TQM & LOs LO11468

Bbcompton@aol.com
Mon, 16 Dec 1996 23:58:18 -0500

Replying to LO11462 --

Mike, God bless your soul for saying:

> If getting ahead as a function of "critical thinking", then managers would
> be more likely to learn it and do it.

Damn right! Too often getting ahead is a matter of killing those in front of
you. In some respects, we've gone from beating each other with clubs to
beating each other with words. Does a battle of words somehow make us more
civilized than those who battled with clubs? I don't think so!

Mike then says,

> How this is overcome [i.e. getting managers to deal with abstractions], in
> its
> simplest terms, is to make the knowledge creation and increased
organisational
> intelligence part of the corporations definition of "performance
> objectives" and to
> build in the same kind of feedback, rewards, etc. for these results as for
> the more
> usual kind.

Glad you mention this, Mike, as I've been thinking along similar lines. In
your book you talk about the distinction between production and learning,
and how the distinction really isn't appropriate. Production and Learning
form a mutually symbiotic relationship, as they feed off each other. This
is a great point, and one that has caused me to think a lot.

At work our performance metrics center around "speed." In other words, how
many calls can be taken and resovled within a specified period of time?
Our current theory goes something like this:

P(t1. . .t2. . .t3) = P(x1. . .x2. . .x3)

Where P is Production.

In other words, the more time we speed producing the faster (and more) we
can produce (i.e. the greater number of calls we can take and resolve).
This is stinking thinking. Here's how I see "speed":

pl
s = ----------
t

Speed is the result of production and learning feeding off each other over
time. Without factoring in "learning," I don't think we'll ever
significantly increase our speed. Along with a couple of the people I work
with, we've been working on some mathematical models to show this unique
relationship between production and learning. When we're finished (when I
don't know, because I've got so many different projects in the fire at one
time), we'll publish a paper.

--

Benjamin B. Compton bbcompton@aol.com

Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>