I read John Lehrer’s New Yorker article, Groupthink, and then heard him discuss his new book Imagine on the radio. I found his assertion that brainstorming doesn’t work very interesting — and true. In my own experience leading continuous improvement initiatives and conducting workshops,  I’ve used that technique and find Lehrer’s claim true — specifically as a way to find a new and creative solution to a problem. Often you have a room of people who are there because their bosses made them go to the meeting or appointed them as the representative of a particular department or function. Being put into a situation where you have to brainstorm with a group of co-workers is what I like to call “corporate fun.” You put a bunch of adults in a room and try to get them to thinking outside their daily work routine. Dull work routine one minute, creative genius being unleashed under duress the next. Corporate legislation of creativity. The transition can be tough or just doesn’t happen effectively.  And the results are mixed.

I agree with Lehrer that in the end, you can often come up with better ideas alone rather than in a group, particularly when you are relaxed and not trying hard to be creative. However, groupthink is useful and does serve some purpose, even if it doesn’t actually unleash employees’ creative sides or come up with the next big thing. Getting everyone in the same room brainstorming to try to solve a problem or come up with great ideas helps the cultural process and helps put everyone on the same page. In the age-old team-building process of forming, storming, norming, and performing, brainstorming can serve to facilitate getting a group working well together to accomplish a goal. It helps inculcate corporate norms and culture and helps build teams.  Maybe it’s brainwashing “lite” instead of brainstorming. Rather than necessarily getting the best ideas, brainstorming can help create high-performing teams who need to get a job or project done. But as a tool to get the best ideas out of people, the tyranny of the majority often quashes some of the good thoughts. Not overtly, but with subtle body language. The wild and crazy thought is put up there because people are supposed to be non-judgemental. Every thought is supposed to be considered. But some of the best ideas are left on the list, but taken no further or disregarded because of who said them or because an idea’s possiblities are not understood or just don’t fit with peoples’ mindsets.

What are your experiences?

-Sherry R. Gordon

Several years ago I penned a rant for Spend Matters about tool heads. What are tool heads? I define them as those people who focus on the tools of continuous improvement such as lean tools and Six Sigma tools rather than on the big picture of what the organization is trying to accomplish and the people who need to accomplish the transformation. Tool heads love the tools of continuous improvement, as these are tangible and readily deployed: SWOT, histograms, value stream mapping, andons, SMED, etc.  They are concrete and not abstract. They are effective and dramatic at transforming chunks of a business. Tool heads can get mired in the tools and focus on the trivial many instead of the vital few, often missing the big picture.  Tool heads are rarely strategic thinkers. Many individual problems may get solved, but the overall issues don’t get addressed. Small processes may get optimized, but the overall business process may be sub-optimized. Culture and behaviors stay the same, as applying tools doesn’t address cultural and behavioral issues. However, tools are often simpler to use than bringing about real transformation, as they can be deployed in spite of the people whom they impact. Tool heads are more comfortable working with continuous improvement tools than with the folks who are impacted.

Tool heads are the folks who set up desert islands of excellence. As pilot projects in an overall enterprise improvement process, islands of excellence can help spark and inspire a successful improvement initiative. But too frequently they turn into desert islands of excellence when they become detached from the firm’s mainland of mediocrity and never spark real change or just optimize one chunk of the business, leaving the rest suboptimized. One of the most common manifestations of this phenomenon is putting in a “lean” cell on the manufacturing floor. A standalone cell is the beginning, not the ultimate goal. If all the processes surrounding the cell, particularly administrative and supply chain components, are not linked up and also optimized, you end up with a lean cell that is a desert island and limited in its overall impact to the organization. The rest of the company conducts business as usual, and looks at the cell as “we do lean manufacturing.”  And many firms really do believe that they are implementing lean as soon as the first cell is online, even if it’s just a desert island.  Real change is limited, and the tool heads have done their job.

Implementing change begins and ends with people. And that fact hasn’t changed.

-Sherry R. Gordon

I once worked in quality improvement capacity as Director of TQM for a distribution company for whom the term supply management was a new concept. Purchasing in particular felt that it had no clout or influence over suppliers. The rest of the company saw purchasing as the price choppers and the whipping boy for stock outs. I was facilitating an improvement project with this group and we quickly ran up against resistance from other departments who thought that purchasing problems needed to be solved by purchasing alone and who weren’t interested in owning their contributions to problems. This was, of course, not entirely the case. In this company, Sales was the king to whom all others had to defer.  Not to minimize the importance of sales, since they were the revenue generators. But they often created unnecessary waste and cost (and fire drills for purchasing) due to their focus on making their numbers.  This resistance to working with purchasing rather than dictating to them turned out to be a bigger problem than recalcitrant suppliers. At one of our meetings, I jokingly described the way something was done as “Mickey Mouse”. One of the purchasing staffed replied that of course it was, as they were working for a Mickey Mouse company. After a few days, mouse ears and white gloves popped up all over purchasing on the tops of monitors and filing cabinets. I had struck a sensitive spot, and we had stumbled upon an inadvertent team-building tool.

However, continuous improvement meant working counter to a culture that had existed in this company since its inception and was very challenging. In this family-owned business, the staff was getting mixed messages. On the one hand, they were told that they were “empowered” to improve things. On the other hand, the empowerment went only so far before it could be squelched by the owner who, although he wanted his company to improve, felt that deep down, improvement was for everyone but him.

-Sherry R. Gordon

Thousands of people have gone through Six Sigma training and many call themselves Six Sigma Black Belts. While they may have gone through black belt training and possess the technical know-how, many may not adequately fulfill the role and create successful changes and improvements in an organization. They have the book learning but not the street smarts. Expertise in moving an organization on an improvement path is hard to do and especially difficult to teach in a course. It is a capability that is gained over time. And not everyone is able to make it happen.  

One questions how good a Six Sigma Black Belt is when they:

–Think and act tactically and not strategically.

–Fish  for their associates rather than teaching them how to fish or the opposite — won’t get their hands dirty.

–Can’t leave their egos behind and are self-agrandizing instead of inspirational.

–Are unable to motivate others.

–Focus on the Six Sigma tools but not on organizational and political barriers to success.

–Don’t know how to be agents for positive change and overcome resistance to change.

–Are ill at ease interacting with senior management

–Are statisticians who are not effective communicators at all levels of the organization.

–Have Six Sigma book learning but little real application of the tools.

–Claim to be a Black Belt and “name drop” about it, but don’t actually demonstrate their expertise, just brag about.

—Have difficulty being a team player

–Focus internally without truly considering the customer

As in any continuous improvement methodology, practitioners must be more than tool heads. They must possess essential leadership and communications skills and the guts combined with tact to be a positive change agent.  Six Sigma must add up to more than the sum of disparate cost savings in different areas of the company, or it will  not succeed or be sustainable.

-Sherry R. Gordon