Second Life for executive education

I've come to believe that a key catalyst in the revitalization of American industry is getting middle and upper management to start using relatively new models such as the Toyota Way, Theory Y, and other techniques of empowering employees and distributing the workload further down the organizational hierarchy.

The US National Academy of Science's Institute of Medicine has similarly recommended empowering "microsystems" or front-line teams as the intervention that has proven successful in raising quality and lowering costs in hospitals.

And, where these techniques have caught on and worked, they have worked very well. The problem is, that's not very many places. There are far more failures than successes at this sort of cultural transformation of existing industries.

There are several big problems that I see.

One problem is that this change involves collaboration, and that's not something that single people can do. Even the IOM recognized that changing the behavior of a single doctor, in an unchanged culture, was up-hill to the point of impossible. The common wisdom in Public Health's field of behavioral modification also holds that any change has to be multi-level, and address higher levels of context and the individual, not just the individual. But, like one person with a phone, one is not a very helpful number. You need a larger critical mass before this behavior change can become self-sustaining and pay off.

So, it's hard to get started. There is no "good place" to start for those who want to.

The second big problem is that it is paramount that command and control not be lost during this transitional hand-off from central control to distributed control. That's huge, and generally not mentioned in these how-to books. We know how centralized control works, and we can find examples of distributed control working, but there are very few published examples of getting from one to the other successfully. The trajectories all seem to go through a disruptive middle ground where it is unclear who is responsible for what, with the expected results. In hospitals or the Army or aircraft cockpits or nuclear power control centers, disrupted control can result in a large loss of life.

So, a revised golf swing might be far better than then one you have now, but it is almost certain that transitioning from one to the other will involve a period that is worse than either. If a company is barely above water as it is, a period of worse performance may not only test faith in a process, it may simply not be survivable. If you can't get from here to there, it hardly matters how good "there" is.

A third problem is that the CEO or top executive staff might not like the idea of sharing power, losing the limelight, and losing the justification for being paid 100 or 1000 times what front-line workers are paid, regardless how beneficial this is to stockholders. It's hard to expect them to have an unbiased, altruistic interest in the good of the company at their own expense.

And, the fourth and biggest problem mentioned is "culture," or the self-sustaining, self-regulating norms for "how things are done here." Again, any single individual going up against culture, even the CEO, risks being brought back "into line" with the culture. As I've modeled this before, the culture is effectively a living thing with its own survival paramount, and one that has been rewarded for keeping things "in line" with the status quo.

Culture is far stronger than simple passive mass or inertia, which change when pushed on, even if annoyingly slowly. Culture, when pushed on, is as likely to retaliate and break your arm as it is to change direction.

Where are we?

OK, aside from the fact that the culture and the management team will conspire to fight back or comply maliciously, that there's no place to start, no visible route that works, and damn few role models, this is a great idea.

You can immediately understand why, say, brand new hospitals in Dubai or Bankok have a huge competitive advantage is starting with a blank slate, no legacy IT systems to stay compatible with, no legacy culture to fight back, a lot of space, and cheaper labor with fewer regulations. As Harvard Medical International pointed out in the Keynote address to the latest HIMSS virtual conference, they can also hand-pick administrators and clinical staff from day one that agree to a transparent, quality-oriented culture.

So, one way around all these obstacles is to forget dealing with them and just start over somewhere else. That's one model.

That doesn't do much for John and Mary Smith, or the local community here in the US though. Is abandoning the US and walking away the only model?

This is the point at which I suggest we look at using the best technology we have on this problem. It is, however, a social problem. So it requires social technology.

What's "social technology?"

There are many new tools that have only come to fruition in the last few years that are available to aid collaboration and employee empowerment. Many of them fall under the "Web 2" category, meaning they are on-line tools where the users are all active participants and content suppliers, not just passive consumers of content. An example is the op-ed columns of the New York Times, where a few paragraphs of opinion results in several hundred replies and replies to replies within a few hours, adding a lot of depth and richness to the conversation.

