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This Week’s Topic:
"There is nothing so useless as ..."
Sometimes Continuous Improvement is a really bad
idea
On my very first day as a fresh-out-of-school engineer I was scheduled to meet
my new boss. I had been hired as a welding engineer in a firm that made pressure vessels
and the manager was a respected authority in the field of welding technology. I was more
than a little nervous but was also looking forward to the great insight that he would provide
about my chosen profession.
We shook hands, exchanged a few pleasantries and then he grew serious. He looked at me
intently and said, “Always remember that the objective of a good welding engineer should be
to eliminate the use of welding wherever possible.” I waited for him to laugh at his little
joke but he didn’t. He was perfectly serious and demonstrated his commitment to that
approach over the years we worked together.
I wasn’t smart enough to know it at the time (and some people would say I haven’t made any
noticeable progress since) but he had provided a nugget of Lean Six Sigma wisdom. Peter
Drucker, the brilliant management philosopher, went on to state the same idea in broader
terms when he said: “There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should
not be done at all.”
How many times do we all stumble into that trap? When faced with a deficient process or
an inefficient operation our brains seem hard-wired to seek improvements. In some cases the
better response is to ask “why are we even doing this at all”.
Let me provide one real-world example. Long after my welding days I was providing Lean
Six Sigma consulting with a Medical Products company that made catheters. A team was
struggling to efficiently trim the length to a tight tolerance. The fact that the catheter
could shrink after production made this more challenging than it sounds.
The team was about to embark on a sophisticated Lean Six Sigma analysis to determine how
to control this variation when someone asked, “I wonder how the doctor actually uses this”.
It turned out that every catheter was eventually cut to a unique length by the physician.
The only real requirement was that the catheters exceed some minimum value.
Rather than spending time, money and resources to efficiently hold a tight tolerance the
right question was “Why do we have to hold a tolerance at all?” Peter Drucker and my
first boss would have been proud.
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