Another Scary CPI Story

“Killing the Baby” was not a phrase I’d ever expected to hear while learning about magic. As the regular readers of this newsletter may recall, I am a what I like to call, a “tenacious amateur” magician. My childhood hobby has continued into adulthood, and I’ve found some correlation between performing prestidigitation and facilitating improvement events. I’ve written several past articles about it (See The Magic of Process Improvement, Nothing Up my Sleeve, Process Improvement Magician, and The Power of a Few Words)

As I continue to study the art, I learn things that apply to performing magic, as well as help with process improvement. One of these nuggets of wisdom came from award winning magician Stuart MacDonald. Stuart fooled Penn & Teller as well winning numerous magical competitions. Stuart also used to teach Lean principles for Whirlpool, and lectures on Magic & Lean as a keynote speaker. During his lectures, he talks about not being afraid to Kill the Baby.

The phrase is intended to shock, because it addresses something that many magicians do not want to do…discard their favorite bits. They don’t want to change, or improve, because of some sentimental attachment to something. Perhaps it’s a trick they learned while young and have fond memories of performing it. Perhaps it’s a sleight of hand technique that took them months to perfect. Or maybe it’s a joke, one that’s not really that funny to anyone but the magician (for some reason, personal inside jokes happen a lot with magicians). Whatever the reason, the performer doesn’t want to get rid of it…even if it does not move the plot forward, or even diminishes the routine.

That is when a person must have the courage to “kill the baby,” get rid of something they really love ?in order to have a better show.

This happens quite a bit in the world outside of magic as well. People not wanting to get rid of something for whatever reason. The most common are the “It’s the way we’ve always done it!” or the similar “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” But there’s also times when the boss, or some senior leader has a personal preference. Or there’s a long term partnership with a supplier and it would be uncomfortable to talk about modifications. Then there’s my personal pet peeve one, “We’re not sure if legal will sign off on it!” (Had that one played during an event in which we wanted to change how telephone agents greeted customers). It then falls upon the facilitator to help lead the team to making the change.

One of the best ways I learned to do this was using the Air Force’s Rapid Improvement Event approach. It used the Toyota A3 as a structure problem solving methodology. The first three steps are identifying the problem, define current state, and then create a future state. The Air Force would have us lead the teams through an exercise of creating an Ideal Future State…what would you do if you were King/Queen for a day with unlimited resources. This did two things.

First, it got the team thinking outside the box. Breaking paradigms and encouraging new solutions. And second, these new solutions often did not include the old processes that were causing problems. So as you worked with the teams to create a future state and how to get there, you could point back to the fact they didn’t want the old way. It’s a way to drive change without directly addressing the issue.

There are some other options that can be tried:

• The direct approach. Just hit the team head on with the fact that the thing doesn’t work, that the baby must be done away with. This approach depends on team dynamics. If the team operates on facts, and you’ve got data to support you, it may work.
• Alignment can also help. If the baby in question is something that does not align to the organizations vision or strategy, you can leverage that.
• Showcasing Pain can be effective. If there are examples of actually injury or damage, or excessive costs, or rampant employee dissatisfaction, you can leverage them to drive change.
• Trial Runs. Get the team to try a change for a short period of time. Or, run change in one group, with the another acting as a control group.
• Benchmarking. Look at other groups or organizations using different processes.

Change is never easy…sometimes it’s downright scary. Especially when you’re dealing with something that you really love…

#quality #lean #leansixsigma #operationalexcellence #processimprovement #totalqualitymanagement #storytelling innovation? #lean #leantraining? #leanthinking?