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.)

(Image Credit: Doug Buckley of http://hyperactive.to)

Are you an entry-level Young Quality Professional (YQP) who has participated or led a project that resulted in tangible benefits for your organization or community? Are you a student in high school or college who has worked individually, or with a team, to apply quality tools to solve practical problems in your school, or community, or at home? If so, WE WANT YOU to tell us about it!

On Wednesday, May 23rd, we will be conducting a session at the ASQ World Conference on Quality and Improvement (WCQI) to demonstrate the impact that the newest members of our community – students and entry-level professionals – have had on their organizations, businesses, and communities. This session will consist of vignettes from up to 15 quality or process improvement projects performed by students or entry-level professionals. We’ll be inviting all WCQI attendees to come celebrate the accomplishments of the youngest members of our community, and support them as they progress in their education and in their careers!

HOW TO APPLY: Send an email to Jacob Mayiani Loorimirim (Graduate Assistant, JMU) at loorimjm@dukes.jmu.edu (and cc: simmo2ra@jmu.edu and radziwnm@jmu.edu) with short answers to each of the 6 questions below. Project review started on February 1 and will continue until all slots are filled, or February 29 at the latest.

If your project is selected to be part of the Showcase, we’ll work with you to put together a few slides, audio recordings, and/or video clips that describe the problem you solved, the quality tools and approaches you used, your results, and the impact of your solution on your stakeholders. We plan to spend between 3 and 5 minutes showcasing each project. If you are a student who will be attending the WCQI in person, we would love for you to submit a project that you completed individually or as a team – and talk about it yourself for 2 to 3 minutes during our session!

QUESTIONS:

1. Project completed by: (List your names and ages, and specify whether this was part of a school/university project, for a client, or was done in service to your community; if you had a teacher or faculty advisor, please list them too! Also, let us know if you plan to attend the WCQI in person in Anaheim, CA this May.)

2. Project title:

3. Project start and completion dates:

4. Provide a brief problem statement (1-3 sentences) that summarizes the problem, your stakeholders, and your goals:

5. Provide a brief description of your hands-on performance while completing the project, providing specific examples of the methodologies (e.g. PDSA, DMAIC) and/or tools (e.g. process maps, fishbone diagrams, Pareto charts, affinity diagrams, multivoting/nominal group technique) that you used to solve the problem.

6. In one sentence, describe your project’s RESULTS and the impacts on its stakeholders.

Thank you for your interest! Please forward this announcement by email, Facebook, Twitter, or any other mechanism if you know of a Young Quality Professional (YQP) whose work should be noticed and recognized – or where they might be hanging out.

Sincerely,

Nicole Radziwill, College of Integrated Science & Technology, James Madison University
Rebecca Simmons, College of Business, James Madison University

TRIZ, the “theory of inventive problem solving” conceived by the Russian innovator Genrich Altshuller in the mid-1940’s, is a collection of analytical tools intended to capture “innovation logic” so it can be systematically applied to solve engineering problems. Using TRIZ, individuals and teams have an actionable guide for thinking out-of-the-box and generating breakthrough insights to help solve problems. These problems can be related to new product design, enhancements to existing products, process design and improvement, or quality improvement. The acronym is derived from the Russian Теория решения изобретательских задач (Триз) or, alternatively, the Anglicized Teoriya Resheniya Izobreatatelskikh Zadatch (TRIZ). Reflecting its Russian origin, TRIZ is pronounced like “breeze”.

TRIZ was initially conceived as a set of 40 “design principles” that can be used to accelerate the innovation process. Later, this was expanded into the Matrix of Contradictions which can be used to identify which of the 40 design principles are applicable to a particular problem. The assumption underlying this matrix is that new inventions become possible when technical contradictions are resolved. Since Altshuller’s initial development of these tools, several teams of TRIZ practitioners and researchers have expanded the techniques that are now associated with TRIZ, although the 40 principles remain central to the technique.

Altshuller developed the core of TRIZ during his experience as a patent clerk for the Russian Navy, where he examined trends and patterns as he screened hundreds of patents that had realized innovative potential. He investigated the characteristics that made each patent successful, and eventually determined his fundamental axiom of TRIZ, that technical systems evolve according to objective laws. The most common modes of evolution were captured in the 40 principles. Believing that the newly developed technique could help rebuild the USSR in the aftermath of World War II, Altshuller proposed some initiatives to his government. However, rather than being rewarded for his work and allowed to help his country, he was punished for his heretical viewpoints and sentenced to 25 years in a labor camp in Vorkuta in 1949, a sentence he shared with many other academics and intellectuals who educated one another in their fields as a defense against the brutality. After his release from the camp in 1955, Altshuller began publishing not only about TRIZ, but also science fiction books, since it was so difficult for newly released prisoners to find employment. By 1985, Altshuller had conducted hundreds of seminars on TRIZ, had worked with students in elementary and secondary school on inventive problem solving, and had earned his reputation as a leader in innovative thought.

