Waste, Error, Cognitive Bias & FOFU . . . 

A flurry of posts on a common theme sparked me thinking this week.

Thank you to the authors for this.

Olaf Boettger wrote a great piece reminding me that our job “isn’t about having all the answers” but about asking the right questions and “making problems visible to stimulate action”.  More on this below . . 

It’s all about “show me the red” (makes me think about “Watermelon KPIs”) and Continuous Improvement.

Ben Torben-Nielsen also shared an image that seemed surprisingly familiar. He explained that he had been in a meeting about process analytics where the team could clearly see how the data revealed bottlenecks and variations. The data provided insight into inefficiencies and root causes. But the team felt threatened. They were afraid the data might expose mistakes or show poor performance.

We have all been there . . . 

We all know about “FOMO”, and this condition is apparently known as “FOFU” 😉

Ben asks “when did learning what went wrong become scarier than being stuck? We need to shift our focus from blame to learning. The first step to improvement is knowing what needs fixing.”

This problem is a form of “loss aversion”, a cognitive bias that can lead us to make risk-averse choices, prioritizing the avoidance of (perceived) failure over the pursuit of potentially large gains.

We need to get better at recognising this in ourselves and our colleagues and creating environments where we can “confront and slay this dragon” in a positive and maybe even light-hearted way. 

Stephen Klein also recently wrote and again referenced Taiichi Ohno as the pioneer behind “The 5 Whys”, a great technique for getting to root causes of any waste, error or problem. Stephen’s post was titled “The Greatest Business Minds Of All Time All Use the Same Algorithm – And It Only Has One Line of Code” 😉.

In his post, Olaf shared a wonderful image of the great Taiichi Ohno, the founder of the famous Toyota Production System and a major influence on Lean principles, with his call to action that we should remember;

“Waste is hidden. Do not hide it. Make problems visible”.

There are leaks everywhere, if we just look . . . . 

You can read Olaf Boettger’s post “Good leadership isn’t about having answers” here . . . 

Ben Torben-Nielsen’s post “The first step to improvement is knowing what needs fixing” here . . .

Stephen Klein’s post on the “5 Whys” is here . . .  

A timely, brief reminder of Taiichi Ohno and “The 7 Wastes” can be read here . . . 

Cognitive biases are funny (and dangerous) things.

We all suffer from them.

Let’s try and learn some new habits.

Thanks for reading, and thanks to Olaf, Ben and Stephen . . . .

Waste, Error, Cognitive Bias & FOFU . . .