Organizational Effectiveness – Page 43

The battle of the ovens

Thanksgiving is coming right up. As modern, change-embracing trend-setters, I know you and your fellow members of the KJR community will be taking advantage of convection ovens to cook your birds faster than your parents achieved with their quaint conventional roasting technologies.

No? You don’t use a convection oven? Me neither. But if you’re like me, you’ll warm up your leftovers in the microwave.

Microwave ovens were hugely successful. Convection ovens weren’t. Recognizing why will make you and your teams more successful in rolling out the incipient changes you’re championing.

When microwaves first appeared on the scene (the ovens, that is, not the 300 MHz to 300 GHz electromagnetic radiation, which after all appeared on the scene shortly after the universe got started) … where was I?

Oh, yes, when microwave ovens appeared on the scene, Americans had already embraced convenience foods, whose principle attractions were (1) they were packaged as single portions so everyone could eat what they were in the mood for; (2) they needed far less effort to prepare (none) than the equivalent meal made from a recipe (between some and a lot); and (3) they were ready to eat far more quickly than the equivalent meal made from scratch.

Convenience foods might not have been as tasty as home-cooked meals, but they were palatable enough that the convenience outweighed the difference for many households on many evenings.

The microwave made convenience foods even more convenient, along with the salutary speed they brought to defrosting frozen food and the ease with which they warm coffee that’s become lukewarm.

Speaking of which, excuse me a moment …

Thanks.

Compare microwaves to convection ovens. Convection ovens are for cooks, not for folks heating prepared meals. For cooks they speed up baking and roasting by maybe 25%. That’s nice but not transformational. And it added enough uncertainty that cooks couldn’t rely on the conversion charts that came with the convection oven.

They also couldn’t rely on their experience … their feel for conventional cooking, refined over a lifetime of kitchen endeavor.

Convection cooking either meant abandoning recipes collected and practiced over years, decades, even generations in favor of those in a convection oven cookbook. Or else it meant subjecting every recipe to trial and error to get the convection time and temperature right.

And oh, by the way, the cook doesn’t have the luxury of serving a few burned or undercooked meals to the family while getting the hang of the new appliance.

This meant cooks, faced with a convection oven, had to start over. I, faced with a microwave and a frozen burrito, did not.

One more bit of information: Convection ovens haven’t been a dismal failure. They’ve been a dismal failure in the home marketplace, but as I learned while researching this article, they’re quite popular in commercial kitchens.

This makes perfect sense. When you’re running a restaurant, cutting baking and roasting cycle time by 25% or more means delivering meals to customers that much faster, which in turn means turning over tables by roughly the same amount.

Which, following the logic chain to its unavoidable conclusion, means that comparing otherwise identical restaurants, one using convection ovens has 25% more capacity than a competitor that uses conventional ones, with no loss of meal quality.

Of course restaurants learned to use convection ovens. They couldn’t afford not to. And their chefs were (and are) developing new recipes all the time. Developing them for convection ovens took no more effort than developing them for conventional ones.

To summarize:

> A major cultural change had preconditioned the home-kitchen marketplace, plowing the metaphorical field for microwave ovens. Convection ovens had no such advantage.

> Convection ovens made competent cooks less competent. Microwaves might have encouraged laziness and less discerning palates, but their only impact on home cooks was to make convenience foods even more convenient, thereby letting them off the hook for even more meals.

> In commercial situations, convection ovens offered direct financial benefit, with few or no serious negatives for the chefs.

Ask your change teams: Are their plans consistent with business culture? Will they make change targets’ lives better in some easily explained way? Enough better to offset their short-term loss of competence, if it’s going to have that effect?

Because when it comes to making change happen, business benefit might be the goal.

But it has little impact on success.

Fiction isn’t fact only better

Everyone has a story.

I was re-reading Eliyahu Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints. It’s the principles he first elucidated in his groundbreaking “business novel,” The Goal, rewritten as prescriptive methodology.

Goldratt’s Theory of Constraints (ToC) is, as process improvement methodologies go, quite brilliant and sadly underappreciated. And yet, early in the book appears this disturbing statement about the value of ToC success stories:

Who would be helped by such testimonials? The people that have already been persuaded by The Goal do not need them, they have their own real-life proof. Those who were not moved by the common sense logic in The Goal will certainly find it easy to demonstrate that their situations are different and that these ideas will not work in their environment.

I say disturbing because Goldratt appears to be asserting that fiction not only is more persuasive than fact, but that it should be.

It probably is — when I talk to clients about DevOps, for example, more cite The Phoenix Project than any company’s real-world experience.

By this logic, if, in a debate about military strategy and tactics, my opponent were to support a point with Grant’s victory at Vicksburg as described in his personal memoirs, my best counterargument should come from the battle of Helm’s Deep as described in The Lord of the Rings.

Fiction can be an excellent way to illustrate a point. But offered as evidence it’s a cheat. Fictions’ authors are puppeteers, able to make their characters say and do whatever is necessary to “prove” whatever point they’re trying to make.

Not that business case studies are much better. They aren’t, because those presenting them (1) start with the conclusion they’re trying to prove rather than starting with evidence and using it to guide their opinions; and then (2) sort through the available stories to find those that support the predetermined outcome, ignoring all the others that don’t.

Then there are the anecdotes we consultants tell. We all have them.

I recall (but couldn’t track down) a bit of braggadocio from a Lean consultant who described his experience on a construction site. After a brief period of observation he was able to use Lean principles to save the construction firm oodles of time and sacks of cash by repositioning the concrete mixers.

In my own consulting we once saved a client the time, expense, and aggravation of a multimillion dollar process reengineering project through the simple expedient of having IT educate a business department in the use of an already-installed feature of the software package they used.

Twenty minutes later the problem the reengineering project was supposed to fix was taken care of.

We all have these stories. They’re fun to tell. We hope they convince potential clients that we’re adept at finding “low hanging fruit” — quick and easy improvements that can justify and fund the hard stuff.

Quick and easy improvements that, astonishingly enough, never require significant investments in new or changed information technology. In fact I’ve yet to hear an apostle of any of the major process improvement methodologies explain the importance of cleaning up and modernizing the organization’s portfolio of business applications. I have often heard them explain how they’ll work their magic without requiring major investments in information technology.

There is, for example, this little ditty, found in Six Sigma Daily. It does a nice job of presenting some Lean Six Sigma principles Jeff Bezos relies on for making Amazon hum.

Don’t get me wrong. The principles and examples extolled in the article, while not the sole province of Lean Six Sigma, are good principles and examples.

It’s just that, reading the article, you’d be forgiven for concluding Amazon runs its warehouses with stacks of 3×5 index cards and not highly sophisticated information systems.

Why are these tales of easy, IT-free success so popular? That, at least, is easy to explain: it’s confirmation bias in action. That is, most people, most of the time, including you and including me, tend to accept without much scrutiny anything that tells us what we want to be true, while we nitpick to death anything that tells us anything else.

Fiction, case studies, and anecdotes of the “all you gotta do is …” variety tell business decision makers what they want to hear the most: making revenue grow, costs shrink, and risks disappear is going to be cheap and easy.

Against this “logic” there’s this simple but unattractive fact: When you’ve picked all the low-hanging fruit there’s a tree-full of peaches left that’s going to need a lot more effort to harvest.

Someday I’ll have to write a business novel about picking them.