Crash, but Don’t Burn
December 1st, 2004 by HalCan anyone upstage Tom Peters' kaizen Is…Very Dangerous Stuff? How about David Drickhamer? David has a different view on kaizen, Continuous Improvement — Crash, But Don't Burn, appearing in Industry Week.
People often cringe when I say, "Fail early and often." We work so hard to avoid failure, to encourage it seems counter to accepted wisdom. When I worked at The Neenan Company we called attention to our errors by banging on a Chinese gong in the main lobby of the building. Visitors thought we were crazy. Our subcontractors knew it to be true!
The road to process excellence and market success — and wisdom — is paved with failure.
So along comes David Drickhamer telling us to talk about our company and project failures. This is a guy who says if we don't speak about the failures we can't become great.
"What doesn't work — the major and minor failures — becomes the tacit knowledge and experience that builds up within individuals and organizations as they keep trying new things. Learning from past missteps, the next time they face a similar bottleneck, or a customer makes a similar request, these people and organizations are able to skip some of the trial and error to arrive at a solution faster."
I've learned that only the mature and wisest of managers and companies take advantage of failure. Politics, petty ambitions, and the fear of not looking good are the main enemies of an organization intent on learning, innovating, and staying competitive. David describes the usual situation:
"(W)hen the death knell begins to toll for really big projects, everybody who possibly can flees, separating themselves mentally and physically from the doomed venture."
Hey, Tom Peters. kaizen is not dangerous. Danger is an organization that doesn't systematically and continuously learn from its mistakes.
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March 3rd, 2006 at 4:47 am
Continuous Improvement needs to be measured in order to motivate teams that they are making progress and heading in the right direction. Breaking down a large task into much smaller tasks that can be measured on a more frequent basis is the energy team needs to continue on the path of continous improvement. Managers that can break down tasks and measure them with numeric milestones rather than G0-NOGO criteria allows team to stay motivated as long as they see progress being made and recognized by their peers.
March 3rd, 2006 at 11:23 am
It’s hard to argue with Peter Drucker, “What gets measured gets done.” There does need to be a way to measure that learning is ocurring…that progress is underway. We live in a society that covers up mistakes. Speaking only for myself, some of the richest learning moments in life have been those where I performed poorly. Those were moments for breakthrough.
Drickhamer is suggesting and I agree that organizations need to systematically embrace its failures for the learning of individuals and the organization as a whole. Toyota has accomplished that in their “no blame” evironment. They did that in the USA. The rest of us can do the same.