Product or process innovation?

Hi All,

Let me wish you a successful year 2009!

This time I would like to discuss the difference between product and process innovation.

Recently I had an interesting meeting where a manufacturer asked me how to improve the alignment of some of its parts. The product is being manufactured and than serviced at the customer.

You could compare it to a machine that is being made and afterwards placed and aligned at the customer. For instance a loom contains the possibility to regulate most of its parts during assembly but also at the customer.

I had some trouble aligning my heat convectors in the floor because no regulation was made possible by the product. I had made a change of my own to enable the alignment, it was however a product change!

Logically the regulatory function in the examples was either included or not included yet. However, once the product has been aligned it is fixed in the aligned position and it reaches its end position.

From my point of view it was more interesting to use a tool to align the parts instead of integrating it permanently into the product because you only use it once.

This means that it might be more interesting for product designer to exclude functions that are only temporarily used. This sheds a new light on how to design a product because instead of making a rather complex regulation sub system or parts it might be cheaper to buy one tool that is able to deliver the function for the specific product. It is like IKEA giving you an Allen key to assemble the wardrobe and to push it a bit further they give you a saw so you can adjust it to your exact height and length. Imagine!

This is maybe one step further in the design for assembly and manufacturability thoughts. In this manner one really could eliminate the need for a function in a product and put it in the process when you service it out.

I have always wondered what came first, the chicken or the egg. According to the model of Abernathy-Utterback for Product & Process Innovation published from the mid to late-1970s it was clearly always a dominant design in the product. Maybe we should change this into a dominant design in the product and process features.

Have a great day!

Learning from the past (2)

Hi All,

Inventions from the past seem so normal. Most of them are not.

In order to keep up with the increasing demand for those newfangled contraptions, horseless carriages, Ransom E. Olds created the assembly line in 1901. The new approach to putting together automobiles enabled him to more than quadruple his factory’s output, from 425 cars in 1901 to 2,500 in 1902.
Olds should have become known as "The father of automotive assembly line," although many people think that it was Henry Ford who invented the assembly line. What Ford did do was to improve upon Olds’s idea by installing conveyor belts. That cut the time of manufacturing a Model T from a day and a half to a mere ninety minutes. Henry Ford should been called "The father of automotive mass production." from http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inventions/assbline.htm

Henry ford and the assembly line http://nl.youtube.com/watch?v=JgvYGi5J-Cg

Again some very good examples of increasing productivity through using technology!

But Ford tried to standardise production through standardising the product. One color, one type, ...simple operations in a high speed each after the other. Ford had the opportunity to change the design to make the manufacturing more easy. (This technique today is called Design For Assembly and Manufacturability, see Boothroyd and Dewhurst)

Unfortunately this high degree of standardisation is not possible today. The variants disturb the good balanced workflow even in the flow production line. The more the demand decreases the more the production types goes from flow upto project production. How can we deal with these 'disturbances'? The answer is again 'technology' but variant independent technologies!

Have a nice year end!

Ives

Learning from the past (1)

Hi All,

That process innovation, finding new technology breaktrhoughs, was the direction to increase productivity drastically is easily shown from several examples from the past. I'm going to do a series of these in the following boggs.

In England the production of steel and iron was improved in the late eighteenth century resulting in a large mechanization of the production systems. The effect was that where most production was done at low scale, a large scale mass production came about.

The avalability of iron and steel made it possible to produce trains, bridges, railway stations, etc.

Inventing better methods to manufacture steel resulted in greater quantity and quality.Notice in the following story the different technological inventions that made it possible to come to a uniform way of producing. (the following text was adapted from http://science.jrank.org/)

Because the focus of improving steel must have been the talk of that century it is not surprizing that William Kelly of the United States, and Henry Bessemer of England, both working independently, discovered the same method for converting iron into steel. Kelly built his first converter in 1851 and received an American patent in 1857. In 1856 Bessemer completed his vertical converter, and in 1860 he patented a tilting converter which could be tilted to receive molten iron from the furnace and also to pour out its load of liquid steel. The Bessemer converter made possible the high tonnage production of steel for ships, railroads,bridges and large buildings in the mid-nineteenth century.