The core of TRIZ, its 40 design principles, must be used in the context of a problem-solving approach. This is called the TRIZ process, and consists of 1) stating the contradiction (what is not working), 2) expanding your understanding of the materials being used, equipment being used, environmental conditions, work methods, and people involved, 3) defining the ideal state of the evolved system, and 4) generating ideas using the 40 principles. This process is different than brainstorming because it does not rely on randomly identifying ideas, but takes a structured approach to exploring the system and the technological contradictions that might reveal potential avenues for innovation.

The 40 design principles of TRIZ are:

1. Segmentation. Break an object into different independent parts to uncover opportunities for creative assembly, disassembly, or component design.
2. Taking Out. Remove one part of a product or process to explore alternative ways to achieve the required function.
3. Local Quality. Explore the potential for one object or process to serve an additional or unexpected function, like a hammer with a nail remover attached.
4. Asymmetry. Change the shape of an object from symmetrical to asymmetrical, or make an object more asymmetrical, to reveal opportunities for alternative designs.
5. Merging. Identify how people, objects and subsystems can be combined to satisfy the requirements of the system in novel ways.
6. Universality. Determine how one object or component can perform multiple functions.
7. Russian Dolls. Also called nesting, this principle encourages placing objects within one another in various configurations to explore design alternatives.
8. Anti-weight. Explore ways to counterweight the system when it is impacted by negative external influences.
9. Preliminary Anti-action. By anticipating problems, steps can be taken to prevent their occurrence or to mitigate negative consequences when the problems arise.
10. Preliminary Action. By anticipating scheduled changes in the state of a system (e.g. knowing which machines will be used in an upcoming shift) action can be taken to ease the transition between states.
11. Beforehand Cushioning. Identify how to detect and respond to potential failures.
12. Equipotentiality. Explore how moving things side to side, instead of up and down, might impact the ability of the system to achieve its required functions without unnecessarily expending energy.
13. The Other Way Around. Determine whether turning components upside down, or inverting steps in a process, will resolve technical incongruities.
14. Spheroidality/Curvature. Identify how flat or planar parts could be changed to curved or spheroidal components, for example, ball bearings or spirals.
15. Dynamics. Explore how external forces acting on the system will impact its structure and integrity.
16. Partial or Excessive Action. Determine whether doing less of something, or doing more of something, can solve the problem.
17. Another Dimension. If a problem cannot be resolved in the number of dimensions allowed for the problem, increase the number of dimensions. Add corners, planes, or bends, or go around components within the system, or introduce the time dimension.
18. Mechanical Vibration. Inject energy into a system by shaking it or applyind sound and investigate how it responds.
19. Periodic Action. Determine how parts of the system where continuous force is applied would need to be changed if the force occurs in bursts.
20. Continuity of Useful Action. Identify how to reduce idle time or make alternative use of time.
21. Skipping. Explore how performing process steps more rapidly might impact introduction of errors.
22. Blessing in Disguise. Determine whether adverse impacts or waste can be reframed and treated as benefits, or even increased to strengthen the potential for indirect benefits.
23. Feedback. Monitor points within the system and evaluate whether utilizing that information can reveal new opportunities for improving the product or process.
24. Intermediary. Explore adding a new component to a system to temporarily or permanently reduce adverse impacts.
25. Self-service. Assess whether there are aspects of the system that can be self-regulating and self-repairing.
26. Copying. Evaluate whether one instance of a component in the system could be used rather than two or more of the same component.
27. Cheap Short-lived Objects. Identify whether short-term disposables play a role in the solution.
28. Mechanics Substitution. Replace mechanical systems with invisible or software systems to see how components of the product or process would be required to adjust.
29. Pneumatics and Hydraulics. Replace solids with liquids or gases to see how components of the product or process would be required to adjust.
30. Flexible Shells and Thin Films. Identify whether introducing thin sheets of materials into parts of the system would alleviate the problem.
31. Porous Materials. Determine whether pores should be introduced or closed within the materials comprising the system.
32. Color Changes. Adjust the color of the component or the system to signal different meanings to users or customers, or identify whether color changes indicate that new information must be acted upon.
33. Homogeneity. Explore how the system would change if you used one type of material for its construction.
34. Discarding and Recovering. Determine how rejecting or regenerating components might adjust the constructs within the system.
35. Parameter Changes. Also described as transforming physical and chemical states, this requires evaluating how resistant the system is to changes in physical composition and parameters in the external environment, such as temperature.
36. Phase Transitions. Explore how to stop, start, and otherwise influence transitions between different states within the system.
37. Thermal Expansion. Identify how heating or cooling a system will influence its structure, feedback between the components, or other factors.
38. Strong Oxidants. Determine whether adding or removing oxygen from the system will change its structure or constitution.
39. Inert Atmosphere. If environmental variables are negative impacts, explore the result of moving those from the system.
40. Composite Materials. Explore whether replacing traditional materials with composites will remove the technical contradictions.

