Posted by George Huhn on Sun, Aug 15, 2010 @ 11:47 AM
"The bigger things may age you, but it’s the little things that make you old." W. Town Andrews
I remember a
call from a friend of mine a few years ago who was working in a pharmaceutical plant that I had consulted for several years earlier.
"George," he said. "I have a problem. I was reviewing some documents, and I noticed that the copy I was looking at was different from the original document. When I checked the original, I found that the original data had been painted over with White-Out and a different number written over it."
In the pharmaceutical industry, altering data is a big "no-no." In general, when original data needs to be modified, the practice is to neatly draw a single line through the data so it remains legible, and then write the new data, your initials, the date, and the reason for the change, such as "writing error." Not following this practice rigorously can lead to government actions ranging from FDA warning letters to criminal charges.
He took the document to the associate director who had made the alteration and she told him "not to worry about it." He then took it to her supervisor, and was told that it was not going to be changed.
Now, this wasn't a mission-critical document and it did not have any impact on the quality or safety of any shipping products. But it was against the company's own written standard operating procedures and yet they didn't fix it – they were going to ignore it.
My friend and I were both very surprised at this. Several years earlier, this never would have happened – this plant was known for best-in-class good manufacturing practices and regulatory compliance. But management had changed and a culture shift had also started.
A few years later, what had once been a thriving and productive facility was cited for numerous violations by the FDA and essentially shut down.
When I heard about this, I thought about the "broken window" theory in criminology, which comes from this example:
"Consider a building with a few broken windows. If the windows are not repaired, the tendency is for vandals to break a few more windows. Eventually, they may even break into the building, and if it's unoccupied, perhaps become squatters or light fires inside.
Or consider a sidewalk. Some litter accumulates. Soon, more litter accumulates. Eventually, people even start leaving bags of trash from take-out restaurants there or breaking into cars."
Maybe the altered document was the first "broken window." Once it wasn't fixed, it was easier to let the next infringement pass, and the next one after that, until the violations did begin to affect the quality of the products. But by then it was too late.
"Broken windows" can happen in all kinds of ways in any business. They can be things like unfixed software bugs, unanswered customer complaints, or disregarded safety practices. They are often cheap to fix, but also easy to ignore. And there's usually someone who cares, like my friend, pointing them out.
Fix the "broken windows;" don't ignore them.
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Posted by George Huhn on Sun, Jun 27, 2010 @ 03:38 PM
The power of your network isn't just in its size. And it isn't just in whom you know or in whom they know. The power of your network to change the world may come from just introducing two people in it to each other.
In 1935, my grandmother, Henrietta B. Seiberling, was experiencing some hard times. Separated from her husband and living in a
small gatehouse in Akron, Ohio with her three children, she had been attending meetings of the Oxford Group, then a movement that was trying, in her words, "to recapture the power of first Century Christianity in the modern world."
One of the group members was Dr. Bob Smith, who was an alcoholic but didn't think anybody knew about it. So my grandmother arranged for a small meeting of a few people where she hoped people would share deeply about their own shortcomings and victories more than they did in the larger meetings. She later said:
"I waited and thought, Will Bob say something? Sure enough, in that deep, serious tone of his, he said, 'Well, you good people have all shared things that I am sure were very costly to you, and I am going to tell you something which may cost me my profession. I am a silent drinker, and I can't stop.'"
My grandmother knew nothing about alcoholism, but the next day she called Bob and told him to come over to her house for "a guidance." When he arrived, she told him that, to his disappointment, "he mustn't touch one drop of alcohol."
In her words:
"He said, 'Henrietta, I don't understand it. Nobody understands it.' Now that was the state of the world when we were beginning. He said, 'Some doctor had written a book about it, but he doesn't understand it. I don't like the stuff. I don't want to drink.' I said, 'Well, Bob, that is what I have been guided about.' And that was the beginning of our meetings, long before Bill ever came."
