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Organisational Mechanics

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Too Clever by Half

9 September, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Most lifts have the buttons inside, the ones that tell the lift which floor you want to go to. Yesterday I used a bank of lifts that had the buttons on the outside.  You choose your floor before the lift arrives, this gives the computer extra time to figure out the most efficient way to […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: clarity, complexity, continuous improvement, error proofing, good enough

Virtual Control

12 August, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Eric Whitacre has produced an amazing virtual choir.  You can hear their recording of “Lux Aurumque” on the YouTube video below. Eric has never met or practiced with his choir, it contains more than 185 singers from 12 countries. He simply asked them all to download his sheet music and a video of him conducting, […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: best practice, empowerment, error proofing, organisation, process control, purpose, teamwork, training, trust, video

Can I Spit Yet?

12 June, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

I bought an electric toothbrush. It is great, it brushes your teeth perfectly, but best of all, after 2 minutes it stops, so you know you have done just enough.  When my daughter uses it she doesn’t keep asking me if she can spit yet. This sounds like a small thing, but if everything was […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: best practice, error proofing, process control, reinforcing behaviour, video

The Alternative to Shouting at Your Staff

12 May, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

How do you get people to comply?  How do you make sure that they follow the right procedures, stack the shelves in the right order or answer the phone in the right way? Check and Shout.  Check they did what you wanted and shout at them if they didn’t. Alternatively you could look at why […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: compliance, error proofing, learning

The Professional

12 May, 2010 by James Lawther Leave a Comment

Sometimes I come across people who are really hard to convince of the need to look at an organisation as a set of processes, as one big system.  They don’t see the relevance to their daily work. Often these people are “professionals”.  They have been trained for years in the optimisation of one aspect of […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: error proofing, silo management

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