September 2004
Innovation Tips
...for thriving on collaborative innovation.
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Quality Decisions — The Productive Advantage
Our culture exalts expediency. We are driven to make a decision and implement it. We are surrounded by an increasing array of timesaving and laborsaving gadgets and machines. We get more done in a day, send more messages, have more phone conversations, and accomplish more tasks than ever before in modern history. Yet to what end?
Most of us feel frenetic and worn thin. The timesaving gadgets have only given us more to do. We have not more available time, but less. We are not settled, but caught up in the daily swirl of endless activity.
Make the sale, complete the task, do the job, implement the project. In the frenzy of activity, we have lost the patience to take time to think through our decisions. Instead, we shoot from the hip and think that we have accomplished something grand because we have made the decision in record time.
Yet, decisions made in haste will often create more problems than they solve. If we did not have time to make a quality decision in the first place, when will we find the time to fix all the problems we have created by making a poor decision?
The key to enduring productivity in organizations is not speed but quality. Edwards Demming preached quality to managers in America after World War II. Few listened, but Japanese industrialists heard him and quickly created highly productive companies producing the highest quality products. They succeeded by following Demmings’Äô advice: they took time to make quality decisions.
Decisions of high quality are generated by "systems thinking"—decisions made through dialogue among people doing the work or affected by the outcomes. Japanese companies developed a reputation for extraordinary quality simply by letting people doing the work make the decisions about how best to do that work.
It seems so simple, yet it is so uncommon. Few organizations in our American culture actually operate that way. We are instead bound up with egocentric agendas and political hierarchies, exalting speed, volume and prestige over quality and humility.
Quick decisions from the top contribute little enduring value to the social capital of the organization. They build no sense of ownership; they generate resentment from those left out and fail to engender collective enthusiasm. Though the "boss" may feel powerful, decisive and strong, too often these single-minded decisions are simply decisive and wrong.
Quality decision-making requires patience and tolerance for diverse perspectives. Like the postwar Japanese industries, organizations that take time for quality decision-making will also enjoy phenomenal economic productivity. In this age of expediency, not more haste but more patience will win the day.
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