TITLE : TEAMING FOR QUALITY IMPROVEMENT: A PROCESS FOR INNOVATION AND CONSENSUS.

PREFACE

Seek the unpredictable . . . Yearn for surprise

Teaming! Human empowerment through intellectual liberation. Individuals, working together, within formal procedures, encouraging an environment of free expression, innovation, and consensus, to decide an issue, solve a problem, or improve a condition. This book is about how such teams work. It takes you along on a Teaming journey and gives you the vicarious sense of being there.

Teaming is a part of most participative quality improvement processes suggested by respected experts. But there are relatively few published works that examine the detailed interdependent human behaviors shaping the enterprise. That is the focus of this book. We shall consider such questions as "how do I form a team . . . how do we start once we are seated around the table and ready to go . . . what should individual members do and not do . . . what techniques can we use to stimulate and exploit creativity, innovation, good will, and consensus .. . what happens when the process breaks down and chaos seems to rule . . . what rules and procedures must we follow and when can they be changed . . . what limitations and difficulties do teams usually experience .. . how is the process to be evaluated and decisions implemented . . . what happens if top management does not support us . . . and how do we overcome cynicism?"

Note that my emphasis is on "teaming," a verb, rather than "teams," a noun. Action, "doing," is the critical Teaming unit of analysis, not things, "being."

Teaming is an activity conducted to actualize central principles of quality improvement, that is, to operate and apply them. If principles are meant to directly influence behavior and performance, then mechanisms must be engineered to bring them to life. Teaming is one such mechanism.

There are numerous designs and models for conducting collective decision making. Many of them focus on problem solving. But problem solving is only one topic of interest to people. Things do not always go wrong, yet people still require meetings. Sometimes the intent is simply to examine what is happening or to imagine what could happen. At other times, interest is directed toward improving what is already functioning properly. Quality minded people do not accept the well-worn dictum "if it ain't broke, don't fix it." They would counter with "if it's broke, fix it . . . if it ain't broke, then improve it." Therefore, the Process for Innovation and Consensus (PIC) model that I suggest begins by looking at symptoms instead of problems. Problems are merely one possible subset of symptoms.

I have tried to link the PIC and its techniques to the general body of quality improvement theory. But my primary purpose is to describe and analyze the act of Teaming with sufficient insight and detail to give the reader enough direction to try it. This book should prove very useful to both inexperienced and experienced team participants as a guide to the Teaming rationale, form, structure, and procedure. Anyone who is even slightly interested in management, organizational behavior, productivity improvement, and quality improvement will find this work useful. It fits in academia and in industry.

My writing style is informal . . . very informal. First and second person references are as prevalent as third person references. This is not the stuff of mathematical models, chart's, and formal organization charts. It is the stuff of individual human beings.

Chapter 1 introduces the idea of Teaming and offers a few hints about what Teaming is and what it is not. Belief and faith in the process are also discussed.

Chapter 2 juxtaposes five well known and authoritative definitions of quality and suggests that they emphasize a single theme presented from different perspectives. Debates concerning an appropriate definition appear to be neverending. I like to think that these few pages will shed some light on a different way of looking at the question. I offer my own definition of quality and show how it relates to the others. Finally, I suggest that they are all useful.

Next, I look at the difference between indicators and measures as devices for verifying performance and outcomes. At this point, I introduce tBhe first of Shuster's Laws. These eight rules of Teaming are critlcal enough to be considered universal.

Chapter 3 is a short detour into the land of commitment. Everyone seems to believe that commitment is the most vital ingredient of quality improvement. But few people spend much time and energy dissecting it and observing it under a microscope. I offer a short analysis by arguing that, at root, commitment is an ethical decision that every individual must personally make. Then I suggest two definitions of commitment, one each from a negative and positive perspective. The discussion ends with a corollary to the oft-stated truth that quality management cannot be achieved without commitment. That corollary adds that it can begin without commitment. All that is needed is endorsement, commitment's weak, but far more familiar, sister.

Chapter 4 is an excursion into some characteristics of human behavior that are important to understand within the contexts of quality improvement in general and Teaming in particular. I look at adversarial and cooperative behavior styles, individual and collective interests, and the vast differences between manipulation and leadership. I also offer a definition for leadership that centers on individual character traits. The strengths of individual expression and collective consensus, so characteristic of Teaming, are explained in terms of eighteenth-century classical liberal principles of the free market economy. With respect to leadership, I argue (with Plato) that the true test of leadership is not in its origin in the one, few, or many, but rather in its beneficiaries. Do leaders serve themselves or their constituents? That is the key, in business organizations no less than in politics.

Chapter 5 gets to the heart of applications. The PIC model is fully described and illustrated. At first, my model looks a bit more complicated than necessary. But I have found that some models identify individual steps without clarifying the overall pattern and intent of the process. Therefore, I begin with a very general two-phase process, break each phase into two subordinate stages, and further subdivide each stage into a number of steps. The idea is to understand both the forest and the trees. Each step begins with a question. It ends with the answer, which implies another question/step/answer, and so on. The logic of the PIC is simple:

o Identify a symptom

o Determine the root causes

o Target recommendations against those few root causes that account for the bulk of the symptom

o Determine:

** How to implement the recommendations

** The possible consequences of the recommendations

** The feasibility of the recommendations

None of this is particularly earth shattering or original. But, the PIC does offer some new twists and linkages of principle and practice to the discipline.

Chapter 6 is the center of the book. It is long. It is detailed. It adds to the literature by offering an examination of Teaming techniques that is full, detailed, and complete. Techniques are the thinking tools used to conduct the various PIC steps, very much like hammers and saws are the tools for conducting the various steps of carpentry. With the exception of Juran's discussions of Pareto analysis, these techniques (some familiar and some original) are dissected to a degree seldom found throughout current quality improvement literature. The chapter begins with an explanation of how the process (PIC) and the techniques interrelate. This is followed by nearly 80 pages of detailed analysis of each technique. Each technique diseussion is divided into two sections, features and procedures. The features section presents the intent and characteristics of the technique. The procedures section eontains a step-by-step outline of how to conduct the technique. Table 6-2 identifies which techniques are used in each specific PIC step.

Chapter 7 adds some color regarding the kinds of things that happen in a functioning team room. These are human beings behaving in the room and anything can happen. I talk about the role of the facilitator, a topic (along with commitment) worth another book. The chapter includes a list of different kinds of teams and how they can be coordinated to ensure universal participation of all personnel (Table 7-1 and Figure 7-1). It is important to understand that quality circles are only one of many kinds of teams and are, sometimes, the least preferred.

The second topic discussed in this last chapter introduces a behavioral systems model that offers a reason why Teaming works so well as a quality improvement mechanism. Derived from engineering control systems theory and social sciences systems analysis, the model suggests that any organization's best guarantee for survival, in a risky and uncertain competitive world, is the ability to positively adapt to stress. Positive adaptation means more than simply reacting to stress (passive adaptation). It refers to proacting in the face of threats to survival by turning their energy to favorable use. The mechanism for such adaptation is feedback, the ability to adjust behavior by sensing the results of previous behavior. Teaming actualizes such virtues and is, therefore, a superb mechanism for operationalizing quality improvement and enhancing corporate survival and growth.

Appendix I lists Shuster's eight laws of Teaming.

Appendix II is a detailed description and analysis of the systems adaptation model introduced in Chapter 7. I took it out of the mainstream of the book because the details will interest only some readers.