Some things once seen, cannot be unseen.
Years ago, someone pointed out how to identify a well done ceramic tiling job. Now when I enter a room, my eyes go instantly to the one tile that is not lined up properly. That is annoying.
The webcomic XKCD made a joke about this effect
http://xkcd.com/1015/ (don't look up the word unless you want to be haunted by badly designed signs forever)
My lifelong hobby (obsession) of process improvement came from one of these "cannot be unseen" topics.
As part of our family ritual on Sunday afternoons, my mother would read aloud from comedy books. Most often it would be the stories by Patrick McManus and describe the bizarre exploits of his character Rancid Crabtree. My mom would try to keep reading even as the laughter made her hitch to catch her breath and tears ran down her face. My mother is a large lady who looks like a Swedish incarnation of Mrs. Santa Claus. Watching her shaking and crying with laughter made the story even funnier. As a barely-teenager I always thought of it as a "mirthquake," These days were some of my fondest memories growing up.
One of the books she read, and laughed to, was Cheaper By the Dozen. (Please ignore any of the movies of the same title. They are unrelated) This incredibly funny story is about the long suffering and large family of Frank Gilbreth, one of the first process efficiency experts. The father is loud and friendly in a way that embarrasses his kids but is so absorbed in the efficiency concepts that he does everthing he can to embed it into his family's entire life. To get all the 12 kids through baths on Sunday night, he developed a scientific way to soap and rinse your body that defined the exact path the soap would take over your body. Every tiny aspect of their lives is analyzed and made efficient. The reactions of his family are hilarious.
Buried in the story though were little hints of the "motion study" process that he invented. It defined a way to think about how to make any process more efficient, cost less, work better and be less annoying.
I looked up his process in the library and learned about how to describe the process in logical, measurable steps using "therbligs." These were Gilbreth's functional units of process and motion.
It became a constant hobby of mine to look at any process or series of actions and figure out how to make it work better... In this way I thought about bus routes, checkout lines, building sand castles... everything.
In college, my Biotechnology class discussed producing a chemical in a bacteria by genetically engineering in all the enzymes necessary to convert the precursor step by step. To get the greatest efficiencies, we used math to figure out the slowest parts of the chemical process. Then, we would work to fix the "rate controlling step." This fix would give the highest payoff.
It occurred to me that this idea of finding the slowest part of a process and speeding it up to get the biggest ROI worked outside the lab.
Then I started noticing the choke points in all the processes I saw. I started really annoying people with helpful comments like "you know, the slowest part of the checkout process is the person swiping their card. You could double the customer throughput if you..."
Years later, I took an Army correspondence course on "Human Factors Engineering" that talked about how to design things to actually interact well with people. The book contained endless tables on how big things needed to be for a person to use it, the 7 colors that can be seen under low light conditions, the amount of resistance a button should give so that you can feel it with gloves on...
I found out later that my father was one of the thousands of soldiers that the Army measured in hundreds of dimensions (arm span, leg length, head size, distance between the eyes, thumb length, etc) to make those endless tables.
After that course, I started noticing badly designed hallways, access panels, kitchens, etc.
The next piece of the puzzle hit about 15 years ago when my programming instructor, Mr. Lacoq, gave me an essay he had written. This essay started by discussing a ratchet system like the one on a guillotine. The handle can twist either way, but when it turns one way the pawl slides smoothly over the notches and the handle spins freely. When the handle spins the other way, the pawl catches on the notches and the blade is lifted up by one inch. (see
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ratchet_(device) for a good demo) If the handle spins back and forth randomly, the guillotine blade will slowly rise.
His point was that social cultures can have this same ratchet. His example was in the military. If, on a very small level, the officers with a slightly better uniform got promoted early, that produces a similar ratcheting mechanism. Even though the incremental changes may be tiny, over a period of years the organization will shift steadily. In extreme cases, such a ratcheting system can drive an organization into behaviours that it would never consciously condoned.
His example was the difference wartime vs. peacetime ratchets for the officers. During peacetime, the ratcheting system encourages crisp uniforms and not rocking the boat. During wartime combat effectiveness was more important.
I learned a couple of things from that essay:
1. The incredible but subtle power of small ratchets
2. You can make huge long term improvements by changing the direction of a ratchet
3. The attitudes of the people in the system are the biggest part of the system that needs to be addressed. If you build a perfectly efficient system, but the social ratchet is drifting a different direction, your improvements will be discarded.
In short, changing attitudes is the most important part of the process redesign in the long term. You need a advertising campaign with a carefully crafted message.
Since then, I have spent my time trying to craft the messages as part of the initial design of the improved process. This blog is where I will tell of the things that have worked.
