Quality for business misalignment cloud

Tools

Exerting leadership – creating the environment

A leader must create the environment that enables people to give their contribution to the goal of the system.
Such a system, as we see in Step Three, in order to be managed, must be stable. A fundamental reason for wanting to empower people is to create intrinsic stability within the system.

How can we create such an empowered environment? By focusing on two of the most relevant aspects determining instability in an organization:
misalignment between authority and responsibility
lack of clear instructions

The Misalignment Cloud

Dr. Goldratt dealt with the problem of misalignment between authority and responsibility in a very insightful article published a couple of years ago. He tells of a situation where there is a freight to be urgently shipped, but the person responsible for the shipping doesn’t have all the necessary information to carry out his duty. An ostensibly simple action could be taken by this person to provide himself with that information and avoid the delay of the freight, but there is a company internal procedure that forbids him to do this. This person is in a conflict: take that action (violating the procedure), or do not take that action (delaying the shipment).

The evaporation of this conflict will reveal the importance of redefining the authority of that person and, more generally, the need for systematically providing everybody in an organization with the relevant authority to perform the tasks they are responsible for.

The mechanism that we use to re-define and realign authority and responsibility is the conflict cloud. Frequently, people do not recognise these situations as conflicts, so we often call this cloud the “fire-fighting” cloud. In fact, these clouds are recurrent and often lead to systematic situations of tension in the organization.

Let’s say that I am in a situation where if a certain action is not carried out an important need of the system is endangered; and let’s also say that I am responsible for that action. As we know, the position of a need in a conflict is B.
It may happen that a rule of the system (possibly a company policy and/or procedure) prevents me from fulfilling my responsibility. The place to write this rule is D’.
The opposite of this rule is, of course, what would enable the fulfilling of my responsibility, D.
The rule of the system that blocks me is originated by another need of the system, C.
The common goal of the two needs is, obviously, A.

The maintenance manager of a medium-size company deals constantly with the same problem. He is measured on the basis of the machines’ downtime, but he does not have the possibility to choose the quality of the spare parts, which currently are purchased solely on the basis of price. The purchasing manager, on the other hand, is measured on the basis of how much he saves on the purchase of spare parts. The maintenance manager drew the following cloud.

This cloud can be evaporated, like any other conflict cloud, by surfacing the assumptions and challenging them.

The injection that evaporates the cloud defines the new authority needed for the person to successfully and straightforwardly carry out their tasks.

Assumptions:
1. Only the purchasing manager can strike the best deals
2. If anybody can buy you lose control of the situation

Injections:
1. The maintenance manager advises the purchasing manager on the kind of spare parts (and only spare parts) necessary to make the machines work at their best, and
2. The purchasing manager is not measured on the basis of what he saves

Why is this alignment so important? Firstly, each time somebody who is supposed to do something has to stop his work to ask somebody else’s authorization, an unnecessary inefficiency is introduced into our system ( graphically this is a loop in the flowchart of the process).
Secondly, each time somebody has to ask for an unnecessary authorisation, they will feel less responsible/motivated/committed to the successful completion of their task.
Thirdly, this mechanism facilitates the discovery of wrong policies/measurements.

construct your misalignment cloud

Besides misalignment between authority and responsibility, there is also another not less important aspect in empowering people: the ability to communicate clear instructions. The tool Goldratt conceived in order to do this is the Transition Tree.