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Fixes That Fail

2 January, 2020 by James Lawther 2 Comments

Cost cutting Definition : An effective short term financial fix that has long-term consequences. These ultimately require more of the same short term fix. Examples: Profit numbers were low so managers deferred essential maintenance.  They saved money in the short term, but the machines failed.  This led to poor customer service, reduced sales and — in […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: capability, cost saving, systems thinking

Success to the Successful

16 December, 2019 by James Lawther 6 Comments

When is your birthday? If you took everybody in the European Union and recorded the month of their birth, the split would look like this… The pattern is virtually flat. There are some interesting exceptions.  My wife’s birthday is the 28th February and her sister’s is the 5th March. I will leave the rest to […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: performance management, pygmalion effect, systems thinking

Stopping the Suicidal

23 November, 2019 by James Lawther 2 Comments

Preventing bad behaviour From the start of the industrial revolution to the mid 20th century, we British have used town gas. It lit our streets, fired our boilers and cooked our roast dinners.  Town gas was a by-product of the coke manufacturing industry.  Heating coal in the absence of oxygen removes the impurities and produces […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: accident prevention, culture, error proofing, human nature, reinforcing behaviour

Standards Make Good Servants but Poor Masters

4 November, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

standard work

Standard work I found an interesting post about standardisation in public services.   The post argues that standardisation doesn’t work in the service industry.  Each customer or citizen is different and because each citizen is different they want different things.  So if you standardise everything and then force your staff to follow the standard process […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement, Tools & Techniques Tagged With: andon, best practice, command and control, compliance, conformity, standardisation, work instructions

Brilliance Alone Won’t Take You Far

23 October, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

The land grab In the 17th and 18th centuries the European superpowers; Britain, Spain, France, Portugal and the Netherlands were racing to conquer the world.  They were hell bent on colonising the Americas, Africa and Asia for themselves.  The Europeans were engage in a land grab of monumental proportions. The colonies were dependant on the […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: collaboration, short term thinking, test and learn, trust, usability testing

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