Pluralism: It's not just good politics. In operations management, it enhances your decision making and creates step-ahead outcomes and improves your employee experience and engagement.
Our concept of the world is simplified for efficient processing. This allows us to focus on what is urgent/important and address the less urgent/unimportant later. It facilitates our ability to gather empirical data through scientific theory, DMAIC, etc. filtering out noise and running experiments to prove theories and constructs. It is even a survival mechanism that helps us prioritize evading a devouring lion, rather than finish our lunch! But it has a downside too.
This is important to take in…it is status quo in business, to just problem solve-to RCA, CAPA, 5-whys, fishbone, etc. This process focuses our attention on a segment of the world. We purposely filter out information for brevity’s sake, lopping off part of the world and its complexity in order to develop a quick solution to the identified root cause. Every time we do this, we filter out complexity and this will yield a limited solution.
But there is more...we believe and act as if, in research or analysis we are a direct observer. We run experiments, build prototypes or do Gemba walks because we want to directly observe the reaction, behavior, process or outcome. But it is a fallacy that we observe the world directly. We experience the world through our mental models! Our mental models are ALWAYS an approximation of reality and are filled with bias.
In "Reality Bias: The Mother of All Cognitive Biases", Drs. Derek and Laura Cabrera assert "Once we recognize reality bias, we can begin to build better mental models of reality. The goal of systems thinking is the continuous improvement and refinement of our mental models such that they more closely reflect the real world. The closer the mental model to reality, the more useful it is to us".
Building on this usefulness, pluralism in operations management, is a blended approach that seeks out multiple perspectives. It accommodates the gathering of information and ideas in various ways to ensure a complete understanding, even if it means we may lose something. It requires systems thinking and metacognition of all participants and problem solvers to purposefully remove bias and generate adaptable solutions from a better understanding of the issues, forces at play, and shared mental models.
Pluralism means that in a discussion, the goal is to learn structure with context and content as defined by various perspectives and boundaries, which is true inclusion and empowerment. This is not just the transfer of knowledge, or a quick RCA response, but a culture of genuine openness, learning, and devolution (a deferring to the other). The most important perspective is the one that hasn't yet been taken that may impact a better solution. In turn, wherever possible, solutions involve universality (think direction, not detail), to allow for more autonomy at every level in the organization.
Further, pluralism broadens perspectives and opens options to a broader range of implementation strategies. There are different approaches to operations and continuous improvement. Many leaders will use best practices like lean, Six Sigma, WCM, etc., and these models might be part of an ideal solution. But as the Cabreras want you to understand, your business is a complex adaptive system (CAS) in a CAS environment. There are numerous unique dynamics:
Distinctions
Relationships
Systems
Perspectives
Agents
A pluralistic approach will Include and even amplify, not reduce, the power of your company's "uniqueness", and is the first step to nearly limitless options and outcomes.
Though pluralism enhances business outcomes, be aware a pluralistic approach to operations management can seem slower and inefficient, since there is particularly a lot of frontend investment. But this is simply bias from decades of business conditioning. To paraphrase Albert Einstein, to solve our problems, we cannot use the same thinking we used when we created them. ATBE, you will develop a more complete solution that will spawn fewer unanticipated issues and be better accepted and elevate the situation and its agents/actors.
A further foreword about implementing pluralism is that it may result, at least initially in contentious debates and heightened emotions. Managers must put their egos aside and the fear that creates silos and power dynamics. Also, it is hard for people to give their true input into a situation and expose it to potential action; a good thought miner and mediator helps raise comfort levels. The good news is with patience, respect, and repeated attempts, a pluralistic mindset for your company's operations management can be an extremely rewarding process for value creation.
As long as humans are involved, we may never eliminate procedures, documents and records for critical processes. But the creation of such requirements and everything around those necessary details, benefits from pluralism and universality.
Lori G. Fisher
PLS Management Consulting
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