However, the steel was brittle from the many impurities. An English metallurgist, Robert F. Mushet, discovered in 1856 that adding an iron alloy (spiegeleisen) containing manganese would remove the oxygen. Around 1875, Sidney G. Thomas and Percy Gilchrist, two English chemists, discovered that by adding limestone to the converter they could remove the phosphorus and most of the sulfur.In England, another new furnace was introduced in 1861 by two brothers, William and Frederick Siemans. This was the open-hearth furnace, also known as the regenerative open-hearth because the outgoing hot gases were used to preheat the incoming air. Pierre Émile Martin of France improved the process in 1864 by adding scrap steel to the molten iron to speed purification. During this period hardened alloy steels came into commercial use; Mushet made a high carbon steel in 1868 which gave tools longer life in France, a chromium steel alloy was produced in 1877 and a nickel steel alloy in 1888. An Englishman, Sir Robert Hadfield, discovered in 1882 how to harden manganese tool steel by heating it to a high temperature and then quenching it in water.Around 1879, the electric furnace was developed by William Siemans. This furnace was used very little prior to 1910 because of the high electrical costs and the poor quality of electrodes used to produce the arc for melting.

The open-hearth furnace was the most popular method of steel production until the early 1950s.

Isn't this remarkable? The basic technoloy stayed the same during almost 90 years! Clearly no major improvements have been found.

Pure oxygen became more economical to produce in large quantities and in 1954 the first basic oxygen process facility opened for production in the United States. Today, most of the world's steel is made by either a basic oxygen furnace or an electric furnace. Strange that we are still working with technology developped in the 18the century. (adapted from here)

Have a great day,

Ives

On change (1)

Hi All,


Projects involve change. As Peter Sacreas said, "Yes, change, but you want improvement, not every change is good!"
When talking about change & improvement a general factor that is used in almost every change management programme is to get involvement of the operators. Listen to what they say because they will perform the actions after all.
Several forms have been tried to involve the operator. In the seventies and eighties quality circles where used. Later on in the nineties the term "team management" was popular so several action teams, self managed team where started.

The following thoughts are regularly used. "Start with a small project so we can reach success and "prove" to the rest this approach is successful. Select those guys that are willing to cooperate and have a positive mindset. Most projects are at the level of continuous improvement and small breakthroughs. "
Recently we tried out a new approach on implementing 5S where the concept of networker was introduced. A networker is somebody that has a great span of contacts. This is an easy way to reach many people in the factory without having to follow the usual hierarchical communication line.

But what did we learn from this team approach?

As far as I’m concerned we are approaching this too much in "a flatland". Ken Wilber uses the term flatland to describe what happens when one or more of the quadrants is ignored or undervalued. Science describes our external world. Science and also "the management” is a world view that measures our 'reality'. Whatever can't be measured in some way is deemed to be unreal or valueless. Values, feelings and intuition have no part in the calculated world. This is the biggest remark from all operators I spoke to when doing an improvement programme. We have created a flat land where the whole left side of the four quadrants has been flattened into the right. It seems we have been developing in a flat land. Even how we evaluate the people involved is rather horizontal. Using team roles developed by Belbin is useful however a more interesting development is vertical. In the picture below a vertical development (wave) has been pointed out by Wilber. (Picture & quotes from here) From The Integral Vision at the Millennium: "The Upper-Left quadrant (which is the interior of the individual, and which in the simplistic figure 1 only contains one stream and eight personal waves), actually contains a full spectrum of waves (or levels of development--stretching from matter to body to mind to soul to spirit; or again, from archaic to magic to mythic to rational to integral to transpersonal, not as rigidly discrete platforms but as interwoven nests); many different streams (or lines of development--the different modules, dimensions, or areas of development--including cognitive, moral, affective, linguistic, kinaesthetic, somatic, interpersonal, etc.); different states of consciousness (including waking, dreaming, sleeping, altered, no ordinary, and meditative); different types of consciousness (or possible orientations at every level, including personality types and different gender styles), among numerous other factors. Taking all of these items into account allows us to utilize the important research findings from developmental studies, but also place them in a larger context that suggests their important but limited contributions, complementing them with an understanding of multiple modalities, dimensions, states, and types, to result in a richly textured, homodynamic, integral view of consciousness. "

Unfortunately how can we reach this integral change technology? How can we help to develop our operators if we ourselves are in constant growth?

According to Maslow people complain on their level of development. It is no use to talk about a scientific rational approach if we are still in the wave of a mythical cultural development!

