Doing vs improving
There’s a natural tension that exists between doing the work and improving the process. Say things are blowing up all the time and you can barely handle the torrent of tasks on your plate, which means you don’t have any extra time to improve the process you’re running. In some companies, the default solution to any problem is to hire more goddamn people.
Nobody is thinking about process improvement
In other companies, you don’t improve the process so much as assume that ‘this is the way things have always been done’; nobody spends any time thinking about process improvement.
Changing the process: last time and how often?
Now ask yourself: When was the last time this process was changed for the better? How often do you typically change a process? (Also: can this particular process be improved?) If you can think of a process improvement, why hasn’t it been implemented?
At regular intervals
It means that one out of every five days, say, is spent not doing the work, but working on the work — taking a critical look at the way you run things, and testing small changes to improve. And it means that you do this forever — there’s no special time you set aside to improve your process; you do this at regular intervals throughout the year, workload or crunch period be damned.
Hiring / work harder == better before worse in the short term
Managers can ask their folk to work harder, or they can accept lousier results — unfinished tasks, subpar work — while they spend time improving the processes. In other words you can pick a ‘better before worse’ option or a ‘worse before better’ option.
Why process improvement is sidelined
In other words, most managers choose the ‘work harder’ option because it produces short term results. Meanwhile, the process improvement option gets sidelined because (a) process improvement isn’t guaranteed (experiments fail; new tools turn out to have unexpected problems, etc), plus (b) there’s often a delay before process improvement produces results.
Shortcuts and shorter hours on process improvement
To close the remaining throughput gap, workers resort to shortcuts and gradually reduce the time they spend on process improvement, training, and experimentation until they free the needed four hours per week.
Boosting pressure works immediately
To the contrary, managers quickly learn that boosting production pressure works — throughput rose when they turned up the pressure.
People are problem, not the system prevents improvement
After a number of years, senior management increasingly consists of such war heroes, which further reinforces the mindset that ‘people are the problem’ and ‘only can-do people can advance in this business’, which in turn means there’s no point in doing performance improvement anyway, since the biggest problem is lazy people.
Blameless post-mortems
The overarching conclusion that Repenning and Sterman have is that you’re not going to make any headway on process improvement if you don’t first deal with the inevitable beliefs that ‘people are the problem, not the system they’re embedded within.
Who are we blaming?
Anyone who has worked under dysfunctional management should know the tension between blaming people and blaming the system