Three Sigma Systems

The gadgets you own will soon be you.

NYT today – “Cellphones Let Shoppers Point, Click and Purchase“ “We see the smartphone being used more and more in the shopping experience,” said Dick Cantwell, Cisco’s vice president for retail at Cisco’s Internet business solutions group.

As the more daring retailers see it, the potential benefits outweigh the risks. More aggressive profiling of shoppers — along with a novel, entertaining shopping experience — could help increase sales. And the technology may help retailers save money by cutting workers, essentially substituting electronic guidance for store clerks.

The gadget revolution is ramping up! Technological innovators understand that people are fed up with having to be tied to their homes in order to insulate themselves from the stress of interacting with fleshy, sneezy, dirty, human beings. In the beginning, avoiding human contact on the run was limited to primitive devices like the Sony Walkman. Next came the sexy iPod. But it was the ubiquitous mobile phone that made it possible for the average Joe to turn-on, plug-in, and tune out, no matter how many living, breathing, people were polluting his physical space.

Today, iPhones and Smart Phones are transforming our on-the-go peoplescape into a bloodless and stress free cyborg community. The unpleasant ambiguities of human contact — the gestures and smells and shifty glances of others —- can be scrubbed into succinct twitters, 6 mega-pixel snapshots, and instant data scans. Hands sullied by shakes, pats, hugs, and counting money, will soon become a thing of the past. The possibilities are as limitless as the imagination of those who want your money but not the messy inconvenience of you.

Here’s a current events tie-in with my “Secret of Success” post.

From SailWorld.com:

There is little doubt that the many Court actions over the 33rd America’s Cup have been a major turn-off for the sport and sailing fans generally.

In a couple of days the sport will see a sailing match of the likes that has never been seen before and probably will never see again. Two of the highest performance yachts will square off against each other in a fascinating contest, conducted under the bare minimum of sailing rules.

Money is no object

Two of the world’s most “successful” guys are in the midst of a protracted battle royal that will culminate 25 miles off the coast of Valencia, Spain, when one or the other cheats his way to two out of three meaningless wins in the 33rd America’s Cup sailing regatta.

My Bay Area neighbor, “successful” self-made Larry Ellison, the 66 year old founder and CEO of Oracle and 9th richest man in the world, is spitting, scratching, and yowling in his fight with 44 year-old Ernesto Bertarelli, the European aristocrat who ranks as the 52nd richest in the world by virtue of the bio-tech empire he inherited

It’s interesting, and very sad , to watch these two going at it, but the lessons to be learned, as I suggested in my previous post, the secret of “successful” people is their aim to manipulate the system to their personal advantage rather than improve the system so that everyone can win. Read more…

NPR ran a story today entitled “Catching Hospital Workers Dirty-Handed” in which they report:

“According to the CDC, health care-associated infections kill about 100,000 Americans a year, at a cost of billions of dollars.”

One solution being evaluated is the use of hi-tech wireless technology to spy on the hand-washing practices of individual doctors, nurses, and other caregivers.

The solutions we come up with depend on how we frame our questions. For example, in the NPR story they report that “The standard protocol in hospitals is for doctors and nurses to wash their hands on the way in to see a patient, and on the way out. But that doesn’t always happen — they get busy; they forget.”

If we frame the question in terms of who’s to blame…

• Workers who forget to wash
• Workers who are too busy to wash
• Workers who are too stupid to wash
• Workers who are hydrophobic
• Workers who want to spread death and disease

We end up with the answer that inspecting and policing workers is the best solution. Of course, when we institute a system for inspecting and policing people,  we also create a system of inspectors and enforcers against defectives and criminals.

Now think about this. That NPR report also says that, “Studies show that only about 40 percent of health care workers in the U.S. wash their hands as often as they should.”

No need for control charts here! Sixty percent non-sanitizers is a big, big, signal telling us that the problem is not one of individual performance. We are not dealing with outliers! If we understand the nature of a system and variation, we know immediately that we have a system that predictably and reliably produces 60% non-sanitized hands! We might be able to inspect out a small fraction of non-sanitized hands, at great expense, but we are foolish to expect a system that produces 60% non-sanitized hands to do what it does not do.

I'm sure you can come up with something better than this!

What if we frame the question differently? What if we ask, “By what means can we best assure that healthcare workers’ hands are free of disease bearing agents as those workers move from patient to patient?