Therefore tuning into the apparent culture of an organisation and helping it evolve along several lines is the biggest challenge for any advisor, engineer or consultant.

Have a nice day,
ives

On the 5W's

Hi All,

Some time ago i got a question from a client who was concerned with remarks on the 5Ws in the blog. It is advisable to read this article first. Here are my remarks

The text in italic is taken from the blog.

So why do I recommend banning 5-Whys from your organization? Because of the following 5 major reasons:
1. The 5-Why technique doesn't reliably lead investigators to fixable causes of either human performance or equipment problems. Why? Because it does not have embedded expert knowledge and is usually used just to record the investigators beliefs about why a failure occurred. (It does not lead and investigator beyond their current knowledge.)

You can now not know no more than you know now. You can therefore afterwards note that you knew not enough btw when do you know enough? Will we ever know everything? At this moment your analysis of the possible causes has been your best recommended vision. We believe that the "causes" come from all the relevant objects in the system and how all these objects interact at a certain moment. All these objects may directly influence each other and defining the possible influences give you what you need to create an undesired effect. There are more conditions (eg objects, attributes and interactions defined by scientific laws (we also call these scientific laws effects eg the Seebeck effect) needed to create an effect. (yet nothing more than these objects because the scope you have defined).

(Picture from source)







2. 5-Whys is NOT reliable for use by novices OR experts (because of the problems described above that are inherent to the cause-and-effect philosophy).





3. The 5-Why technique in not robust because it causes people to focus on a single problem and miss more subtle problems.


Entirely agree, it a system this means that several objects and conditions are needed to create an undesired effect. When i was working with a company in the textile sector they kept on telling me it was the quality of the thread that caused so many machine stops. I didn't agree because the thread alone doesn't doe anything. It is the interaction of the machine (pulling the thread, pushing it through holes) together with the attributes of the threads that may cause the thread to break. The thread alone doesn't do anything unless it is in the machine!





4. The 5-Why technique usually isn't tested or documented and usually has poor training. Why? Because some claim that 5-Why is so easy people don't need documentation or training. And why should anyone test a system that is so easy to use?
Entirely agree, we are easily misguided by our first beliefs.

5. The 5-Why techniques is not designed to be compatible with a consistent, well thought out categorization system for trending.

Entirely agreed, as soon as certain properties formulated from the assumptions (hypotheses) made, one comes to a model that gives a more clear picture of what we think is happening. This model can be tested through experiments and analysis of measured data. Eventually cause and effect thinking is very closely related to science. Building a model results in making and defining your experiments.

The question of 5 Why should rather be "What conditions do we need to cause an effect as we have seen".

If you want to create a fire with a match you need oxygen , flammable material and someone to strike the match against the side of the match box. Solving the problem of the fire can be done by eliminating oxygen OR eliminating the side of the match box (the surface is made of sand, powdered glass, and red phosphorus) OR eliminating the flammable material OR no striking at all (the friction caused by the glass powder rubbing together produces enough heat to turn a very small amount of the red phosphorus into white phosphorus, white phosphorus burns easily (=scientific effect) OR eliminating the match (made of sulfur, glass powder, and an oxidizing agent) The heat and oxygen gas then cause the sulfur to burst into flame









If these experiments show that the model was wrong, the model has been wrong itself. This way learn you something!

If you want to go beyond these 5 reasons you could also bring up the issue of BLAME.
In many implementations of the 5-Whys, people are taught to simply ask "Why?"
When they do this during an interview, the interviewee naturally becomes defensive.
Why? Because they interpret the question as blaming them for something. Therefore, instead of providing information, they start providing justification. They want to avoid the blame inherent in the "why" question. Thus the 5-Why technique may lead to an atmosphere of blame and suspicion.

Our feelings (or thoughts!) obstruct us in seeing what is happening in the system. This is why we always start our training with the six thinking hats from the Bono to let everybody experience that putting aside your first judgement enables you to obtain new ideas. Finding the best recommended vision is of course shimmered by the previous "internal" psychology which is coloured by perceptions, value judgements, feelings. These should fall first in a scientific approach. Opening yourself to other insights (strange to your own insights, not thinking that you know what happened but with curiosity discover the different conditions needed to create that undesired effect) ensures you an in-depth scientifically curiosity to reach the root causes of certain effect. It is notable that you cannot get deeper in root causes then sciences best recommended visions (e.g. gravity) and I found it pleasing to that read that you needn't go so deep. Mark is completely right. To try put the gravity responsible for the fact that someone falls is nonsense. If the point of gravity is unbalanced any object will fall. Some what you could modify to be the objects from the system on which you yourself have an impact! Eg in the case of falling, these are respectively, the person himself (and his ability to handle surroundings that cause to fall, the condition in which person itself was (mentally/physically)), (condition of) shoes, (condition of) the ground, to carry out the action.

