Myth of Tech Omnipotence: Boosting Lean with Deming (Part 6)

Many companies strive to automate by using more technology and fewer humans. But does their productivity really improve? Does it keep them agile? In this episode, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz share stories of companies that improve productivity because they focus on processes instead of tech alone.

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.3 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we dive deeper into the teachings of Dr. W. Edwards Deming. Today, I continue my conversation with Jacob Stoller, Shingo Prize-winning author of The Lean CEO and Productivity Reimagined, which explores applying Lean and Deming management principles at the enterprise level. The topic for today is myth number five, the Myth of Tech Omnipotence. Jacob, take it away.

0:00:29.8 Jacob Stoller: Great, Andrew. Thanks. Great to be here again. Yeah. Tech omnipotence. Well, it's quite a myth. We sort of worship technology. We have for a long time, and we tend to think it can solve all our problems, and sometimes we get a little too optimistic about it. What I wanna talk about is in the context of companies adopting technology and go through some of the stories about that and how that relates to productivity. Really, the myth of tech omnipotence is kind of like a corollary to the the myth of segmented success. In other words, people have believed that you can take a chunk of a company. Now we'll take Dr. Deming's pyramid, and we take a chunk out of that and say, oh, well, that fits so and so in the org chart, let's automate that.

0:01:28.1 JS: And they don't consider what happens to the rest of the organization. It's just this idea that you can superimpose automation. So this has a long checkered history. And the way technology gets justified in organizations is generally what it's been, is reducing headcount. And I used to work in a tech firm, and we used to do this. We would do these studies, not really a study, but you do a questionnaire and you figure out if we adopt this, if we automate this workflow, let's just say, I don't know, it's accounts payable. So you automate accounts payable and you say, well, you got so many people involved, we think we could cut this by three people or something like that. So that becomes your business case. Now, they had categories in these little questionnaires where you would try to get other benefits from the technology, but they tended to be what they call soft benefits.

0:02:35.4 JS: And you know what that word means. Soft benefits means, well, okay, nice to have, but it's not going to get budget money or it's not gonna get approved. So anyway that's really been the kind of standard way of getting tech projects justified. And that goes through pretty much any industry. So what would happen is people adopt these technologies without looking at the whole system. And guess what? You put the software in, you start to implement it, and you run into problems. Doesn't quite work. Doesn't work the way it was supposed to. And so the tech people tended and still do tend to blame the company. They say, well, they had user problems. Users weren't really adjusting to it. These people are sort of way behind. We're a tech company. We've automated the same process for 50 different companies, we know what's good for them. We have to educate them, but they don't seem to want to be educated. So that was kind of the way it was. And I'll give you an extreme example. I did some freelance work for research firm, and one of the studies I worked on, I'm not making this up, it was called Aligning the Business with IT. So it was trying to get people to smarten up with their business and align it to what the smart people are doing with IT. So that's how extreme that kind of feeling was.

0:04:17.3 AS: As opposed to maybe aligning with the customer or something like that.

0:04:21.1 JS: Well, yeah, wouldn't that be crazy? Or how about aligning IT with the business? Finding out what the business wants. So anyway, that whole way of thinking has had, it's sort of filtered into manufacturing in the same way. And I found this out really researching Productivity Reimagined as I interviewed Ben Armstrong from MIT Industrial Performance Center. And what I learned from him is the whole history of automation and manufacturing in North America. And really, what he told me is that between 1990 and 2010, there were increases in productivity, but those were always from reducing headcount. They never found ways to actually grow the value of the business by using automation. So around 2010 or leading up to 2010, manufacturing started to change, and we started to transition into what they call a high-mix, low-volume type of markets.

0:05:33.3 JS: And I've talked to manufacturers that have said, 10 years ago, I only had to make two or three variations of this part, now I have to make 50 or 60. So you're getting shorter product cycles, larger mix. And the big buzzword now in manufacturing is agility. You've gotta be agile. So there was a study MIT, I think this Performance Center did a study. And they found that when you actually try to grow productivity, and this is really since 2010, you actually lose agility at the same time. You're kind of caught in that situation because you can't... That you lose agility when you let go of people. But that was the only way they could increase productivity. Does that make sense?

0:06:29.1 AS: Yeah. So I'm thinking about that's interesting because agility means being flexible, being able to accommodate. And when you think about the typical automation, it's about repetitive, repetitive, repetitive.

0:06:46.5 JS: Yeah.

0:06:47.3 AS: And so I can kind of get that picture about the agility versus, let's say automation or repetitive processes.

0:06:56.3 JS: Yeah. And I think that people are longing for this golden age. You go from the 1920s to 1960s, and manufacturers made incredible gains in productivity with automation. You put in these huge welding lines where they just weld. You look at the body welding, say in a plant, and it's at lightning speed. There's no question about that. But they basically ran into a plateau with that. And one of the robotics companies told me, he said, we learned decades ago how to automate these mass production processes, but now we're getting into a different kind of age where as somebody put it, we're moving from the industrial mass production age into what they call the process age, where processes are becoming more and more important. So to...

0:07:50.8 AS: And I'm thinking about the automation. I've seen videos on like online about let's say a fulfillment center with all these little robots going around and picking, putting things on them and packaging them, and all of that. So I'm thinking, well, automation has become definitely more maybe, I don't know if the words agile, but it's definitely, it's gone beyond like just automating one little part of the process.

0:08:21.4 JS: Yeah. It's gone away from the let's replace people type scenario. And so what the fastest growing segment right now in robotics is collaborative robots, which can work with people. So to put it very simply, instead of a human replacement, they're becoming tools. But these things are amazing. A worker online on the shop floor can programming these, and they have to be able to because things are changing so fast. So a worker, a welder can actually hold the robotic arm and guide it through a weld and thereby program it so it can learn how to do that weld. So then you can get the robot doing all the dangerous parts. If they're welding something large where they might have to get up on scaffolds or something, they might be able to get the robot to do some of the more dangerous types of positions. So that's when you get the real benefit.

0:09:27.7 AS: Yeah. I would think like in a paint booth, which we had in factories I worked at, now you can seal it off and have a robot in there, and all of a sudden lung problems and other things like that just go away.

0:09:40.8 JS: Interesting. Well, so anyway, we're still in a, I think in a rough spot generally with manufacturing because between 2010 and present day, at least in North America, productivity's gone down. And it's because people haven't been able to... They've depended on those people to keep their agility, but they haven't learned how to add value.

0:10:08.3 AS: Can you discuss that just for a second about productivity going down? That's a little bit of an odd thing because I think most people think that productivity's probably going up. What is the measure you're talking about, and how long and why is that happening?

0:10:23.5 JS: I think it's basically... At least I'd have to look at the study that they have, but it's basically output in proportion to the number of hours. I think that's pretty well accepted. So they're losing ground as the demands for agility are increasing. And their attempts to automate have been, caused problems. You automate and you lose your people, and then you're gonna have a heck of a time getting them back right now because that's really hard in manufacturing. But yeah, I would have to look at the study in detail to understand how they got that number, but I was taking it on faith that this is from Ben Armstrong, who's the director of the Industrial Performance Center.

0:11:11.8 AS: Yeah. You just mentioned something that I was just recently talking with another person about, and that was, one of the downsides of an aging workforce is that you're losing really senior people and you're replacing 'em with people that may not have the skills. Also, US kind of is notorious in America for a declining education. And with education coming down for the last 30 years or so, it's also hard to find, let's say, engineers and people that... There's not a deep market in some of these places where there's need. So that's a real cha