Some tools are more complete suites of collaboration software, with video and audio and shared-white-boards and files, which vendors are rushing into right now. Examples of more developed packages are on the website of the University of Michigan's School of Information under the mouthful "Technology Mediated Collaboration". I've taken their graduate class in that, SI689, and checked it out, and the short of it is that there is great potential but it's harder than it looks to get this working -- for the reasons I describe above.

Another reason it's hard is that most IT programmers still think in terms of single-users and "human interfaces" between man and machine, and don't think through the fact that it's really man-machine-man interface, in fact it's a many-people-to-many-people interface or a social product they are implementing the technical part of. As a result the designs tend to be inflexible and miserable, accompanied by the designers whining that the software works fine but the problem is "bad users" or a "bad culture." This is like designing an interstate highway with right angle turns in it, and complaining that bad users keep driving off the road -- the road is fine, so long as no one actually tries to use it.

Again, unless you deal with how the culture and command and control systems are all going to be migrated from point A to point B and not have serious issues in the middle, you haven't solved the right problem. This is not something "IT-people" even recognize, let alone own, in general. In their minds, this is just "implementation" which is like taking out the old PC and putting in a new one - what's the problem?

Still, these are not the most powerful social technologies out there. The most powerful one we have, in my mind, has a very low profile and looks at first glance like an innocent game. An example is the "Second Life Grid" by Linden Labs.

"Second Life" is a 3-D, multi-player virtual world in which people can wander around, build things, interact with others, run businesses, farm, fly, explore fantasies, whatever.

"Second Life Grid" is Linden Lab's name for their offering that world-construction site to anyone who wants to build or script an experience for whatever reason they want it. They have a corporate and educational branch as well.

Harvard, Stanford, New York University, Texas State University, and others have started using this tool. (A 16 page list of them is here.)

So, you might say, big deal. Aside from inane things like flying and walking through walls, how does this help get my management staff and culture through the transitional problems we discussed above? Why not just put people in a room and teach them the old fashioned way?

There are several huge advantages of training in a virtual on-line world. One is that it avoids the need for physical travel to some site, with all the costs and hassles that involves these days.

A second is that the virtual world is open 24-hours a day, 365 days a year. This means it's open from home to an executive who suddenly realizes they have 8-9 pm available because something got canceled. Everyone doesn't have to be in the same place at the same time.

The third advantage, but possibly most important one, is that Second Life can be anonymous. No one knows who you really are in real life.

This is huge. Everyone has some ego, but top executives or government officials or doctors have huge egos, to the point where they are totally resistant to any experience where they might look awkward or stupid or confused in public. And they tend to hang around with a small group of similarly minded people in a culture that supports or demands that personality.

So what we need, and what Second Life (or some equivalent) provides, is the ability to put on a different body, hang with a different group of people, and try out different ways of behaving without anyone knowing it's you.

This is huge. Most top executives can't even walk into a room without the whole nature of the conversation changing to fit their old personality and role. They have no idea what goes on when they aren't changing the rules just by being there, "observing." They are so used to dominating a situation that all they see anymore is a reflection of themselves in the survivors around them, and get no useful feedback about changes they should make in themselves and the way they behave. No one is honest with them.

With a different personality, all that changes. You could come to a virtual meeting of white males as a black woman, say, and suddenly understand first hand what it's like to be invisible in public with your opinion totally ignored or punished. Or, flip side, they could learn how to behave so that they aren't so over-bearing that lower-ranking people in their vicinity are not terrorized or intimidated into silence. They can practice that sweet-spot between authority and being perceived as being open to criticism.

Just getting doctors to behave in a way that let nurses raise a question, once, dramatically improved the tragic error rate in hospitals in the study Dr. Peter Pronovost did. Doctors had little idea how much they were intimidating the staff into silence, possibly based on some incident of flying off the handle 3 years ago that is still reverberating around the culture.

