Are you going to be a chicken or a pig?
“The people we nominate to help in this situation are either going to be the chicken or the pig.” The room went silent, but my mind was racing. Was I the only one who had no idea what she was talking about?!!??
It was a review with the senior executives. I was the least senior person in the room. We were strategizing how to address the issues that were brewing at a distant remote company site. Everyone realized the emerging problems were going to be big and painful and really challenging to get under control.
The “chicken or pig” comment came specifically in response to resistance someone had to sending some people to the remote site. After a pause, the executive went on to explain “when you are making breakfast, the chicken contributes, but the pig is committed”. Aha! It made sense now. We weren’t going to resolve this problem with remote and part-time help. To get the job done, we would have to send people truly committed to working hands-on and to staying abroad for weeks until the job was done.
The mindset in the room changed immediately. The leaders of the various functions got the message – they were now thinking more intently about getting committed help to the site for a dedicated period of time, including several of them getting on a plane themselves. After a few weeks of intense effort, several of the underlying issues were resolved and the situation was in control.
After that project, “chicken or pig” became team shorthand for level of commitment. Next time your team is faced with a big challenge, I strongly encourage you to reflect - are you and your team sufficiently committed for the team to succeed? Are you going to be chickens or pigs?
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Over the years we’ve been exposed to Six Sigma, Juran, Deming PDCA, 8D, Dale Carnegie, A3, Shainin, and more. Each technique works pretty well, and has been demonstrated many times in a wide variety of industries and circumstances. At the core they are all essentially the same!
Each approach relies on an underlying logical flow that goes like this: [a] make sure the problem is clearly defined; [b] be open to all sources of information; [c] vet the information for relevance and accuracy; [d] use the process of elimination to narrow down all possible causes to the most likely few; [e] prove which of the suspects is really the cause of the issue; [f] generate a number of potential solutions; [g] evaluate the effectiveness, feasibility and risk of the potential solutions; [h] implement the winning solution(s); and [i] take steps to make sure your solution(s) don’t unravel in the future.
The differences between the paradigms resides in supplementary steps and toolkits. For example, 8D contains the important “In
Your team is marching through the tools of your company's chosen problem-solving approach. This is time not spent on growing your business or delivering cost reductions. Yet your customers are suffering, and they're not shy about letting you know it! Why isn't it working?
