Problem Solving

Problem Solving^©

Arthur M. Schneiderman

There have been three major breakthroughs in problem solving in the last 50 years:

ALL employees should spend a portion of their time improving the way that they do their daily job.

Their efforts should be directed toward improvements in their processes that will have the greatest strategic impact on stakeholder satisfaction.

Improvement should be based on the scientific methodology.

Remember the saying: "If it ain't broke, don't fix it?" Or, my mother's version: "Leave well enough alone?" The first one is attributed to Alfred P. Sloan, who served as President, CEO or Chairman of General Motors from 1923 to 1956. The idea was that if the process is working ok, don't touch it, since if you do, there's a good chance that you will make it worse. Well "ok" is not always good enough. With Deming and Juran's visits to Japan in the early 1950's, the rules changed. To the dismay of Sloan's successors, the odds were shifted dramatically to the success side of process improvement. The keys lay in 2. and 3. above.

Remember also the classic Charlie Chaplin movie "Modern Times." It epitomized the industrial age's separation of planning and doing in the execution of a process. Experts (managers or industrial engineers) wrote the standard operating procedures and the worker's job was simply to follow the directions. Humans were relegated to the equivalent of robots*, or more appropriately, hubots (human-robots). But a second revolution occurred. A concept called the "dual function of work" emerged, again in Japan, in the latter half of the last century. Here the idea is that the people who execute the process should spend a portion of their time improving the way they do their job. Experts were there to support, not to control the improvement process.

However, left to their own process workers would rely on the improvement method which has driven most of the history of humankind: trial-and-error. But trial-and-error is a slow, costly and often dangerous approach to improvement. The scientific methodology is both a more effective and a more efficient way to improve things. But we're not all endowed with the skills required to be proficient engineers and scientists. Walter Shewhart recognized this dilemma but also realized that we don't need to be rocket scientists to significantly improve our odds over trial-and-error. He devised the PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act) cycle as a way of teaching the scientific methodology to the rank-and-file. This was refined into the 7-step method now in wide use by improvement teams:

problem definition

data collection

root cause identification

solution generation

solution testing

standardization of confirmed fix

self-assessment and next problem selection

I refer you to my article "Are There Limits to TQM" for an extensive discussion of this approach.

Together, worker ownership of process improvement, prioritization based on strategic impact, and the scientific approach yield an order-of-magnitude increase in the rate of process improvement.

*Interesting side note: The word "robot" originated in the "early 20th century. Via German from Czech, from robota "forced labor"; coined by Karel Čapek in his play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1920)." according to the Encarta dictionary. They give its original definition as a "person like a machine: somebody who works or behaves mechanically, showing little or no emotion and often responding to orders without question."

return to top

Last modified: August 13, 2006