Months later an alcoholic named Bill Wilson arrived in Akron from New York to complete a business deal. The deal fell through, and Bill was left with nothing but a few dollars in his pocket, not even enough to pay for his hotel room. Even though he hadn't had a drink in 5 months, he looked into a bar and thought, "Well, I'll just go in there and get drunk and forget it all, and that will be the end of it."
But instead, he looked in a ministers directory and picked a name at random, a man named Tunks. He called Dr. Tunks and he gave him a list of names to call, including a good friend of my grandmother, Norman Sheppard. Norman knew what my grandmother was trying to do for Bob, so he suggested that he call her. Down to his last nickel, that's exactly what he did, and he told her, "I'm from the Oxford Group and I'm a Rum Hound from New York."
So she got Bob and Bill together at her house the next day, just thinking that they each might benefit from talking with each other. Bob had promised his wife he would only stay for 15 minutes, but he end up staying the whole day with Bill, and they shared their stories with each other. And while each had thought that telling their stories was going to be what helped them, what they found was that listening to each other's story was even more helpful. And seeds of Alcoholics Anonymous were planted.
Later, Bill Wilson, or Bill W. as he came to be known, talked about some of the precepts that developed into the famous "12 Steps" of Alcoholics Anonymous:
"We admitted we were licked.
We got honest with ourselves.
We talked it over with another person.
We made amends to those we had harmed.
We tried to carry this message to others with no thought of reward.
We prayed to whatever God we thought there was."
Now, my grandmother wasn't trying to start an organization to help alcoholics. At the time, she really didn't understand what alcoholism was – nobody really did. She was just trying to help a friend never touch another drop of alcohol. But she put two people together and then worked with them to start an organization that has helped millions of people around the world.
Not for money. Not for fame. Just to help a friend.
In the new economy world where being heard through "Social Media", Twittering, and accumulating Facebook "friends" is all the rage, just remember my grandmother and never forget the magic that can happen when two people simply meet, face-to-face, and honestly listen to each other.
Posted by George Huhn on Fri, Jun 04, 2010 @ 11:36 AM
Wondering why your teams aren't more creative and innovative? Maybe they are stopping themselves.
When it comes to innovation "what really matters is not getting many good ideas, but getting one or two exceptional ideas. That's really what innovation is all about," says Terwiesch.
But if you're getting lots of ideas, shouldn't that naturally lead to more "exceptional ideas?"
Not necessarily.
"The evaluation part is critical.," Terwiesch says. "It's no good generating a great idea if you don't recognize the idea as great. It's like me sitting here and saying I had the idea for Amazon. If I had the idea but didn't do anything about it, then it really doesn't matter that I had the idea."
And project teams are not very good at recognizing and developing great ideas. For example, here are 4 reasons that team dynamics can get in the way of innovation:
- Team members self-censor themselves to avoid upsetting a colleague or to go along with the status quo
- Too many people in the room doesn't provide enough time for everybody to be heard and have their ideas discussed
- "Build-up" or the tendency of people to expand on ideas that have already been accepted by the team at the expense of considering other ideas
- The tendency to defer to authority or up the hierarchical team structure, i.e. "the boss is always right"
Also, Terwiesch says, "We find huge differences in people's levels of creativity, and we just have to face it. We're not all good singers and we're not all good runners, so why should we expect that we all are good idea generators?"
What are some things that teams can do to work around the innovation-killing team dynamics?
In their book "
Innovation Tournaments: Creating and Selecting Exceptional Opportunities," Terwiesch and Ulrich suggest that putting more structure around the early idea generation process can help ensure that quality ideas bubble to the surface. They recommend using a virtual "suggestion box" to collect ideas and "coordinated competitions" to filter exceptional ideas.
Terwiesch adds, "People like having a process because they understand that it's fair. In a typical brainstorming meeting, it's not fair and everybody knows it: The boss is always right."
