Posted on May 25, 2011  Comments (2)

Guest post by Bradley Jones

Almost a hundred years ago R. A. Fisher‘s boss published an article espousing OFAT (one factor at a time). Fisher responded with an article of his own laying out his justification for factorial design. I admire the courage it took to contradict his boss in print!

Fisher’s argument was mainly about efficiency – that you could learn as much about many factors as you learned about one in the same number of trials. Saving money and effort is a powerful and positive motivator.

The most common argument I read against OFAT these days has to do with inability to detect interactions and the possibility of finding suboptimal factor settings at the end of the investigation. I admit to using these arguments myself in print.

I don’t think these arguments are as effective as Fisher’s original argument.

To play the devil’s advocate for a moment consider this thought experiment. You have to climb a hill that runs on a line going from southwest to northeast but you are only allowed to make steps that are due north or south or due east or west. Though you will have to make many zig zags you will eventually make it to the top. If you noted your altitude at each step, you would have enough data to fit a response surface.

Obviously this approach is very inefficient but it is not impossible. Don’t mistake my intent here. I am definitely not an advocate of OFAT. Rather I would like to find more convincing arguments to persuade experimenters to move to multi-factor design.

Related: The Purpose of Factorial Designed Experiments – Using Design of Experiments – articles by R.A. Fisher – articles on using factorial design of experiments – Does good experimental design require changing only one factor at a time (OFAT)? – Statistics for Experimenters

Posted on May 21, 2011  Comments (2)

Photo by John Hunter at Antelope Island State Park, Utah

The management improvement blog carnival is published 3 times a month (though not this month – May 10th was missed) with select recent management blog posts. Curious Cat also collects articles on improving management practices, you can subscribe via RSS to new article additions.
See more photos from my trip to Utah, including Antelope Island State Park in the Great Salt Lake.

• Drive out Fear by Wally Bock – “Fear corrodes morale and team spirit. Fight or flight rules the day, with team members hiding from the rampaging saber-toothed tiger of a boss, throwing blame at each other and hoping, to borrow from Winston Churchill, that the crocodile will eat them last.”
• 8 Ways to Deal with Employee Personal Problems by Harwell Thrasher – “Every employee is an individual with their own personal strengths and issues. You can’t expect to take advantage of an employee’s strengths without occasionally running up against some of the issues.”
• Three Requirements for Managing by Fact by Jon Miller – “1) decision on the criteria of relevance, 2) testing of hypothesis and conversion of opinion into tested fact, and 3) arriving at consensus through clash and conflict of divergent opinions.”
• Rapid PDCA with 3P by Mark Rosenthal – “The idea is to be able to quickly and cheaply try out, and experience, a process (or product) so that problems can be surfaced, opportunities for improvement can be seen, and the PDCA cycle can be turned far more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.” [One important key to excellent results using PDSA is rapid, quick cycles through the PDSA cycle (many organizations turn the PDSA cycle much too slowly) - John]

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Posted on May 9, 2011  Comments (3)

Respect for people sure sounds great. And most of us have plenty of experience with organizations that dis-respect people continuously (both employees and customers). So what does respect for people mean at the core? For me:

A system that lets people take joy in work and fixes root causes instead of finding people to blame.

A huge part of the disrespect shown by companies to employees is through direct action. But another huge part is forcing people to deal with horribly bad processes that just haven’t been fixed. Most TSA employees have to feel horrible about what they are being required to do. This will often then result in them lashing out in other ways (because they try to hide from those feelings [no-one wants to consciously go to work everyday knowing what they are doing is counter to their core beliefs] – but in doing so they just deflect the feelings into other places). Dealing with these bad processes drives employees crazy year after year.

For me creating a climate where people can take pride in what they do everyday is the key. It isn’t being “nice” to everyone. What matters is providing a workplace where intrinsic motivation flourishes. Eliminating bad practices (paying attention to HiPPO instead of the best idea, huge amounts of paperwork instead of productive action, inflexible and overly prescriptive policies, not trusting employees, providing managers that don’t know how to manage people, embarrassing employees in from of others…) is necessary but insufficient.

Beyond eliminating bad practices though we need to provide a climate where people can flourish. This requires providing meaningful work (people need to know how they contribute, how what they do fits into providing value). Providing managers that know how to manage people is a huge step in the right direction, but often the systems to promote people have little success at selecting those that will excel in this area.

Another practice to respect people, is to give them the training and resources to do what you ask them to do. It isn’t respectful to expect people to take heroic action to overcome the companies poor practices. I can go on and on, and do in my posts about respect for people.

Related: The Two Pillar of the Toyota Way: continuous improvement and respect for people – Hire People You Can Trust to Do Their Job
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Posted on May 1, 2011  Comments (1)

The management blog carnival highlights recent management blog posts 3 times each month. The posts generally focus on the areas I have focused on in the Curious Cat Management Improvement guide since 1996 (Deming, lean thinking, agile software development, respect for people, leadership…).

• Autonomy: condition for continuous improvement by Rob van Stekelenborg – “Teams that should take the responsibility over a (part of a) process should at the same time also be given the opportunity to actually improve something within their area of responsibility… That the team is allowed to experiment with suggestions that were put forward…”
• Laying Off Hands, Losing Brains by Kevin Meyer – “Remember, there’s a brain attached to that pair of hands. Value can be created even if the hands aren’t being used at the moment.”
• Lunch by Joel Spolsky – “Ten years ago Michael and I set out with the rather ambitious goal of making a great place to work. Eating together is a critical part of what it means to be human and what it means to have a humane workplace, and that’s been a part of our values from day one.”
• Tools, Rules, Principles, and Lean Wallpaper by Art Smalley – “You need a critical mass of people that have both the right thinking patterns (know what) but also the right technical knowledge (know how)… Unfortunately I don’t see as much advancement on the actual technical “know how” dimension of the equation and until that problem is solved actual performance results will not match up with the associated performance expectations.”
• How to succeed in business by doing nothing by Michael Blastland – “the fashion for corporate dashboards displaying up-to-the-minute information about company performance makes me wonder – will bosses everywhere be staring at the numbers, twitching with every down, feeling the pulse race with every up, on the phone demanding action with every flicker on the dial?” [tampering is a common problem - John]
• Exorbitant Executive Salaries = Resources Wasted On Those Who Don’t Need Them by Aaron Anderson – “The question I raise here is as to if the monies beyond a certain level of salary might not be better spent on developing a pool of resources that can be utilized to generate organizational slack that can invigorate invention, creativity, and lead to new ways of doing in an ongoing way that allows people to break free of the shackles of the long standing tradition or status quo.”

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