Page 89 - The Handbook for Quality Management a Complete Guide to Operational Excellence

76 I n t e g r a t e d P l a n n i n g S t r a t e g i c P l a n n i n g 77

Despite the admonition to “consider your internal customer,” many
depart ments still behave as if they’re in a “silo” by themselves. They pay
lip service to the idea, but for a variety of reasons they don’t practice it
very well. Their focus remains inward, on individual measures of perfor-
mance and efficiency. Most efforts are spent improving the links of the
supply chain, with little effort devoted to the linkages, or interfaces
between links, and the operation of the chain as a whole.

Systems Thinking
What these companies failed to appreciate was that a higher level of think-
ing was needed: systems thinking. Once the quality of individual processes
is put reasonably well into line, other factors emerge to warrant attention.
Consider the analogy of a football team.
Major professional sports spend a lot of time and money on process
improvement, even though they probably don’t look at it that way. A team
owner can spend millions on a contract for a star quarterback. By apply-
ing natural talent, they expect to “improve the passing process.” But in
many cases, the touchdowns don’t appear, despite the huge sums spent
on star quar terbacks. At some point in the “process failure mode effects
analysis,” the coaches discover it’s impossible for this highly valued quar-
terback to complete passes from flat on his back. They find that the offen-
sive line needs shoring up. Or a good blocking back is needed, or a better
game plan, or any number of other factors.
The point is that any organization, like a football team, succeeds or
fails as a complete system, not as a collection of isolated, independent
parts or processes. In the same way that a motion picture clip tells us
much more about a situation than an instantaneous snapshot, systems
thinking gives us a clearer picture of the whole organizational dynamic.
In The Fifth Discipline (Senge, 1990), Peter Senge proposes that the only
sustainable competitive advantage comes from transforming a company
into a “learning organiza tion.” The keys to doing this, Senge maintains,
are five basic disciplines that every organization striving for success must
master: systems thinking, person al mastery, mental models, building a
shared vision, and team learning. Guess which one he considers the most
important. Though he numbers it fifth, he lists it first, and he titled his
book after it.

System Optimization versus Process Improvement
If one “thinks system,” the question inevitably arises: What do we do
with process improvement? Do we ignore it now that we’re thinking at
a higher level? No, process improvement is still important. It consti-
tutes the building blocks upon which system performance is based. But
like the football team alluded to above, once you have a “star per-
former” at every position, you have a challenge of a different sort: coor-
dinating and synchronizing the efforts of every component in the

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