‘pick important problems, fix them and tell everyone about it’
Posted by Gordon on January 15, 2011
This is a very neat summary by Alistair Cockburn of some key points from Sparrow – a book I’ve read large bits of, but never gone all the way through.
The Regulatory Craft is so good that I found myself reading it online (yes, the whole book is online … but after reading a dozen or so pages I decided to buy it). I was trying to find the paper by Harvey Brooks from 1967 in which he discusses “Problems in Engineering Education”. Google turned up a reference in this book, so I started poking around. Sparrow’s discussions of problem-solving hooked me. Plus, he writes beautifully. The punchline (if there is one, given all the interesting policing and regulatory problems he walks through … e.g., how do you stop smugglers at the Mexican border? He walks through any number of attempts to reduce smuggling there, plus, and this is very important, he addresses the question of How Would You Know If You Had Made a Difference?)… anyway, the punchline of the book is in the chapter on Problem Solving, and Infrastructure for Problem-Solving. I map this to a “learning organization” (see Senge’s The Fifth Discipline).
* Sparrow recommends to people, “Pick important problems and fix them“. * They (of course) reply, “Oh, We Do That.” * Then he asks the kicker questions:
o “Whose job is it to pick what counts as ‘important’ and in what forum do they do that?
o How often?
o Where do they get their candidate problems from?
o How are the candidate problems communicated? o
Who allocates resources to problems and how?
o How is progress recorded?
o What happens to problems that are not picked?”
* After which, the people reply, “Oh, We can’t do all That!” So later he writes about having an infrastructure for solving problems. It consists of (I’ll run out of space before enumerating all, so here are some of them) systems for:
* (a) generating and funneling candidate issues;
* (b) assessing and selecting;
* (c) assigning responsibility and allocating resources;
* (d) channeling reports of accomplishments to performance accounting;
* (e) supporting teams with external resources;
* (f) rewards.
When I was reading through that, I started seeing those as the questions to ask, topics to address, to become a “learning organization.” I’ve had execs tell me, “Oh, we’re a learning organization here” (referring to Senge), but had none of that infrastructure in place. If I were setting up a learning organization, I’d open this book to look for the infrastructure systems to set up to support it. Oh, and not just by the way, his chapter on Stages of Problem Solving is really cool. He has 7 stages. What’s cool is stage 3 is “Determine how to measure impact.” Stage 4 is “Develop solutions.” He writes, “Stage 3 before Stages 4 and 5. No action until the measures are in place. Otherwise no one tell what works and what does not.” Test-first, a.k.a. Dos equis driven design by any other name.
While this summary is good, it doesn’t emphasis the ‘and then tell everybody’ part – a later speech by Sparrow seems to suggest that he learned that bit later and/or that people tend to forget it. He talks a little about about why the ‘tell everybody about it’ part should not be forgotten (at page 9). The speech appears to be from 2002 and to a conference of the US Environmental Planning Agency.
Also in that speech Sparrow identifies 4 types of innovation
At the Kennedy school, we teach students about four types of innovation and it’s worth just
plugging them into the back of your mind
Strategic innovations that is some whole new idea about missions, values, and goals. A
different statement about what the organization is about.
Program innovation is where you invent some new program. The equivalent in commerce
would be when you invent some new product line.
Administrative innovation is when you change some internal system. For the police -
different rosters and schedules 4 x 10 rather than 5 by 8, two person cars rather than one,
different allocations of staff, changes in the financial systems and budgeting system and
the information systems.
Field level innovations this category is when you have a front line engineer confronting
directly a problem and they just invent a solution because the need for one is obvious to
them.
