Getting to the root cause.
While out for a bike ride with a friend of mine today, we talked about the class on A3 thinking that I’ll be teaching this fall at the Stanford Continuing Studies Program. As I described the importance of finding the root cause, he told me about a fascinating example of root cause analysis by the National Park Service. (My source for this story is here.)
There was excessive wear on the Lincoln Memorial from all the cleaning it was getting because of bird droppings. The Park Service experimented with different cleaners and brushes to cut down on the wear. That didn’t work so they looked at it differently and asked “Why are we cleaning it so much?” Because of all the bird droppings.
They put up nets to keep the birds out and it worked some but not well enough and the tourists complained about them. They went one step further and asked “Why do we have so many birds coming to this monument?” After studying it they determined it was because of the insects that swarmed the monument in the evenings. They tried different types of insecticides but nothing seemed to work for long. So they asked “Why do we have so many insects swarming the monument?”
They determined the bright lights that illuminated the monument in the evenings were drawing the insects. They found out that by turning on the lights 1 hour later each evening they could eliminate over ninety percent of the insects and the resulting bird droppings. The brushes and cleaners, nets, and insecticides all addressed symptoms of the root cause. The Root Cause was the lighting and once it was addressed the problem went away.
This story really exemplifies lean thinking at its best. The Park Service solved a major problem without spending large amounts of money or reallocating huge numbers of resources. By taking the time to understand the problem instead of jumping to solutions, they were able to institute a cheap, effective countermeasure.
As you know, I’m fascinated by the dysfunctional relationship people have with email, and the waste that it often creates. This story makes me think of all the technological solutions that companies are peddling to fix the email blight. Yes, they may work. But I’m not sure that they’re really addressing the root cause of the problem. You can categorize, prioritize, analyze, sort, thread, and color-code your messages all you want — but you’re still going to spend a preposterously large amount of time dealing with mail. Perhaps it would be better to figure out why you’re getting so much, and how you can prevent its creation in the first place.
How are you going to stop the (metaphorical) bird crap from invading your office?
I’ll be a guest on The Lean Nation radio show on August 30 from 4-5pm on 790 AM Talk and Business, hosted by (the always dapper) Karl Wadensten. This is a reschedule of my earlier appearance, when the Yankee game preempted my interview.
We’re going to discuss how lean principles translate to good leadership. This topic was inspired by a guest post I did for Mark Graban’s Lean Blog, titled “You Don’t Have to be Lean to be Good.”
You can listen to my appearance live on 790AM in Providence, RI. The show is also globally available via a live audio stream at 790business.com. I would love to hear your opinions and answer your questions on this topic or others, so feel free to call in to the show. The call-in number is 401-437-5000 or toll free at 888-345-0790.
Can’t tune in live? The podcast will be available after the show, so you can have my dulcet tones put you to sleep while you’re sitting on the airport tarmac.
Last week, I wrote about 5 specific behaviors that e-mail users
tend to display, and that can drive their team’s productivity down.
These behaviors were
- Not responding to legitimate e-mails and leave others in the dark
- Abandoning e-mail conversations in the middle and leave them hanging
- Responding to e-mail only partially leaving important issues unanswered
- Responding to e-mail vaguely delaying dealing with the real issues
- Copying everyone and their brother unnecessarily
I also included a brief self-assessment (the 3-minute e-mail “airhead” test) that can help us reflect on the above behaviors and recognize how much we engage in them.
From Self to Others
While a self-assessment can be useful, the real assessment needs to include “others”; the people who send us e-mail or are on the receiving end of our e-mails, and who may have differing opinions about whether we engage in these e-mail “airhead” behaviors and to what degree.
I am inviting you to involve others in helping you assess your e-mail behaviors by sending them this 360-degree feedback form (see below), so they can give you their input on your e-mail behaviors. Forward to them the form and ask them for their feedback (anonymously if preferable). Ideally you would include people from all angles, like your colleagues, your direct reports, your manager, and potentially people from other groups.
Download the e-mail 360-degree feedback (PDF, Microsoft Word, Web Form)
Once you gather the feedback, compare it to your own self-assessment, and see what you learn, and what adjustments you might want to make to how you manage e-mail.
Score interpretation
As a recap from last week, here is the interpretation of the score:
- Total e-mail airhead: Total score of 15 or above
- Semi e-mail airhead: Total score of 10 to 14
- Human e-mail user: Total score of 7 to 9
- Accomplished e-mail user: Total score of 4 to 6
- Total e-mail geek: Total score of 0 to 3
Stay tuned for more tips and techniques relating to e-mail management!
Additional resources
We all do some of this at least some of the time, but when we do most of this and most of the time, this can drive our productivity and our team’s productivity down drastically.
5 things that e-mail airheads do
- Don’t respond to legitimate e-mails and leave others in the dark
- Abandon e-mail conversations in the middle and leave them hanging
- Respond to e-mail only partially leaving important issues unanswered
- Respond to e-mail vaguely delaying dealing with the real issues
- Copy everyone and their brother unnecessarily
Take the 3-minute e-mail airhead test now!
Interpreting the score
After you take the test and add your scores, please review the following:
- Total e-mail airhead: Total score of 15 or above
- Semi e-mail airhead: Total score of 10 to 14
- Human e-mail user: Total score of 7 to 9
- Accomplished e-mail user: Total score of 4 to 6
- Total e-mail geek: Total score of 0 to 3
Stay tuned for more tips and techniques relating to how to deal with e-mail “airheads” and how not to be one, more often than not!
MBA case studies teach the wrong things
A couple of months ago, Steve Spear wrote that C-level and other senior leaders usually don’t embrace lean as a strategic concern, because their training has been focused on making decisions about transactions, rather than making discoveries through experimentation. As he describes it,
Business managers are not trained to learn/discover. Rather they are trained to decide about transactions. Consider the MBA curriculum core:
- Finance–how to value transactions
- Accounting–how to track transactions
- Strategy–taught as a transactional discipline of entering or exiting markets based on relative strength and weakness
- OM courses–heavily pervaded by analytical tools (in support of decisions)
Largely absent: scientific method, experimentation, exploration, learning methods, teaching methods, etc.
I couldn’t agree more. When I think back to my MBA classes (1990-92), I remember wading through case studies in all my classes that ostensibly taught me something about business. But the truth is that these simplified, post-hoc analyses really didn’t do a great job in teaching any useful information (at least for me). The eventual business success achieved by the heroic managers in times of crisis were attributed to brilliant insight, or “leveraging core competencies,” or some other management buzzword of the day. I can’t think of a single case where the leadership team said, in effect, “Well, we’re screwed. Now what do we do? How about if we try a few countermeasures and see what works?”
Even worse, the great insight was almost always a major — even revolutionary — idea springing fully-developed from the forehead of the brilliant leader in isolation. No incremental steps or improvements that, over time, lead to a successful shift. No input or ideas from the workforce, who, as Kevin Meyer always reminds us, is composed of more than just pairs of hands. No guidance on how to understand the real problem, rather than simply leaping to solutions. No lessons on how to work through PDCA cycles in an effort to make real, lasting improvement.
The truth is that the corporate ecosystem is enormously complex. Presenting a simplified view of that ecosystem may seem to make pedagogical sense, but it leads to the false belief that problems are easily understood, that there is one “right” answer, and that there’s no need for experimentation. And that’s a tremendous disservice to future business leaders.