Can we design a worker-sanitizing system that minimizes worker decision-making requirements regarding whether to sanitize or not to sanitize?

If we could accomplish this, wouldn’t  everybody win?

When lawyer Dan Pink tackles the subject of motivation, he does what lawyers are apt to do. He gets the details right but almost everything else wrong.

The problem is that Pink continues to work from a fallaciously reductive theoretical foundation. Because of this, the techniques he suggests are correct, but the explanation he provides is upside down. This leads him to incorrectly dichotomize motivation into “extrinsic” and “intrinsic”. He is not alone in making this disastrous error. Read more…

There have been a quite few rumors that our competition will be launching decoy balloons designed to thwart your identification efforts and deny me us our $40,000 award. With only 28 hours to go before our Department of Defense launches their balloons, I am providing this CONFIDENTIAL “DoD Red-Balloon Finder’s Identification Guide.” also referred to as an R-FIG.

Read more…

As is clear in his notorious 14-points, Dr. W. E. Deming was adamantly opposed to the use of motivational incentives by management. He saw goals, targets, performance evaluations, and pay-for-performance schemes as destroyers of the system of people. He said the correct function of management is to “remove obstacles to joy and pride in workmanship”. I have suggested that the very ideas suggested by motivational theory might be best abandoned. My suggestion is one of those ideas that I think of as bordering on the edge of chaos. It challenges conventional thinking and pushes our thinking envelope.

In this post I use an engineering analogy to explain how the idea of motivation may lead us in the wrong direction.

Note: For the sake of continuity, I have created a new category called “Motivation” that gathers my blog posts on the subject so that readers can look back at previous entries on the subject.

I am a great fan of John McPhee, who writes a good deal about the contradictions produced by the hubris of technologists who push buttons, pull levers, drive bulldozers, and otherwise bully our environment by “motivating” it to fit our needs and desires. The following analogy was inspired by the essays included in his book, “The Control of Nature“, which I commend to your attention.

Analogical argument in favor of repurposing organizational management

Imagine that there two engineers who have been tasked to come up with a plan for getting water to a location called B from its current location called A.

Remove obstacles to the flow

Engineer 1 is an ambitious fellow. He draws up a plan to move the water in a straight line by motivating it up and over mountains using pumps and siphons. He argues in favor of his plan by saying that by “motivating” the water he can direct it along the shortest and most reliable path to point B.

Engineer 2 is an older and wiser fellow. He proposes a much longer path that follows a gravity line from A to B. His plan does not require pumps or siphons. He argues that, by understanding the behavior of water, he can gently channel it to point B. He has no need to “motivate” the water. He only needs to understand how it behaves and REMOVE OBSTACLES to the flow.

The designs of both engineers will likely achieve the target outcome (RFP specs) in the short run but, keeping in mind that neither will be perfect,  which theory — to motivate the water or to let water’s inherent behavior do the work — will set in motion the fewest contradictions (problems) in the longer run?

Of course, people are not water. People flow uphill!

W. E. Deming was clear in his 14-points that he was adamantly opposed to the use of performance appraisal systems and the use of deferential rewards and punishments given on the basis of goals and targets . But the use of these techniques remains ubiquitous in our business practices despite evidence of the fallacy of these methods that has recently come to public attention in the form of the globally disastrous outcomes produced by bonus systems in the the financial industry. Even Obama has stepped into this trap with his advocacy of pay for performance teacher appraisals.

Why does this approach persist in the face of the evidence that it produces disastrous outcomes and what is the alternative?

Motivation

I think the evidence against the use of performance appraisal and differential motivators is simply invisible to those who are hopelessly mired in  the assumptions promulgated by a theory of organizational and individual psychology. Try as people may, they cannot shake the common sense “logic” that the self-interested will of every individual participating in an organizational enterprise must be bent to the will of the organization by the administration of rewards and punishments, and that it is the principal job of management to do this bending, person by person, appraisal by appraisal.

The assumption behind this view is that we can understand what motivates individuals and act on the basis of that understanding to reliably produce predictable behavioral outcomes among individuals. If you think about this, it is exactly the same logic that an operator uses in controlling a piece of machinery.

In other words, “If” I understand the machine, read the dials, and push the right buttons, it will do pretty much what I want it to do.

