Tag Archives: photography

289 – Fire fighter or architect? It is your choice.

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580 words (6 minutes reading time) by Lancing Farrell

I recently completed a training course in the work of W. Edwards Deming. At the end of the course, one of the participants said they felt as though they now had the knowledge to become an architect in their work and cease being a fire fighter.

It made me think about how it is that leaders become fire fighters. It is a common complaint from executives in local government who are being exhausted on a treadmill of frantic and stressful activity.

I recently saw this piece on LinkedIn by Simon Dodds, a Health Care Engineer at SAASoft Ltd. I have reproduced it in full because it eloquently describes from a health care perspective, the same series of events that shifts managers and directors on the council treadmill from walking speed to sprinting. Here it is.

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287 – The council goal posts

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550 words (4 minutes reading time) by Tim Whistler

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Lancing has highlighted a key problem with many council services. I used to call it the ‘lowest common denominator effect’ (i.e. performance gets reduced to the lowest level tolerated) but I think the Taguchi Loss Function makes the point in a way that helps you to fix the problem.

Imagine that the diagram Lancing used to show the target value that a customer or citizen wants as fitting between two ‘goal posts’, to instead show a set of Australian Rules football goals. For those non-Australians, I have helped you imagine that with the diagram below.

If you aren’t aren’t familiar with Australian Rules football, when the ball is kicked between the two centre posts it is a goal and scores 6 points. If it is kicked between a centre post and the post either side, it is called a behind and scores 1 point. If the ball is kicked outside all the goal posts it is out of bounds on the full and there is no score and the opposition gets to kick the ball back into play.

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