Low Tech Gets It Done

I suspect that few of us are regular readers of The Journal of the American Osteopathic Association.  But the Cleveland Plain Dealer recently published an article that reported the results of research that took place in a local hospital that should be of interest to all of us no matter what industry we’re in.  

Here’s the important finding:

“...[The researchers] showed that holding daily meetings focused on discharging patients can reduce the time spent in a hospital for those with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease by 67% for patients between 40 and 69 years and 36% for those 70 and older.”

Buried in the academic language in the paragraph above is the point that simply holding frequent and regular meetings that focused on a single important issue led to substantial and measurable improvement in team performance.  (Shortened length of stay helps patients because longer stays are associated with increased rates of infection.  Also, a hospital room occupied by a patient that should be at home can’t be provided to another patient who’s in greater need.  Lower lengths of stay also result in lower costs for both the patient and the hospital.)

We’ve all become accustomed to reading about the many advances in technology and how they’ll shake the very foundations of manufacturing strategy.   I’m not inclined to disparage these reports but we’ve seen too many examples of new technologies over-promising and under-delivering.  Hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent by manufacturing organizations on failed efforts to improve their technology strategies.  

This isn’t to argue that advanced technologies have no role in helping manufacturers address today’s challenges.  Still, are new technologies sometimes being too enthusiastically lauded when less costly, less risky solutions would work just as well, if not better?  After all, simply holding regular daily meetings led to significant improvements in outcomes according to the study mentioned above.  I’ve seen similar results in my own work.  Regular, short meetings that focus on a few issues are very effective in creating measurable improvement to operations.  I’ve recently been working with a team of supervisors and associates at a client’s distribution center with a focus on workplace organization.  We meet once a week for about thirty minutes to walk through one area of the DC and to review all team member’s self-reviews of their own areas.  Engagement is high and the DC has sustained high levels of excellence with respect to organization and cleanliness.  

When I talk to my business school students about the importance of good communications, they sometimes hold to the notion that good communications is mostly about “talking nice” to one another.  They (and my clients) agree that good communication is important, but they see it more as a way of keeping friction among employees low than as a way of pursuing stakeholder value.  This view leads to managers giving lip service to good communication but not really doing much about achieving it apart from having HR put out a quarterly newsletter that reports birthdays and work anniversaries.  The study mentioned above shows us that regular, focused, face-to-face communication is a low-tech, low-cost avenue to continual improvement.

Here’s the method in a nutshell: 

1. Meet often and regularly.
2. Focus on just one, maybe two things.
3. Review data.  Make decisions.  
4. Turn decisions into actions.
5. Rinse and Repeat.

In this world, where there is much deserved attention to digital transformation, Internet of Things, and the applications of Artificial Intelligence, it turns out that some of our most effective improvements are always going to be based on attention to the fundamentals.