Read more…

Click image to listen to the interview

Last night I listened to Tom Ashbrook’s interview with psychologist/author Alexandra Horowitz. In her book, “Inside of a Dog”, she set out to explain the behavior of dogs in society with humans, from the dog’s point of view.

They’re not simple humans. They’re not friendly wolves. Dogs are highly evolved for compatibility with homo sapiens. But the way they sense the world is vastly different from our own. These “creature of the nose,” she says, can actually smell time. And when they do see, they see more of the world in every second (than us).

She asserts that the bond between dogs and humans began with the dawn of Homo sapiens. The dogs were pre-wolfish, scavenging camp followers. The characteristic that triggered a benign symbiotic interaction between the two species (human and canine) was almost surely the fact that canines lock eyes with each other….and with humans. She contends that it was the deep mutual gaze between dogs and humans that bridged the unbridgeable gap between dog being and being human.

But the bridge between dog and human is not a meeting of the minds. It is not a mutual understanding grounded in shared intentions. The dog’s view of the world and the human’s world view may be compatible, but in all  other respects, are wholly different! Says NY Times Sunday Times book reviewer, Cathleen Schine:

“[Horowitz's] work draws on that of an early-20th- century German biologist, Jakob von Uexküll, who proposed that “anyone who wants to understand the life of an animal must begin by considering what he called their umwelt . . . : their subjective or ‘self-world.’ ” Hard as we may try, a dog’s-eye view is not immediately accessible to us, however, for we reside within our own umwelt, our own self-world bubble, which clouds our vision.”

In the balance of her interview, Horowitiz explains her ideas about how a dog sees the world and why they do what they do.

In one example, Horwowitz suggests that the face licking we get from our dogs when we return home, is not an act of affection. It is a behavior that triggers the regurgitation of food acquired by other pack members during their day’s hunt.

Now here’s what really caught my attention. A caller offered an observation to Horowitz and Ashbrook. She said, and I paraphrase, “I am not sure I want your explanation of my dog’s doggish motives. If I saw doggy ends in his every act, what joy would remain in my relationship with him?  Suspicion would come between myself and his every facial lick. It wouldn’t work.”

The caller had touched on a profound idea. Does my dog lick my face in order to make me regurgitate? I have never regurgitated for her, so why would she continue to lick in abject futility? It doesn’t work!

When we impute motives to a dog’s behavior we deconstruct the physical and emotional symbiotic bridge between us. The dog’s does not think about his human buddy as a means to his doggy ends, and those of us who revel in our relationship with our doggy buddies do not regard them as a means to our human ends. The bonds between canine and human  were carved out of a long evolutionary process. Those bonds are what they are and they continue to be what they are because they work! There is no more to it than that, and when we deconstruct those bonds by imputing means-to-end motivations, our suspicion destroys the relationship that works — dog and human, moving forward in the business of living.

One of the themes I constantly return to is something I call the fallacy of motivation. My position is that the psychological concept of motivation, in which all individuals action is interpreted as a means to some self-interested end, is a destroyer of the bonds that define us as human beings. We are told that although we cannot see the motives of others, and we cannot rely on others to confess their “true” motives, we can and should infer their motives. This suggests that it is only by doing this that we can defend ourselves against malevolent intentions and manipulate the actions of others by appealing to the motives behind their actions. In other words, we must always regard the acts of others with unrelenting suspicion.

I contend that the reduction of human interaction to a theory of psychological, means-to-end motivation, is a powerfully self-fulfilling accident of human knowing. Our tendency to reduce the world into orderly parts spills over into a process of reducing ourselves to parts. In our relentless drive to turn all the world into a predictable clockwork mechanism, we destroy the bonds carved out over millions of years of evolution, that have brought us into existence as social beings and propelled us forward in the creation of our society and culture — the bonds that work!

Consider this idea. What if the motives you use to explain your behavior and the behavior of others, are no more than inventions (rationalizations) you create to make the world sensible? Is it possible that the forces that shape your doing what you do, and others in doing what they do, are not what you imagine them to be? Can you imagine that?

There is a great deal of scientific evidence to suggest that this may be so.

I woke up this morning and made my way out the front door to pick up the daily newspaper on my driveway. Near my front gate, an Orb spider was weaving a wonderfully symmetrical web across my path. I stopped for a while to watch it at work. After spinning a run, it would laboriously ascend to a perch on a thread of its own construction and then, in a series of acrobatic drops, sweep a new strand of silk along the arc of its emerging work of functional art. After a few minutes, I grabbed a stick and swept away the web that was blocking my path to the newspaper. The spider dropped, then swung away in the breeze. I proceeded along my way, confident in the knowledge that the spider would begin building its web anew, and hopeful that it would choose a new location that would no longer block my path to news of the day.

