Stories begin to appear about how “Executives report that 80 percent of the attempts to do X result in failure.” First just a trickle of stories, then a flood.The new approach is widely discussed in the non-business media. Suddenly, people who hadn’t heard of the new approach a year ago, or who are familiar with only some of the details, are supposed experts. As demand for information on the new approach builds, the supply of talented people who understand the details is exceeded.Others get on board and shout their success stories to the business media. A really big company or other prestigious source begins to tout the approach. Outside organizations discover the secret and are able to replicate the results.A champion helps to spread the group’s message to the larger organization, and results appear there too.An isolated group off somewhere in the organization is doing something that’s producing excellent local results.With this large sample size (n = 9 isn’t that bad), I’ve been able to discern a pattern in the life-cycle of a fad:
In our field, the MTBF (mean time between fads) is roughly four years, nearly half the seven-year MTBF for the business community as a whole. Over my career, I’ve encountered statistical quality control, zero defects, quality circles, Deming/SPC, Motorola Six Sigma, TQM, business process re-engineering, Lean, GE Six Sigma (with Belts and other infrastructure), and various combinations and permutations of these. It seems as if the business improvement world has more than its share of fads. Frederic Bastiat, That Which is Seen, and That Which is Not Seen, 1850 When, therefore, a man absorbed in the effect which is seen has not yet learned to discern those which are not seen, he gives way to fatal habits, not only by inclination, but by calculation. Richard Feynman, Cargo Cult Science, 1974 So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land. It looks exactly the way it looked before. So they’ve arranged to make things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head to headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas he’s the controller and they wait for the airplanes to land. During the war they saw airplanes with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people.
0 kommentar(er)
