The theme of this year's AME conference was "Turning Points"... those game-changers that have a dramatic effect on how your organization operates forever more. There were numerous presentations on what were the turning points for different companies, including two of our clients:
Pat Elwer, Principal Engineer, Intel: "Achieving 3x Improvement in the Development of Intel's Chip Testing"
Tom Ebertowski, Director KDPD, Boston Scientific: "Knowledge Driven Product Development"
They invited Michael Kennedy (our CEO) to participate in a Future Turning Points panel discussion, with other Lean leaders such as Jim Womack and Doc Hall. For that, they asked each panel member to contribute one slide explaining what they predict will be a future Turning Point. After some thought on what that key element is that would transform companies' performance, he came up with this slide:
Refusing to make decisions until the limits and
trade-offs between those decisions are visible to all!
The meetings in most organizations are dominated by people taking their best guesses at how to satisfy the different wishes that they each are championing, and then the group offers their opinions on those guesses and those wishes. Unfortunately, such meetings tend to generate more heat than they do quality decision-making.
The turning point for those organizations is when they start refusing to make decisions until the limits and trade-offs between those decisions are made visible to all. That seems to require a lot of extra effort going in; but often it is less effort than the long, heated meeting to make the decision without that visibility. But more importantly, it is far less effort than changing those decisions later when you realize the wrong decision was made earlier.
For more on that, please click through the rest of the tabs on our website...
starting with The Challenges...