Progress happens fastest when contradictions are revealed and resolved. My job means I spend pretty much all my time looking for contradictions. Sometimes they reveal themselves more easily than others. Sometimes it’s necessary to dig quite deep before you discover things you thought were the same are actually not the same.
This is the experience I had when I attended the Lean educators conference last month. One of the governing principles of Lean is the drive for ‘Perfection’. For a long while I assumed this was the same principle as the ‘Ideality’ pillar in TRIZ. I thought, too, that both were present in order to provide those tasked with improving and evolving systems with a compass heading. Everyone knows that ‘perfect’ is a hypothetical end destination that will never occur in practice. Everyone in the TRIZ and Lean communities also knows that unless you know where you’re heading, you’ll never know if you’re moving in the right direction or not.
The fact that Lean ‘Perfect’ and TRIZ ‘Ideal Final Result’ are not the same kind of crept up on me during the conference. Lean people constantly tell me that Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota Production System, made no distinction between innovation and optimization, and that in striving for perfection one would sometimes be making incremental improvements, and other times discontinuous jumps. I can kind of see this in theory. What happens in practice, however, especially if you examine the Lean toolkit, is that the incremental is precipitated much more readily than the step-change. Ohno’s start point was the elimination of waste, and specifically, what he saw as the overriding waste of ‘over-production’. All of the other 7, 11, 15 or – pick a number – ‘wastes’ were introduced merely because Ohno’s start point was deemed too abstract by those he tasked with improving Toyota’s manufacturing operations. The ‘Waste of Over-production’ in Ohno’s terms, by definition incorporated the potential waste of a lost customer, but if you look at the catalogue of Wastes being managed in most organisations, you will see how this difficult one tends to get side-lined in favour of the ‘easier’ internal wastes. This is particularly evident when we look at Lean Manufacturing initiatives. Anyone responsible for squeezing Perfection out of a production facility – like Ohno – has no ability to do anything about lost customers. ‘Perfection’ in this manufacture-oriented context effectively means building the Perfect Car. And that in turn means a car that leaves the production line having generated Zero Waste.
While this might be a good direction-providing (unattainable) target, it is very definitely not the same as the Ideal Final Result found in TRIZ. Like Lean, TRIZ focuses on the customer. The Ideal Final Result is first and foremost the customers’ Ideal Final Result. But there the similarity ends. In the Lean world, the customer gets a Perfect Car. In the TRIZ world, the customer gets Perfect Transport. In TRIZ world, there is a clear recognition that what customer’s really want is the Function. They are trying to get from A to B, rather than have a shiny new, waste-free, Prius in the garage.
Ideal Final Result in TRIZ is defined as the (unattainable) end point of delivering all of the desired Benefits, without any of the Costs or Harms. TRIZ, in other words, takes the B/(C+H) value equation and extrapolates it to its logical end point: all of the positives with none of the negatives.
The fact that Toyota still makes cars and didn’t invent Uber tells me that the Toyota Production System is very clearly not working towards the TRIZ version of Perfect. I think we can see similar dangers of having the wrong ‘Perfect’ goal in any organisation that find itself gazumped by upstart providers offering customers the function rather than the product. Whenever I see Lean being introduced into an enterprise, my first thought these days is, “here is a business heading on a ‘make the wrong thing perfectly’ road to certain oblivion”.
The TRIZ definition of Perfect is a better target, but it too – now I’m thinking about it – carries its own set of dangers. TRIZ emerged into the world at around the same time as Ohno was pulling together the various borrowed threads of the Toyota Production System. The world in the 50s and 60s – at least from a management perspective – was built very much around tangible and measurable factors. Value meant tangible-Benefits, tangible-Costs and tangible-Harm.
What 21st Century ‘design-lead’ companies like Apple, Tesla, and Uber taught the business world was that customer Value was as much, if not more, defined by intangible factors such as trust, fairness, autonomy, belonging and competence. The definition of the (unattainable) end target needed to change. And that’s why, whenever you see the Systematic Innovation version of the TRIZ Ideality equation, you’ll see it has the word ‘Perceived’ added to it. Value in the SI world is defined as Perceived{Benefits/(Cost + Harm)}, and Perfect in this definition is when the customer perceives they have received all of the tangible and intangible benefits they desire without any of the tangible or intangible negatives.
Adding ‘intangibles’ into the definition of Perfect is, I think, a subtle but quite profound step-change in the evolution of the compass heading of any improvement initiative. It forces those tasked with improving the system to consciously build in to their efforts the need to improve customers’ sense of autonomy, belonging, competence and meaning, etc, as well as delivering all of the tangible elements written into the specifications. It thus also opens up the search for a whole new set of conflicts and contradictions – when the tangible conflicts with the intangible, those are some of the richest opportunities to step-change to a better solution.
In theory, the (unattainable) P{B/(C+H)} end-point is the point at which ‘all’ of the conflicts and contradictions have been eliminated. Every individual customer receives a solution that is Perfectly customised to their own personal needs and wishes.
But, of course, the moment we think we’re anywhere close to what we initially might think ‘Perfect’ might mean, we begin to realise that we’re merely approaching a horizon that, once we get within touching distance, we realise keeps moving further and further away from us.
What could possibly be better as a compass heading for any improvement activity than every customer getting their own personal perfect solution, complete with all of the implications that carries of how fickle we are as a species? What’s perfect for me to day, is anything but perfect tomorrow. Perfect in human terms is potentially a very ethereal and transient thing. In theory the Systematic Innovation definition of ‘Perfect’ doesn’t exclude such fickle-ness, but on the other hand, I now believe the ‘AntiFragile’ work of Nassim Nicholas Taleb provides us with a need to look further over the Perfect horizon and build the concept of anti-fragility in to our definition. The (next) true Perfect solution not only gives individual customers exactly what they want, whenever they might want it, it also self-learns to adapt and change as the tangible and intangible needs of the customer shift and evolve. The more the customer might change their definition of ‘Perfect’, the more the Perfect solution is able to compensate, adapt and anticipate future changes. It becomes, to put it another way, ‘meta-Perfect’ – perfectly working out what ‘perfect’ means to the customer.
Taken all together, I think the various worlds of Lean, TRIZ, Systematic Innovation and AntiFragile give us a story of the evolution of ‘Perfect’. The story seems to me to look something like this:
So what? you say, if the whole thing is unattainable, why should companies care that the end point has moved? If we’re nowhere near the ‘Perfect Car’, why should anyone be building Anti-Fragile Meta-Perfect definitions into their way of doing business?
For me, we just have to look at the amount of value Uber has stolen from the automotive companies to get the answer we need. Our understanding of ‘Perfect’ might be evolving, but the underlying customer understanding of what they want has always been there. Any organisation working in a high-pulse rate change environment – i.e. nearly all of us – needs to recognise that today’s customers already want useful functions our product delivers, not the stupid product itself, they already want all the intangible factors we don’t know how to manage, and, now Professor Taleb has given us the word, they already know they want the antifragility.