“all models are wrong…some are useful”

March 28, 2014 Simon Black 1 Comment

This day one year ago (March 28th 2013) saw the death of one the country’s most quietly influential exports, Professor George Box. Born just after the first world war in Gravesend, Kent and attending University in London for both his batchelor’s degree and his PhD, he ended up spending most of his life in the USA.

This modest and witty Kentish man, who stumbled into the world of statistical analysis is now considered amongst the top ten statisticians of all time.

I recall seeing a George Box presentation at the 1995 First World Congress on Total Quality Management in Sheffield; he described how industrial progress has been based on increasing knowledge and systematic design (he used a schematic of historic developments in shipbuilding to which I have often referred people to illustrate this point).

As a statistician made famous for the development of models to better describe phenomena, Box’s most memorable quote was:

“essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful”

If you come across a model, remember it is just that – something to map onto your mind to help make sense of things. If the model helps, make it something useful to you – by using it. But don’t waste time picking small holes in things – ‘worry selectively’ as Box would say. There is no ‘best way’ to see anything, but if there are fundamental flaws in a model, or it is useless, then drop it. As much as not worrying about everything, there is also little time to keep flogging dead horses!

Reading:

Box G.E.P. (1976) Science and Statistics. Journal of the American Statistical Association, 71 (356): 791-799

Box G.E.P. (2013) An Accidental Statistician, Wiley-Blackwell

Jones B. (2013) George Box: a remembrance. http://blogs.sas.com/content/jmp/2013/03/29/george-box-a-remembrance/

Change Principles, Myths

Culture “Change”: a new frontier or more disruption and waste?

March 10, 2014 Simon Black Leave a comment

The idea of ‘culture change’ has been around at least since the 1970s.

Company culture was flagged as the new route to progress and competitiveness. A good company culture was seen as the antidote to inefficiency, obsolescence and lethargy. The old ways were habits to throw away, to be ashamed of, to turn our back on. People who don’t adapt are seen as dinosaurs or stuck in the dark ages.

This trend in thinking gave rise to a plethora of ‘culture change’ programmes, usually involving energetic efforts to describe company values, visions, extended programmes of training, sometimes introspection (on the part of managers), browbeating and exhortation (of employees), ‘communication cascades’, ‘town-hall meeting’ and suchlike. To support this, various four-box models, multi-ring schematics, life-cycles and illustrations sprung into life to describe this intangible ‘thing’ of culture. But is ‘culture’ a cause or an effect of what happens in organisations?

Peter Drucker stated: “company cultures are like country cultures. Never try to change one. Try instead to work with what you’ve got.” This is pragmatic thinking – and in many senses he is right – but not wholly so. A different perspective is needed, since sometimes the pervading culture can be damaging, counterproductive or simply unfair or unethical.

The culture in a company, or department, or team, or any type of organisation CAN actually be changed, but it is not achieved by trying to change the culture itself. Seddon suggests that we should never make efforts to change a culture by ‘doing it to them’ (Seddon 2005). People will resent it – and also people tend to detect any manipulation or ‘brainwashing’ a mile off. This increases resistance, undermines trust, garners cynicism and is generally unhelpful – the opposite of what you intend.

Don’t try to change people by attempting to change people, instead influence them to change themselves. The same is true of organisations. We can avoid a great waste of time, energy and resources if we skip this approach and instead work on things which really matter to people – and matter to our organisation. Just like forcefield analysis, it is better to identify and remove the forces that are driving the negative culture, rather than push at the positives.

The most effective approach is to intervene at the point of work. Deal with the issues which people already find difficult or frustrating. Remove the conditions which impose upon them the negative behaviours which we want to eliminate. Give them a sense of purpose to fix their ideas upon – how things could change for the better and what THEY can do about it.

Reading:

Drucker PF ( 1993) Managing for the Future: the 1990s and beyond New York: NY, Dutton.

Jacobs, C.J. (2009) Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science, Penguin Group Portfolio, NY

Seddon, J. (2005) Freedom from Command and Control, Vanguard Press, Buckingham, UK.

Change Principles, Leadership

Cool runnings? Change perspectives. Just do it.

