Cheryll and I were just talking about our personal experiences in very-high-performance groups, and how it is impossible to tell which person was "responsible" for which of the ideas that the group, as a whole, surfaces and gives form to.
This merging or loss of individual identity seems to be an indispensible part of the activity of a very-high performance group. As is well known in sports like basketball, it is not the individual super-stars that are responsible for the victory, it is the TEAM as a whole that wins or loses.
It is not surprising that the academic community of college professors writes very little about this type of work, or that they are baffled by requests from above to "teach group work."
The reason is that their entire socialization and formative period, working up towards tenure, and for that matter their educational experience before that, all focus attention and behavior on doing things that can be CLEARLY ATTRIBUTED TO EXACTLY ONE PERSON, ie, "their work". They are trained, repeatedly, to shun and shy away from work where it is not clear who did what part of the intellectual heavy lifting.
After six years of forcing themselves to behave this way, and dragging their belief systems around to support how "reasonable" that is, when they finally achieve "tenure" and are certified by the University as qualified to teach on their own recognizance, as it were, as "full professors", they are simultaneously essentially blind to and unable to see how to work as true collaborative group members, where exactly the opposite is valued, where it is best if ideas belong to the group, not to individuals.
Similarly in industrial settings, in business, compensation and reward systems are typically set up to reward only those behaviors that can clearly and unambiguously be attributed to that one person. Regardless how much the Human Resources (HR) department, and Organizatational Development people lecture and give moving Powerpoint presentations of the importance of "team work" and "working together", when it comes to deciding who gets a raise, or promotion, or who gets laid off, what goes into the equation is JUST the actions that can be clearly and unambiguously attributed to each person.
The quality guru W. Edward Deming noted this problem, and thought that our entire educational system was wrong-headed, training us to think exactly the wrong way about how to approach problems, as individuals, not as collective supra-identity-groups. (my new term, but I like it.) True collaboration demands that ideas be detached from their personal source, so that the group can own them and run with them, without creating "winners and losers".
Here are a few quotes from Deming, by the way, directly related to this subject, taken from the Wikipedia article on Deming (emphasis added).
The Appreciation of a system involves understanding how interactions (i.e. feedback) between the elements of a system can result in internal restrictions that force the system to behave as a single organism that automatically seeks a steady state. It is this steady state that determines the output of the system rather than the individual elements. Thus it is the structure of the organization rather than the employees, alone, which holds the key to improving the quality of output.and
- Drive out fear , so that everyone may work effectively for the company. (See Ch. 3 of "Out of the Crisis")
- Break down barriers between departments. People in research, design, sales, and production must work as a team, to foresee problems of production and in use that may be encountered with the product or service.
and
- Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
S
xandeven Deadly Diseases
The "Seven Deadly Diseases" include
- Lack of constancy of purpose
- Emphasis on short-term profits
- Evaluation by performance, merit rating, or annual review of performance
- Mobility of management
- Running a company on visible figures alone
- Excessive medical costs
- Excessive costs of warranty, fueled by lawyers who work for contingency fees
"A Lesser Category of Obstacles" includes
- Neglecting long-range planning
- Relying on technology to solve problems
- Seeking examples to follow rather than developing solutions
- Excuses, such as "Our problems are different"
(Deming on Quality Circles) "That's all window dressing. That's not fundamental. That's not getting at change and the transformation that must take place. Sure we have to solve problems. Certainly stamp out the fire. Stamp out the fire and get nowhere. Stamp out the fires puts us back to where we were in the first place. Taking action on the basis of results without theory of knowledge, without theory of variation, without knowledge about a system. Anything goes wrong, do something about it, overreacting; acting without knowledge, the effect is to make things worse. With the best of intentions and best efforts, managing by results is, in effect, exactly the same, as Dr. Myron Tribus put it, while driving your automobile, keeping your eye on the rear view mirror, what would happen? And that's what management by results is, keeping your eye on results." [2]AND THIS GEM
Eliminate slogans, exhortations, and targets for the work force asking for zero defects and new levels of productivity. Such exhortations only create adversarial relationships, as the bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.That last gem of "profound knowledge" is worth a great deal of study.
First note that it includes the concept that, "adversarial relationships" are noted as contrary to good results, not something that produces good results. COMPETING to produce good NUMBERS is exactly the WRONG thing to do, is what Deming is saying.
But a more important gem is in that last phrase so let me repeat it:
...The bulk of the causes of low quality and low productivity belong to the system and thus lie beyond the power of the work force.He is saying one of the key teachings of "systems thinking" here, namely, that the output of "a system" is NOT primarily the result of the parts of the system, so much as it is the result of the RELATIONSHIPS AMONG the parts of the system.
Our language lacks the correct words to pick up and hold this thought, so let's at least hit it from several different directions.
Maybe one way to think of it is this -- the quality of great music does not depend on how superb single notes are on the piano, but on how well the notes are combined together, where almost imperceptible changes in timing of that synchronization make or break the desired effect.
The way to climb up the exponential ramp is to get into a world that has a complete LOOP in it, which has a beneficial impact, and then repeatedly go around that loop, over and over, each time increasing the impact by another FACTOR, say, of a few percent. This process, if carried out 100 times, compounds the effect to be huge. This is the sort of thing that goes on, for example, in a tornado -- each cycle of the loop releases a little bit of energy, and primes the loop to release even more energy on the next pass. It doesn't matter actually, how much energy is released on the first pass, or any pass, because that can be made up by a sufficient number of passes of ANY non-zero positive value.
