We began to see that the world and its people really dominated us. In that state, the wrongdoing of others, fancied or real, had had power to actually kill.
Big Book of AA, pg. 66
I believe there are more urgent and honourable occupations than the incomparable waste of time we call suffering.
Sidonie Gabrielle Colette
Most human beings today waste some 25 to 30 years of their lives before they break through the actual and conventional lies which surround them.
Isadora Duncan
A penny saved is a penny earned.
English Idiom
1. Introduction
LEAN management philosophy, created by Japanese business leaders, in particular the Management at Toyota in the mid-20th century and now in use throughout the world, tells us that there are specific, clearly defined categories of waste in every organisation.
What are these, and how do they correspond with the Saboteurs of the Positive Intelligence (PQ) Mental Fitness approach? This article is an exploration of the commonalities of these two complimentary frameworks. For what are the Saboteurs, if not energy drains? Allowing them to determine our interactions is tantamount to driving with the hand brake on.
2. Saboteurs and Lies
In PQ, the Saboteurs are patterns of thinking and action, fuelled by areas located in the brain’s left hemisphere, the Survival Brain. The list of Saboteurs and their corresponding lies, are as follows:
- Judge: I’ll be happy when….
- Hyper Rational: There is a rational solution to everything.
- Controller: Either I’m in control or out of control.
- Stickler: My way is the only right way.
- Pleaser: Helping others will keep me safe.
- Victim: This is the only way of getting the attention I deserve.
- Avoider: No good comes out of conflict.
- Hyper Achiever: I am what I achieve.
- Hyper Vigilant: Watch out! Life is full of dangers.
- Restless: Life is too short; I’m going to miss out (FOMO).
The PQ approach to developing Mental Fitness is simple. Identify and intercept the Saboteur as soon as it becomes activated. Then use body-based exercises (so-called PQ Reps) to gather oneself and activate the mind command muscle, which helps us shift to the beneficent energies of the Sage, which are fuelled by areas in the right hemisphere, the PQ Brain.
3. Five Sage Powers
These Sage Powers are: Empathise, Explore, Innovate, Navigate, and Activate. When we deal with our challenges using the Sage Powers, we are more focussed on problem solving, which results in higher efficiency, lower stress, reduced energy expenditure, and improved levels of learning for all concerned.
According to the LEAN philosophy, there are eight forms of waste in every business that lead to inefficiency. A core principle in LEAN is the provision of true value for the customer, whereby the elimination of waste plays a critical role. Waste can come in the form of lost time, material scrapped, or simply labour expended which doesn’t add value for the customer.
By increasing value and reducing the amount of wasteful work performed, many organisations experience a transformation that allows them to significantly improve competitiveness within their industries. In short, they accomplish the task of producing more, more quickly, without having to add resources.
Can we apply PQ to dealing with wasteful dynamics in an organisation as a whole? To do so, we need to loosely relate each of the forms of waste, as defined in LEAN, to one or other of the ten Saboteurs in the PQ framework.
4. Forms of Waste (LEAN)
According to LEAN, the eight forms of waste in every business, commonly referred to by the acronym TIMWOODS, are: Transport, Inventory, Motion, Waiting, Over-production, Over-processing, Defects, and Skills.
The following brief examples are each taken from the office, manufacturing, and construction environments.
a) Transport is a form of waste because normally few customers are willing to pay for excessive transport of material or information or documents. Examples include:
- Working from home (WFH):Having to regularly go to the office to pick up equipment or files when not properly resourced or equipped at home.
- Having an unnecessarily long distance between workstations and or operations.
- The movement of material stockpiles multiple times throughout a project.
Here we can see a co-relation to the Restless and Avoider Saboteurs. Excessive transport challenges distract from the core task at hand, namely the creation of customer value. They keep us busy while we avoid what we should really be addressing.
b) Inventory masks mistakes and unaligned processes. The storage of this inventory requires money to finance it, which could be spent productively elsewhere. In addition to that, inventory requires space that could potentially be better utilised. Examples include:
- Excessive storage of office equipment.
- High inventory stocks of raw, semi-finished, and finished goods.
- Stockpiles of materials.
Removing the outer layers of this behaviour, we recognise the Hyper Vigilant Saboteur. We keep inordinate levels of Inventory, just in case. The Controller can be seen in action here too, believing that potential difficulties can be controlled or even eliminated through excess inventory. In a well-run process-driven organisation, much lower levels of Inventory would suffice, thereby freeing up working capital and energy which could be focused on identifying and meeting the customer needs.
c) Unnecessary Motion wastes time, it occurs because of poor workplace or process organisation and lack of ergonomic design at workstations. Examples include:
- People `borrowing´ cables, docking stations etc. and not replacing them.
