INVISIBLE? Leverage

INVISIBLE Leverage, what is that? It’s leverage you don’t know you have, because some things are non-obvious. Let’s start with a quick thought experiment. Imagine that… Before the 9-11 terrorist attacks, a stronger “impenetrable” cockpit door was designed and installed on all the commercial aircraft in the US. Further imagine that… The new cockpit doors prevented the 9-11 terrorist attack from ever happening! Wow, what a big deal that would have been! The interesting thing is this…almost no one would know the impact of the new cockpit doors, because it would have avoided the 9-11 problems. Only a small group of people at the airplane manufacturer would know the whole story. But the impact would have been tremendous! That’s how it is when problems are AVOIDED. Since the problems do not appear, people do not know what problems were avoided. Some insight on this situation from Shane Parrish: “When solving visible problems, it's easy to signal value creation to others. If you work in a large organization with a regular paycheck, few people ask if the problems should exist in the first place. Instead, everyone thinks you're indispensable because you're so busy solving problems. As you move toward avoiding problems before they happen, visibility decreases. Explaining what you do all day becomes harder and more subjective. Rewarding people for something that didn't happen is very difficult…” I call the leverage of avoiding problems INVISIBLE because we cannot see it unless we are actively avoiding problems in our work or working with others to avoid problems. We have to actively look for these opportunities and aggressively seize them. Let’s think about this type of leverage from the Process Perspective, for different stage projects… RESEARCH Projects: Levers to AVOID Problems

• Have a production cost model and use it. ALWAYS, no exceptions.

• Evaluate suppliers and try to work around (and eliminate) sole suppliers that “can’t be replaced”.

• Repeat the process carefully, often, and see what you learn about signal and noise.

• Document the process flow and ask why – EXACTLY – are we using this process flow?

• Check the “competitive advantage” over existing products: greater than 3X (300%) desirable for strong position.

DEVELOPMENT Projects: Levers to AVOID Problems

• Test manufacturability SERIOUSLY, with pre-agreed to criteria.

• Devise and test 2 or 3 alternative processes /materials.

• Solidify business case to ensure it has margin and “wiggle room” in it.

• Over-communicate with executives and stakeholders to ensure support and alignment.

• Intellectual Property: have a strategy and actually implement it: either trade secrets and/or patent protection.

MANUFACTURING Projects: Levers to AVOID Problems

• Yield Improvement Projects…what is possible, what is smartest to act on?

• Understand, via designed experiments, measurement capabilities vs. customer specification windows.

• Life-cycle impacts: examined and optimized (where possible).

• Look extremely carefully for new problems that surface as sample sizes increase.

• Understand why the process works (and does not work): document and share these findings.

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My main learning from this line of thinking is how subtle and non-apparent key technical solutions can be, if they smoothly and effectively avoid problems. Avoiding problems is often not as glamorous as heroic efforts to fix existing problems. Motivated process builders know the power of avoiding problems rather than fixing them, and they are on the constant lookout for opportunities to do just that!

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CHALLENGE TO READERS

Please think about how you and your organization have AVOIDED problems over the past 5 to 10 years…

• Ask your key process builders what problems they have avoided and what they learned. You may be very surprised at the impact of some of their efforts!

• What problems could you help your CUSTOMERS avoid? Do you have actionable ideas that are worth discussing further?

I’d like to know how you think about this concept of deliberately and strategically avoiding problems. How successful have you been at it? What examples can you think of? What opportunities are most exciting? If you email us, we will get back to you promptly. Thanks!

All the Best,

Marty

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