The tendency of employees and managers to identify themselves with their “group,” (i.e. their department or area of specialization) is a engrained instinct that a lot of us grapple with on a daily basis. A big part of systems thinking, of quality thinking, is seeing the big picture – to
be able to analyze and integrate the parts and the whole.
For some reason this comic has me thinking of strategic vision and shared fate and questions of alignment and congruence.
I love the power of Karl Weick’s future-oriented sensemaking – thinking in the future perfect tense – for supplying us a framework to imagine the future as if it has already occurred. We do not spend enough time being forward-looking and shaping the interpretation of future events. But when you think about it quality is essentially all about using existing knowledge of the past to project a desired future.
This making sense of uncertainty – which should be a part of every manager’s daily routine – is another name for foresight. Foresight can be used as a discipline to help our organizations look into the future with the aim of understanding and analyzing possible future developments and challenges and supporting actors to actively shape the future.
Sensemaking is mostly used as a retrospective process – we look back at action that has already taken place, Weick himself acknowledged that people’s actions may be guided by future-oriented thoughts, he nevertheless asserted that the understanding that derives from sensemaking occurs only after the fact, foregrounding the retrospective quality of sensemaking even when imagining the future.
“When one imagines the steps in a history that will realize an outcome, then there is more likelihood that one or more of these steps will have been performed before and will evoke past experiences that are similar to the experience that is imagined in the future perfect tense.”
R.B. MacKay went further in a fascinating way by considering the role that counterfactual and prefactual processes play in future-oriented sensemaking processes. He finds that sensemaking processes can be prospective when they include prefactual “whatifs” about the past and the future. There is a whole line of thought stemming from this that looks at the meaning of the past as never static but always in a state of change.
Foresight concerns interpretation and understanding, while simultaneously being a process of thinking the future in order to improve preparedness. Though seeking to understand uncertainty, reduce unknown unknowns and drive a future state it is all about knowledge management fueling risk management.
A powerful tool in this reasoning, imagining and planning the future, is metaphor. Now I’m a huge fan of metaphor, though some may argue I make up horrible ones – I think my entire team is sick of the milk truck metaphor by now – but this underutilized tool can be incredibly powerful as we build stories of how it will be.
Think about phrases such as “had gone through”, “had been through” and “up to that point” as commonly used metaphors of emotional experiences as a physical movement or a journey from one point to another. And how much that set of journey metaphors shape much of our thinking about process improvement.
Entire careers have been built on questioning the heavy use of sport or war metaphors in business thought and how it shapes us. I don’t even watch sports and I find myself constantly using it as short hand.
To make sense of the future find a plausible answer to the question ‘what is the story?’, this brings a balance between thinking and acting, and allows us to see the future more clearly.
Steven Shorrock writes about “Work-as-Observed” on his blog Humanistic Systems, as part of a great series on Work-as-Done. This is a nice framework for the activity of going to the Gemba, and I strongly recommend the entire series.
The latest version (version 14) of the “How to do” Document – Interpretation of ICH Q7 Guide and “Review form” for APIs was published a few months back. It is intended to facilitate the implementation of the ICH Q7 Guideline and provides recommendations on interpretation.
In this version, the responsible Task Force of the Quality Group of APIC, which is a sector group of the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC), mainly made additions and updates in chapters 11 – Laboratory Controls, 15 – Complaints and Recalls, and in section 16 – Contract Manufacturers (incl. Laboratories).
The addition in section 11.11 for “Approval/rejection of materials” is pretty striaghtforward – have an SOP.
The changes in section 15 for recalls is pretty cosmetic.
I would re-read section 16 on contract manufacturers. Not much substantial here, but the rewrite makes it a good time to ensure compliance.
Interesting perspective on adapting what makes us successful as problem solvers as we move into more senior leadership positions. Resonates very well with some of my own challenges, so I stronly recommend listening to this episode.
Investigations of a Dog 