"Oh what a tangled web we weave." (Click to visit site with web construction video)

What causes the spider to weave its webs? Does it require some special motivation? Does the spider anticipate some future gain? Does it weave its web out of some fear of future dangers? These questions are silly. The spider weaves webs because spiders and their web-weaving physiology and behavior have come into being over the eons through a process of natural selection. Spiders weave webs because their webs have worked over the ages of spiders becoming spiders.

I have described human beings as first and foremost, enterprising creatures who swim upstream against the tides of entropy with aims and intentions that can be powerfully harnessed using aiming and the definition of mission. Our enterprising nature is why we weave our webs, not out of spider silk, but out of symbols that become woven into an ever-emerging web of knowledge. To be human is to laboriously expend energy to ascend from the unpredictable chaos of the world toward a more predictable, orderly, and valuable world of our own creation.

Read more…

Motivation

In my “Power of Aiming” post,  I used the terms “aim” and “intention” in a manner that may have seemed interchangeable, but there is an important difference between these concepts.

Aiming is something we do as part of a method. Intention, on the other hand, is what guides our conscious actions even when we do not acknowledge its influence. In other words, we are always acting intentionally, but when we realize the importance of our intentionality, we can harness it by aiming. My “Power of Aiming” post is concerned with transforming intention into aiming, but the astute reader will detect something at the core of the concept that is rather striking. What does the idea of “intentionality” say about the common sense concept of “motivation” that is everywhere in our conversation about human behavior?

Read more…

On this blog I have devoted a great deal of time to the abstraction of theory. In my “Methods of Enterprise” posts, I will be departing from this indulgence and in order to offer some specific methodologies for improving an enterprise.

There are many specific methods that an enterprising organization can use to improve the efficacy of their efforts. Fans of Dr. W. E. Deming often have favorites. Some people focus on the use of statistical methods and control charts. Others want to displace performance evaluations and incentives. And still others look to employ Lean methods to improve the efficiency of processes.

The problem that is typically encountered comes from the fact that none of these methods can stand alone. Instead, they must be employed as part and parcel of and overall strategy that is based in comprehensive theory of enterprise.¹

Nevertheless, in a discussion of methods, we have to start somewhere and I can think of no better place to begin than with the methodology of “aiming”. I will try to keep this discussion of aiming in the context of an overall theory of enterprise.

Deming and Aiming

The importance of aiming has been consistently misunderstood, and is often skipped by enterprise leadership because it is seen as being too fluffy, too imprecise, and not directly related to the “bottom line”. But Dr. W. E. Deming regarded aiming as a method of the utmost importance, placing it in the prominent position of Point 1 in his famous “14 Points“.

Deming also said, “A system has an aim” and it is by way of aiming the system that an enterprise can realize what he called a “constancy of purpose” that is the essential component of “continuous improvement”

In other words, if you are going to create and drive a system of enterprise, you must assert the aims of that system or you will not be able to create the constancy of purpose necessary to improve continuously.

So let’s be clear. In Dr. W. E. Deming’s view, aiming was neither trivial nor optional.

Below I explain the concept of aiming in the context of a theory by which enterprising organizations innovate and improve by creating new knowledge. Then I give an example of how U.S. automakers failed because they did not understand the process of aiming.

Read more…

This blog entry is a contribution I made to the W. Edwards Deming interest group on LinkedIn. I will be posting a follow-up entitled “Primal Poodles #2″ today or tomorrow.

Psychological reductionism has created a system of belief in which the behavior of people is reduced to actions toward or away from some specific stimuli. The theory suggests that one can employ rewards and/or punishments to “motivate” (i.e. manipulate) people to behave in the ways one deems desirable for his or her purposes. Why is this theory of human behavior problematic?

Clearly, external stimuli do affect behavior. For example, throughout human history fear has been employed as a motivator to manipulate behavior. The recent debate over water-boarding demonstrates just how persistent our belief in fear-as-a-motivator is. There can be no doubt that fear moves people to action but just how predictable is the action that flows from the administration of fear? Will fear cause people to behave honestly or will it cause them to do ANYTHING they can get away with in order to ameliorate their feelings of fear?

