The Squawk Point

Organisational Mechanics

  • Home
  • Blog
    • People
    • Data
    • Process
    • Wild Cards
    • Index
  • Podcast
  • Book

Learning From the Boy Who Cried Wolf

10 February, 2020 by James Lawther 2 Comments

False positive and false negative Lots of us are paid to make decisions: Maybe you decide how to treat a patient Maybe you decide if a prisoner is guilty Maybe you decide how much soup to prepare Maybe you decide if a payment is fraudulent Maybe, maybe, maybe. There are plenty of decisions to be […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: data is not information, decisions, false positive and negative, risk assessment

Medieval Plumbing

12 September, 2019 by James Lawther 4 Comments

Delayed feedback When I was a child I lived in a farm house in North Yorkshire.  I’d like to tell you that I was part of the county set and owned a Range Rover and a horse, but it wasn’t that sort of farm house.  It had stone walls that were three feet thick in […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: human nature, lead and lag measures, learning, measurement, systems thinking, tampering

How to Turn a Supertanker

26 August, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Leverage There is a management metaphor that changing the direction of an organisation is a bit like changing the direction of a supertanker.  It can be done, but organisations are big, cumbersome and it takes a lot of time to push them onto another course. A flawed analogy It is a nice analogy, but a […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: complexity, less is more, leverage, systems thinking, test and learn

Pointless Conversations

16 July, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Defining the metric People get very excited about metrics; they spend hours debating exceptions and accuracy.  The definition becomes everything. Imagine the conversation: My Boss: You take too long to get to work in the morning; we must measure performance. What should the target be? Me: I’m not sure; there are several things we should […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: cheating, Goodhart's law, key performance indicators, measurement, objective setting, performance management, systems thinking

Short Breaks Will Kill You

21 May, 2019 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Quantitative or Qualitative Analysis? An apocryphal tale… A statistician working for a large organisation was asked to explain why sick pay was increasing.  The business had an ageing workforce and sickness levels were rising.  He gathered lots of data on lots of things: Working patterns Demographics Employment related illnesses Commuting times Office locations…  The list […]

Filed Under: Blog, Operations Analysis Tagged With: gemba, insight, learning, quantitative or qualitative, root cause analysis

  • « Previous Page
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • …
  • 41
  • Next Page »

Explore

accountability assumptions beliefs best practice blame bureaucracy capability clarity command and control communication complexity continuous improvement cost saving culture customer focus data is not information decisions employee performance measures empowerment error proofing fessing up gemba human nature incentives information technology innovation key performance indicators learning management style measurement motivation performance management poor service process control purpose reinforcing behaviour service design silo management systems thinking targets teamwork test and learn trust video waste

Receive Posts by e-Mail

Get the next post delivered straight to your inbox

Creative Commons

This information from The Squawk Point is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Creative Commons Licence
Customer Experience Update

Try This:

  • Regression to The Mean

  • Glory Lasts Forever

  • Fish Bone Diagrams – Helpful or Not?

  • Should You Punish Mistakes?

Connect

  • E-mail
  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • YouTube
  • Cookies
  • Contact Me

Copyright © 2025 · Enterprise Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in