February 24, 2014 Simon Black 1 Comment

It is a sporting theme again, inspired by the thrills of the Winter Olympics. Let’s hark back to the 1988 Calgary Games, memorable since British involvement started to impress outside the ice-rink. Eccentricities of Eddie ‘the Eagle’ Edwards, our first Olympic ski-jumper matched Martin Bell’s efforts in the men’s downhill. Even our bob-sledders were competitive.

One story, now globally famous, concerns the Jamaican soldiers formed into an unlikely bobsleigh team on a shoestring budget, qualifying in 1988 as the first tropical nation at the Winter Olympics. American expats George Fitch and William Maloney were inspired by watching Jamaican push-kart racing and had initially raised the idea. At the outset, one of the eventual Jamaican team members, Devon Harris, thought the idea was ridiculous. Another, Dudley Stokes, only got involved because his superior officer in the military told him to participate.

The story was largely fictionalised for dramatic effect in the comedy film ‘Cool Runnings’. In reality the team were warmly welcomed by co-competitors and enjoyed the support of other national teams to access equipment ahead of the Games. The Jamaicans performances improved during the Games programme, but unfortunately they crashed in their final competitive run so did not reach the final. However the precedent had been set and Jamaican teams have qualified for several Winter Games over subsequent decades including the Sochi 2014 Olympics.

So what can we learn? How does this relate to our ideas for change and improvement?

Just do it – and keep trying. If things don’t quite work, don’t give up. George Fitch failed to recruit Jamaican athletes, so asked the Jamaican military to find volunteers.
Other people respond to your initiative. Jamaica’s competitors welcomed the team as co-athletes, whilst the Olympic crowds were fanatically enthusiastic about the team’s efforts.
People can be inspired – your team may have skeptics and cynics, but they can all be inspired by purpose and vision of what is possible and what they can do.
Learn from disappointments. Since the crash of 1988, Jamaica have performed at a high level, beating established winter sport nations such as France, the USA, Russia and Canada.
The unlikely can become the norm. A later Jamaican team-member, Lascelles Brown, married a Canadian, and subsequently won medals for Canada at two Olympic Games.
Seize the opportunity – even unlikely ideas can set a new way of doing things. Small initiatives can have a lasting effect. It just takes the effort to start the ball rolling…

Links:

BBC Sport (2014) Jamaica’s ‘Cool Runnings’ bobsleigh team in 1988, Sochi 2014http://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/winter-olympics/25144672

Evanovitch (2005) Interview with Devon ‘Pele’ Harris Jamaica Bobsled Team Member, Jamaica Primetime. http://www.jamaicans.com/articles/primeinterviews/interviewdevonharris.shtml

Jones E. (2014) Va. Mayor’s Little Known Link to Jamaican Bobsledding, NBC Washington http://www.nbcwashington.com/news/local/Va-Mayor-Cool-Connection-to-Jamaicas-Bobsled-Team-243973451.html

Excellence, Myths, Service

Absorb variety and increase excellence

February 12, 2014 Simon Black 1 Comment

Trying to address the demands of variety is a perennial problem. Customers wanting different features in a product, a different colour, a different size, a specific delivery slot, a student wanting specific feedback on their essay. In times gone by, the craftsman would make things according to what the customer wanted. Take the blacksmith – he would manufacture a horseshoe (or shoes) specific to the horse that was presented to him by his customer. A unique shoe every time, or at least finished from a blank to fit the foot perfectly. If you didn’t make your own clothes, you would buy from someone who did, and the clothes were produced in the same way – fitted and finished in the cloth of your choice.

Increasing numbers of customers (and therefore volumes of production) gradually made the provision this type of offer through ‘cottage industries’ more difficult. Bakers had almost always produced batches of loaves for a range of customers, for example, whilst drapers, haberdashers, corwainers and milliners largely did the same. By the 1900s Henry Ford had taken things to the extreme when he produced the Model T Ford, stating memorably in 1909 that any customer “can have a car painted any colour that he wants so long as it is black”.

Today we are used to buying off-the-shelf or off-the-peg products and services, from fruit to footwear, from breakfasts to banking. Standard products are so familiar that off-the-shelf is seen as inferior and run-of-the-mill. Of course commercially this has become a NEW point of competition and differentiation. Marketeers have identified ways in which we can customise the products to suit our needs. Why?

