DailyKaizen

Problems are gold.  So the good news is that over the last six months or so as an organization we have gotten a whole lot better at making problems visible.   This is a great thing, since the problems have always been there, but in the past they have often remained hidden due to a variety of reason.   They have begun to become visible both as the result of processes that we have begun to change as well as changes we are beginning to make in our management system.  I also believe this is a good indicator that the culture of the organization is beginning to change for the better.   Slowly, over time I have watched how the transparency and openness of dialog between leaders has increased and with it the opportunity for improvement.

One of the biggest challenges we have with this heightened awareness of problems is the need for the organization to have systems, processes and capabilities that allow it to quickly solve these newly found problems.   This is an area that we are not yet very good at.  This has become very obvious over the last month as we have driven the checking process down through our organization to monitor our progress toward strategic targets.  Every checking session we find areas where our hypothesis were incorrect and we are needing to put in place countermeasures to get us back on plan.  The good news is that we know we are off plan and we need to intervene.  In the past we would not have even had that level of awareness.  The bad news is that our problem solving methods are non-standard, to slow, are lacking urgency and are lacking depth on the technical side.  Basically, we don’t know how to swarm problems. 

So, like I said in the beginning of the post: problems are gold.  From a management system perspective we now have a new problem and the root cause is that as an organization we don’t know how to solve problems.  So our countermeasure is simple: we will ramp up our capability through education and more importantly a whole lot of experience.  We sure have a lot of problems to practice with   :<)

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