IF we judged whether this process is "worth it" by looking at the improvement available by a single pass of the loop, perhaps 1 percent, by classical management thinking, this would probably be discarded as not worth the effort.
That is the wrong question to ask. The right question is, CAN WE REPEAT the process and COMPOUND the effect? Next time we go around that loop, can we get a 1 percent increase on the 101 % we ended with last time, to get us up to 102.1 percent? Again, this difference between 2 percent and 2.1 percent looks meaningless, but it is the clue we have that we are getting synergy, which we can increase without limit by repeating the loop again and again.
It is as if we had a bank account that paid 1% interest PER PERIOD, and we get to determine how long the period is. The faster we run around the loop, the more "periods" we get per day, the more interest we get. This tiny one percent, if compounded that way 200 times, amounts to over a factor of 700%. or seven times our original investment. (If you don't believe this, get an excel worksheet and enter "=1.01 ^200" where that character before the 200 is usually obtained by SHIFT-6 on the keyboard. It means, take 1.01 and compound it 200 times, or take it to the 200th power.
Suppose instead of a 1 percent gain each day on what we have at the start of each day, we have a 1 percent loss. The equation in Excel is "=(0.99)^200", and the result is 13%. We end up at the end of a working year, 200 days, with about a 7th of what we started with.
The difference between ending the year with SEVEN TIMES what we started with, and ending the year with ONE SEVENTH of what we started with, is the difference between a 1 % gain and a 1% loss each day, compounded.
Wow. (the math is correct.)
This is a HINT of the power of getting people to work together better by an additional multiplicative factor of 1% each day.
Don't look at the 1%. Look at what it translates into at the end of the year.
It is my asserition, and I think Deming would agree, that if we can get the SYSTEM EFFECTS working for us, if we can get the PEOPLE working with each other by 1% better each day, it will have a FAR more profound effect on the output at the end of the year than ANY other training, educational program, or new technology we can bring into the picture.
This is not magic. This is very straight forward behavior of "systems" which include feedback loops, in the real world.
The correct job of "management" or "leadership", in this model, is to keep on helping, urging, pushing, expecting the people to learn how to work together, and to make even TINY-SEEMING incremental improvements each day. The wrong thing to seek, locally, is HUGE IMPACTS. There probably aren't any. Don't set up a system that focuses attention on and rewards LARGE impacts. Set up a system that rewards TINY-BUT-SUSTAINABLE-INCREMENTAL improvements in the OVERALL SYSTEM, which means focus on improving all the relationships in the syste, which means focus on SYNCHRONIZING and HARMONIZING the TIMING of the activities of each of the diverse component parts.
You don't even need to CHANGE what people do, or even, to untrained eyes, HOW they do it-- you only need to attend to changing WHEN they do it. And you need to change that "phase" angle by getting people increasingly TUNED INTO EACH OTHER and AWARE of each other and slightly more SUPPORTIVE of each other in the belief that, in the medium run, this will pay off handsomely.
THAT's it. THAT's all it takes. THAT's what gets our stockholder's investment up by a factor of seven not down by a factor of seven, at the end of the year.
And it is NOT what we are taught in school, although it WILL be what we are taught in the new "systems thinking" classes that are springing up around the world.
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mathematical digression - skip the next few paragraphs if you don't enjoy math.
Again, from a mathematical point of view, the "inner product" of two vectors A and B, with an angle Theta between them is generally written as A*B , or read "A dot B", or perhaps as (A,B),
and has a magnitude given by |A| * |B| * cosine(theta) -- that is, the product of three terms -- the absolute magnitude of A, the absolute magnitude of B, and a term "cosine(theta)" which is typically considered to be equal to 1 if And B are aligned perfectly, ZERO if A and B are at right angles to each other, and minus 1 if A and B are exactly opposite directions.
Since this model restricts cosine(theta) to be at most a value of "1.0", then the only way to increase this product, after more or less aligning A and B, is to increase A separately, or increase B. It focuses our attention and energies on increasing the TERMS of the equation, and severely limits the effect of the relation to mostly the elimination of contrariness.
I think the correct way to restate this, which includes the above as a special case, is that the CORRECT innner product of A and B, in general, is the real part of A*B*C where
C(z) = (0.5) * ( exp(iz) + exp(-iz) )
That is, in very general terms the cosine of an "z", is equal to the half the sum of two terms, one the eponential function of the product i times z, the other the exponential function value of minus i times z, where i = the square root of minus one.
(references:
http://newbricks.blogspot.com/2007/10/its-actually-infinite-pie-if-we-let-it.html
)
In this much more general world, the cosine function is unbounded upwards or downwards.
The key point is, correctly understood, if we let "C" stand for "cosine(theta)", the term which can go towards infinity the m ost easily in A*B*C is NOT A and NOT B, it is "C". That is, if we want to increase the result of A working with B, we are immediately focused not on increasing what A does, or what B does, but on IMPROVING THE ALIGNMENT, in multiple dimensions of what A and B do together.
This is just critical. If we're going to let mathematics control our lives and policies, we should at least be using the correct math in the general case!!! The answer of where to focus that we get in correct math is exactly the OPPOSITE of what we get using the wrong math subcase.
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