One of the major failures of many
managers is their belief that improvements anywhere in the system will result in a system
improvement. I've discussed the concept of suboptimzation before on my blog,
but this time I want to talk about the difference between an optimizer and a
satisficer. So what the heck is a satisficer? First, let's talk more about the
concept of suboptimization and
then we'll define both an optimizer and a satisficer. By the way, there's
another great book for you written by Boaz Ronen, Joseph Pliskin and Shimeon
Pass entitled Focused
Operation's Management for Health Services Organizations.
The
authors I referred to above define Suboptimization of a system as: Separate
optimization of every subsystem, which results in underutilization of the performance potential
of the whole system and may result in deterioration of overall performance.
Nobel
laureate H. A. Simon recognized many years ago a managerial situation that
causes decision-making hardship and his approach revolutionized management.
Simon made the claim that executives and other decision makers are trying to
become optimizers
when making decisions. Simon defined an optimizer as a decision maker who
always wants to make the best possible decision without any consideration of
time constraints. He further claimed that decision makers will never have all
of the needed information available to evaluate every conceivable alternative.
Simon tells us that in a dynamic world changes are frequent and it is of utmost
importance to make timely decisions. What good is a perfect decision if it
comes way too late?
In
1957 Simon proposed an alternative approach to decision makers and recommended
that they become satisficers.
He defined a satisficer as someone who is satisfied with a reasonable solution
that will significantly improve the system and does not look for optimal
solutions. The authors go on to explain
that the satisficer sets a level of aspiration or a threshold that he or she
aspires to achieve. The objective here
is not to maximize or minimize some performance measure, but rather to achieve
a solution that will improve a measure.
And once the level of aspiration has been achieved, the satisficer can
set a new level of aspiration.
A
satisficer achieves excellence by complying with two basic principles:
1.
Set
a high enough level of aspiration that is compatible with market conditions,
competition, or investor expectations.
2.
Adopt
an approach of continuous improvement.
The
bottom line of all of this is that organizations don’t need to function
perfectly, they only need to perform better than the competition. This too is my message today. Don’t try to seek perfection because usually
in your quest for it, your decisions might be perfect, but they will most
likely come too late. This has been one
of the problems I have with Six Sigma “projects.” Although the DMAIC is a wonderful approach to
improvement, I have seen too many examples where there is a failure to
launch! Collecting mountains of data,
analyzing it using sophisticated statistical tools, but all of this at the
expense of valuable time.
I
am a total believer in the integration of Lean and Six Sigma with the Theory of
Constraints simply because TOC provides the focus that is missing in many
improvement initiatives. In many ways
Six Sigma is an approach used by many optimizers. I am a satisficer and have been for many
years. Rather than quantifiable bottom
line results taking months to achieve, since I am a satisficer my results
typically come in weeks. Are my solutions
perfect? Absolutely not! But at the end of the day, in my opinion, a
satisficer’s approach achieves leadership buy-in much faster because they see
bottom line improvement much quicker than with an optimizer’s approach. How many of you are optimizers?
Bob
Sproull
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