He also says that it is important to prevent the group dynamics in brainstorming sessions from killing early ideas. "Your initial thoughts are very vital to the company because they are your unbiased opinion."
According to Ulrich, "We have found that, in the early phases of idea generation, providing very specific process guideposts for individuals [such as] 'Generate at least 10 ideas and submit them by Wednesday,' ensures that all members of a team contribute and that they devote sufficient creative energy to the problem."
The next time you're looking for innovative ideas, consider trying the virtual suggestion box, and then focus on evaluating the ideas that were generated. If you have a large team, consider breaking the team into smaller groups while being conscious of the social and organizational hierarchy and personalities within each small group.
Finally, consider using a "Positive, Negative, Interesting" (PNI) parallel thinking structure around the discussions. Using this approach, the team evaluates each idea in only one area at a time. So when the "Positive" idea characteristics are evaluated, only positive attributes of the idea are discussed and recorded, and when "Negative" characteristics are evaluated, only the downsides of the idea are discussed and recorded. The "Interesting" characteristics are the neutral or "just the facts" attributes of the idea.
Once teams get used to this approach and experience the value in it, they become more self-directed and peer pressure alone keeps the discussions on-track.
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Posted by George Huhn on Tue, May 25, 2010 @ 12:19 PM
I was talking with a friend of mine, Dr. Richard Flanagan, a psychologist and co-author of the book The Six Disciplines of Breakthrough Learning: How to Turn Training and Development into Business Results, about his recent election to a non-profit Board of Trustees. Our discussion quickly turned to the number of new acronyms that he had heard being bandied about in his first meeting.
"I know what you mean," I said. "I often have meetings with clients where the acronym flow becomes too fast to follow."
So Richard told me how he solves that problem: he raises his hand and says that he is sorry that he can't understand because he is "dysacronymic."
"Most people at first express their sympathy, even though they don't know what 'dysacronymic' means."
So he explains:
"I coined the term "Dysacronymic" to mean confused by or unable to understand acronyms, an impairment in the ability to understand or interpret acronyms. I use the term especially in new settings where internal acronyms are bandied about: any company, government agency, or technology group being prime offenders, but all human systems seem to be afflicted with shortcuts assumed to be known and understood by all. I guess we also need a diagnostic term and description for human systems that are overburdened or blessed with many acronyms - maybe hyper-acronymic systems!"
"After I use it I always confess to making up the term and meaning no offense and then request acronym interpretation or explanation. Very often others express gratitude for the intervention - even insiders sometimes don't know the meanings but don't want to look bad by asking. I have found that sometimes the acronym users themselves can't explain them very well and have often forgotten the exact terms that the letters stand for."
The project management and project portfolio management fields are loaded with acronyms; this page from Project Management Knowledge lists 87 project management related acronyms. And, of course, many acronyms have multiple meanings. Our Data Machines website gets hits from people searching for information about "parts per million" as it shares the same acronym as "project portfolio management" (PPM).
Richard told me that he is planning to write up a "clinical" description that "will follow the DSM-IV diagnostic descriptions model." For those of you like Richard and me, who are dysacronymic, DSM is the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders" of the American Psychiatric Association."
So, are you dysacronymic, too? If you are, thanks to Dr. Flanagan, at least now we'll have a clinical diagnostic model to point to that explains our affliction.
But does anybody have any cures?
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Posted by George Huhn on Mon, May 24, 2010 @ 11:21 AM
The first part of his seminar was a terrific presentation of examples of disruptive innovation, and in the second part of his talk he encouraged companies to focus less on customer and product segmentation and instead ask the question "What jobs are your customers hiring your products to do?"
He told a story of a fast food restaurant that wanted to sell more milkshakes, so they did what many firms would do: they interviewed their customers to discover exactly what features that they wanted in a milkshake. Then they took the results of that research and used it to build the perfect milkshake that their customers described.
Did sales go up? No.
Did sales go down? No.
