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The Quick Fix Makes Things Worse

5 October, 2019 by James Lawther 5 Comments

Shifting the burden Lord I have had a bad day!   I knew it was going to be a bad day when my diary showed I was stuck in back to back meetings for eight hours on the trot. Worse still, those meetings had been shrunk to 30 minutes each.  That way I could have […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: root cause analysis, short term thinking, 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

Blame or Solutions?

8 January, 2019 by James Lawther 2 Comments

Finding Blame

Blame is natural The minute something goes wrong we seek out somebody to blame.  Somebody to take the rap.  It is human nature to find a fall guy when things go belly up. Blame is easy We live in a connected world.  We work within a mesh of colleagues, customers and suppliers, so there are […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: blame, culture, root cause analysis

The Two Faces of Accountability

1 January, 2018 by James Lawther 7 Comments

Accountability When things go wrong there is a simple solution. Politicians do it, journalists do it, managers do it and even my children do it.   When things go wrong we search for somebody to blame “hold accountable”.  It’s in our nature. Fortunately it is more nuanced than that. There are two ways we can […]

Filed Under: Blog, Employee Engagement Tagged With: accountability, blame, learning, management style, reinforcing behaviour, root cause analysis

4 Ways to Solve a Problem

8 June, 2016 by James Lawther 2 Comments

The one that got away

An apocryphal story: A man you know is hungry.  There are 4 ways you could solve his problem: Slap him about a bit. This will take his mind of it.  Hunger gone, problem solved. Give him a fish to eat.  Hunger gone, problem solved. Give him a fishing rod and show them how to fish.  Hunger gone, problem solved. Develop a […]

Filed Under: Blog, Process Improvement Tagged With: continuous improvement, error proofing, problem solving, root cause analysis

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