCI has to be considered in the mind of the examiner). The International Team Excellence Award (ITEA) criteria in the Team Excellence Framework (TEF) also forms a rubric in conjunction with the performance levels of missing, unclear, meets expectations or exceeds expectations.

I see a lot of ways in which rubrics can be developed and applied in the quality community to help us establish best practices for some of our most common project artifacts, such as Project Charters. Nancy Tague includes a Project Charter Checklist in The Quality Toolbox to help us create better and more complete charters… but what if we added a second dimension, which includes performance levels, and turned this checklist into a rubric? Any checklist could be transformed into a rubric. Furthermore, to develop a good rubric, we can brainstorm and rank all of the potential criteria in the left hand column, using a Pareto chart to separate the vital few criteria from the trivial many.

Are any of you already using rubrics for purposes outside training or education? I would love to start a list of resources to share with the quality community.

Reference: Griffin, M. (2009). What is a rubric? Assessment Update, 21(6), Nov/Dec 2009.

Note: There is a comprehensive site containing many examples of rubrics at http://www.web.virginia.edu/iaas/assess/tools/rubrics.shtm – however, they won’t open in Google Chrome.

Jim Collins, author of Built to Last (2004) and Good to Great (2001), released a new compendium of his research this fall entitled Great by Choice: Uncertainty, Chaos, and Luck – Why Some Thrive Despite Them All. I was pleasantly surprised to discover that these authors have also stumbled upon the importance of quality consciousness – awareness, alignment, and selectively focused attention! These are the keys to developing a highly successful “ten-X” (10X) organization (one that outperforms its industry index by at least ten times, especially during times of great volatility in the business environment).

Collins and his co-author, Morten Hansen, don’t call it quality consciousness, though – they call it “Level 5 Ambition.” And Level 5 Ambition consists of three traits: fanatic discipline, empirical creativity, and productive paranoia. Each of these traits demonstrates one or more aspects of quality consciousness. Here’s how (using excerpts from p. 35 and 36 of the book):

Fanatic discipline: 10Xers display extreme consistency of action – consistency with values, goals, performance standards, and methods. They are utterly relentless, monomaniacal, unbending in their focus on their quests [emphasis added].

Consistency of action is enabled by awareness of quality standards, and unrelenting attention towards achieving them.

Empirical creativity: When faced with uncertainty, 10Xers do not look primarily to other people, conventional wisdom, authority figures, or peers for direction; they look primarily to empirical evidence. They rely upon direct observation, practical experimentation, and direct engagement with tangible evidence. They make their bold, creative moves from a sound empirical base.

By aligning the actions of an organization and its players with what the evidence shows will work, everyone is more confident and able to engage fully in the pursuit of shared goals. A data-driven approach, familiar to anyone who understands quality improvement practice, allows an organization to test its ideas on a smaller scale before committing to major changes.

Productive paranoia: 10Xers maintain hypervigilance, staying highly attuned to threats and changes in their environment, even when – especially when – all’s going well. They assume conditions will turn against them, at perhaps the worst possible moment. They channel their fear and worry into action, preparing, developing contingency plans, building buffers, and maintaining large margins of safety.

Hypervigilance is heightened awareness of the external environment, even during times of peace and productivity. The aspect of productive paranoia that I think is most instructive, however, is that it involves a choice of where to focus your attention: instead of harboring worry and panic about what might happen, the productively paranoid manager will focus on understanding failure modes, developing contingency plans, identifying backup strategies, and planning to branch off on alternative paths, if necessary. The attention is purposefully and positively diverted from unproductive emotions (worry and panic) to productive emotions (the positive feelings associated with being prepared).

Even though nearly 40% of the end of the book is an “Epilogue” containing more detail about Collins and Hansen’s research methodology and results, this is still a very substantial read, and one with very practical advice for businesses aiming to succeed through a challenging economy. My graduate students in technology management enjoyed it too.

This post is a collaboration between Eric Sessoms at MyCustomerCloud & Nicole Radziwill.

Everyone knows what a tool is. We use tools all the time, every day. Hammers to drive nails… cars to drive to work… glasses to read a book. Tools help us do stuff. They make our jobs easier, our lives simpler, and our existence more orderly. But we have to remember that tools only exist to help us achieve our goals… we humans are the real brains behind the brawn of our tools! And we have to figure out what goals we’re trying to achieve – or else we could inadvertently use our tools and technologies to just stumble about without making any progress towards our goals!

In the words of the political scientist Langdon Winner [1], “What matters is not technology itself, but the social or economic system in which it is embedded.” It’s the context of what you’re trying to achieve that makes a tool work – or fail miserably!

Here’s the scenario: you have a bunch of experts sitting in a room, trying to make a big decision about which of TWO proposed scenarios to accept. One proposal is lower risk, and one is much higher risk. ONLY ONE has the potential for an outcome to fall above the “threshold for a brighter future” – which is kind of (sort of) important in a visceral sense, but not so important that it disqualifies the lower risk proposal.

What would you do? How would you approach the decision making task in this case? How might you approach social and political concerns here (political meaning the politics of institutions in general, not necessarily the government)?

Note: This example is BASED ON A TRUE STORY and a real conversation in a panel of experts! All characters, fictional and otherwise, have been modified to protect the innocent.

If you have at least 5 years broad experience in quality, please help us validate the “Quality Systems Development Roadmap” originally published in Quality Progress in 2008 (http://asq.org/quality-progress/2008/09/basic-quality/starting-from-scratch.html). This is part of an expert systems project developed by Doug Jin, a student at James Madison University, under the guidance of Nicole Radziwill, JMU faculty member and ASQ member leader.

The 5-page, 13-question survey will be available until January 15, 2011 or 1500 responses are received, whatever comes first, so contribute now at http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/W2LYFYP!

I love the most recent XKCD that takes a swing at the soulless customer service scripts that prevent mere mortal CSRs from actually connecting with their customer and delivering authentic customer service.

This adds a new dimension to “Getting Blocked” – “I’d like to help you, but I just don’t know enough to figure this out for you, so you’re going to have to wait (possibly forever) for advice from one of our (possibly nonexistent) technology ninjas”.

However, I’d like to enthusiastically support the notion of Expert Easter Eggs so that people with challenging problems can connect to CSRs with great skills whose mouths are watering for those challenges! Great idea, XKCD.