Many tools for quality improvement fit nicely within the TRIZ structure. For example, CTQ Trees can be used to investigate #1, Segmentation, and Failure Mode and Effects Analysis (FMEA) can be used to explore #11, Beforehand Cushioning. As a result TRIZ can be used to catalyze innovation not only for design efforts (including new product design), but also to stimulate innovation through the quality improvement process.

What’s Next? I envision new, artistic, right-brained TRIZ-like games for innovative brainstorming like Bizku’s (with a long u). 

See also:  lean, INNOVATION, PROBLEM SOLVING, FAILURE MODE AND EFFECTS ANALYSIS (FMEA), CTQ TREES

Further Reading:

Biography of Genrikh Altshuller: http://www.aitriz.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=12&Itemid=26

Dew, John. TRIZ: A Creative Breeze for Quality Professionals. Quality Progress, January 2006, p. 44-51.

Scanlan, James. TRIZ 40 Design Principles. Retrieved on December 1, 2009 from http://www.scribd.com/doc/21798337/TRIZ-40-Principles

Wallace, Mark. The Science of Invention. Salon, June 2000. Retrieved on December 1, 2009 from http://mobile.salon.com/tech/feature/2000/06/29/altshuller/index.html.

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.

I have a 6-year-old, which means I also must have sparklers on the 4th of July. (And that’s about it; I don’t trust my klutziness to be in the proximity of most explosives.) So this year, I drove down to South Carolina on the eve of the 4th to make my purchase. I got 96 sparklers for $5.00 – WOW, that’s only 5.2 cents per sparkler, I thought – what a great value! We got them home, night fell, emotions got high, and my kid was concerned that our sparklers would be so fantastic that all the neighbors would come to watch. (“Do we have enough seats in the yard?” he asked.)

It was dark… we were ready. We lit the sparklers. Expecting a ball of sparks at least 6 inches in diameter, I jumped back after I lit the end of the stick. I was looking forward to the part where we could write our names in the dark air, letting the letters hang there – a rite of passage in youth, or so I assumed. A little tiny penny-sized flare zizzled up, and a few sparks shot out straight to the ground, and 10 seconds later it was over. Just 3 sparklers left giant, noxious clouds of irritating ash and dust that filled up the neighborhood, to the point where we couldn’t light any more after just one round.

WHAT????!!? I thought. I wasn’t alone… I looked over and saw a sad, puzzled face looking back at me. “Are you sure you got real sparklers this time?” I was sure, but what I’d purchased – though a great perceived value, at first – turned out to be very low perceived quality. Why? My expectations were that any decent company making sparklers would have standards… nice ball of sparks, 60-second-plus duration, smoky cloud that would not put you in the hospital or give you Black Lung. My expectations were unmet by the product, and as a result, both perceived quality and perceived value plummeted.

As I’ve mentioned in other posts, there is a difference between how you perceive quality, and how you perceive value (according to Mitra, 2002):

• Perceived quality happens before you buy, adopt, or experience something.
• Perceived value depends on how well the product, service or experience meets your expectations after you buy, adopt or experience it.
• Perceived quality and perceived value are moderated by your expectations. Your expectations can (and often do!) change after you buy, adopt or experience something. Perceived value is NOT invariant, nor is it independent of perceived quality – your perception of value can change after you buy, adopt or experience similar products or participate in similar activities, because then you have a more rich basis for comparison.

This made me wonder just why people are buying these sparklers… as a sparkler connoisseur since this incident, I have noticed that pretty much all sparklers that are sold are the exact same variety that we got. Which means there must be a lot of people buying this brand of sparklers… and the company certainly wouldn’t be making them if people weren’t buying them. If we keep buying low quality products, how will manufacturers ever know that they’re not meeting minimum quality standards? I know this is significant in safety critical industries, or industries where there’s intense competition, but this whole sparkler debacle made me realize that as consumers, there are probably many fronts where we’re selling ourselves out. I’m sure there are plenty of families who also bought the same sparklers and thought they sucked, but they probably rationalized it by thinking that any sparklers are better than no sparklers for my kids. I might have thought the same thing, but I’m now of the opinion that NO sparklers are better than crappy sparklers, because buying duds sends the wrong message into the Invisible Brain of our Invisible Hand-guided global economy.