Or, you could join a group that is actually collaborating to get something done, instead of everyone trying to "win" every meeting and make everyone else look bad, and feel what it feels like to collaborate - an experience many MBA's have apparently never had.

The truth is, one day in Business School, as an MBA student, we covered a case in Personnel class and I suggested, naively, that the managers could consider collaborating to solve it. After a few second silence, the class burst into hysterical laughter. The concept is simply not even on the table for people trained in that way.

They literally cannot imagine managers cooperating.

That's a problem. And it's a problem that some hours in a virtual-life simulator could potentially fix.

No commercial pilot steps into a cockpit today who hasn't practiced various collaboration scenarios over and over and over in the simulator first. It matters, and it works.

Professor Bryan Sextan at Johns Hopkins found that 74% of commercial aircraft accidents occur on the first day new teams of people are in the cockpit together for the first time.

Hmm. First, it shows the power of collaboration, and teamwork, in flying something as complex as a plane, which is way simpler than flying a business. Second, it makes me ask why those people aren't required to practice collaborating with each other in a simulator before they try it out for the first time on the plane I'm on.

And, third, it raises the question of why we think management teams, or Boards of Trustees, can possibly collaborate well, honestly, and frankly if they've only practiced doing it wrong and never practiced doing it right.

Issues of time, cost, availability, and ego can all be dealt with by virtual-life simulators. I suggest we apply that technology to management teams as a way of passing on the fire, and having anyone, anywhere in the world able to role play to help mentor new anonymous mangers over their psychological barriers to this new way of acting.

There are literally hundreds of "content providers" looking for business at setting up new virtual worlds in Second Life, which is the only one I've looked at so far. I have no financial connection to Linden Labs -- I just think this is a very cool product that is worth investigating and supporting.



I just can't think of any other way to address the training gap for executives that doesn't take 20 years internship at Toyota, and we don't have 20 years to figure this out regardless. Interactions with others can only be learned by interaction with others, not by watching power-point presentations, or videos, or reading about it. This training goes into a different part of the brain than normal school-work anyway. The experience is required to change deeply-based beliefs. Even Toyota says that training for the Toyota Way requires actions first that change beliefs, not vice-versa.

Here's a way to generate, moderate, and improve those actions. It's a massive multi-person "game" setup at Linden Labs, so there would be no problem adding 10,000 people in a week to the system a their end.

I think we need to apply "Lean" to lean instruction. GM couldn't grasp that model change-overs could take less than 6 weeks until Toyota did them in 6 hours. Learning to control your alpha-rhythm in your brain takes 20 years on a mountain in Tibet, or 5 minutes with a clinical biofeedback monitor. Sometimes, technology can help.

Just because Toyota took 20 years to learn something doesn't mean, say, that all Michigan businesses couldn't learn it in 20 weeks of sponsored time in Second Life, or some such tool. That's the kind of breakthrough technology that scales up that we need to grab and run with.

Wade

exec ed photo by by Jimee, Jackie, Tom & Asha
Teamwork (crossing stream) by ___________
pool by by prettywar-stl

How long does it take to change a culture?

We have ways out that we don't see.

Our whole world is like the scene near the start of the movie Labyrinth where our heroine and a worm are walking down a seemingly endless pathway around the castle, and she finally blurts out "There's no door!" and the worm corrects her and says "Yes, they're everywhere! There's one right there. You're just not seeing them." Then her vision "clicks into place" and she finds the door, no problem.

As they say, "Some things you have to believe to see."

There is hope.

This is the consistent message that various religions of the world have tried to embody, that commerce in the form of "The Toyota Way" or "Making the Impossible Possible" teaches, and that, at last, science is starting to catch up and understand and accept as legitimate, as it gets enough computer power to model the feedback loops involved.

While we tend to think of "culture" as being a huge, almost unchangeable rock or "supertanker we're trying to turn", in point of fact it can change overnight.

Did you ever have this happen to you? There's a person you knew a long time and had pretty fixed view of, and then you find out something you never knew about them or about their life or past, and it changes everything in an instant? Suddenly you realize you'd been misinterpreting them all that time, just to see things "in a new light"?

