Our Process Improvement Will Continue Until Processes Improve

I went to a corporate off-site yesterday and did my best to avoid playing the role of the Corporate Crank. I almost managed to escape without standing up and saying something. At a break in the morning I had to call a friend at work and rant to keep my head from exploding. Here's a few tidbits.

Perhaps the very worst part of the day was a certain fellow who gave a talk on what other corporations were doing to innovate. Innovation is a very big deal in our organization. We're always looking to innovate. Yep, that's us. Innovative innovators innovating innovatively.

I've asked this fellow any number of times to start a blog on our corporate blog site, but he always refuses. Instead, at the end, he gave his email address and said he would send his PowerPoint slides on innovation to anyone who wrote and asked for them. I felt like Dr. Strangelove at the end of the movie where he struggles to maintain control of his body. I won that fight and managed to stay in my seat and not blast this guy in public. That's when I called my friend and told him I would be in County Jail in an hour and asked, would he bail me out? He thought I was serious for a minute until I explained. Sorry about that, Roger.

Me, during the meeting.

The part where I finally stood up and asked some too-pointed questions was, of course, our Lean Six Sigma (LSS) talk. It turns out that our cheerful, little LSS gnomes had done an LSS event examining just why our supervisors don't have any free time.

Oooh, oooh! I know! Pick me, pick me! Is it because we force them to do all kinds of idiotic process improvement training and generic process improvement efforts in addition to their normal jobs?

We have lots of different sub-units. Each has a different business model, a different set of customers and a different structure. LSS works when things have little variation. This LSS team analyzed the supervisory situation and discovered, much to their horror, variations in our processes!

Variations are evil. They must be stamped out. LSS cannot cope with variation. That's when I stood up and asked if, given the diverse nature of our business units, variations weren't TOTALLY FREAKING EXPECTED?

The poor devils on the LSS team, being people who you would not entrust to run a Dairy Queen, hemmed and hawed and mumbled. I made the mistake of boring in, still ticked off from our PowerPoint slides on innovation. That was not a good move. Finally our CEO stood up and staunched the bleeding, telling everyone how important LSS was and how we needed less variation to achieve process improvement.

This is how you achieve a reputation as the grumpy crank in corporate meetings. I'm not sure if I'm proud of it or not.