“What if I were to tell you that one of the most important keys to your organization’s success can be found in a very unlikely place—a place many of you may consider to be complicated, inaccessible, and perhaps even downright boring? What if I were to tell you that this key to success is already one of the most ubiquitous and impactful forces in your organization? It’s there, waiting for you to tap into it. This key to success is measurement.”

No, that’s not me talking above, but my respected colleague Dean Spitzer, from his wonderful book, Transforming Performance Measurement (AMACOM, 2007). He’s a former executive at IBM, where he did groundbreaking research on “the socialization of measurement” and was a thought leader in identifying innovative performance measurement models.

As a consultant, it’s easy to lose touch with reality and become a platitude-spouting machine. I always like hearing from my readers because it keeps me grounded—and I try my best to reply to them all. My heart lies with the hard-working front-line folks doing the real work.

As long as I can offer real solutions and reassurance to people passionate about improvement, as in the unedited conversation below, my passion for helping practitioners like this to create a culture where improvement is embedded into the organizational DNA will not fade.

It started innocently enough with a comment on my article, “What Are You Tolerating?”

Reader
I guess I’d say that based on an I-MR chart [i.e., individuals-moving range chart], there is no statistical proof that the improvement efforts they made have done anything to reduce the number of falls. Basically, this year and last year are not significantly different.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the improvement efforts that they’ve done so far are all a waste of time, does it? Surely, there is a way to have an impact.

I’m curious: What would your advice be?

At the end of my December 2012 column, “Evolving Beyond Platitudes to Holistic Improvement,” I described three different management styles. Management expert Peter Block saw the need to evolve away from traditional management, and in “As Goes the Follower, So Goes the Leader,” he describes a simulation designed by the late Joel Henning in which teams are asked to role-play three different styles of leadership. Each is given a short case study, asked to define the problem, and then do one of three things.

I paraphrase the simulation and its results below.

Team 1 role-plays a high-control, autocratic leadership style (i.e., traditional management). This team devises a solution and runs an employee meeting as a true autocrat would do it: The team has all the answers and restricts the questions for the end. This could be perceived that employees are the problem, and all they need to do is follow the leader, embrace the vision, and be rewarded for their compliance (they will also save their jobs).

Previously I discussed three common cause strategies (links below) that help to expose all existing, underlying special causes of variation. They also provide necessary insight into how the current process came to be and allow construction of a baseline for assessing the effects of an intervention.

Common cause strategy No. 1: Exhaust in-house data in “Wasting Time With Vague Solutions, Part 2”
Common cause strategy No. 2: Study the current process in “Wasting Time With Vague Solutions, Part 3”
Common cause strategy No. 3: Process dissection in “Another Strategy for Determining Common Cause”

W. Edwards Deming considered this a major achievement—getting a process to the point where only common cause is present. He felt that it was only after all lurking special causes were exposed and appropriately dealt with that improvement could begin.