This, dear friends, is the kind of "new light" that we need to understand the workings of, and get a lot more of.

We tend to rush on by and not pause to realize, "Whoa. That's exactly what I need."

In fact, we need to start manufacturing "new light" bulbs and lay out a power grid for making them shine, or maybe even a wireless broadcast power system would be better -- the cellphone model not land-line model.

Please slow down your reading and "reflect" on this for a moment. I'm not talking about magic or mysticism or "Kum-bay-ya by the fire" here - I'm just talking about exactly the same kind of sudden realization that all of us have had and can relate to.

We could call it a "magic moment", but it is only amazing in impact. We usually spend zero seconds reflecting on exactly how a complete transformation of our thinking can occur in 1 second. It is kind of surprising, isn't it?

What is called "one-time learning" is the same way. We tend to think of learning as something that is hard, requires buying expensive textbooks, going to class, studying for hours or weeks, taking exams, and maybe we get and maybe we don't. But take a 4 year old child somewhere where they get a cookie, and see if they remember that fact the next time they are in that neighborhood. Of course they do. Effortless, one-time learning. No study required. No memorization of facts. It just goes in and stays.

I've heard "true art" described as a way of making a person experience something that has the effect that they never see the world the same way again after that.

Actually, this is pretty much the meaning of the word "repent" in the Christian Bible, to re-think something in a dramatic new way, to re-conceptualize it, to re-frame it, to "turn and be saved." It's not magic or I don't know what, it's just an "Oh, my God!" moment of realization of something that was always there that you were blipping.

And as soon as perception changes, behavior follows along and changes. The "impossible" becomes "possible." Everything is somehow different, in a new light.

If you dig under the covers in "The Toyota Way", it is clear that the end point, the goal of all the fancy tools and techniques, is actually just to get to a new way of seeing things and seeing each other. They use the term "philosophy" and say the whole way is based on it. To me, that word smacks of years of academic study and Ph.D's and makes the concept seem almost impossible.

So, I'm going to apply the Toyota Way to itself, to thinking about the whole process of transforming ourselves to the Toyota Way, and ask "Why do we imagine it should take years or decades of struggle to accomplish?"

I don't think it does.

I think we could do it in an afternoon, if we drill down and figure out what it is that we're not seeing that we need to see, and how to make that a vivid one-time-learning, flash of realization experience - with every camera flash in the whole company going off at the same second.

Flash. Realization. Exact "same" world, and yet, suddenly, in an instant, entirely different.

I mean, Toyota looked at US auto companies struggling to convert assembly lines from one model to another in 6 weeks, and asked "Why can't we do that in 6 minutes?" and realized they could, and now they do. The barrier was all in their heads. Some things you have to believe to see.

Now that we have a whole new technology of incredibly realistic, life-size 3-D simulation virtual worlds, you'd think we should be able to script whatever interactive experience we want someone to have, and do the whole thing in under an hour, tops.

This requires challenging the "common wisdom" that the Toyota Way involves some kind of magic learning that cannot be described and only can be pointed to indirectly that takes years and years of labor to grasp.

Well, that's what some high priests of yoga said about certain physiological control they had learned to do, and it did take them decades, thank you, to do it the old way, but we can do it in 5 minutes with biofeedback now. It's 2007, not 207.

I recall Tony Robbins mentions in one of his self-help books that someone asks him how long it takes to change a deeply embedded belief or behavior, and he responds "How long do you want it to take? We can change that this afternoon."


We don't really have the luxury of taking another generation to turn around the economy of Southeast Michigan. We need something we can do in "months" not "decades". A lot of people need help. A lot of businesses need help. The edge is way too close for comfort.

If we can just focus on how "new light" works, it becomes possible.


Wade

(Image of a self-assembling tower crane adding a new section to its own top as it grows is from "How Science Works"; "Friends forever" image is by the author.)