Motivators

The evidence for the efficacy of fear as a universal motivator for producing desired outcomes is hardly convincing. As often as not, fear produces counteraction in which those being “motivated” seek to subvert the power exercised by the manipulators. What are these counteractions? Such counteractions are limited only by the imaginations of those being manipulated. In other words, counteractions are intended by those being manipulated, to be deceptive and unpredictable.

Are there better motivational gimmicks that can be substituted for fear by those interested in manipulating the behavior of others—-rewards for example? As with fear, it is clear that rewards also affect the behavior of people but again, how predictable are the outcomes? Will rewards cause people to behave more honestly and predictably or will they cause people to do ANYTHING they can get away with in order to receive the reward? Recent events on Wall Street demonstrate just how much we believe in the power of “motivators” and just how unpredictable will be the outcomes.

The paradigm of reductive psychology seeks to discover the magic keys to human action. Those who hold to this dogma believe that if they can just discover and apply the right set of “motivators” people will act in the manner in which they want them to act. The paradigm of behavioral manipulation pervades our society. It is to be found in our workplaces, our educational system, and our community and family life. The use of “motivators” does affect behavior—-in dangerously unpredictable ways!

There is another theory of motivation. In a systems view, people simply are genetically motivated toward becoming integrated into the social system into which they are born. In the absence of perverse external motivators such as fear and greed, they will act to construct shared meaning with others in their tribe. They will seek out recognition and approval from others by positioning themselves in a relationship of responsibility to others. They will seek to work with others to formulate shared aims and through collaborative action, realize those aims. When these human motivations are allowed to reign freely, shared aims, methods, and efficacy produce gains by which the tribe and each of its members, wins. There is, as W. E. Deming said, the opportunity for all to experience “pride and joy in workmanship”.

The psychological view invites us to apply motivators. The systems view suggests that we need to remove obstacles to collaborative action and let people get on with doing what they do best—-creating value for the tribe. Observations, when viewed through the lens of theory, can be used to support both views. In the long run, the most important question is which view produces the most desirable outcomes while minimizing the undesirable contradictions.

In the “West” we have come to revere individual business “warriors” who have risen to the top of the heap as measured by wealth and power achieved by any means. This is a fantasy meritocracy based on an amoral model of ruthless combat. This Spartan-like model of rightness is compelling, but in some other cultural settings, such behavior is regarded as criminal. Rather than granting status to the most cunning and ruthless in the tribe, these cultures grant status to those who act bravely to further the wellbeing of their communities. In these cultural settings, honor, selflessness, and helping are the measures of a person’s worth and status is granted accordingly.

Read more…

Today the House of Representatives passed a stimulus package to help stave off the collapse of the US economy. The entire contingent of Congressional Republicans claimed to be standing on principle as they voted against the bill.

Imagine that it is Sunday morning and we are all on a ship in the open ocean. There is a great tempest upon us. The planking of our vessel is opening and the sea is rushing in. The captain orders all hands on deck to man the pumps. Half the crew announces that, being principled Christians, they cannot work on Sundays.

With only half the crew at the pumps, the battle against the sea is lost. Our ship founders and sinks. Crew and passengers alike are plunged into the deep dark sea, never to be heard from again.

I suppose the principled among the crew would reconvene in Neptune’s chamber to condemn the Captain and unprincipled crew for doing their best to save the ship.

The value of a philosophy–a grand theory–is measured in terms of it’s predictive power and coherence in explaining how things work. Deming’s philosophy was expressed as a running commentary on the conduct of human enterprise and encompassed the nature of reality (systems and flux) and the nature of human knowing (There are no true facts).

Explanations of current events are being proffered by the media–very complicated and uniformly WRONG! The first step is to abandon the idea of a FIX. The system and the philosophy (ideology) that sustains it, must be “dynamited out”.

The first step is to “institute leadership” that eschews ideology in favor of theory and AIMS “to make a better world”.

We have been sold an ideological bill of goods that postulates the inevitability of relations of inequity and constant conflict based on the intractable evil of so-called “human nature”. This has become a self-fulfilling prophecy that sustains those in power, but belies the abundant evidence that the human species is intensely collaborative by nature.

For over thirty years, leadership in the United States has been rooted in an ideology of human greed and cutthroat competition. It’s time for a change.