What Gets Measured, Gets Done or “Did you figure out yet how to motivate a team?”
After inheriting responsibility for a rather decrepit lab, I set to work trying to rally the technician team to make improvements. Walking through the lab area one day, I discovered an unrestrained compressed gas cylinder (if you’re not familiar, these things can launch like torpedoes if they fall over and the neck breaks). Passionately explaining to the team that they could lose limbs (or worse) should an incident occur, we got the cylinder secured properly. About a week later, I found another cylinder unsecured in a nearby part of the lab – somehow risk to their life and limb was not sufficiently motivating for the team to stay on top of this safety concern. In the end, I found a way to get people to consistently secure the cylinders - the solution was to implement formal lab audits with numerical scoring, and to broadly email the audit results to the technicians and their managers – a mechanism to measure performance and report it out to all the stakeholders. The team members were mortified to have low audit scores published next to their names (and visible to their managers). The adherence to safety protocols and overall state of the lab improved dramatically. To this day, it’s surprising to me that simple numbers on an email did so much more to drive action from the team than the tangible risk of dying, but the approach works, so I have used metrics as a means to successfully influence behaviors many times since then. The old adage is true – “What gets measured, gets done.”
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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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