Have a nice day.

Conflict resolution: a first overview

Hi All,

Conflicts seem to be all around us. The most famous of all production conflicts is the Quality-Cost-Delivery model where the conflict says that in trying to improve the Q the cost will go up or the delivery will go down. Strangely enough i tried to find the origin of the QCD model but unable to trace it back to its origin. Does anybody know who used it for the first time? OK, lets continue.

There are many conflicts in production. Here is a small list of some of the issues.

• Many intermediary places versus ease of assembly
• Higher quality versus short production time
• Large parts, many crates versus length of a production line
• Work safe versus work fast
• Work ergonomic versus work quick and easy
• Many parts at a line although they are for variants versus time to transport them
• Automated machine versus creation of bottlenecks (many small handling's create maneuverability, but if all steps are automated you can hardly balance)
• Order/ clean environment versus produce fast
• Tooling to make the work easier (e.g. lift) versus time loss due to lift
• Standard packaging versus need on the line
• Continuous replenishment versus discrete replenishment
• Splitting up left assembly from right versus mistakes made through this split up
• Splitting operation into small steps versus low motivation
• Long operations versus time needed to know the whole process
• Changing versus discipline

How can we solve these at a glance insolvable conflicts?

Well, lets have a look at conflicts.

What is a conflict. To start with: it is easier to have one thing in our mind than two. And if the other person has the opposite in mind you both might have a "social conflict". You're wrong I'm right. The conflict does not have to be with 2 people. You yourself can formulate technical/social conflicts easily. Such as i want to have more time for pleasure but i need to work to earn money to have pleasure. Opposites are all around us, men -woman, black -white, magnetic north & south, ..

The conflict becomes bigger if both sides polarise. If the conflict becomes more "extreme" in opposites. If you think you need both but you can only one. Watzlawick calls this type of (social) conflict (and change) a first order. A second order change is described as in the example of a group of peasants that where on a killing path. A first order change is when they encounter the police they fought and many people were killed. A second order change is when the police explains that they are there for practising shooting on the pigeons and that thy are not here for them!

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function." (Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-Up" (1936))

Looking at solving conflict the following strategies were proposed by Gerhard Schwarz (see here for the full text) The following conflict-solving strategies , can be met through

1. escape: "run away"
2. destruction: "kill your opponent"
3. submission: "subordinate your opponent"
4. delegation: an independent authority (judge) decides the conflict
5. compromise: an arrangement between the two positions

6. consensus: seeking for a dialectical synthesis

Clearly the first 3 strategies are similar to what would happen if an animal is under attack (see here for an interesting book) and also show similarity with Ken Wilber's Human Consciousness Project, where the levels of conscious flows in the left bottom quadrant through agricultural, magical, mythical, scientific and spiritual.

As engineers we learn to make a compromise. If something has to have a huge speed but it can not warm up, we tend to look for the speed that has an acceptable temperature. (this a compromise).

The conflict becomes aporetic if all strategies up to 5 can not be used any more. Only on a higher level will this conflict be solved. A conflict has to fulfill three conditions in order to be called aporetic:
(A) There must be two opposing positions.
(B) Both positions must be true or at least legitimate.
(C) Both positions must depend upon each other; one cannot exist without the other

Here i would like to quote from Malcolm Gladwell's "Blink, the power without thinking". In his book he describes the triangle test with Coke and Pepsi. This test is that there are two glasses of Coke and one of Pepsi. The test is seemingly simple: point out the Pepsi glass. It seems that it is to the point of chance as to identify the Pepsi glass. Malcolm points out that if you can "describe and hold the taste of the first" and then the second in our memory and covert to sensation into a permanent, we are understanding the vocabulary of taste" (adapted from Blink, p186).

The dialectic model of Hegel "these antithesis syntheses" is finding the third direction that lifts the conflict as if the conflict never existed. Process innovation is about finding the "third direction" that lifts the conflict.

Conflict resolution strategies.