- Searching for drawings and tools.
- Multiple trips to get tools and materials.
Here we see the Pleaser in action, tolerating less than disciplined working practices in order not to put co-workers or team members on the spot. The greatest hinderance to having a healthy culture of conflict resolution is the Avoider. We let things slip rather than confront them in the spirit of `blameless discernment´.
d) Waiting is the most obvious type of waste. Very often from the perspective of a product or process, 80% or more of the total throughput time is waiting time. Examples include:
- Waiting for decisions, approvals, releases from managers.
- Set-up times and maintenance of machines.
- Waiting for resources or supplies.
The Victim Saboteur sees the cause of all problems in other people and circumstances. It leads us to tolerate the waste of Waiting. On the part of decision makers, the Stickler may often be active to such a degree that reams of arguments are required before decisions are taken, for fear of making a mistake. Here, the Avoider may also be contributing to delays, driven by the same fears.
e) Over-production relates to activities unnecessary to meet customer demand. It is also called the `mother of all types of waste´ because over-production causes all other types of waste. Examples include:
- Creation of presentations without a concrete target or customer.
- Manufacturing of products to optimize machine capacity utilization.
- Overreporting information that is not used or generated too frequently.
Here we may be dealing with the Hyper Rational and/or the Hyper Achiever Saboteurs, with the Controller and Stickler working from the wings. The Hyper Rational, having become a slave to the predominant systems of the organisation,will serve up what the `system´ delivers (e.g., SAP Reports) regardless of the needs of the project.
The Hyper Achiever works according to the mantra `More is Better´, the Controller believes he can keep a lid on things by providing more of what he thinks the customer needs (without taking the effort to ask), and the Stickler is primarily preoccupied with deflecting any potential criticism of the deliverables produced.
f) Over-processing describes process steps or functions that are not necessary to fulfil customer requirements or performing wasteful steps where they aren’t required. It includes redundant or duplicate operations. Examples include:
- Multiple and redundant data entry.
- Product features, not adding value for the customer.
- Multiple Inspection and Approval steps.
Here we often find the Hyper Vigilant at play (belt and braces approach). The Stickler is never far away from such a stance.
g) Defects that result from mistakes can cause scrap material or lead to rework. Both create an additional cost of repeating tasks. The essential point is that all tasks or activities should be performed right first time. Examples include:
- Mistakes in transferring numbers or text from one file into another.
- Poor or wrong calibration.
- Reworking drawings and paperwork.
Restless and Avoider hinder us from putting in the front-end effort required to get things right in the first place (measure twice, cut only once). They tell us it is OK to improvise, that things will work out somehow. The Victim may also be setting us up for self-fulfilling prophesies in such scenarios.
h) Skills: Not using the talent of all the team members by neglecting to maximise everyone’s contribution, growing their potential, or engaging and involving Team Members. Not giving people the training they need to do the job correctly and efficiently. The examples of this waste can be found in every industry segment. Examples include:
- Not providing people time to think.
- Not involving people in change.
- Not challenging anyone to improve their work, their process.
They say a B-Class manager will always have C-Class employees. Here we see the Controller in action, keeping people down for fear of being overtaken or outshone.
5. Summary
This is an exercise in approximation rather than proven science. My Stickler is not happy with the results. Applying the principles of PQ, I gather myself by means of PQ Reps, and move into Sage mode, asking which of the Sage Powers would be most helpful in this situation. Navigate tells me that `roughly right´ is fine for the purpose intended and Activate tells me give it just one final review before pressing the `publish´ button.
Transformation processes can be mandated from the top. This never works. Alternatively the team can be engaged to come up with the ideas and then execute. This is a much better approach. If the Saboteurs remain invisible, however, true transformation will never be achieved. Sustained transformation requires the `Coaching from the Inside Out´ provided by the PQ approach. Only by identifying the Saboteurs, and applying the on-going practice of PQ Mental Fitness to keep returning to Sage, will the desired transformation begin to shape new ways of interacting in high-performance teamwork.
Most transformation processes fizzle out after a matter of weeks or months. This is because true transformation comprises 20% insights and 80% practice. One USP of PQ is the on-going structured daily practice, short exercises spread out throughout the day, provided through the `Gold-Standard´ PQ App. The App also contains an array of exercises which can be built into the daily practice, a mental fitness studio, if you will.
Even over the initial eight-week foundation course, this will facilitate a palpable improvement in Mental Fitness on both the individual and team levels, while providing the team with an accessible, practical framework and common language with which the desired transformation can be more easily scoped, tackled, and successfully achieved. Continued practice beyond that period will yield even more powerful results.
