"Every one of us does things in the course of a day that adversely affect the health of the planet. We don't decide to, we just don't give it a thought.
Surprising, though, how many habitual practices we can - and do - change once we give them some thought. We can all name environmental habits we've changed and more we intend to. This has to be done, and more often by more of us. The impact of an unexamined life is far more serious than it once was - deadly so.
Here we'll examine Patagonia's life and habits as a company. The idea is to give more of our practices some air and thought, and to change habits often played out on an industrial scale, with concomitant effects. We've been in business long enough to know that when we can reduce or eliminate a harm, other businesses will be eager to follow suit."
"Walking the
Gemba" is an expression used by practitioners of Lean Management. You have to
get of your chair and walk to the "floor", observe without interfering the
actual processes as they are executed. Walking the Gemba on a regular basis
will give you the deep understanding of reality which is needed to guide
improvements. This week I heard one bad and two good examples from different
industries.
The new
management of a merged healthcare institute prides itself that they visit all
locations. The reality is that they have meetings in these locations, staff
sees them walking in...and walking out. No
contact what so ever. The bitterness in the staff rises because they get
chastised about their performance based on (in their opinion totally wrong)
reports out o the new IT-system.
The surgeons
of a hospital that is being scrutinized for quality issues have to take a
training where they physically follow and comment on all steps a patient will
experience. All 35-40 steps from intake to release after surgery, including the
support processes preparing everything
for surgery.
A contractor
who builds fiber networks experienced serious overruns on costs and time while
integrating existing duct networks (50 mm HDPE tube). The management "walked
the gemba" and spent a day or two in the trenches. To
their utter shock they saw that their subcontractors had developed a quick and
dirty method to identify the right duct in a bundle you have dug up. Just close
one side of the tube , put pressure on the tube on the other end, take a drill
and drill a small hole in each tube where you have dug. If the tube starts
hissing it is the right one. Unfortunately the drilled tubes now are damaged. They
have a leak, take in water, it may not be possible any more later on to blow
fiber through the tube. But hey, whose problem is that?
In the last million years, as our brains grew explosively - as one scientist put it, "perhaps the most improbable event in all of evolution, anywhere" - much of the potential of all that new gray matter was put to work for social benefit. The "new brain" or neocortex, which is the most dramatically enlarged portion of the human brain, seems to be the area dedicated to our social relationships.
We know this because, in 1992, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar compared the average troop size of gorillas and chimpanzees against the average tribe sizes of humans. He found that there was a direct correlation between the volume of the neocortex in these three species and their average troop or tribe size. This value, known as "Dunbar's Number", is roughly 20 for gorillas, who have the smallest neocortex, about 35 for chimpanzees, and - for us lucky human beings, who have the greatest selection pressures on our social behavior - just under one hundred and fifty. We may not be entirely exceptional, but we're doing quite well.
Essentially, inside of each one of our heads, there are a hundred and fifty other people running around. Yes, that sounds a bit crowded (particularly when they're up partying all night long with their mates), but it's actually imminently practical. These "little people" inside our heads are models of each person we know well: our family, our friends, our colleagues. For each of these people we build mental model which helps us to predict their behavior. (It isn't really them, but rather, our image of them.) This predictive capability smoothes our social interactions. We know how to interact with people whom we have in our heads; with others we remain demure, reserved - in a word, predictable. Only with intimacy do we express the quirks of behavior which make us unique, only with intimacy do we take note of them in others.