Lifting the conflict means looking at similarity. In therapy the commonalities are searched. What do those two opposites have in common, what are their mutual assumptions?

Another conflict resolution approach is found at Goldratt "evaporating cloud". (see here)

There is an apparent opposite (conflict). What are you trying to achieve (what are the root causes) and what is the mutual goal is the approach of Goldratt's evaporating clouds. The important aspect of this tool is the analysis of people’s needs and the assumptions that are often made. The connections are “if…then…” or “if…and if…and if…then…” cause and effect relationships. Here we clearly look again at what is the common goal. Under every arrow lie assumptions. Determining those assumptions through making “in order to, we must...” statements, and then adding the word “because...” to it, will get you to finding one that seems susceptible to questioning. One assumption that can be broken.

Another conflict breaking approach is found in TRIZ. One of the old approaches is the contradiction matrix. Where 2 opposite parameters conflict a inventive solution is applicable. This inventive solution originated from patent analyses and applying abstract thinking. More powerful approaches such as ARIZ and Su-field analysis were modelled.

But the basic pattern is that we "blind" ourselves with one or two way thinking. The third direction is available. Before now and after. Energy, matter and information. Mind, body and spirit. Past present and future, Thought words action. "The first step to change anything is to know and accept that you yourself chose that it is what it is. & If you really want you life to start, change your idea about life.Call for a new reality."(Donald Neal Walsh) In essence, solving conflict is about change of what you think is true.

Process innovation is a systematic approach to find the other direction. It is about answering the questions : How many ways do i know to perform this or that action? How many ways do i know how to react to this or that situation?

J'ai décidé d'être heureux.C'est excellent pour la santé.
VOLTAIRE (1694-1778)

Have a nice evening.

Ives

(re) Use what you have

Hi All,


I hope you all enjoyed then change in number from 7 to 8.
Today I would like to discuss the (re)use of what you already have. Process Innovation is about re-using what you already have but didn't realise you had it. Let me give you some examples.


Some days ago I was in Norway for a SMED exercise. The material that had to be removed was removed by a box manually. I wondered how the material got into the silo. The answer of course was a pump. The next you can guess. Can't we use the pump to suck the material away? The investment to change the pump and pipes is much lower compared to the gain.

The best alternatives are alternatives that use the resources within the system. The trick is to check the function of the process at hand. Where else can I find a similar function performed in the same system?

Another company in the blow moulding sector combines steel with rubber. For one product an operator had to use a manual press to undo the curving of the product (steel & rubber while blow moulding) The experience was that using a oven to heat the steel plate gave better results yet a downfall was that the binding material already on the steel worsened. How to overcome this? Strangely enough when the steel plate was inserted in the machine and the rubber was injected a studied showed that the plate always curved in the same direction. This poses the next question as to why not pre-curve the plate in the other direction so when blow moulding the plate would become straight. Some test ware performed positively. So using information can be an interesting resource. Knowledge is a resource. Also doing it in advance can be very attractive.

A painting company wanted to stir the three component paint better. But how? A chemist knows that an Erlenmeyer consisting of a magnetic pin and a magnetic field give a good stirring result. This technology was already in use in the company, but never the connection was made with the 'normal' process. So using another field can give a good result.

Many companies use cranes to transport a piece from a box to a work table. Once finished the reverse is done. Why not use the box as a work table? This solution was implemented and gave an improvement of 10 minutes on a process of 20. Another object gives the same function!

To measure a correct alignment a measurement device was attached to the machine. While the machine turns the operator checks the movement of the instrument. A quicker solution was found by the company itself by using “the other resource”: the operator! The operator easily rotates the measurement device himself, doing it much faster than the machine could. (This was an investment of 300 Euro).

So the resource can come from a
Object (space, time, field, Knowledge), Function , System ,Organisation you already have. So next time look at the system surrounding what you have, you may be able to use it!

Have a great time,
Ives

Technological Innovation part 1

Hi All,

A couple of days ago i was startled by the following quote: "Innovation is not the ability to master or adopt a technology, but the ability to see how that technology can meet a business need or solve an - as of yet -unsolved problem. (from here)".

