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In election years past, I’ve avoided the temptation to endorse a particular candidate. This year might be different … but not this week.

But this week’s re-run from 2007 should give you a pretty good hint — maybe not of who I think you should vote for, but who you should vote against.

– Bob

I’m going to form a new political party — the Competence Party. Our platform: Competence does matter … a lot more than policy.

We’re already in the annoying run-up to the next presidential campaign. Here’s what you haven’t heard from any of the candidates: “If you elect me, I will appoint the best people to every position in government, and I define ‘best’ as ‘most qualified to effectively take care of the people’s business.'”

Here’s what you also haven’t heard: “As president, I will insist that everyone who works for me gives me the most accurate information possible — the information I need to hear, not the information I want to hear. I will base my decisions on this information. The only time I will trust my gut is when I decide what to eat.”

Anyone can present ideas that seem brilliant in sound bites and PowerPoint slides. It takes competence to make something useful happen. Most of what any administration ought to be doing is pretty much the same regardless of any policy specifics. That’s especially true if you inject competence into the process of policy formation, to weed out the alternatives that just won’t work.

If you think I’m singling out the current administration for criticism, I’m not, nor am I suggesting its predecessor prized competence more. Form your own conclusions about either or both.

This is about the next election. Based on the current round of speeches and debates, there are only three conclusions a reasonable person can draw. One is that the candidates think policy issues are all that matter — that if you’re headed in the right direction, then everything else will happen as if by magic. Another is that one or two candidates really do care about competence but are afraid to raise the issue for some reason. The third is that the candidates figure we citizens don’t think competence is important.

Nothing is more important.

If you want to join the Competence Party you have to accept the party’s platform. Raise your right hand, place your left on whatever book you want (the Competence Party doesn’t much care where or whether you worship, so long as you’re good at what you do) and vow to uphold these principles:

  • We will know what we want to accomplish, be clear in how we describe it, and know why it’s a good idea.
  • We will concentrate our efforts on a small number of important goals, recognizing that if we try to accomplish everything we’ll end up accomplishing nothing.
  • We will be realistic. We will choose courses of action only from among those possibilities predicated on all physical objects obeying the laws of physics, human nature not somehow changing for the better, and what has gone wrong in the past having something useful to teach us.
  • Our decisions will always begin by examining the evidence. And we will recognize that when our cherished principles collide with the evidence, the evidence wins. Every time.
  • With new evidence we will reconsider old decisions. Without it, we won’t.
  • We will never mistake our personal experience for hard evidence. Personal experience is the evidence we know best. It’s also a biased sample.
  • We will think first, plan next, and only then act. The only exception is a true emergency, where making any decision in the next two minutes is better than making the right decision sometime in the next several days.
  • We will never mistake hope for a plan. A plan describes what everyone has to do, in what order, to achieve a goal. Vague intentions and platitudes don’t.
  • We will sweat the details. Vague intentions and platitudes don’t have any, which is why those who stop with them always fail.
  • We will put the most qualified person we can find in every position. We’ll find some other way to reward high-dollar campaign contributors. Also, if we find someone is not able to succeed at what we’ve asked them to do, we’ll replace them with someone who is.
  • We will never blame anything on the law of unintended consequences. Our job is to foresee consequences, which we can usually do if we think things through.

No, I’m not really going to try to form the Competence Party. It’s enough of a challenge applying these principles to our day-to-day consulting work. I’m not really suggesting you join, either — you’ll have plenty to do applying them to your day-to-day leadership.

And, anyway, building a political party from scratch isn’t something I’m competent to do.

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Last week’s column introduced a new process design technique — the Six Stupid methodology. Six Stupid is based on the well known phenomenon that a group of people is dumber than its stupidest member.

In contrast to Six Sigma, which reduces variance to six standard deviations from the mean, Six Stupid designs processes based on what one person can put on one PowerPoint slide and persuade the other five team members will work really, really well.

One correspondent, reading the column, suggested I trademark the name, reserve www.sixstupid.com, and charge big bucks for seminars. Hey, if you’re willing to pay …

Another, more serious-minded than the first, pointed out that in both of the situations I described (a furniture order that could only be routed from Shipping to Restocking by way of my Manhattan apartment, and an air travel experience that nearly forced me to fly from New York to Florida by way of a blizzard zone), the companies had out-of-control processes.

True enough. My guess, though, is that they were out of control by design, in that nobody ever thought to build controls into them. And in the absence of good process controls, the only control left is the process itself — following the steps, which guarantees frequent horrible outcomes.

Business processes have six possible goals — perhaps “points of optimization” would be a better way to say it. They are: Reducing overhead costs, reducing unit costs, improving throughput, decreasing cycle time, adding excellence (the ability to adapt to unexpected circumstances, add nifty product features and otherwise do cool stuff), and increasing quality (reducing the number of out-of-specification outputs).

A good process control is nothing more than one of these goals, expressed as a number instead of a sentence. Putting process controls in place lets every participant know which goals to pay attention to, and, as a consequence, that it’s the goals, not the steps, that matter most.

Six Stupid process designers don’t start by establishing the process goals. Instead, everyone on the design team operates from a different set of assumptions about what they’re trying to achieve. But that isn’t important, because all will agree their goal is to “do what makes sense.” That’s clear, isn’t it?

And so the design team toils away, eventually agreeing to a series of steps everyone is supposed to follow. Proud of their efforts they publish the flow chart and disband, leaving it to whoever supervises the workgroup to implement it. And since the process has no stated goal, the supervisor has little choice. The team’s instructions: Follow the steps, regardless of the consequences.

That’s how bureaucracy happens. What’s particularly sad is that when most of us deal with a bureaucracy, we blame the bureaucrats. But it isn’t their fault. They’ve been given clear instructions — just follow the steps, fill out the forms, dot the i’s and cross the t’s.

Compare this to a process that follows a more rational methodology than Six Stupid. The first step is to define inputs and outputs (and perhaps resources and constraints as well). The next is to decide on the goals. After that, the designers will ask the musical question, “How will anyone know if we’re heading in the right direction?”

That’s where metrics come from, or are supposed to come from at least. If the top process priority is throughput, the process will include information outputs that allow the process manager to measure it. If the second priority is unit cost, cost information will come out of the process as well.

Much more important than the metrics themselves is how they allow everyone to deal with the process when it’s in production. Compare the production employees in two rival companies.

Those in the first learn how the process works and the details of their individual responsibilities. Those in the second get more training. They’re told what the company is trying to achieve. “We’re trying to maximize throughput and minimize errors while keeping costs to an acceptable level.”

Even more important, they’re encouraged to think: “If something comes up where the process doesn’t fit the situation, figure out what will take care of things, do it, and then let your supervisor know about it.”

Which contrasts the difference between Six Stupid and intelligent forms of process design. Assemble six stupid people and they’ll figure they’re the only ones smart enough to figure out solutions. Put six smart people together and they’ll reach a very different conclusion. They’ll figure they can’t possibly be smart enough to anticipate everything that might happen.

They’ll also figure that when whatever it is does happen, grown adults can probably figure out reasonable ways to handle the situation … if they’re encouraged to do so.

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