The Benefit of the doubt?
November 22, 2009 by david.evanson
I’ve just been going through my RSS feeds for this week and saw this great blog entry from Seth Godin about how we deal with instances when we misunderstand the communication from a friend versus a stranger:
http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2009/11/benefit-of-the-doubt.html
This got me thinking about where else we give the benefit of the doubt rather than probing and prodding below the surface to really understand what causes us to get the results that we’re getting.
For example - How often in your production meetings do you give your colleagues the benefit of the doubt when discussing factory performance? When discussing improvement initiatives? When discussing capital investment? When discussing OEE performance? When carrying out 1-2-1 reviews?
We frequently observe that factory decision making can based on production loss information which can be as low a 33% accurate…and we see teams taking this at face value, working hard, and wondering why performance is flat or sliding backwards.
Let me offer a motto that i personally use everytime i walk into a site: “Seek to Understand before being Understood“.
Next time you have a production meeting seek to understand where the data comes from, how accurate it is, what possible errors it may have, and therefore how effective it has been for guiding your actions.
Understand the challenges that your team face, and their teams. If you don’t do this, who else will?
