Dear Systems Thinker,Busy this past month working with a large insurance company focused on their IT department. Interventions of this size offer huge opportunity for improvement. Many work designs are not built with knowledge and many times emerge from assumptions about the functional separation of work and economy of scale thinking.
I will be at the International Deming Conference in New York on March 21-22. My paper "Managing Service Organizations as Systems" will be presented during that time. Anyone interested in attending or getting the abstracts after the conference can go to the website -
The 17th Annual International Deming Research Seminar
I have challenged the lean folks to attend as they are constantly quoting Deming on twitter for convenience, but when it comes to supporting the Deming community they are strangely absent. Dr. Deming warned us about copying which is exactly what the lean tools approach does in service. Worse, they are copying manufacturing, an industry with different problems. This may be one reason they shy away from the Deming community.
Some time ago I gave a speech that was captured on video. I cut the part out and had posted on YouTube about the relationship between assumptions, system conditions and management thinking. You may enjoy watching this video:
GMROI - The Video
I am planning another seminar for late summer early fall, probably in Orlando. Stay tuned for information in the May newsletter.