In spite of building this great milkshake that they were sure was going to hit their customers' sweet spot, sales remained flat.
So they hired a team of consultants to watch how people purchased milkshakes throughout the day, including how they were dressed, who they came in with, the time of day, etc.
And they found something very surprising.
The majority of milkshakes were sold early in the morning to customers who came into the restaurant alone and purchased only a single milkshake. Finding this interesting, they began to interview these customers, and they found that what they had in common was that each one had a particularly long commute to work in the morning.
It turns out that the job that they were "hiring" the milkshake to do was to accompany them on their long drive to work. But why milkshakes? Well, if you wrote a help wanted ad for the milkshake's "job," it might look like this:
Wanted: Reliable Food For Long Drive. Must be sweet, cold, and filling. Must fit in cup holder, require only one hand to consume, and last for most of the trip. Must not make a mess in car or on clothes. Must have slightly healthy appearance. Coffee, bagels, candy bars, sodas, and breakfast sandwiches need not apply.
You see, many of the milkshake customers had tried other products for the job, but none of those products had the unique combination of qualities that made the milkshake the perfect fit for their tacit job requirements. And it wasn't really even about the quality of the milkshake; it was about the general characteristics of the product that made it right for the job that the customers were hiring it to do.
So what did the restaurant do to improve sales? They moved the milkshake machine to the front of the store and made it self-service so that these customers did not have to wait in the breakfast lines. They could come in, get their milkshake, swipe their card, and go. They also offered a new type of milkshake with small straw-size pieces of fruit inside that made it last a bit longer (they were harder to suck up the straw!) as well as adding some variety to the taste and texture.
In the end, it wasn't about what features that the customers thought would make a great milkshake. It was about discovering the unspoken job description in the customer's mind that made the milkshake the perfect candidate for that job.
I wonder if they tried coffee milkshakes?
There was another group that was the next largest purchaser of milkshakes, and I suspect it was for many of the same "job qualifications." Can you guess who they were? The answer is in the comments section.
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Posted by George Huhn on Mon, May 17, 2010 @ 02:27 PM
What does it mean when a meteorologist says "the chance of rain today is 60%?"
Each day in the United States, a massive amount of data is collected from weather stations, satellites, and weather balloons from around the world and sent to the National Meteorological Center near Washington, D.C. The data is processed to give a multi-dimensional picture of global atmospheric conditions, and then it is analyzed using various algorithms to develop local weather forecasts and predictions.
But this isn't how they make the "percent chance of precipitation" predictions. Even with the massive amount of data and super computer speed, their predictive algorithms alone just aren't good enough. So they use comparisons to historical data.
Basically, they take the current atmospheric conditions and compare them with days in the past that had very similar conditions. So when they say that "the chance of rain today is 60%," it means that it rained on 60% of the days in the comparison set.
And guess what? Assuming the data was entered properly, these predictions are 100% reliable all the time. Why? Because they are only predictions of probability – they aren't "wrong" on a particular day, whether it rains or not. But whether they are accurate or not in the long term is an entirely different question.
The only way to determine if the predictions are accurate is to collect the data and plot the actual versus the predicted conditions over time to learn the margin of error. If it only rained on 30% of the days that the prediction was 60%, then there is a problem with the data or the data processing.
You can do the same type of probability prediction and testing with your business projects, too. The more accurate your estimates, the more confidence you will have in your overall project-value ranking in your project portfolios.
Developing more accurate project risk estimates requires 4 basic activities:
1) Identifying the key drivers of cost, time, and resource risks in completing project tasks.
2) Preparing a database of these tasks that includes the corresponding cost, time, and resource estimates assigned to each project and the basis for those estimates at the beginning of the project.
3) Tracking the actual costs, times, and resources used performing the task as each task is completed.
4) Comparing the actual costs, times, and resources with the starting estimates.