The reason for wanting to differentiate is, at a superficial level, because we like it. The reason we like it, however, is because we have different needs and at a fundamental level we want a product or service that meets our needs.

So what is there to do about this if we are offering services, whether financial, commercial, educational or other?

Somehow we have to design our services to allow people to request variety, so that a variety of requests from many different customers can be absorbed by the system. Does this sound like some kind of menu system (akin to the dreaded telephone services; press 1 for …). No! Because if we do that we are just providing off-the-shelf all over again: simply reproducing options based on what we already produce in the workshop (or back-office), we build up a set of stock answers that potentially meet no-one’s needs.

Instead we have to do quite the opposite. We need to design processes to be flexible to meet the needs of users/customers at the point of demand. If we do that then our services will respond to them at the point of need and will deliver against their requirements. Services will then be perceived as excellent by the individuals who matter – the people that use them!

***

Why bother with partnerships?

January 7, 2014 Simon Black 1 Comment

‘Partnerships’ might become the new buzzword of the year. But what is this really all about? Why ‘partner-up’ in a collaboration when we used to just do it without using the ‘P’ word? The danger is that partnerships means everything to everyone but in the end does not mean anything in itself.

The Oxford dictionary defines a partner as someone “who takes part in an undertaking with another or others… with shared risks and profits“. If we are serious about partnership it actually means something which carries very specific and, potentially, radical expectations:

1. there is a shared vision of what you want to achieve

2. work expectations are mutual and shared (but NOT contractual)

3. work is conducted through a RELATIONSHIP which builds over time, based on integrity

4. clarity: in desired results, working principles, resources, accountability and consequences

5. the association is long term – the work might change but the relationship continues

6. the association is win/win – partners have to actively seek mutual benefits

7. work output is a sum of the whole partnership, NOT just ‘we do our bit’ and ‘you do yours’

8. there is trust and openness, including when problems or difficulties occur

9. therefore, partners work together to solve problems and make improvements

Critics would argue that this list sounds fine in theory but is it of practical value? Let’s face it we have to have contracts and sometimes people let us down – we also need to prioritise our needs above others or we will not optimise our outputs, surely?

Actually we really need to consider these assumptions more seriously. When we perform at the highest level alongside collaborators or work colleagues, what are the things that really give sense to the work that we do? Is it contracts, standards, specifications, or something else?

I would argue that it is something else – we need relationships which allow us to navigate the flow of work, to be able to ask the right questions, to seek advice and resources, get goods delivered or receive the information on time. We need people who care about the work, who are bothered about the end user (and don’t just do the bare minimum to reduce their own costs). We need people who will raise problems before they incur cost or who will be honest with highlighting difficulties or practicalities before they become a real problem. This is a true work partnership.

Covey, S. (1989) 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Simon & Shuster, New York, NY.

Kouzes J.M. and Posner B.Z. (2007) The Leadership Challenge, 4^th Edition. San Francisco, CA: Jossey Bass John Wiley and Sons.

Change Principles

New Year’s Resolutions

January 3, 2014 Simon Black Leave a comment

The workplace continues to call on our ability to change and respond to:

* users’ requirements

* customers’ preferences

* stakeholder expectation

* regulations

This blog covered a range of topics in 2013.

Here are some things to think about for 2014:

•Make new networks of people (peers, working partners, contacts): broaden your perspectives.
•Develop your team (line reports or project team; commissioned or a gathering of ‘the willing’).
•Be clear about your personal job purpose and how that fits with your department.
•Be ready to choose how you will change: the effort required, and impact of your behaviour.
•Seek useful partnerships – based on relational expectations and mutuality, not contracts.
•Change only when it is meaningful to you: act with integrity, consistent with your values.
•Value incremental change, unless the system shows that it needs a radical overhaul.
•Learn how to identify the difference between common causes and special causes.
•Always seek knowledge and learning – better understand the impact of your work.
•Aim to have fun.

Two books to consider reading this year:

Covey, S. (1989) 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Simon & Shuster, New York, NY.

