Evolution: A key to resolving conflicts

I was reading a book called Elegant Solution (Toyota's formula of  Mastering Innovation) by Mathew May which is all about how Toyota fosters  the environment  for Innovation and Problem solving. One remarkable point which hit me was a typical situation every  organization focuses  when it wants to be rigid to drive discipline  at the same time it needs to flexible for driving innovation. Isn't it a good contradiction

From the book, it seems Toyota has resolved this contradiction by diluting the concept of incremental vs breakthrough. It is claimed that everything should evolve incrementally to create sustainable impact. There is nothing called breakthrough it’s only a natural and logical step forward from what we have at present. This made a lot of sense to me especially when I come across following story from one business articles.

A Small Case

       Techzone Ltd was involved in providing CAD and analysis services. The company leadership felt that we must delight customers by improving our quality by devising and implementing quality system. A team of about 6 people with diverse mix was formulated. The team knew the end  objective to deliver high quality in terms complete model checks, no errors, accurate or validated results with right interpretations etc.

A typical Team Responses

 Hmm so this means we must have a system to ensure right first time results isn’t it? A senior member proclaimed. Everyone nodded to agreement. 
Yes the system  should ensure the highest quality for all the work and should delight customers. Someone with process experience said that we’ll have to understand all the processes and understand those parts where probability of highest failures occurs.  Someone pointed that few departments are already using quality system in some other form. The project finally kickstarted to achieve right first time results.  And guess what happened! 

What happened to project

Project became like a big ship which everyone wanted to drive in his own direction.  Most of the time team members argued on defining measures, scope and definition of quality itself although end objective was clear to everyone. Businesses had conflicting opinions where someone said they are fine with this whereas other said it is never possible to achieve right first time. It is too high expectation from our workforce. Lot of benchmarks from other organizations were also studied but they were vastly different from each  other again creating  confusion to decide which is right for us.

 So what really was happening here?

A Quick Analysis

I am convinced that the root of this problem lies in not driving the project in an evolutionary or incremental fashion.  Right first time as end objective should come towards the end of evolution stages.

From quality literature the following four stages of Evolution are suggested

Stage 1: 

Quality system monitoring at Organization level with simple measures as number of quality issues reported Vs Number of quality issues resolved in a particular month. This is standardized system managed by a Quality leader

Stage 2:

 Every Business or department tune or refine this system to suit to their own requirements. This is a customized system managed by a Quality leader. The measures here are  mostly standard as in Stage 1 however can be customized by individual BU

Stage 3:  

One or two departments are asked to change the form of the system to take it closer to end objective of achieving right first time. The focus is shifted to Built quality in process and this needs investigation of underlying processes. This is feasible as department wise processes are fixed and limited in number. The measure here could be Right First time results. Local quality leader emerges at this stage.

Stage 4: 

The new system invented by a local department is modified and standardized at organization level. Again it is managed by quality leader with measures of right first time.

Summary                

This is what I understand by evolution as a series of incremental changes implemented with discipline.  It’ll about deciding at what stage we are and what is next for us. The concept of evolution itself resolves multiple conflicts , enables effective use of resources , creates simplicity , provide path to achieve vision and  most importantly eliminate boiling whole ocean which is a good analogy to  bad strategy of achieving end objective.