After you have maintained this database for a period of time, you will be able to plot the actual versus the predicted results. This plot will show you the accuracy of your cost, time, and resource estimates as well as revealing the distribution of the actual results. (You will probably learn that your cost estimates were too low, your time estimates were too short, and your resource estimates were for too few. And that is a good thing to learn.) Eventually, you will be able to use the actual results data as a basis for future probability predictions, including understanding the uncertainty in those estimates.
I saw the data of one major pharmaceutical company who did this for their project "percent probability of success" estimates. The data between 20 and 85% was surprisingly linear; for example, about 50% of the projects that had "percent probability of success estimates" of 50% were ultimately successful. It also showed that all projects that had an estimated "percent probability of success" of 85% or greater succeeded and all that had an estimate of 20% or less failed.
If you’re involved in project portfolio management and you're looking for ways to improve your project planning, compiling and analyzing your historical data is a great way to test and improve your future estimates.
Does your company track and analyze historical project management data? Why do you think that most businesses don't?
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Posted by George Huhn on Fri, Apr 30, 2010 @ 10:38 AM
This last paragraph caught my attention:
Karl Popper, the great philosopher of science, once divided the world into two categories: clocks and clouds. Clocks are neat, orderly systems that can be solved through reduction; clouds are an epistemic mess, “highly irregular, disorderly, and more or less unpredictable.” The mistake of modern science is to pretend that everything is a clock, which is why we get seduced again and again by the false promises of brain scanners and gene sequencers. We want to believe we will understand nature if we find the exact right tool to cut its joints. But that approach is doomed to failure. We live in a universe not of clocks but of clouds.1
Our businesses are mixtures of clocks and clouds, but it is often difficult to distinguish which parts are clouds and which parts are clocks. The clocks are things that we can measure and control but clouds are things that we can only try to predict.
Confusion begins when we try to measure and control clouds as if they are clocks or we focus only on trying to control clocks without trying to predict and mange the clouds.
Like Leher's comment on science, it is also a mistake of modern business to try to pretend everything is a clock. While I am a strong proponent of using business analytics, such as
simulation and
optimization in
project portfolio management tools, the analytical tools that we use should be able to manage data from both clocks and clouds. And when we're using these tools, we should be ever mindful of the inherent uncertainty (cloudiness!) in the data and the resulting predictions. Business analyses should rarely be
chiseled in stone. Too often, they are treated like they are.
Look around your business today. Where are your clocks? Where are your clouds?
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Posted by George Huhn on Mon, Apr 26, 2010 @ 09:55 AM
Looking for new and better ideas from your project team? Thinking about having a typical "
brainstorming" session? Don't bother. New research shows there's a better way.
"Brainstorming" usually consists of people meeting specifically for the purpose of coming up with new ideas around a specific topic. Any and all ideas are recorded, and evaluation of individual ideas is postponed so as not to inhibit idea generation or discard ideas prematurely. Brainstorming is proposed to work on the basis that ideas from each person in the group will stimulate new and different ideas from others, therefore, more ideas will lead to better ideas. That's the theory, anyway.
However, in a recent article published in the
INFORMS journal
Management Science entitled
"Idea Generation and the Quality of the Best Idea," researchers found that most of the literature on brainstorming focused on the number of ideas generated, but not the quality or the selection of the best ideas. Furthermore, they found that the literature showed the opposite of what brainstorming promised: "research has unequivocally found that the number of ideas generated (i.e., productivity) is significantly higher when individuals work by themselves, and the average quality of ideas is no different between individual and team processes."
In other words, brainstorming produces fewer ideas than individual efforts, but about the same quality of ideas.
1) the average quality of ideas generated,
2) the number of ideas generated,
3) the variance in the quality of ideas generated, and
4) the ability of the group to discern the quality of the
ideas.