Putting care on "cruise control"

There is a difference between "care" and "caring".

Today's news illustrates that on several fronts.

In Arizona, an unmanned "drone" aircraft crashed after the pilot, located safely 60 miles away, failed to update his "game console" correctly. ( NTSB cites lax safety controls, Pilot Error in Ariz. Drone Crash, Washington post 10/17/07)

The pilot's computer console locked up, investigators said. He started to transfer control to a backup console used by Customs agents to operate the drone's cameras but did not follow a checklist that required him to make sure the engine controls on the second console matched the ones he had been using.

Because the second console's controls were in the fuel shut-off position, investigators said, the Predator-B's engine quit when control was switched.

The pilot told investigators that he didn't follow the checklist because he was in a hurry, said Pam Sullivan, an NTSB investigator.

Steven R. Chealander, a board member and former Air Force pilot, said that regulators and operators need to ensure that proper procedures are followed in drone operations because pilots may not realize the consequences of their actions if they are not in a cockpit. "You have to change the mind-set from someone operating a computer Game Boy to being the pilot of an aircraft," Chealander said.

I've discussed before the rise in "passive observer" syndrome, almost certainly trained by 1000 hours a year or more on the equivalent to a flight simulator, a "life simulator" (Television) where passive observing is the trained behavior, regardless what is going on around you. Now, with full-life-size TV figures, that has got to be getting even stronger.

The other major behavior training simulator in use today is video games. I'm not sure what the intentions are of the creators, but the impact is desensitization to killing other people or crashing the car/boat/plane one is operating, because all becomes well again by pushing the "reset" button. I tend to believe I pass such drivers - or they pass me - almost every day, as they weave in and out of traffic at high speed. Again, the message for 1000 hours a year is that "it doesn't matter" and "there are no actual consequences of what you do."

And, my regular readers know its about time for my rant on the upcoming "Ice causes pile-up on Interstate X!" headlines. Actual pilots almost never blame "accidents" on "bad weather"-- the NTSB blames "continued operation by the pilot into conditions beyond their skill and experience." "If the ice and snow "causes" crashes, I mean, what can you do? We're helpless in the grip of this outside force! There I was, I hit the brakes, and nothing! It's not my fault! (Of course, I was going 85 mph on icy roads and weaving around all the idiots who were poking along at 30 for some reason ...)" Yeah. Right.

I want to carry over that thought to the second item of the day, on the inexorable progress that "superbugs" or antibiotic resistant bacteria are making at returning us to the days when there were no antibiotics. (Actually, as Carl Sagan once pointed out, it will be much worse this time.)

The headline in today's Washington Post is "Drug Resistant Staph Germs toll is higher than thought". Here's the essence:

A dangerous germ that has been spreading around the country causes more life-threatening infections than public health authorities had thought and is killing more people in the United States each year than the AIDS virus, federal health officials reported yesterday.

The microbe, a strain of a once innocuous staph bacterium that has become invulnerable to first-line antibiotics, is responsible for more than 94,000 serious infections and nearly 19,000 deaths each year, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention calculated.

Although mounting evidence shows that the infection is becoming more common, the estimate published today in the Journal of the American Medical Association is the first national assessment of the toll from the insidious pathogen, officials said.

"This is a significant public health problem. We should be very worried," said Scott K. Fridkin, a medical epidemiologist at the CDC.

Other researchers noted that the estimate includes only the most serious infections caused by the germ, known as methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA).

"It's really just the tip of the iceberg," said Elizabeth A. Bancroft, a medical epidemiologist at the Los Angeles County Department of Public Health who wrote an editorial in JAMA accompanying the new studies. "It is astounding."

This has the same ring as the items I've posted in the last few days regarding the drought and water emergency in the South ("The hard numbers have shocked the Southeast into action, even as many people wonder why things seem to have gotten so bad so quickly...") or the economic woes of Southeast Michigan (""Our" Hurricane "Katrina has been out on the horizon for a generation, and we just watched it come," said Rick Snyder, ") or Global Warming.

