If Nothing Bad Happens, You Must Be Doing Something Right?

You have been struggling for a while and now the recession is really hitting hard. You are starting to wonder… Where have my customers gone? Are my competitors just buying jobs? How can I cut expenses? It seems like a lot of people standing around? How did I get here? That is precisely how a mental model could work and it may be a result of if nothing bad happened, you must be doing something right. So as time moved on, bad practices became part of our business model.

Despite signs of trouble, we adjust our mental models to accommodate larger deviations from the norm. Without a mechanism for reframing our behavior or redefining our group, the effects are ignored, as they were at NASA, until a catastrophe happens.

As the investigating board put it, both Columbia and Challenger were lost also because of the failure of NASA’s organizational system: both actions were failures of foresight in which history played a prominent role.

So influential board NASA’s models and scripts, and so delusional self-confidence bred group is, that even after Columbia broke up, killing all on board, the space program manager told the press that he was comfortable with his previous assessments of risk and didn’t think the foam debris could cause the accident. But remember that a key feature of this system is that, taken one small step at a time, each decision always seems correct.

In a culture that evolved at NASA, each returned from a successful mission was another moon landing. NASA was silly. Applause that was by the time of Columbia, more than 30 years old. So instead of appearing more deeply into the problem, they gradually revised their models until they were literally interpreting failure as success. The final report of the commission said:

Engineers and managers incorporated worsening anomalies into the engineering experience base, which functioned as an elastic waistband, expanding the hold larger deviations from the original design. Anomalies that did not lead to catastrophic failures were treated as a source of valid engineering data to justify further flights.

This example is taken from a Laurence Gonzales book Everyday Survival: Why Smart People Do Stupid Things and should make it obvious why you must not only have a systematic process in place for continuous improvement but also outside eyes observing your practices mindful not to leave your organization slip into doing; STUPID THINGS!

Rant: So many times our acceptance of our culture allows us to get sloppy in our practices. Good enough is a common word. When I discuss Lean in marketing it is typically met with resistance. When I use the words Six Sigma Marketing; alarms, bells, whistles and even fireworks seem to take place as a result of the connotation of “Six Sigma”. I seldom ever get understanding that you should look at Six Sigma as a methodology rather than the strict mathematical definition of Six Sigma. It is the mental model that is in place.

Having a systematic process in place allows us to deal more effectively with the problems and even the future. Our choices of how we do things and what we see (data) have significantly multiplied. Decisions have become increasingly more difficult. Having a proven process such as the Six Sigma tool of DMAIC will result in better informed and more accurate decisions. I use Six Sigma as an example. There are many methodologies and tools out there to solve problems. However, even these processes can become “intuitionalized” and allow good enough to creep in. Keep striving for perfection and always keep asking Why!