In an ideal situation, my role as a Lean/Six-Sigma professional is akin to listening for subtle rattles in the metaphoric machinery of a process and identifying what to tweak next.
These last couple months, it’s a lot more like stress-testing a submarine by diving straight to the ocean floor and waiting to see which bolts fly off first.
All of our organizations will be different when we come out on the other end of this. So, at the risk of sounding trite, I want to cover two things that you can do now to help your firm/team/org weather the storm and come out the other side with stronger and more agile processes.
1. Limit your data consumption.
This one probably sounds a bit unintuitive at first, let me explain. I’ve seen a lot of dashboards popping up that look like the inside of a fighter pilot’s cockpit. They communicate a lot of interesting data without actually telling any useful story.
When we’re navigating a crisis the last thing we need is confusing data – we need to know which way is up and how to stop going down. To do that, focus on a few metrics rather than try to track and interpret all the metrics.
After things stabilize there will be time to dig into the data and analyze the weak-points of your operation. To avoid death-by-data NOW, remove any metric that doesn’t have a clear answer to the below three questions:
- What decision does this metric enable?
- If this number were [pick an extreme value] what would we do differently?
- Does this metric make it clear what action you need to take?
Resist the temptation to make your dashboard a supreme pizza with all the toppings just because some exec expressed a passing interest in a new metric. Hold the line – ask the above questions, and add only what provides value now. Once you have a few metrics set up that can guide immediate action, you can always add nuance and detail later.
2. Don’t let duct-tape solutions take over your operation
You know that stupid report/process/committee your team has? Odds are it began as a clever work-around back when something went wrong.
When bolts are flying off the walls, we’ll MacGyver any solution we can find (with duct-tape and paper clips typically). This is awesome. The problem is, we keep using those duct-tape solutions long after the need has passed. Expectations get set, and inertia carries that ‘quick-fix’ on long, long, after its usefulness has ended.
To be fair, in the heat of the moment it can be near impossible to see which short-term solutions will become long-term headaches, and which are true improvements. You’ll eliminate A LOT of pain down the road if you do one simple thing.
Record what a change is meant to accomplish and set a date to check on it.
Stupid-simple, but you’d be surprised how unintuitive it can be do to this when in a crisis.
Keep it simple, mine usually look something like this:
| What was the Change | Review Date: | Success is based on these metrics: |
| Added a new escalation point to [X] process | [Date Usually 1-3 months out] | [one or two metrics that will show if the change is accomplishing its purpose] |
Then I’ll slap an invite in the calendar for 1 or 2 months down the road and “PRESTO” you’ve just dramatically decreased the chances that this will become a zombie process that lives on and terrorizes future colleagues.
Really the magic comes from clarifying expectations, and ensuring that a conversation is had at some point to review those expectations.
And, far from slowing a team down in a crisis, this practice has saved my team time. On many occasions, the simple act of clarifying what “success” means has uncovered significant misunderstandings or helped us spot a dead-end before committing resources.
And there you go. Far from everything, these are two of the easiest things you can do to better handle an operational crisis right now while also setting yourself up to come out the other end with stronger processes in place.