Top-Down Knowledge Myth: Boosting Lean with Deming (Part 4)

In this episode, Jacob Stoller and Andrew Stotz discuss the myth that managers need to know everything in order to manage. What happens when you ask non-managers for feedback?

TRANSCRIPT

0:00:02.2 Andrew Stotz: My name is Andrew Stotz, and I'll be your host as we continue our journey into the teachings of Dr. W Edwards Deming. Today I'm continuing my discussion with Jacob Stoller, a Shingo-Prize-winning author of The Lean CEO and also Productivity Reimagined, which explores how to apply the Lean and Deming management style at the enterprise level. The topic for today is Myth Three: The Top-down Knowledge Myth. Jacob, take it away.

0:00:31.2 Jacob Stoller: Okay. Great to be here again, Andrew. And, yeah, the myth we're gonna talk about is this notion that managers can make their workers and their people more productive by telling them exactly what to do. And that's surprisingly prevalent in the workplace. But I wanna start out by just saying how this relates to the other myths that we were talking about, 'cause we started with this, what Dr. Deming calls the "pyramid," the org-structure type or...

0:01:08.9 AS: Organizational chart.

0:01:09.9 JS: Paradigm idea, yeah, the organizational structure that says that everything is a independent component, right? You got your different departments, they all work independently, we optimize each, and we optimize the whole, right? So, from that, it naturally follows. And we did Myth Number Two that we can follow financial logic, 'cause financial logic fits nicely into that structure. And of course, we saw last time that all the shortcomings and problems you get when you follow that kind of thinking. So, the third myth is we get to top-down knowledge. And again, that follows from the pyramid structure. If it were true that interdependent components weren't interdependent, that everything could act independently, it would certainly follow that you could have knowledge about those components taught in school and that it would all make sense. I think it's the interdependence that really shoots that whole thing down of top-down knowledge. So... Sorry. Yeah.

0:02:16.3 AS: Go ahead.

0:02:18.8 JS: I wanted to start with a bit of a story just to illustrate how prevalent this is. I was doing a workshop with a small excavation company, and we were looking at ways to make them more effective and serve more customers, grow more effectively, and stuff like that. I did an exercise with them, and we looked at where maybe the waste was taking place the most. And they were driving trucks around a lot. This was a rural area, so there was a lot of mileage that was perhaps being wasted. So, we did an exercise with tracking value and non-value mileage. If you're going to a customer, that's adding value. But if you take a detour to have lunch or something, well, that doesn't add value to the customer, right?

0:03:08.8 JS: So, we were exploring those things, and that exercise worked out really well. They made some big changes, and it actually really helped the company grow. They started posting little notes in the trucks talking about, "Remember, value versus non-value." They were tracking it. And it was really interesting. But the success was largely due to one participant. And I'm sure you've seen this, Andrew, in workshops where somebody really seems to get it. And he had all these ideas, a very, very thoughtful guy, and we were just writing down his suggestions. He had a lot to do with that. But after the workshop, I sat down with him when we were chatting, and he told me that he'd been in the construction business for 15 years, and nobody had ever asked him for his opinion about how work was done. Never.

0:04:04.7 AS: Incredible.

0:04:07.1 JS: I was just stunned by that. This guy was so good. [laughter] When you think about that, it's pretty typical. And I think it's really, people are, managers are taught that it's their job to tell people what