Month: December 2019

Bias

There are many forms of bias that we must be cognizant during problem solving and decision making.

That chart can be a little daunting. I’m just going to mention three of the more common biases.

  • Attribution bias: When we do something well, we tend to think it’s because of our own merit. When we do something poorly, we tend to believe it was due to external factors (e.g. other people’s actions). When it comes to other people, we tend to think the opposite – if they did something well, we consider them lucky, and if they did something poorly, we tend to think it’s due to their personality or lack of skills.
  • Confirmation bias: The tendency to seek out evidence that supports decisions and positions we’ve already embraced – regardless of whether the information is true – and putting less weight on facts that contradict them.
  • Hindsight bias: The tendency to believe an event was predictable or preventable when looking at the sequence of events in hindsight. This can result in oversimplification of cause and effect and an exaggerated view that a person involved with an event could’ve prevented it. They didn’t know the outcome like you do now and likely couldn’t have predicted it with the information available at the time.

A few ways to address our biases include:

  • Bouncing ideas off of others, especially those not involved in the discussion or decision.
  • Surround yourself with a diverse group of people and do not be afraid to consider dissenting views. Actively listen.
  • Imagine yourself in other’s shoes.
  • Be mindful of your internal environment. If you’re struggling with a decision, take a moment to breathe. Don’t make decisions tired, hungry or stressed.
  • Consider who is impacted by your decision (or lack of decision). Sometimes, looking at how others will be impacted by a given decision will help to clarify the decision for you.

The advantage of focusing on decision quality is that we have a process that allows us to ensure we are doing the right things consistently. By building mindfulness we can strive for good decisions, reducing subjectivity and effective problem-solving.

Amazon’s lack of safety culture

Time after time, internal documents and interviews with company insiders show, Amazon officials have ignored or overlooked signs that the company was overloading its fast-growing delivery network while eschewing the expansive sort of training and oversight provided by a legacy carrier like UPS.

“Inside Documents Show How Amazon Chose Speed Over Safety in Building Its Delivery Network” by James Bandler, Patricia Callahan and Doris Burke, ProPublica, Ken Bensinger and Caroline O’Donovan, BuzzFeed News
 Dec. 23, 3 p.m. EST

Great reporting on the purposeful decisions that led to an unsafe culture. I recommend everyone reading this.

“Those interviews, as well as internal documents, reveal how executives at a company that prides itself on starting every meeting with a safety tip repeatedly quashed or delayed safety initiatives out of concern that they could jeopardize its mission of satisfying customers with ever-faster delivery.”

It all starts with leaders walking-the-walk and paying more than lip service to principles. “delighting the customer” is a great goal, but there are other stakeholders, and employee safety is a higher principle.

This article really reinforces my opinion that while there may be useful tools we can learn from FAANG companies, by-and-large their cultures do not appear ones truly dedicated to safety, quality and excellence.

It bears repeating. If we made pharmaceuticals the same way Amazon or Facebook operated, we’d all be dead. Every-time I read about Alphabet getting involved in healthcare I become petrified. One only has to look at the safety record of Tesla (both in the factory and the safety of it’s automobile) to start feeling worried on what happens when you take the bad culture from Silicon Valley and apply it to other endeavors..

Conference Speaking -2020 Lean and Six Sigma

In February I will be presenting at the 2020 ASQ Lean and Six Sigma Conference in Phoenix on Sustaining Change – Executing a Sustainability Plan.

Here’s the presentation summary:

For Lean and Six Sigma projects a central question should always be “how do we sustain this change?” Sustainability is a major part of all the major change models but is often the easiest to neglect. This session will engage the participant in building a Sustainability Plan, a key tool to ensure the change is anchored and embedded in the organization. Through three case study examples of changes at the three major change levels -transactional, organizational and transformational – the participant will gain the knowledge to create and execute an effective change plan.

