A Resilient Way: Cutting Costs without Spending Money

It wasn’t long before positive press about the program began to spread outside manufacturing.

One day, based on my manufacturing credentials, I was hired by a service business. As part of my role, I helped identify root causes when something went wrong.

In manufacturing, the conversation is about parts, machinery, and specifications.

In service, the conversation was fundamentally about who did what.

When fingers pointed, someone was fired, and the wheels of HR turned. As you might guess, turnover was a massive problem.

To me, that is not the wheel of progress. Progress is helping fallible humans avoid making human mistakes.

My value system is based on the belief that we all make mistakes, and no one plans to make them. If something terrible happened because someone didn’t know how to do it right, that was a lack of training. That’s something we can fix. No time? Capacity management is also within our control.

I created a short list of things we could address to halt the blame game. Over time, this list became too long to remember. As I learned in grade eight study skills, when a list becomes too long to remember, make an acronym to help.

When I trained my classes on root cause analysis in service, I taught them this list of root causes, which I abbreviated to WEAKMAPPER.

“Why that word?” I was often asked.

While forces invisible to our consciousness map our behaviour, they are weaker than consciousness. They say that when you know better, you do better, and it’s all about knowing what to do to prevent detrimental outcomes.

Consciousness enables us to predict and better control outcomes.

Identifying Issues

Planning is power; it often involves a retrospective analysis that examines what went wrong.

In service, I was asked if we could talk about “what could have gone better” because they didn’t want anyone to take offence. Part of the journey to a culture where Six Sigma can thrive is a culture that doesn’t balk at scrutinizing for any opportunity to improve, not one where everyone argues that a different spin will make everyone feel better.

In service, such retrospective analysis only occurred when things went wrong and facts could not be denied, explained away, or hidden. They were undertaken as manhunts and not as opportunities to improve. As such, they were something to be avoided.

How courageous is your culture? Every HR professional tells me their company has a great culture, but no one can tell me anything helpful. Your culture is your organization’s personality. Like personality, identification comes from comparison, not from what you say.

How curious is your culture, and toward what end? If investigations result in opportunities in other departments, does that end the work, full shrug? Is a wall of prevention erected so that next time, the fallout lands where it was made? I’ve seen many strategies, all of which tell me about the state of openness and accountability within.

Eyes wide open, I’d avoid the country club culture in the future. I’ll take courage over conformity every day because I’ve learned that drowning in mediocrity can kill me, especially when I’m supposed to be happy with “baby steps” and “that’s not your problem.”

It may not be my problem to solve, but it is my problem if I’m linked to it.

Doing My Job

I know that I’ll never be one who can find comfort in “I was just doing my job.”

Some can, but I’m not one. Why should I have the right to prioritize my need for income over whatever needed excusing and the impact it created on another human being?

Especially when good money is on the table.

Good money should demand sound reasoning and morals, but it doesn’t always. It seems that good money corrupts into great money, which corrupts greatly. A failure to turn income into wealth, for with great money comes outstanding bills to pay.

Alongside my salary, I made it my job to turn my income into wealth. I learned about the four pillars. I got to work building them, planning and dreaming about the day I’d be free.

Carrying my lunch to work daily, I let my colleagues laugh at my little blue lunchbox. Who’s laughing now? Isn’t that the old joke? (I still have it, but now it’s for water on the water, beer on the pier.)

On my first project in the service industry, I identified over 70 issues contributing to operational expenses that could be eliminated with a simple fix at the source of the problem.

While excited at the prospect, they also asked me to “bucket” the problems because four is a more appetizing number.

What’s your appetite for improvement? Is your skin too thin for this business?

It’s a giant leap of improvement to look beyond the person to identify the underlying issue.

If the person is at fault and you are adamant about it, then look at your hiring and selection process. Where’d it go wrong?

Are you still doing outdated things like automatically sifting applications with keywords, asking for references, and choosing the safe bet?

Taking Action

Anyone can improve with the correct information and the onus to take action. But not everyone wants to.

Some people want to win. They see competition where they should be aiming for collaboration. Everyone does. The question is how overt their desire to dominate is and how strategic their tactics are.

In the competitive culture, what level of backstabbing is deemed acceptable by HR? That is, when are people fired?

I learned that when you wish there were a whistle to blow, hundreds more could have done it and didn’t. They merely walked away quickly, quietly, and calmly.

When you go to HR with a complaint, you are the one who is let go, because you are the odd man out, and they can’t fire everyone else.

“We want people who are happy to be here,” they told me in HR after I’d sounded the alarm at one organization.

Once laid off, twice shy?

Most of us enter collaboration with trepidation. Trepidation is when we hope for the best while not holding out much faith. We’ve all been on teams before, and everyone’s been burned one way or another.

