Reality Check
A direct report of mine would frequently leave me out of the loop as problems escalated, preferring instead to “work harder”. It was clear that he felt uncomfortable delivering bad news to me (his boss) when things were not going according to plan.
One day at our weekly sit-down, I explained that my role as manager was to facilitate his success, but to do that effectively I needed to know what was going on, emphasizing that when I heard nothing, what I imagined was almost certainly far worse than what was actually happening. Therefore, it would be better for him to make sure I had a clear grasp on the reality of the situation, even if things were not perfect. Plus, if we could openly discuss bad news, we could jointly develop ideas and solutions to fix the problem.
At the end of our talk, in the small notebook he always carried around he jotted down a single word – “Reality”. Our collaboration improved significantly after that day.
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
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I was struggling to get updates from my regional project management directors. Sensing my frustration at having to constantly repeat my (apparently futile) requests to the team to provide their updates consistently, my boss suggested, “If you want something done, schedule it.” He meant that if updates are needed at a specific time, actually schedule them directly on people's calendars, making the expectation and reminder "automatic" each month, and emphasizing the importance of the updates by turning them into meetings – people tend not to show up empty handed to meetings where they're expected to present. Scheduling removed a bit of "friction" and created a sense of urgency that resulted in real progress. Amazingly, they didn’t miss any updates after that point!
