I’m probably like most people that given the choice of
which of the five senses (sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell) you could not
live without, it would be sight. I know there have been times I wish I was a
little hard of hearing, that my taste buds would have processed a different
sensation, as well as having a bit of nasal congestion. All this while my wife
had told me how hard she had slaved in the kitchen to produce something that I
would not touch with a barge pole!! (Sorry darling but allow me some poetic license).
Applying our sight as a business tool is not always
practiced habitually. Over the years I’ve experienced plenty of occasions where
through observation, followed with an appropriate probing question, what has
been the status quo all of a sudden gets turned upside down.
Often businesses will look for opportunities and ways to
do things better from a numbers base, business ratios, trends and general other
performance-based data. But what is wrong with just standing and watching a
process activity, or are we paranoid that we have to be seen doing something,
even if it’s not productive?
By way of example, a couple of years ago I was working
with a mixed group of cross functional people and was conducting an exercise
based on purely observation within a distribution facility. Part of this
exercise was positioning people strategically within the process, in areas that
they had no responsibility for. In this one case, I had two women from Human
Resources standing in a loading bay watching vehicles being loaded and
unloading. The exercise was run for about forty five minutes with each group
making notes of what they saw to then feed back their observations to the group,
and the management team responsible for the distribution operation.
It was interesting to see what people actually notice
about a process when they are given the chance to observe it. My ladies from
Human Resources challenged the depot management team around so many of the
activities within this basic task of loading and unloading vehicles. What was
interesting was the majority of them were valid and very few of the
questions/observations were out of ignorance. What was even better was that
some have subsequently been adopted and became the new standard operating
procedures. There’s nothing wrong with a fresh perspective on a process when
the environment is created for it to happen.
All of what they saw and suggested could not have been
determined out of numbers or any other form of analysis. It’s also worthwhile
pointing out a few things about our sight.
Should we be surprised about the power of observation?? Did
you know after the brain, our eyes are the most complex organ in the body and
they can process 36,000 bits of information every hour? Not only that, they
account for 65% of all the pathways to the brain and have contributed to 85% of
our total knowledge.
Surprisingly, our eyes are the only part of the body that
can function at 100% of its ability without rest, never becoming tired!!
Given we have such a powerful tool combination, our eyes
and the hardwiring into our grey matter, I would encourage people to take the
time in a structured way and observe business processes both manufacturing and transactional;
ask yourself some questions about what you are looking at, why does that
happen, could it be done smarter?? You never know what opportunities you might
see.
For a bit of fun, why not start to develop some
observation skills now? Given you are more than likely reading this at an
airport, and some of you will be taking an SAA flight, have a look at the
safety video. There is nothing wrong in the safety message contained within the
video at all, just have a look at it a little harder. The film industry has
something called continuity; see how many ‘continuity’ errors you see on the
safety video. I’ll give you three:
·
How many SAA flights do you board and walk
facing the back of the seats?
·
The guy in the green jacket has a lapel badge
that starts on his right then moves to the left of his jacket
·
Since when did you ever hear the sound of
heels making a sound as woman walk down a carpeted aisle??
See if you can find more…
Contributed
by Stan Shaw, Senior Client Partner at Breakthrough Management Group
