By Rafael Aguayo and Alan Pippenger
An enterprising young woman decided to become a professional plumber. Her first step was to join herself to a master plumber. This she did for a year and a half. Being industrious and a fast learner she learned to use many of the trade tools and acquired some skill. She now knew the difference between a left and right handed monkey wrench, how to cut, fit and thread pipes. She could use a snake and other important tools. For her 18 months work she got a paper certifying her as a “Black Belt” in plumbing. With all that time invested she, understandably, decides to go off on her own. She puts an ad in the online yellow pages and before long has a lively business.
Our new Black Belt does pretty well at first. Doing simple faucet repairs and opening drains. But as her business grows she takes on more difficult and complex jobs. Her makeshift solutions appear to work but create deeper problems of which she is unaware. Her fixes hold up for weeks or even months. The hidden problems are building.
When we hire a contractor for an addition, do we ask if he is familiar with the hammer, saw, screws, and wood? No, when hiring a real professional we assume they understand much, much more than the use of the tools. We assume that as professionals, as master craftsmen, they are very versed in the theory of their particular trade. Without understanding theory, tools will get you just so far, as our young apprentice found out.
Teaching tools without the accompanying theory behind them is a sort of cruel joke. It allows mere apprentices to be represented as craftsmen even while they are causing very deep damage to a company. This they can do while appearing to make it profitable. Sometimes it is months or even years before the damage is revealed, but it is revealed.
In the 1950s business schools taught MBO, Management by Objectives, using the financial statement to improve the results. One person who very successfully used these techniques was Robert McNamara who became president of Ford Motor Company. When McNamara left Ford it was profitable while at the same time acquiring a reputation as Found On Road Dead. A very few years later Ford was on the verge of bankruptcy as customers bolted en masse. McNamara went on to become Secretary of Defense and ran the Vietnam War in the same manner.
Would you hire an X-Ray technician to examine you, evaluate your physical condition and prescribe a remedy? Of course not. Yet, that is exactly what we do in management. It can take as little as two weeks to obtain a black belt in management. After six weeks, six months or six years this person is still a beginner, still unprepared to offer sound theory for improvement.
Knowing some tools is just insufficient. Without understanding the theory behind plumbing you are doomed to repeat the experience of our apprentice. Even our master plumber would be at a loss if he had to design a water irrigation system. He would have reached the limit of his knowledge, the limit of theory. Success only comes when sound theory guides us in the selection of the tools to use.
No one understood this better than W. Edwards Deming, the American who in the 1950’s taught the Japanese control of quality through statistical methods. Deming warned against the very scenario we are discussing, use of tools by apprentices without understanding of sound theory.
Our aim is not to disparage anyone or any thing. We recognize that everyone is doing their best, most with the best of intentions. But best efforts will not make things better. This is counterintuitive but true. It’s time to invoke Deming’s second law: We are being ruined by best efforts. The best process improvement, efficiency improvement and/or cost reduction programs will ruin companies and societies. Best efforts without theory produce crises. One principle of systems thinking is that the cause of a problem rarely occurs at the same time or in the same place as the symptoms.
There is no way the current crop of process excellence managers could know this? How could they know? They are but apprentices themselves. The blind are leading and teaching, and making everyone else blind.
Our aim is to make others aware that there is a theory, a profound theory that has demonstrated its effectiveness time and again. Using tools without deep understanding of the proper theory leads to serial crises—what we have today. But good tools with the right theory result in Magic. An organization that is functional in every sense and a pleasure to work in at every level. The transformation of management thinking must come first. If not now, when?
Parable of the Plumbers Apprentice
By Rafael Aguayo and Alan Pippenger
An enterprising young woman decided to become a professional plumber. Her first step was to join herself to a master plumber. This she did for a year and a half. Being industrious and a fast learner she learned to use many of the trade tools and acquired some skill. She now knew the difference between a left and right handed monkey wrench, how to cut, fit and thread pipes. She could use a snake and other important tools. For her 18 months work she got a paper certifying her as a “Black Belt” in plumbing. With all that time invested she, understandably, decides to go off on her own. She puts an ad in the online yellow pages and before long has a lively business.
Our new Black Belt does pretty well at first. Doing simple faucet repairs and opening drains. But as her business grows she takes on more difficult and complex jobs. Her makeshift solutions appear to work but create deeper problems of which she is unaware. Her fixes hold up for weeks or even months. The hidden problems are building.
When we hire a contractor for an addition, do we ask if he is familiar with the hammer, saw, screws, and wood? No, when hiring a real professional we assume they understand much, much more than the use of the tools. We assume that as professionals, as master craftsmen, they are very versed in the theory of their particular trade. Without understanding theory, tools will get you just so far, as our young apprentice found out.
Teaching tools without the accompanying theory behind them is a sort of cruel joke. It allows mere apprentices to be represented as craftsmen even while they are causing very deep damage to a company. This they can do while appearing to make it profitable. Sometimes it is months or even years before the damage is revealed, but it is revealed.
In the 1950s business schools taught MBO, Management by Objectives, using the financial statement to improve the results. One person who very successfully used these techniques was Robert McNamara who became president of Ford Motor Company. When McNamara left Ford it was profitable while at the same time acquiring a reputation as Found On Road Dead. A very few years later Ford was on the verge of bankruptcy as customers bolted en masse. McNamara went on to become Secretary of Defense and ran the Vietnam War in the same manner.
Would you hire an X-Ray technician to examine you, evaluate your physical condition and prescribe a remedy? Of course not. Yet, that is exactly what we do in management. It can take as little as two weeks to obtain a black belt in management. After six weeks, six months or six years this person is still a beginner, still unprepared to offer sound theory for improvement.
Knowing some tools is just insufficient. Without understanding the theory behind plumbing you are doomed to repeat the experience of our apprentice. Even our master plumber would be at a loss if he had to design a water irrigation system. He would have reached the limit of his knowledge, the limit of theory. Success only comes when sound theory guides us in the selection of the tools to use.
No one understood this better than W. Edwards Deming, the American who in the 1950’s taught the Japanese control of quality through statistical methods. Deming warned against the very scenario we are discussing, use of tools by apprentices without understanding of sound theory.
Our aim is not to disparage anyone or any thing. We recognize that everyone is doing their best, most with the best of intentions. But best efforts will not make things better. This is counterintuitive but true. It’s time to invoke Deming’s second law: We are being ruined by best efforts. The best process improvement, efficiency improvement and/or cost reduction programs will ruin companies and societies. Best efforts without theory produce crises. One principle of systems thinking is that the cause of a problem rarely occurs at the same time or in the same place as the symptoms.
There is no way the current crop of process excellence managers could know this? How could they know? They are but apprentices themselves. The blind are leading and teaching, and making everyone else blind.
Our aim is to make others aware that there is a theory, a profound theory that has demonstrated its effectiveness time and again. Using tools without deep understanding of the proper theory leads to serial crises—what we have today. But good tools with the right theory result in Magic. An organization that is functional in every sense and a pleasure to work in at every level. The transformation of management thinking must come first. If not now, when?