With experience and enthusiasm, we learn new ways to reduce trepidation.

But more people learn what’s acceptable, what they can get away with, and how to improve their ability to sleep at night.

Some sleep soundlessly, thinking they won and you lost, which had everything to do with how they played the game.

At my brand-new job, I’d just finished explaining what a Black Belt does to a random face that popped into my manager’s office while I’d been sitting there. “They save money without spending any.”

My new manager looked shocked, stunned, and confused and then asked me, “How do you do that?”

It was my turn to be utterly confused as I’d assumed my skills and experience were why I’d been hired.

Indeed, the job posting required Six Sigma Black Belt Certification. How could they need it without knowing what it was? Had it changed in the years since I’d earned it?

The question initiated a lengthy investigation that ultimately led to the requirement being imposed by external powers. Yet, just because I was on the team didn’t mean they had to listen to me, take my advice, set me up for success, or do anything else helpful or productive.

Knowing what I did, I found it excruciatingly painful to do what I was being asked to do. It certainly wasn’t how I’d been trained; it was slow, prone to error and subject to bias. It was my first week, and I didn’t want my name associated with what we were doing.

I was melting down, not knowing what to do.

The other Black Belt leaned over and whispered, “I know how you feel. We’re treated like mushrooms here. Kept in the dark and fed shit.” I thought the giant mushroom he’d drawn on his whiteboard was a shoutout to The Grateful Dead, but now I understood.

Organizational Disorganization

I understood the immensity of the problem we faced. There was conflict in the hierarchy way above our heads, and we were mere tools for one side who knew our ability to baffle the other side with data, charts, diagrams, and figures.

Infighting, a disorganized organization, a lack of alignment, poor leadership – you could call it many things because it’s hardly isolated, unique, or fleeting.

I’ve been used many times against my will.

We were there to push opinions, not find facts. They called it “smoke and mirrors.” Yes, it was called out and labelled with impunity. Every day, I felt sick and was constantly on the search to get out of there. To me, it is a spin and an excuse.

It was what happens when agendas, bias, and conflict are at work. Literally, at work. The place where people invest their futures, reputations, and other essential devices required to sustain life in today’s society—a dangerous place to rock the boat.

It was demoralizing.

It was excruciating when it became clear that the ivory tower lacked a robust solution, and our time was wasted creating spin and excuses instead of being allowed to unleash our skills.

Then, one day, it was mandated that everyone get certified. Sourcing a training provider, I discovered that what took me two years to learn and prove I knew can now be achieved with a couple hundred dollars and an online exam. You don’t even have to know what “optimization” means.

I also learned that you could spend money if an inevitable projected return on investment were rigorously calculated and defended.

Later, rigour was replaced with estimations, and defences were replaced with intimidation.

Us versus Them

With a will and a way, agendas, bias, and conflict will creep into any group setting.
There are many, and the first to avoid is division. It’s us versus them.

Everyone has two ways to divide the population. This one basis creates infighting, dissatisfied customers, cheated investors, and abused employees. Those in power ask, “What will they do about it?” Those on the other side of the divide leave, retaliate, or suffer.

This ingrained ability to see differences requires us to use consciousness to deliberately look for common ground, shared interests, and mutual beliefs.

Infighting takes down the employer; dissatisfied customers and cheated investors expose evidence on social media, and the abuse and suffering stretch the social safety net.

Stretching the social safety net includes acting out frustrations with criminal activity, suffering in silence with eroding mental health, and internalizing anger, which only leads to cancer and disease.

It also means long lines at food banks, tent cities, and hospitals as economies shrink and relationships strain.

Optimizing Collaboration

An optimized approach to collaboration can avoid and perhaps repair these bad outcomes. To deliberately overcome agendas, bias, and conflict, one must hire the right people, control the environment, and manage feedback.

At the level of the nation, it means we need to filter immigration, not gatekeep it, claim our culture and celebrate it. Open channels of communication, not constrain speech and restrict media.

Everyone is affected by the environmental conditions, making it easier or harder to be corrupt and serve themselves. Some will do it in any environment; some would never, even if they knew they’d never get caught. One person can tempt followers by showing how to do it and get away with it. These environmental conditions must be designed and maintained if you want to unlock merit.

Hiring the right people starts with principles and natural tendencies that make you sigh with relief, not leave you on edge wondering how that difference may manifest in actions, behaviours and choices when it matters. It’s more likely that gut feeling, social connection, and first impressions contributed to hiring decisions.

Managing feedback means knowing who to listen to and how to hear what they are saying, when it’s difficult to take criticism and easy to take defence. Whether it’s in the data, the vibe, or the voices, you need to know how to tune into critical messages before the writing is on the wall and it’s too late to back down.