In fact, in 1990 we had a whole wall covered with scholarly papers at Parke-Davis warning of this coming catastrophe and the failure of antibiotics. I alluded to Carl Sagan, who told us once that "bombing us back to the stone age" would be far worse than that. At that time, people were very bright (they had to be) and could track animals, both prey and predators. They knew how to survive. Now we think food comes from the grocery store or the golden arches and if those are out of business we have no idea what to do next.

In particular, if we go back to 1900, two things stand out. First, people understood about the importance of hygiene - a word that seems so out of place in our modern world that Johns Hopkins, almost in embarrassment, took it out of the name of their "School of Hygiene and Public Health"). People understood about handling food, and washing hands, and knew this because they grew up in families where half of the children died by age 10 from infectious disease.

It wouldn't have been hard to get people to wash their hands then. Now, it seems a massive burden to even get doctors to wash their hands without constant reminders. Again, the myth of godhood and the facts of infection don't sit happily together, so one has to go - and is is usually the facts of infection and the reminder that death is really not under control at all.

These days, death of a child is an extreme event. Hasn't "modern medicine" conquered death at last? Well, the brochure and video may imply or say that, but the truth is, no, it hasn't, and death by plague is scheduled to come back to visit us again.

We don't like the idea of death - part of the theme of my last post on T. S. Eliot's message. We particularly don't like the idea of death that comes despite our best efforts and makes a mockery of our egos and sense of personal and societal godhood.

"We are gods!" is the basic social myth, and if facts disagree, well -- get rid of the facts.

In fact, in 1918, more people died of infectious disease than world war I. In fact, healthy men of age 20 would go to work in the morning and be dead by sunset. It made a mockery of our sense of control of death. And so, we have silently expunged this, deleted it, from both our memory and our textbooks. A recent study showed that the Flu of 1918, which was the biggest story of the day by far, has now become either a one-sentence note in passing, or been left out entirely of all the new history books. Interesting.

Houses had "parlors" which is where the dead family members would be laid in state, and "living rooms" were given their name as a place where the remaining, living members of the family could spend their time.

And, even more so, we had an ethic and religion that allowed us to accept this kind of damage and keep on going in the morning.

It's astounding to us. If 20 percent of our children and young adults were to die tomorrow, it's not clear this society could pick up the pieces and go on, as our grandparents had to, and did. We seem to be devastated when 3000 people die in a terrorist attack, as if that's the end of the world, not just the end of another myth of invincibility and godhood.

That ethic and religion has been jettisoned, and that is perhaps the scariest fact of all - far more so than loss of the sense of hygiene. The society is already on massive anti-depressants for life being hard, and that doesn't include losing family members right and left.

Yes, Tom Welsh's article had it right - "culture" is the core problem here. And, my root-cause analysis continues to point to our pleasant core myth of our own godhood as the core problem with the culture. If we don't learn what humility means the easy way, we'll learn it the hard way. But either way, death is coming to visit.

We can, and should, revise our mental model of Life to include Death as part of it, as a natural part, not something that is unusual. This is akin to the Japanese making houses of bamboo and flimsy paper, that could survive hurricanes and only need slight repair, or that could fall on you in an earthquake without killing you. Instead, we build concrete block towers of unreinforced masonry, because we have already put the past earthquakes out of our minds. We rebuild new houses on the flood plains and coastal barrier beaches, discarding the inconvenient truth that this won't work. Then we build our whole society up on that base.

The meaning is that most of the damage to our society and ability to go on when the epidemic comes, as it will, is of our own making. We can't go on thinking that "We didn't need all that God stuff, it was just in the way, those days are over, we have modern medicine and technology that will protect us."

Hmmmm. More likely, our modern social myths will blind us, paralyze action, and make us incapable of even thinking about these problems in a sane and rational fashion.

