(Co-Authored with Steven A. Cavaleri)
Here are some other ways one can enhance problem seeking, recognition and formulation in organizations. First, Management can assist in moderating the natural fears of people by offering Problem Seeking, Recognition, and Communication “boot camps” to employees. The objective of these boot camps is to train people in:
— specifying standards and expected outcomes of strategies, business processes, parts of processes, and activities;
— looking for places where expectations and actual events in operational processes and activities have diverged;
— understanding why problem recognition, in the sense of pointing to knowledge gaps, is important for competitive advantage, organizational effectiveness, and job performance;
— self-evaluating the results of their activities;
— recognizing when outcomes are, in fact, falling short of their expectations;
— recognizing what type of knowledge and capability they need to overcome the performance shortfall; and
— communicating about the problems they recognize.
The boot camps should use case study, knowledge café, and narrative elicitation techniques since an important goal is to provide participants with a variety of interpersonal perspectives on the areas to be covered. It is also important that sharing perspectives in a boot camp environment can begin to create a community that will reinforce the idea that problem recognition is important. This community may then be organized as a Community of Practice (CoP) after the boot camp is over.
Second, an important barrier to problem recognition is getting “feedback” on the results of their activities to people, so they can do a good job of monitoring and evaluating the consequences of their decisions. In organizations with active Quality Management, or Balanced Scorecard, or other Performance Monitoring programs there is a great emphasis on measuring outcomes and on reporting, and this may provide a good foundation for recognizing problems (knowledge gaps) where they exist.
But, since metrics from performance monitoring systems often aren’t relevant to testing expectations about how strategies, business processes, and activities will work, Management should also support metrics development and implementation activities throughout the organization, and should develop a metrics program covering the various aspects of the PSP. Management can support metrics development generally by performing research and development (if necessary) on methodologies for developing and implementing metrics and by sharing this knowledge with staff performing other business processes. In addition, metrics development can be supported by insisting that metrics are necessary to evaluate whether the results of activities meet or diverge from expectations. Further training initiatives may also be a good way of supporting metrics development throughout the organization.
Third, another aspect of providing feedback so people can recognize problems is to use Information Technology to provide relevant information (and sometimes knowledge) that is “baked into the jobs” of knowledge workers. In the Partners HealthCare case study Tom Davenport and John Glaser report on such an application. Here, Doctors may suspect the existence of a problem after the order entry system tracks the Doctor’s order, and in cases where it appears to the system to differ from what would be prescribed by a knowledge base produced by an expert committee, reports the knowledge base recommendation to the Doctor, while alerting she or he to the conflict between the Doctor’s and the System’s prescription. This timely feedback, active knowledge base integration into the decision process of doctors, tied to the Doctor’s role of ordering prescriptions, obviates the need for problem seeking and directly stimulates problem recognition and an individual level effort at problem solving performed by the Doctor involved.
Fourth, the most important way for Management to enhance the problem recognition capacity of an organization is for it to initiate and maintain a policy of “openness” in problem recognition. That is, a policy of maintaining freedom for all participants in business processes to state that a knowledge gap affecting performance exists, and to communicate that view to as many others in the organization as they care to without fear of reprisal. Openness here will support the objective of distributed problem recognition and greatly increase the probability that problems will be addressed in the PSP. Again, the example of Toyota is instructive here. It encourages highly distributed problem seeking, recognition, and formulation, and not only are there are no reprisals for such activity, but it is viewed as part of everyone’s job.
Increasingly, a policy of openness in problem recognition requires allocating resources for an Information Technology infrastructure that will empower staff to exercise this freedom. In practical terms, that means, implementing software that will allow the free publication of newly identified knowledge gaps in the context of the business processes, work flows, and types of decisions that generated them. Enterprise 2.0, social media, social software, and social computing tools are related terms that describe current technology for implementing increases in transparency, increased participation, and content aggregation inside organizational firewalls.
To Be Continued