Doctor John Toussaint posted a letter from the CEO of Thedacare, Dr. Dean Bruner.
Then Paul shared a story with us about when he began as the CEO of Alcoa. They had an annual employee injury rate of two-per-thousand. He said the goal must be zero and his team told him he was nuts. He went to a plant and told the employees that the goal is zero and they told him he was nuts. So, in a plant of a thousand people he asked a simple question, if the goal is not zero, who here today will raise their hand and volunteer to get a significant injury this year so we hit a higher goal? No one raised their hand.
As part of a Japan Lean study tour, I visited Sango, a tier 1 Toyota supplier. During a questions and answers session, someone asked whether they used Six Sigma. The answer?
Six Sigma is not enough. Our goal is zero defects.
In other words, even though the shorter term target may be improvement, the overall goal is perfection.
But that means the goal is impossible to achieve...
Yes it is, so why would we do that?
When the Lexus was first designed, it's design targets were 250+ km/h, 10.5 L / 100 km, noise levels under 60 dB at 96 km/h (60 mph), and a drag coefficient of 29. At the time, this was considered next to impossible.
The Rocky Mountain Institute has something called 10xE: Factor Ten Engineering, with the idea being to work out how to design solutions that have 10 times improvement of resource efficiency over conventional solutions. Typically the actual improvements are more like 2 - 4x but 5 - 10x has been achieved. An example of a 10xE solution is Amory Lovins' GreenHome which saves 99% of space heating and 90% of electricity use, primarily by not needing any conventional HVAC system.
The purpose of having these kind of next-to-impossible, if not actually impossible goals, is not achievement so much as creating a situation where we must challenge our underlying assumptions.
But couldn't we just aim for the actual acheivable target?
For one thing, we may not actually know what that is. For another, we're more likely to pull off too early. In martial arts / boxing, people will always say "aim past the target". If you aim for the pad, you will decelerate before impact. That's just how your brain works. I suppose it's possible that you can train yourself to aim for the target and not decelerate, but it's a lot easier to just aim past it.
Vince Lombardi sums it up nicely:
Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection we can catch excellence.
But aren't impossible goals demotivating?
If there are no incremental achievable targets as well, yes.
But even if we have incremental targets, the overall goal may well be impossible. Is this demotivating?
If the goal is framed as being about achievement with the corresponding reward or punishment, then yes, an impossible goal is demotivating given that there is nothing you can do to receive the reward nor avoid the punishment.
This is a dysfunctional, management mindset.
But if the goal is framed as being about direction, about challenge, about growth, then no. An impossible goal allows you to dream big and question all limits and assumptions.
This is a design mindset.
It depends a lot on what kind of leaders you have
John Shook talks about 3 kinds of leaders:
- Authoritarian - tells you what to do
- Laissez-faire - allows you to just do what you want
- Lean (which I also call facilitative) - comes down to the work and helps you figure it out
For an authoritarian or laissez-faire leader, "perfection" is an empty slogan.
For a facilitative leader, one who is actively willing and capable to support the actual work, perfection is a statement of intent that is supported by knowledge, behaviour, systems, and symbols.
Fabio Pereira wrote about a different approach to retrospectives we tried a while back that we called "goal-driven retrospectives". Instead of just reflecting on what happened, we framed the retrospective in terms of very challenging, if not impossible, goals. It matters a lot that we are speaking from the perspective of people on the team, doing the work, and knowing quite clearly what we are challenging ourselves with.
You know we know what we are asking, you know we understand how difficult it is, and you know we ask it anyway because we believe that even if we can't touch the face of perfection, we might just get close.
Authoritarian and laissez-faire leaders can't know this.
Deal with learned helplessness first
The gist of it was that each of two teams had to organise themselves and work out how to disassemble and re-assemble a simple go-kart in the shortest possible time.
Round 1:
- Disassembled in around 5 minutes
- Re-assembled in 10+ minutes
Then we told them that a new competitor has shown up who is able to disassemble and re-assemble at a dramatically faster rate. For example, less than 5 minutes total time.
The teams are besides themselves. "That's impossible!" "There's no way!"
We assure them it's possible and we actually have the instructions on how they do it. "I will pay you $1000 right now for that manual" (we had a few executives in the training)
We won't sell you the manual because you already have the capability within yourselves to do this. Just implement the improvements to deal with the problems that you've already identified.
Round 2:
- Disassembled and re-assembled in less than 4 minutes
And... both teams were already pointing out other problems and mistakes that they could probably fix to be even faster.
"That's impossible!" turned into far surpassing expectations (aka the target) and still believing that there is much further to go.
There is learned helplessness in the workplace and that needs to be addressed before we can talk about a goal of perfection.
Goals are about direction; targets are about learning
I think of targets as, most importantly, making a prediction about the effect of an action based on our current understanding. Targets are then about learning and improvement.
I think of goals as providing a True North, a direction which generally guides our exploration.
Perfection is version infinity and improvement is the next version.
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