So what does this have to do with bagels? Here’s what. As I was lamenting the sad state of the sparklers, I thought to myself, “This would never happen in New York City if we were dealing with bagels.” Why? Because people there know a good bagel when they eat one, the price point is well known (as is willingness-to-pay), and people will not tolerate bagels that are subpar. They will vote with their feet. Bad bagels will cease and desist. The market will eat them, if they don’t meet the very high quality standards of the local bagel consumers.

My appeal to consumers is to ask yourselves this question. How bad does the quality OR value of a consumer product have to get before you’ll just say no, and send a proper signal back into the economy? If you don’t signal now, what makes you think the quality levels will stay the same as they are now?

LET EVERYTHING BE YOUR BAGEL. Don’t settle for minimally acceptable quality unless you’re ready for it to sink even lower.

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!

(This post is bound to be controversial – so please, if you have an opinion, write a comment. I’m really interested in hearing what others think and feel about this concept.)

Last week, I read the Harvard Business Review’s 2011 Agenda, in which HBR reported on what projects key business and management leaders will be working on during the upcoming year. I was directed to the report by a Facebook post from Daniel Pink, author of Drive, who was a contributor. One of the subjects he touched on really moved me:

I wonder if we have reached the limits of the profit motive. It is a powerful force, of course, but perhaps it’s somehow inadequate and insufficiently inspiring for 21st century work. More and more we’re seeing that the most enduring and effective companies marry the profit motive to what we might think of as the “purpose motive”—the belief that businesses must stand for something and contribute to the world. Maybe the path out of our economic doldrums is not a tighter focus on profits, processes, or productivity but the broader awakening of a sense of purpose in our enterprises.

As someone who ponders quality and “lean thinking” all the time, this really got the little voice in my head going: Is profit waste? When we’re thinking about waste in the “traditional lean sense,” overproduction is the first sin. Isn’t profit just overproduction of revenue? Sure, but you might argue, it’s profit that helps a business expand and grow. That’s true, IF that profit is turned into investments or retained earnings that become future investments. (But how much of a company’s profit is turned into lottery-sized bonuses to executives who then pursue a personal life of overconsumption? How much of a company’s profit is the direct result of using wasteful ingredients in production, such as using packaging that clutters landfills for years? Doesn’t this equate the profit that’s generated with the waste that’s generated?)

This made me wonder whether other people have questioned whether profit is waste. I did a Google search and came up with very little… but did find two hits of interest. The first is an old article from Volume 36 of The Arena, a critical journal published from 1889-1896 and 1900-1909 and edited by a guy named Benjamin Orange Flower. It was recognized as audacious and unorthodox, and upon its demise The Arena was declared a “fearless exponent of advanced liberal thought” – so apparently, people were a little taken aback by the social mission and tone of the publication at that time as well.  The second was a blog post on the writings of the philosopher Bataille from the 1960’s, who believed that “…a series of profitable operations has absolutely no other effect that the squandering of profits” and “the fate of all profit is waste” – that is, that profit is waste.

In the Arena article, entitled “Consumption of Wealth: Individual and Collective” by C. C. Hitchcock, the author starts his article by loosely addressing the disparity of wealth in society first noted by the Italian engineer, sociologist, economist and philosopher Vilfredo Pareto, and then starts making connections with the income production of typical families of the early 20^th century. He asserts that it is the profit motive in capitalism that’s responsible for the laborer (who creates value and wealth on a daily basis) earning little to nothing, while “by others who may produce nothing we see wealth approximated in sums running up into millions in a single year.”

What is Hitchcock’s solution to the inequality? He says if you want to consume more, you should create value in proportion to the level you wish to consume. Executives of multi-billion-dollar companies might argue that indeed, they are creating value for millions of people, and doesn’t that justify the consumption? At the end of his article, Hitchcock concedes that his whole argument is in place to support socialism, so that “burdened souls” can benefit from “added courage and strength to bear patiently the deprivations and disappointments of life.”

This sounds pretty incongruent with the rest of his argument to me. I tend to like the idea of socialism as a utopian concept, and completely dislike it when I think about all the able-bodied lazy people sitting around getting handouts without lifting a finger. (I know some of these people personally.)

What is Bataille’s solution to the inequality? He says that productivity itself is perhaps a myth. So what? Why pursue productivity when its end goal is just waste? His writings seem to suggest that finding meaning and enjoyment in life is superior to achieving productivity.

If that’s the case, I might stop Getting Things Done (GTD) and start Getting to Meaning (GTM). That last acronym is mine, people!

What sorts of next generation business models could we come up with if we looked at profit the same way we look at inventory holding costs, or waiting, or excessive motion in a process, or defects? Furthermore, is there a cost of profit? (I don’t know what this last question might even mean, but I’ll be thinking about it more and more in the upcoming weeks.)

Why do our business metrics STOP at profit? Why don’t we track where the profit goes, and what it’s spent on, and whether that spending generates any true value? Follow the money… that’s the only way we will be able to test whether profit is indeed waste.