Death is part of life. It's just that, for this concept to work, we, as individuals, need to focus on the lives of our children, our schools, and our society, and all the things outside ourselves we have invested our lives in that will go on with life after our own individual death. Then death becomes tolerable and is not such a big deal. Everything becomes easier again, and far less frightening.

We can save the 50% or so of our "health care" bill that is spent in the last two weeks of life, trying to avoid death "at all costs." That's not "life" anyway.

It's only when the here and now, materialistic, hedonistic, selfish culture faces the stark reality of death of the individual that terror, fear, and irrational behavior result.

We can't control the ground rules of life and death, in the end. We can only be "adaptive" and adjust our culture to fit that reality. We can "get over it" as a whole society. In many ways this is simply agreeing to wear our psychological seat belts instead of refusing to install them at all. Or it's refusing to wear a life-jacket when setting out white-water rafting, because it makes us think we might end up in the water. Yes, you might.

The odds your society will end up "in the water" in that sense is 100%, and the only uncertainty is the date.

So far, we're still hoping that selective perception of parts of reality that support our myth will win the day. That's not adaptive and will not serve us well. It's not "leadership" to let that go on.

"Science" has rejected all our social flotation devices (a.k.a. religions), and said they're not "scientific" and we should get rid of them. I double checked and my current biology textbook doesn't even list "death" in the index, and "death" is not listed as a property of all living things. Isn't that strange? Why is that?

Science is pretty tone-deaf when it comes to recognizing its own blind spots, or accepting responsibility for the downstream consequences of what it does. There are some bright spots, but as a society we seem to think technology will prevent death, and try our best to hide all the old people out of sight somewhere.

That isn't coping with living - it's avoiding the subject. Science says, in large part, trust us, we'll get to that sooner or later.

OK. How about sooner? The more terrified we are of death, the more we amplify the impact of "terrorists" who only have the threat of death to scare us with. If we can look on unafraid, they will have lost all their power over us, and, again, we can get on with living.

When and how should we question authority?

New York Times piece today relevant to thinking about Toyota's Production System,
as well as topics of mindfulness, high-reliability, and how to teach and reach new MPH students that I discussed a few weeks ago in "What I learned at Johns Hopkins last week" where I bemoaned the fact that the students "just sat there, unresponsive."

The Times article, by Norimitsu Inishi
Japan Learns Dreaded Task of Jury Duty
NY Times July 16, 2007

Japan is preparing to adopt a jury-style system in its courts in 2009, the most significant change in its criminal justice system since the postwar American occupation. But for it to work, the Japanese must first overcome some deep-rooted cultural obstacles: a reluctance to express opinions in public, to argue with one another and to question authority.

Well, that certainly sounds like the class I was in. What insights can we gain from this cross-cultural view?

They preferred directing questions to the judges. They never engaged one another in discussion. Their opinions had to be extracted by the judges and were often hedged by the Japanese language’s rich ambiguity. When a silence stretched out and a judge prepared to call upon a juror, the room tensed up as if the jurors were students who had not done the reading.

Well, in my case it's likely that, literally, the students had not, in fact, done the reading and were in no rush to call attention to themselves and get a follow up question back to them that would reveal that fact. And they were reluctant to ask a question that all by itself would show they hadn't done the reading.

One more snippet is worth quoting:

Hoping for some response, the judge waited 14 seconds, then said, “What does everybody think?”

Nine seconds passed. “Doesn’t anyone have any opinions?”

After six more seconds, one woman questioned whether repentance should lead to a reduced sentence....

After it was all over, only a single juror said he wanted to serve on a real trial. The others said even the mock trial had left them stressed and overwhelmed.

So, I for one will be watching with great interest to see how this evolves.

One point I have to note regards our country's history efforts to try to implement abroad things that work for us at home. Sometimes we seem, like a teenager, with our 230 years experience, to be confidently giving advice to 5000 year-old civilizations -- maybe akin to a 2.3 year old trying to advise his 50 year old parents on how to run the household.