Indeed, Technological Innovation (see here where i discussed Technological Innovation) should provide an answer to increase the company value. What technology could provide me the best performance for a certain product for a certain market. What are the steps needed to make the product. Traditionally one will look at the competitors where a similar process is used to produce the product. Technological Innovation should provide the answer to produce the same product 41x quicker, 41x more qualitative, 41x more productive. I used the factor 41 arbitrarily. But setting high standards gets you to find high results. The business value of a technological innovation could be either one of these
- solving a bottleneck or increasing the throughput
- producing with better quality fit for the market
- improving productivity through reducing input resources e.g. material, energy, change over workforce (note that there used to be about 200 steps to make a light bulb, today only four are needed)
- the ability to make a different product fit for the market
- increasing safety issues
- eliminating several process steps
- improving measurements of the process and decreasing the variance of the process

Technological process innovation can be reached in three different ways.

If you want to make light you can use fire, a candle, a lamp, a tungsten light bulb, LED's, TL , a gas lamp, halide lamps, neon lights (read interesting article here). If your industry only uses light bulbs, you'll find a lot of choice. Looking at other technologies and applying them to your industry so you can get a difference is what process innovation is about. This is changing the type of technology.

But on the same level you can also go upwards. The second type of technological innovation could be seen as an automation step. I have seen many companies that have automated their process. It is something like this. The first step is fully automated (e.g. sawing window frames, forming complex forms from a sheet, cutting a form into a sheet, etc.) these steps are usually taken by large setup times. The second is a semi-automatic step where some repair work is done because the former step is insufficient (drilling holes in window frames, grinding the sheets to get the exact form where the forming process was unreachable,...) The last step is finishing. Usually this is a manual (assembly) step where simple non-powered tools are used such as cutters, hammers . Making seats, tunnel consoles, headliners, cars all processes that are in a flow line, job shop or project based environment will have these characteristics.

A technological innovation would be to get the manual last step to a higher degree of automation as in the following figure. You can easily see that the last step is the 3 figure, the second step the 4Th and the first step the last figure. Process innovation states that the next evolutionary step will be going from using non-powered tools to powered tools to full automatic machines.

The third way to go to an technological innovation I'll tell you later:)

Have a nice 2008,

Ives

Let us see that we are seeing wrong

Hi All,

"Let us see that we are seeing wrong."

This is the question i got today from a high tech company. We are stepping down from bottleneck to bottleneck until the expense to find a new improvement is so high and the profit is so low. Every year it become more and more difficult to get 10% improvement. Help us to see something new!

An intriguing question.

We seldom doubt what is commonly used. We don't doubt the patterns that we think are there!

'Caminante, no hay camino. Se hace camino al andar' (Antonio Machado) (There is no path. The path is made by walking)

So many management theories tend to show the path, but there is no path. This behaviour reminds me of how we cope with emotions. We tend to take over the emotions from the person that is showing them. It is not because somebody is angry we have to be angry also. The same accounts for the statement: "it is not because I'm pointing somewhere you have to look at it!"

We hardly question the way we find solutions, the way we implement solutions. Many management theories are add new knowledge but not all this knowledge is applicable in your company. You can not apply the process of the birth of an egg to the process of birth of a monkey.

A paradigm shift is needed.

The key issue here is to find the constraints of the underlying theory. To ask yourself if everybody is doing lean management if it is OK to do it yourself! Lean strives at eliminating waste but the condition to start using lean are dependent of the market. If your market is very fluctuating lean will not be the answer! 6 sigma today is a very integrated in business life, but do we need it all the time?

If you think there is a path, think it is snowing so you loose your path.

Remember the joke about a consultant!

A consultant was driving his new BMW along a county road and came upon a shepherd herding his flock. He thought he'd have some fun with the old shepherd so he roared up in a cloud of dust. He stepped out of his car wearing an Armoni suit, Gucci shoes and Revo sunglasses, then he said to the shepherd: "I've got a proposition for you. If I tell you exactly how many sheep you have in your flock, will you give me one?" The sheep herder though for a moment, and calmly said: "Sure, why not?" So the guy parked his car, whips out his IBM Think-Pad, connects it to his mobile phone, surfs the Internet and finds the NASA Web site. Using the site, he calls up a GPS satellite navigation system and scans the area. Next he opens a database and an Excel spreadsheet and after a few minutes, he prints out a report on his portable printer. He then turned to the shepherd and said, "You have exactly 1,586 sheep." Impressed and a little stunned the shepherd said; "That's right, guess you'll have to take one of my sheep with you." He watched as the young man selects one of his animals and bundles it into his car. Then the shepherd got an idea; "Hold on a minute young man. If I can tell you exactly what your line of business is, how about you give me back my animal?" "That sounds fair, why not?" "You're a consultant." "That's right! But how did you guess that?" "There was no guessing required. You turned up here with all sorts of fancy stuff nobody needs, you expected compensation for an answer I already knew, to a question I never asked, and you know absolutely nothing about my business. Now, give me back my dog."

