Ray Gun Sales: Best Practices Anyone?
The best example of how herd leadership impacts organizations negatively is to highlight the concept of best practices. Throughout my career, I have listened to herd leadership or leadership that occasionally flirts with herd leadership characterize best practices as being an asset to make our safety programs better. I can understand the lure of adopting best practices because, why not, someone else has already shown that they can work.
What if you're a dinosaur thinking about becoming a ray gun? You saw a ray gun work once and thought if I can just get a hold of the blueprints, I can become a ray gun too. Best practices can help us dress up like a ray gun; we might even get something to shoot out of the front of the dinosaur. A real ray gun is the culmination of years of wisdom and learning, and it would be extremely difficult to just say we are one without following a similar blueprint to gain the requisite wisdom and maturity to build one.
My experience is that the pursuit and implementation of best practices can not only make us lazy but are counterproductive to real growth. The habitual use of them by management looks like "the flavor of the month" processes to our team members. They often do not get implemented completely and make the improvement initiatives look like a revolving door of guesswork. Workforces become hardened and resistant to these initiatives over time. These processes make initiatives that produce improvements much more difficult to gain acceptance and take hold. This is especially true of companies that make it their stated purpose to launch best practices on their work environments as an objective of change.
Knowledge and experience create wisdom. Toyota didn't become Toyota by becoming Ford first. There were common foundations in the beginning, but Toyota created and built their own foundation of wisdom to grow exceptional performance. This is the essence of Intrinsic Stability.
Toyota's philosophy of stabilizing, measuring, improving and repeating, along with setting internal goals for process improvement, that supports their culture is the organization's true nugget of wisdom. All the other incredible by-products of Toyota's journey, which organizations characterize as best practices, were outcrops of their internal wisdom.
Organizations summarize their learning and attempt to plant those conceptual elements within their own organizations with the expectation that they will reward themselves with a similar benefit. These organizations spend precious time and resources attempting to plant these mature processes on top of our less mature processes. These less mature organizations get frustrated over time because these adopted best practices are not igniting their organization, or they can't sustain large process conversions effectively using these mature tools because the switching costs are too high or complex for their level of Intrinsic Stability. Too many precious resources are used to shore up areas upstream and downstream of the affected best practice implementation areas just to keep things going. Over time, the focus starts to shift; elements of the best practice become too cumbersome to maintain because the resource exchange is too high, and the process is deemed a failure. Generally, the organization's change of focus was to blame for abandoning the best practice.
What if the organization looked more like a toaster than a dinosaur? Aren't they closer to becoming a ray gun? The short answer is "yes." The growth and maturity needed to go from dinosaur to toaster would be daunting, to say the least. It would be moving from a very low Intrinsic Stability level of maturity, where many of the company's resources would be committed to maintaining basic core functions, to an organization that generates a very low error rate and maintains a substantially higher Intrinsic Stability, to a substantially more agile organization with fewer resource drains for core functions when change occurs within that organization.
Since a ray gun is less of a gap in maturity to a toaster, the organization would have more Intrinsic Stability to attempt a larger move. There is still a substantial amount of risk in this large of a jump. If the maturity gap is too great or a core function is abnormally weak, such as a partnership with leadership, then the trade-off will always be extra organizational energy to bridge that gap. The organization feels it two-fold because not only are they attempting to hold up a foreign culture until processes change and work changes, but also organizational learning is negatively impacted, which requires the organization to hold it up even longer, requiring additional energy spent. If the energy exchange is too high and the organization cannot sustain it, the effort goes the way of the dinosaur. This dynamic may play out slower because the Intrinsic Stability of a toaster is higher. In the final tally, some of the improvement efforts may be retained if the utility was added, but in an organization, like all living things, we will want to seek equilibrium with regard to its energy exchange and normalize by creating stability within its maturity level. Depending on the amount of utility the attempt provided to the organization, it would probably still look like a toaster if the maturity gap was too big.
In contrast, if a toaster wanted to become an oven, then we would have a higher chance of success. Depending on the Intrinsic Stability of the organization and the method used to grow through that change, the energy exchange will be much smaller. This change will feel more gradual and less forced. The leadership team would be operating closer to its capabilities to execute against the growth objectives. Any missing skills needed for execution can be learned and demonstrated easily because the skill requirements for the improvement would be closer to their current skill set. Leadership has time to engage their teams, solicit their input for improvements and allow those team members to execute those changes into the organization. The organization doesn't fear the changes from operational team members because the changes are small and directionally correct. The organization will naturally seek equilibrium within the changes and as it stabilizes the changes through the way it works, the culture would just notch up. Two objectives would be achieved. The organization would have increased its capabilities and would have grown its Intrinsic Stability. With each improvement cycle, it will tax the core functions of the organization less and less as it continues its growth on its maturity curve and, most importantly, builds on previous experience. This organization is learning to learn with each successful improvement cycle.
I have found in the wake of best practice failures that we often don't do an effective postmortem on the failed best practice implementations. In truth, it often seems that the experience is so cumbersome toward the end that the leadership is happy to see it die with reflections on why they let it go on so long. In the analysis, the most common reason for failure is that they placed a mature stable process on top of their immature unstable process without the infrastructure and organizational wisdom to support it.
My experience is that the impact the best practice has on the processes upstream and downstream of the focus area is where the strain is felt first. The organizational maturity, stability and agility needed to integrate that new stable process is never evaluated to determine if the host process is too immature to sustain the change. We never attempt to understand what elements of the invader processes impede our adopting it successfully. An organization that fails to learn from history is doomed to repeat it.
In every case where we attempt culture or process changes, we should absolutely investigate every improvement opportunity to improve our level of Intrinsic Stability. I would say that we should apply this concept to our successes as well, for no other reason but to validate our own data and measurements.
Organizations must earn their own wisdom. Our organizational culture reflects our wisdom or lack of wisdom. Creating and understanding the correct metrics to measure Intrinsic Stability, which reflects our culture, should be a non-negotiable. The level of sophistication of our measuring tools and improvement tools is critical in improving our Intrinsic Stability. The metrics we use to reflect our growth should be maturity specific as well. Any measurement that doesn't tell the level of organization it is intended to impact what to do next probably needs to be rethought to determine effectiveness. If you are a dinosaur and you intend to measure to inform other dinosaurs of vital information, don't provide a copy of a ray gun report and expect absorption. Communication requires understanding, which requires the people to absorb that communication in a way that makes it executable. How many organizations canvas their communications for understanding to ensure their communication for the expectation of performance was clearly understood?
I have gotten more than my shares of free lunches with the following simple bet to leadership around communication. I bet them that I can go out and speak to five people in their organization randomly and ask them about important messages provided. Out of those five people if three people repeat the key messages provided, then the manager wins, and if three people can't repeat those key messages, then I win. Let me tell you that I have never purchased anyone's lunch....