Scholtes, P. (1998), The Leader’s Handbook: A guide to inspiring your people and managing the daily workflow, New York: McGraw-Hill

Excellence

Fun and the nonsense of work

December 16, 2013 Simon Black Leave a comment

A colleague recently made me aware of the Volkswagen brand campaign ‘The Fun Theory’ which illustrates how fun can be related to choices people make in life by presenting some light-hearted ideas to change mundane tasks such as throwing away litter or climbing stairs. For example against the question “Can we get more people to choose the stairs by making it fun to do?”, their electronic stairway piano made 66% more people choose the stairs over the escalator (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SByymar3bds&app=desktop).

funtheory sequence 2 — Initially people prefer the escalator…sound pads are fitted to the stairs…more people use the stairs!

Of course ideas around fun at work are not particularly new: Douglas McGregor talked about Theory Y managers assuming the people value work as an activity as natural as play. Deming – a statistician by trade, the godfather of Systems Thinking and Statistical Process Control and at first impression someone who would appear fairly austere by today’s standards, always opened his seminars with ‘we are here to have fun‘. Although in person he was actually someone with a strong sense of humour and a dry wit, more importantly, Deming always talked about the need (not the nice to have, the need – it was essential) for people to have “ joy in work“: it is one of his most distinctive and quotable catchphrases.

Let’s consider a couple of FUN: amusing, entertaining, or enjoyable [1]
definitions of fun and joy… JOY: a deep feeling or condition of happiness or contentment [2]

Clearly fun has roots in joy, whilst joy itself is a longer-lasting, life-permeating condition. Deming was clear about what should be done to bring joy back into work. Work should be designed such that it is a pleasurable experience, yet he recognised that most organisations design fun out of the experience. However fun (like respect) is not something that you ‘do’ to people – it is not the point of intervention. The trick is not to design fun back in as an add-on (like the piano steps), but instead to eliminate the things that take fun out of work – lack of purpose, lack of decision making, lack of information, inability to influence outcomes, inability to address the concerns of customers and users, inability to make the service improve, inappropriate comparisons of performance (celebration of irrelevant highs or castigation for lows which are outside our control), inbuilt sub-optimisation and inertia, judgement by uninformed outsiders or distant supervisors. Deming didn’t pull punches – these things were for him the forces of destruction.

Even people doing unimaginably difficult jobs in emergency services, terminal healthcare and humanitarian aid (to name a few), themselves gain deep satisfaction and joy in what they do. In these spheres, however, even people with a strong sense of vocation can be demotivated by the negative forces impinging on their work and can leave their professions. Fun and joy are central to the understanding of human psychology of work – and how we should design it.

To think otherwise is counterproductive. A lack of joy at work is a complete nonsense.

Systems Thinking – the oldest ‘new idea’?

December 2, 2013 Simon Black Leave a comment

Deming in the 1930s, 40s, 50s, 60s & 70s: same man, same thinking, different desks

It is easy to expect that when we work with change that this should mean ‘new’, whereas it should really mean ‘better’ or (if circumstances move the goalposts) ‘different’. The path of management learning over the past 40 years is littered with passing fads which have only delivered disappointment, but a few ideas outlast the comings-and-goings of gurus, trends and fads.

I am staggered to recall that it was 25 years ago that I first encountered the work of Dr W Edwards Deming whilst I sat in an undergraduate management lecture in the late 1980s. I have had the opportunity over the intervening decades to apply, test, avoid, seek alternatives or attempt enhancements to Deming’s ideas (and many other management thinkers). Some of my work has been in small departments, others in very large organisations; some commercial, others not. My thinking has emerged from a growth in understanding.

Deming, born in 1900, was an active communicator, teacher and consultant well into his 90s.

The forces along the top rob people of innovation and applied science. We must replace these forces with management that will restore the power of the individual (adapted from Deming 1994) — Fig 1. “The forces along the top rob people of innovation and applied science…replace these forces with management that will restore the power of the individual” (Deming 1994)

His seminars and lecture tours were still in demand from international audiences until his death 20 years ago this month, in December 1993, a couple of weeks after I passed my PhD viva. Deming continues to get a good hearing based on his books written over 30 years ago.