How to escape the known paths!

I think it is important to question the known theories! If a consultant tells you that he installed a new management system, that this is exactly what you need, but if it doesn't work it is due to the people in the company that don't follow the defined rules, he'll be too much focused on his beliefs. I call these guys the "these" consultants. (As in Hegel's triad: these -antithesis -syntheses). Hegel added that civilisation evolves through "finding manifested itself in contradiction and negation. Contradiction and negation have a dynamic quality that at every point in each domain leads to further development until a rational unity is reached that preserves the contradictions as phases and sub-parts by lifting them up to a higher unity. This whole is mental because it is mind that can comprehend all of these phases and sub-parts as steps in its own process of comprehension. It is rational because the same, underlying, logical, developmental order underlies every domain of reality and is ultimately the order of self-conscious rational thought, although only in the later stages of development does it come to full self-consciousness. (from Wikipedia) The acceptance of the antitheses will bring us into a syntheses, a new paradigm.

Defining your own antitheses and the birth of a syntheses

I can only help to define other paths that may or may not be there, help to make clear what are the constraints that are underlying every theory and find the antitheses. So try to contradict everything you think is true. Try to find the other side of what you like and the positive in what you hate. De Bono calls this technique Positive Minus Interesting. Every statement can be contradicted, it is the learning part e.g. the syntheses what really makes you jump!

I wish you all a merry X-mas.

Ives

If we only knew!

Hi all,

We all get a kick if we come up with a great idea that eventually seems to work. This kick is a good thing because it keeps us on our toes but it could also get us in the "Not Invented Here" thinking.

In many organizations there is a belief that unless they invented something, it can't possibly be good, let alone a great or worthy solution to their problems. It is a natural response to feel superior to some else ideas because they have been thinking about these things for so long, so what would be the chance that an outsider could come up with something useful?

I suppose that Innovation Management is at opposites with NIH thinking. Every solution to a problem has already been applied elsewhere most possibly in another context, industry, or scientific discipline.

“If HP only knew what HP knows, we would be much more profitable” former CEO Lew Platt.

To open up the field of every solution has already been applied the following questions will help:

(see also)

1. “Actling”
–“If we only knew what Our Company knows…”
•Norms, standards, common knowledge, reuse, etc.
2. “Knowling”
–“If we only knew what Our Industry knows…”
•Benchmarking, professional associations, certification, etc.
3. “Borderling”
–“If we only knew what The Industrial World knows…”
•Multi-sectoral collaboration, technology database, etc.
4. “Researchling”
–“If we only knew what Academics & Science know…”
•Cross-scientific collaboration, etc.

Most companies today not even reach the first level, to know what its own company knows. Many knowledge is tacit, e.g. between the ears of the people, and the individual may or may not be aware of what he or she knows and how he or she accomplishes particular results.

Turning production process information into Knowledge though would allow for huge process-knowledge-innovations .

The old quality proverb "Measuring = Knowing " is still valid today. Many of the complex problems in production are caused by not knowing the relations between all objects involved. So if you don’t measure it you can’t manage it. This is the place where simulation models come in handy. Gathering data to predict when a welded piece will deviate from expected, when a change over needs to recalibrate because we don't know how the next piece is different from the first...
Another cause of complex problems is the company blindness due to lack of systems thinking. It is easier to be focused on one issue that than trying to see the whole picture and evolving in time. It is like the use of a metonymy. A metonymy is an oversimplification such as in “France won in the world cup” where in fact we mean that soccer players from French origin played according to rules against a number of other teams from other nationalities. According to the rules they eventually won.

We see a lot of problems as we use metonymy to speak easier, trying to solve the oversimplified issue. Looking at all relations of the objects within the system that create the problem you'll know better what are the different strategies to try to solve it.

If you know this, you 'll get further!

But don't forget, if your thoughts prove you wrong in the future don't blaim yourself because you can never knew more then, than you knew at that moment!

Ives