Page 312 - Design for Six Sigma for Service (Six SIGMA Operational Methods)

280 Chapter Nine

• Consider personal chemistry issues when assembling a project team;
find people who will spark off interesting reactions with each other.
• Deming’s four stages of learning—unconscious incompetence, conscious
incompetence, conscious competence, unconscious competence.
• Focus teams on a single project only (give them an enriched envi-
ronment full of success factors).
• “Leadership is a potent combination of strategy and character. But if
you must be without one, be without strategy”—General H. Norman
Schwartzkopff.

B. Exposing a Highly Enriched Atmosphere with One Containing Potentially
Unstable Elements
• Corporate jester.
• “I like Bartok and Stravinsky. It’s a discordant sound and there are dis-
cordant sounds inside a company. As president you must orchestrate
the discordant sounds into a kind of harmony. But you never want too
much harmony. One must cultivate a taste for finding harmony within
discord or you will drift away from the forces that keep a company
alive”—Takeo Fujisawa, Honda cofounder.

Principle 39. Calm Atmosphere
A. Replace a Normal Environment with an Inert One

• Move away from the (normal) disruptive performance appraisal, merit
award, and reward environment to an (emotionally neutral) more fair
system of working practice.
• Hare brain, tortoise mind (Claxton 1997)
• Take time-outs during negotiation.
• Have away-days and team-building days.
• Hold corporate retreats.
• Operations room, e.g., for planning organizational change, proposal
submissions, and contract tendering, etc.

B. Add Neutral Parts or Inert Additives to an Object
• Use of neutral third parties during difficult negotiations (e.g., Senator
George Mitchell in Northern Ireland and ACAS)
• Introduction of quiet areas into the workplace
• Rest breaks and pause-for-reflection breaks in meetings