In their study, they compared two processes: a typical brainstorming structure and a "hybrid" structure. In the brainstorming structure, each team of 4 was given 30 minutes to complete an idea generation challenge. At the end of the 30 minutes, each team was given 5 minutes to develop a consensus-based selection and ranking of the team's five best ideas. In the hybrid structure, individuals were asked to work separately on an idea generation challenge for 10 minutes and then asked to rank their own ideas at the end of the 10 minutes. These individuals were then randomly placed in teams of 4 to share and discuss their ideas and generate new ideas for 20 minutes. At the end of this phase, each team was given 5 minutes to develop a consensus-based selection and ranking of the team's five best ideas.
The ideas were then evaluated by a panel of 41 MBA students who had received formal training in the valuation of new products.
Their conclusion? They found the "hybrid structure" produced 3 times as many ideas per unit of time compared to brainstorming, and the average quality of the ideas was significantly higher.
So, the next time you're trying to generate some breakthrough ideas on your project team, be sure to let your project team members generate some new ideas on their own before you try to do it together as a team. This research shows you'll get much better results doing it that way.
And if you're involved in
project portfolio management, be sure to share this information with your project managers. Sometimes it only takes one breakthrough idea to make the difference between a project that is delivered on-time and on-budget and one that fails to meet its goals.
Follow-up: Two of the researchers who wrote this brainstorming article were interviewed to discuss their work in developing systems to help teams find great ideas.
Read more about it here.
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Posted by George Huhn on Tue, Apr 13, 2010 @ 03:24 PM
Do you want to get a higher price when you sell something at auction on eBay?
After running hundreds of controlled auctions on
eBay, researchers reported in the
INFORMS journal
Decision Analysis that longer auctions yielded more bidders and more bids resulting in an 11% average final price increase compared to the shorter auctions.
When you sell an item on eBay, you can choose auction durations ranging between 1 and 10 days. The researchers studied the differences between 1 and 3 day auctions by auctioning identical items simultaneously with one item in a 3-day auction and the other in a 1-day auction, but both ending on the same day. The also ran an additional 241 control auctions in which the durations for the identical item pairs were the same.
In total, there were 1,223 unique bidders and only 202 of them placed bids simultaneously in a paired auction. Interestingly, they analyzed their data set to see if the higher prices from longer auctions could be attributed to more bids and/or more bidders, but they found that could only partially explain the results.
They also conducted another set of studies on local auction sites with similar formats as eBay, but that had much smaller groups of potential participants. These studies compared auction durations of 1 day versus 10 days. Here they found the opposite effect: shorter auctions resulted in average final prices that were 16% higher than the longer auctions.
The authors caution that these studies are not directly comparable due to a variety of differences in experimental controls and design considerations, and should be therefore be considered primarily as "two separate investigations of the effect of duration on prices in two auction platforms."
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Posted by George Huhn on Fri, Apr 09, 2010 @ 09:32 AM
"It’s like we said on the iPad: if you see a stylus, they blew it. In multitasking, if you see a task manager, they blew it. Users shouldn’t have to ever, ever, EVER think about that stuff."
I love that quote. Why?
Because it shows why Apple is uncompromising in trying to bring their customers the best user experience that they possibly can. It is exactly the reason that they don't launch mediocre products, in spite of media critics who think, for example, that Apple should have launched a net book or are impatient for features that other phones have, but that are poorly executed. They won't do something the way everybody else does it when they believe that they can find a better way.
We try to take the same approach in developing business software applications. For the most part, our customers are not programmers; they're not operations experts; and they're not mathematicians. But they are really smart business managers who want to use business analytics to solve important high-value problems quickly. They want to think about getting to the solution – not how to write equations or how to integrate applications or how to program a spreadsheet.
For example, when we design a
form we have certain criteria that must be met, such as:
- Minimize redundant data entry by using form objects such as drop-down menus
- Enable and disable controls based on the users selection
- Avoid the need to display "Error" screens – if we come to a point where a user might get an "Error" screen, then we try to see how they got there and how we can prevent it.
- Make sure a full description of each form's functions is one click away.
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