One of the concepts that Bruce Nelson and I have written about in our
unpublished sequel to Epiphanized is
the concept of systems thinking. In
today’s posting, this is the topic I want to present to everyone. It’s not a new concept, but for us it’s the
proverbial missing link in most improvement initiatives.
One of the
things that many companies fail to appreciate is, that in order to improve an
organization, the organization, must be viewed at a much higher level of thinking
than simple processes within it. This
thinking is referred to as systems thinking. So just what is systems thinking and why should we care about it? One of the best analogies I’ve ever seen, was
put together by Bill Dettmer in his paper, Constraints Management written
in 2000. (Note: This paper is actually a full chapter in a book on the CQM body of knowledge called
The Complete Guide to the CQM, written
by Thomas Pyzdek and originally published in 1996 by Quality America, Inc.
(Phoenix, AZ).
In his paper, Dettmer tells us to consider the analogy of a football team. Dettmer goes on to say that “major
professional sports spend a lot of time and money on process improvement, even
though they probably don’t look at it that way.” He tells us, for example, “that
a pro football team owner can spend millions on a contract for a star
quarterback and they expect their passing process to improve as a result. Unfortunately,
many times the touchdowns don’t happen at the rate expected, even though the
owner spent these huge sums of money signing a star quarterbacks.” Dettmer
explains that “at some point in the “process failure mode effects analysis,”
the coaches discover it’s impossible for this highly-valued quarterback to
complete passes from flat on his back.” They typically find that the offensive
line needs shoring up. Or a good
blocking back is needed, or a better game plan, or any number of other factors."
Dettmer’s point
with this football analogy is that any organization succeeds or fails as a
complete system, not as a collection of isolated, independent parts or processes. “But like the football team alluded to above,
once you have a “star performer” at every position, you have a challenge of a
different sort: coordinating and synchronizing the efforts of every component in
the system to produce the best system result.” In other words, once the
ducks are in line, the task is to make them march in step together." So just by
improving isolated parts of a system, does not at all guarantee that the total
system will improve.
Many times in my
blog postings I’ve written about the importance of identifying and focusing improvement
efforts directly on the system constraint. Just like the owner of the pro football
team, it is critical to consider the impact of any changes on the total
system. What good does it do the owner
to go recruit a great quarterback, if the offensive line doesn’t give him
adequate protection? Or even a great
running back who doesn’t get the blocking he needs to get him into the
opponents backfield? It’s the system
impact that needs to be considered. Or
as Dettmer tells us, “constraint management seeks to help managers at all
levels of an organization maintain proper focus on the factors that are most
critical to overall success: system constraints.”
One last point
from Dettmer’s article, In this same article, Dettmer points out how important
is it to optimize the system, rather than its component parts? He quotes Dr, Deming
who answered that question in The New Economics for Industry, Government,
Education (Deming, 1993, pp. 53, 100). Deming observed:
- Optimization is the process of orchestrating the efforts of all components toward achievement of the stated aim. Optimization is management’s job. Everybody wins with optimization.
- Anything less than optimization of the system will bring eventual loss to every component in the system. Any group should have as its aim optimization of the larger system that the group operates in.
- The obligation of any component is to contribute its
best to the system, not to maximize its own production, profit, or sales, nor any
other competitive measure. Some components may operate at a loss themselves in
order to optimize the whole system, including the components that take a loss.
To finish this
posting, I want to quote Dettmer one last time, when he wrote the following
paragraphs: “This is a powerful
indictment of the way most companies have been doing business since Frederick
Taylor’s time, not excluding the “quality enlightenment” era of the 1980s and
1990s. In essence, Deming said that maximizing local efficiencies everywhere in
a system is not necessarily a good thing to do.”
“To express the
concept of system constraints more simply, Goldratt has equated systems to
chains (Goldratt, 1990, p.53): We are
dealing here with “chains” of actions. What determines the performance of a
chain? The strength of the chain is determined by the strength of its weakest
link. How many weakest links exist in a chain? As long as statistical
fluctuations prevent the links from
being totally identical, there is only one weakest link in a chain.”
“Goldratt goes
on to suggest that there are as many constraints in a system as there are truly
independent chains. Realistically, in most systems there aren’t very many truly
independent chains. The dictionary (Barnes and Noble, 1989) defines system as:
an assemblage or combination of things or parts forming a complex or unitary
whole; the structure or organization, society, business...Thomas H. Athey
defines a system as any set of components which could be seen as working
together for the overall objective of the whole (Athey, 1982, p.12). The
underlying theme in these definitions is an interrelatedness or interdependency.
By definition, then, a “system” can’t have too many truly independent chains.
So if there aren’t too many independent chains in a particular system—whether a
manufacturing, service, or government system—at any given time, only a very few
variables truly determine the performance of the system.”
“This idea has
profound implications for managers. If only a very few variables determine
system performance, the complexity of managers’ jobs can be dramatically
reduced. Look at it in terms of the Pareto rule, which suggests that only 20
percent of a system accounts for 80 percent of the problems within it. If this
is a valid conclusion, managers should be able to concentrate most of their
attention on that critical 20 percent. Goldratt’s concept of chains and “weakest
links” takes the Pareto concept a step farther: the weakest link accounts for
99 percent of the success or failure of a system to progress toward its goal
(Goldratt, 1990, p. 53).”
I don’t very
often quote authors on a word-for-word basis, but in this case, Dettmer
presented the point of systems thinking in such a powerful way, that I thought
it best to leave it as is. As I said earlier, Systems Thinking is the missing link that separates excellent improvement results from mediocre ones. We all live and work within systems, so if you're trying to improve yours, then think at a higher level than an individual process.
Bob Sproull
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