In spite of the overwhelming odds against me, every new year I firmly resolve to reignite my relentless passion about creating a critical mass of colleagues committed to practicing improvement as “built-in” to cultural DNA using data sanity.
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Will this be the year you join me?
Here is a challenging road map of 12 synergistic resolutions for those of you willing to take this nontrivial risk.
1. Resolve to ask yourself, “Have I unintentionally evolved into a qualicrat?”
The formalization of organizational quality improvement efforts into a separate silo with increasing (and excruciating) formality has been an unstoppable evolution. One could look at it as evolving from Neanderthal to Cro-Magnon. But improvement seems to have settled for and is stuck in the “good enough” mediocrity of Cro-Magnon.
I suppose one benefit of this evolution has been serious acceptance of quality as a viable career path. But the consequence of this has been an expensive, self-sustaining training subindustry—not all of it competent—with countless certifications and belts.
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Comments
In a rut?
I have always disliked data and statistics. People playing number games to get reactions. For example if two out of four people are smokers they would say 50% are smokers. It’s still true that two out of four is half or 50% but you cannot solicit the same reaction by saying only two people 50% has more punch.
It’s funny I come across this article today as work has been slow and I was pondering improvements to my department. I decided to poke my head in on Quality digest in hopes it might zap my brain.
I work as the calibration tech in a manufacturing plant. When I took over the position it was a train wreck/ traffic jam/ landfill of a department. The first six months were spent trying to prevent the bottleneck crippling production, while detangling the previous employees’ methods. At the same time trying to locating better methods and create my own guides from the mountain of forms, papers, and processes (most completely useless) that existed.
The department is night and day different from when I started and I finally tossed all the mountains of copied copies of paperwork.
I have incorporated many methods and chopped them to the bare bone. Still I feel like I have reached that place, as you put it “Cro-Magnon mediocrity”.
I find myself now in a rut, I know more can be done but I refuse to sacrifice quality for the sake of time. I have removed the overly redundant processes and reorganized the steps (you have to make the sandwich before you can eat it) so they flow smother.
I’m not trying to get a big head but can you reach a point where you have hit the ceiling? The only place I can think to improve is equipment. To request equipment I’ll need to brush up on my dentistry and start to pull teeth. *Grumble* do I sling (chokes on the word) DATA, to shock them into putting pen to checkbook?
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