A freshly edited book which pulls together his collected papers was published in 2013. His illustration (Figure 1) of how a person’s motivation withers over their lifetime under “forces of destructive management thinking” rings as true today as in previous decades. Deming’s books draw on his teaching conducted over 60 years ago in Japan, ideas which arose from concepts developed by his professional mentor Walter Shewhart at Bell Laboratories over 80 years ago.

Shewhart’s own book published in 1931 is a classic, (its style perhaps less accessible to present-day readers). The observations and principles identified by Shewhart and Deming early in the 20th Century still stand up to scrutiny and practice. Their centenary approaches…

… much more than can be said for many management ideas since.

Initiating Change…and making it happen

November 22, 2013 Simon Black Leave a comment

Change can be a threatening experience for people

The autumn brings a cycle of change; in temperate zones it is a shifting of the seasons when people traditionally reset themselves for the challenges of the coming year after the pleasures and abundances of the summer.The harvest is securely stored, now the ground must be prepared for the next year’s crops.

In organizations it is a milestone which sets off a new sales season, a refreshed programme of activity, a new intake of students, or preparations for a new budget.

It is a good time to have mental ‘re-fresh’ to consider what ‘CHANGE is all about.

Peter Senge (1990) suggests a number of principles in initiating change:

(i) there must be a compelling case for change;

(ii) there must be time to change;

(iii) help must be provided during the change process

(iv) there is a need to keep an eye open to new barriers after initial roadblocks have been removed.

When we make change happen, we need to recognise that, as carefully as we might plan it, we must be poised to learn and adapt to outcomes. Even if plans are thorough, they will always be based to some degree upon assumption – and those same assumptions and expectations might change as we gain more knowledge when we put things into action on the ground.

• Assumptions can be made about purpose , the reason for being at our place of work
– we should always test ourselves by asking ‘why are we doing this?’
• Assumptions can be made about people, what they do well, or when they make mistakes
– without understanding the constraints they face; a ‘people problem’ or something else?
• Assumptions can be made about good performance, and reasons to celebrate
– without knowing the true cost of that performance; is it sustainable?
• Assumptions can be made about one-off failures, or chronic repeating failures
– without knowing which is which, nor the underlying causes of their occurrence
• Assumptions can be made about cause and effect, and implementing solutions
– without understanding potential unintended consequences.

The best way of overcoming assumptions is to talk to people to identify things to examine; then to examine those things (by getting useful data); then evaluate the outcomes of our examination; then identify what to act upon and how – Plan-Do-Check-Act (starting at ‘Check’).

We must get better at using knowledge, and distance ourselves from rhetoric and assumption. This is done by understanding the system we work in, how to properly measure its performance, and what we can do about it with careful experimentation.

There is a neat way to define the power of working on the system, versus the expectations placed on people; it sends a message to anyone wanting to improve the way things work in their team. This quote is, I understand, attributed to Geary Rummler:

“Put a good performer in a bad system – and the system wins every time.”

In other words, don’t go around trying to change people; instead put effort into changing the system, and get your people involved in initiating the change…and making it happen.

The Pale Blue Dot – paradigms and the big picture

November 1, 2013 Simon Black Leave a comment

We all know that the world is a big place, with lots of complexity and over 7 billion people living in it.
Let’s just stop for a moment and take a look at this photograph…

Taken in 1990 by the Voyager 1 spacecraft, this image is notable for the diagonal coloured stripes; but don’t be distracted – these colours are just artefacts of sunlight glancing off the camera housing. They are not the subject of the photograph.

The most important piece of the image is however, the nearly unnoticeable speck of blue just over halfway down the brown stripe on the right. This is Earth.

Carl Sagan, astrophysicist, astronomer and author, pointed out that: “all of human history has happened on that tiny pixel, which is our only home” (speech, Cornell University, 1994).

So what shall we think about when we return to work on Monday?

Rather than worry about the wider world and the vastness beyond it, we should perhaps take note of Stephen Covey’s suggestion and focus on our Circle of Influence, namely the things close enough to us that we can do something about. If we proactively work on what we can change in ourselves it will cause a ripple outwards and increase our influence to inspire and change others.

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