During this session examples will be given for each component of a sustainability plan:

  • Communication: Mechanisms for persuasive communication and ongoing socialization of the change, rites of parting (saying goodbye to the old ways of doing things), and rites of enhancement (acknowledgment of quick wins and continued adoption)
  • Metrics Tracking: How to identify and execute consistent and effective ongoing measurement and results reporting to track progress and ensure sustained results • Performance Management: Process for observing and objectively measuring desired behaviors and attitudes, including performance appraisal process, promoting, demoting and transferring, and training and development
  • Rewards and Recognition: Program of intrinsic and extrinsic incentives to reinforce desired behaviors and attitudes
  • Sustaining Ownership: Consistent process for ensuring sustained ownership of the change through the ongoing transfer of experience and knowledge
  • Continuous Improvement: Mechanisms for responding to changing requirements and implementing improvements based on feedback, observations, and metrics

The following questions will be explored, and tools for finding answers will be provided:

  • How should organizational achievements reinforcing the change be commemorated
  • What behaviors should be observed and measured on a regular basis?
  • What results should be observed and measured on a regular basis?
  • What metrics should be used for measuring behaviors and results?
  • What mechanisms should be used for reporting results? • What criteria should be used to allocate rewards and promotion?
  • What mechanisms should be used for training, coaching, and role modeling?
  • What processes and procedures should be put in place to ensure sustained ownership of the change?
  • What continuous improvement mechanisms will address low adoption rates and ensure the change becomes part of the organization’s normal functioning?

At the end of the session the user will have a template for creating a sustainability plan and will have been provided tools to successfully execute the sustainability phase of a change.

Learning Objectives 1. Assess the role of sustainability in the major change management methodologies and apply to lean and six sigma projects. 2. Facilitate the sustainability phase of change management. 3. Compose a sustainability plan.

2019 State of the Blog

ASQ change control change management collaboration communication complexity conference cultural excellence data integrity decision making document control Ethics expertise facilitation fda ICH knowledge management leadership Lean learning culture living risk assessments metrics presentation Problem solving process project management psychological safety quality culture quality intelligence quality systems regulatory regulatory inspections risk assessment risk management speaking system design system thinking team Team excellence team performance tools training uncertainty warning letter WCQI

I started this blog as an exercise in deliberate practice, as well as reflective. In order to grow it is important to engage in critical reflection, which requires a process of mutual learning, a consciously organised process of deliberative and distributed reflection. Which is what I strive to do in my blog posts.

At the end of last year, I evaluated my blog goals through an ACORN exercise, as well as updating a SWOT. These stand up pretty well, even in a year of changes where I took on member leader responsibilities as the chair of the ASQ’s Team and Workplace Excellence Forum and took a new job.

I met my posting goal, which was 1.5 posts a week, with 81 posts and 33.5k words.

The top 5 posts of 2019 are:

  1. FDA signals – no such thing as a planned deviation: Written in 2018 this post directs a lot of traffic to the blog from search engines, and has the largest geographic spread. Key message here continues to be all temporary changes, all planned departures, need to go through a change control system of appropriate rigor based on the risk involved.
  2. Risk Based Data Integrity Assessment: Data Integrity and Risk Management are two of my favorite topics and in this post I combine the two and provide a fairly usable tool. I wrote this post while at the ASQ’s Audit Conference, where I presented on data integrity.
  3. Lessons Learned as a Developing Leader: I am very gratified that this piece of introspection was viewed as many times as it was. Three months into my current job and this post, and the followup, are a good roadmap.
  4. Decision Quality: How we make decisions, deal with subjectivity and uncertainty and problem-solve are all big concerns for our organizations. This post serves as a good anchor for my thought and practice, as well as the direction of future endeavors.
  5. Driving for Mature Quality Organizations – FDA recent perspective: Building a quality culture, driving maturity in our organizations are critical. The FDA is spot-on, and companies really need to be coming to grips and dealing with this systematically.

Looking ahead to 2020 for the blog, I am going to take a bit of direction from Luigi Sille who set the following goals for himself:

  1. Build up my expertise
  2. Grow my network
  3. Continuously improve every single day

For building expertise, I want to continue to focus on building tools and methods to: deal with subjectivity and uncertainty around decision making and risk management; proactively build a culture of quality and excellence, especially dealing with aspects of data integrity; and, find connections between the larger organizational/leadership/operational bodies of work and adapt them to the quality profession.

This blog is a large part of growing my network and I want to get to 2 blog posts a week consistently. I’ll continue to work with the ASQ as chair of the Team and Workplace Excellence Forum, including holding at least 2 events (including an unconference!). I am also trying to pull together a group of speakers to bring data integrity and quality culture as a stream to ASQ BosCon. I’ll speak at least 2 ASQ Conferences. I’ll also deepen some ties with the PDA, including speaking at one conference.

As I continuously work to improve, I will bring the topics I’m learning and implementing back to this blog.