By John Hunter, author of the Curious Cat Management Improvement Blog (since 2004).
Jim Benson’s presentation at The W. Edwards Deming Institute 2015 annual conference: There is No Instant Pudding, You have to Show Up to Disrupt.
Everyone in the company needs to be R&D [research and development], even it is just a little bit… We want to be continuously reinventing our companies, our selves and our world. We want to make a place that doesn’t exist today and that is the nature of disruption.
To continually reinvent and make the changes to our organizations we can’t rely on old style top down management. We need to create a system when everyone has an active part in the continual improvement and we work together to learn and adapt.
Understanding is emergent. We don’t start out knowing the solution.
Jim closed the talk by detailing the conditions needed for a company to disrupt.
There are 3 things that I think everybody needs to have if they are going to be able to disrupt and they are going to sound familiar.
- So you would have what I would call clarity around the companies mission and goals, which Deming would have called constancy of purpose.
- They need to understand that they have a relationship, everyone in the company has a relationship with the company. And that includes the CEO understanding everybody has a relationship with the company as well.
- And that people have the bandwidth to make things better.
Related: Jim Benson on Applying Deming’s Ideas to Knowledge Work – What’s Deming Got to Do With Agile Software Development and Kanban – Deming and Software Development