I will close out this series of articles covering the process of discovery by touching on some of the less tangible considerations of performing a solid discovery. The context, the environment, and your own assumptions and bias will affect the reliability of the information that you gather. To be confident that you are collecting useful observational data you need to purposely think through these considerations and be ready to mitigate or minimize the errors that they may cause.
As a Black Belt at Motorola we were often asked to visit a location that was underperforming. Some of my peers had a tendency to take these assignments as a task to go see what another factory was doing “wrong.” Okay. Admittedly, I was guilty of this too. Jumping into an assumption that other people are ignorant or that you know more because of all your worldly experience is not a great way of creating an open and trusting environment.
To avoid this flaw I recommend thinking about three things when you are performing any type of discovery:
- Understand and communicate the context of the work.
- Investigate the environment and culture of the organization.
- Reflect on your own biases and assumptions.
The context of your discovery work will make a significant impact on the forthrightness of the people you observe. As a consultant there are a wide range of circumstances that initiate my discovery work. A company may be looking to improve quality or efficiency. They may need to validate a problem that a customer or owner has brought to their attention. For example, I have been tasked with discovery because of a need to reduce cost and shrink headcount.
As you might guess, in cost cutting senarios people tend to look busy, share all about the complexity of their job, and generally avoid me. In the case of mergers and new management, people are nervous and often will not offer up much. There are not a lot of great strategies to deal with this. It comes down to the more time you can spend and the more data straight from their systems, and not manipulated reports, the more likely you will get to see reality.
The context of truly doing work to help the team do better is a much more enjoyable environment. People are more naturally forthright. With this context I have found people are excited that someone is “finally” listening to them! Unfortunately, the situation defines the context and you don’t often have much control. Either way, you will gain better outcomes if you know this information going into the discovery work.
Context alone is not enough. The context will interact with the culture and environment of the work. A management change and transitioning from an autocratic leader to a servant leader will cause people to struggle to open up and share. They are more likely to mislead you from gaining a true picture of the operation. A culture that is under stress due to a series of organizational changes or multiple mergers and acquisitions will be suspicious of anyone that is new and “here to help.” Your style and approach to quickly gaining trust will make or break the discovery work. I like to find the informal leaders in the organization and listen to their perspective. Then I compare it to what I hear and see from others.
A stressed or fearful culture is not the only challenge you will face. The hidden resistance of a passive aggressive organization makes it even more difficult to perform discovery. Well meaning people often don’t want the organization’s warts to come out in the observational work. You may have heard the term “midwest nice.” I’m a midwesterner and I like to be nice. Observation and collecting data need to be fact based. There will be good and bad; both need to come out. If the culture hides these things for the sake of peace you will have a poor discovery. It helps to be upfront about this and address any passive resistance early in the work.
Context and culture is what you face, but be self aware. You bring your own baggage into your discovery work. The filters that come from our own knowledge, experiences, and assumptions cause bias in what we see. In fact, I find the more a person is an expert in a specific function or industry the more trouble they have listening and understanding. If we go from one electronics manufacturer to another we certainly expect to see many of the same procedures and practices. As an expert you will note differences and ask the question, why? This is good, but listening to the answer without immediately judging the information is really important. For example, I have seen experts in manufacturing apply their assumptions to a service business. The way the industries operate are fundamentally different. Assuming they will operate the same will result in poor observational insights.
Many times it is the difference from a standard method that has allowed a company to be successful. Passing judgement without understanding is a failure of the discovery process. Judgement needs to be left to the analysis phase of the work. In discovery we should be agnostic. “Just the facts ma’am.” This is the best way to avoid letting your own biases cloud the observation. Your biases may be part of the hard data collection as well. What is collected and not collected will bias the discovery work and the filters you use to summarize etc. Again, the key is to be agnostic. Avoid allowing your previous work or expertise to bias your current work.
The discovery phase of process improvement work cannot be taken lightly. In operations this is not something that you just do once. Waste walks can be done on a weekly frequency so that you are constantly learning new things. We say that continuous improvement is a continuous learning philosophy. Discovery is learning, so to be great practitioners of continuous improvement we must be great at continuous discovery.