Maybe things are as they are for a good reason. Maybe, messing with a cultural system we don't even pretend to understand and casually plannint to replace one part of their system with one that "works for us" will have, shall we say, "unintended consequences."

As I said there, the classic paper in this field is Jay Forrester's congressional testimony:
"The Counterintutive Behavior of Social Systems",
http://web.mit.edu/sdg/www/D-4468-2.Counterintuitive.pdf

Quoting the abstract:

Society becomes frustrated as repeated attacks on deficiencies in social systems lead only to worse symptoms. Legislation is debated and passed with great hope, but many programs prove to be ineffective. Results are often far short of expectations. Because dynamic behavior of social systems is not understood, government programs often cause exactly the reverse of desired results.

I am deeply concerned about not just this context-blind approach to trying to walk in and transform existing cultures, that as far as I can tell we are not very good at, but at extensions of this mental model to deciding we are going to start tinkering with DNA.

My daughter recalled a conversation she saw quoted with China's former Chairman Mao meeting with the head of France around 1980 or so, and being asked what he thought of the French Revolution. Mao's response was "It's too soon to tell."

I can't help but note that W. Edwards Deming came up with key quality improvement ideas decades ago in the USA, which was totally uninterested in them, so he went to Japan, where he was welcomed as a hero and passed along ideas adopted by Toyota that have directly led to Toyota's impressive performance. So, maybe Japanese culture had some positive aspect to it that we should be careful not to damage when adding our new "jury duty" feature.

The systems literature shows that it is generally impossible to change just one part of a complex living system without impacting all the other parts. Living things are not machines, with sub-assemblies we can just remove and replace with the latest version. This has the feeling of someone removing the propeller from a small private plane and installing a jet turbine in 98% of the cabin space, since "jets are better than props." Hmm. Not always.

Maybe a better example that I recall actually happening was the period when the US was complaining about Japanese "barriers to entry" of US car sales in Japan, back in the mid 1970's.
GM was offering a car that had the steering wheel on the left side (Japanese, like British, drive on the left side of the road and have steering wheels on the right side of the vehicle.). Also, the cars were too large to fit down most alleys and many streets in Tokyo, too large to park anywhere, and guzzled gas that was running at ten times the US price. And the car interiors were scaled for 6 foot Texans, not 5' Japanese. And, the car had no place to put a bicycle in it for the rest of the commute once a parking place was found. The US attributed low sales to wrongful Japanese barriers to free trade. The reality was that most Japanese couldn't use that car if you gave it to them for free. The basics of marketing once upon a time, when I went to Business School, were "know your customer" and "Be driven by what the customer values, not what you think they should value." In "lean manufacturing" this would be called "pull" or "value chain".

But, then, we were too busy assuming things and talking to shut up and listen.

We were violating Japanese traditions from nemawashi (walking around and gaining consensus before taking action) to the "lean" concept of genchi genbutsu (going down to the floor to see for ourselves before making pronouncements from afar of what is wrong.)

As even Wikipedia realizes:

Genchi Genbutsu (現地現物) means "go and see for yourself" and it is an integral part of the Toyota Production System. It refers to the fact that any information about a process will be simplified and abstracted from its context when reported. This has often been one of the key reasons why solutions designed away from the process seem inappropriate.

So, I'm not sure this particular government policy has a learning curve and won't explode in our face when we turn it on. Maybe this has been deeply considered. Maybe not.

If the objective is to damage Japan's culture and gain a competitive edge, or at least remove their edge over us, then I suppose random tinkering might be a good idea. If the objective is the much harder task of improving the functioning of a 5000 year old civilization, it might be good to be mindful of any indications that our mental model doesn't match their reality, so we should stop what we're doing and address that and update our model with more current information. That's the key to high-reliability performance, and avoiding nasty surprises. The article gives no indication that the policy implementation is contingent on it actually working in practice when implemented.

In the classic PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act), there is that "C" step, "check" that what we did had the desired effect, not an unexpected contrary effect, in case we missed some crucial fact.

That's not a bad model.


W.