“We Always Do It That Way”

“When you want effective change, look for the low hanging fruit.” my work-study lecturer advised. “How do you find low hanging fruit in a steel factory?” was my tongue-in-cheek reply.

“Oh, that’s easy. Go and ask why they do it that way and wherever they reply “we’ve always done it this way” you know improvements are there for the harvesting!”

Rigid thinking looks stupid from the outside looking in. It normally sets in under perfectly reasonable circumstances but, over time, fails to change and hardens under poor training methods. If people are taught only how to do something without understanding why, and they repeat actions without appreciating how those actions lead to a desired outcome, it creates ideal conditions for historical rot to occur.

This is not as easy to rectify as one might like to believe. As part of our course, we had to pick a project to apply our learnings to. My partner and I picked the bottleneck of window hinge making. The machine layout was sub optimised and necessitated four bucket movements around each machine. We worked out that turning the machines around and putting a slide between each machine so the product flowed from one to the next would remove the buckets and all human travel. This change would increase production and remove the bottle neck. Noone in the factory was interested.

Amazed, we sought advice from our lecturer and he shared an analogy of five monkeys in a cage with a hand of bananas at the top of a ladder. As the story goes, when a monkey attempted to get the bananas all the monkeys got sprayed with icy water. Very quickly the monkeys learnt to stop any monkey from climbing the ladder. The monkeys were then replaced one at a time and as each new monkey tried to go for the bananas the others would forcefully stop him until he learned the social norm. The original monkeys were eventually all replaced and yet when a new monkey was put in the group still stopped him from climbing to get the bananas even though none of them had ever been sprayed by cold water. It is learned behaviour. 

With this encouragement we double checked our assumptions and calculations and pushed ahead. The results exceeded our expectations and so impressed the team in the factory they started asking us to look at other bottlenecks!

Do you have things your team does without knowing why? Do any of your team use the reasoning “We’ve always done it this way”, or similar comments, “That’s just the way I was taught”, “I don’t know, I’m just doing my job”, etc?

It is the leader's responsibility to create a culture where people feel free to ask, question, experiment, trial and learn. Learning organisations develop creative ideas and avoid the traps and pitfalls of rigid thinking.