Fiona Lee and her colleagues also discovered another interesting finding in
their experiments. Inconsistency in messages about taking risk kills the drive
for innovation. People are more likely to take the risk if the failures are not
punished andthere is support that failure is acceptable—you need both of these
things combined. Interestingly, if there are supportive statements about how
taking risks is valued but then people are punished, or if they’re not punished
for failing but get the message that failure is unacceptable, they are less likely
to take any chances and more often get stuck. In fact—and this is the most
interesting finding—if they’re told that taking risks is unacceptable, and
they’re punished for taking risk, they are still more likely to take risks then if
they get inconsistent messages. This is startling. It seems that the worst thing
isinconsistency.
In many organizations we’ve worked with there are too many inconsistent
messages. Trying and experimenting are supported in the kaizen event but not
in daily work. Top management is preaching change but middle managers are
preaching production and business as usual and punishing any production
disruptions. Management is preaching to stop and fix problems to achieve high
quality, but in the heat of production workers are instructed to put their heads
down and get production out at all costs. Management says it’s okay to inno-
vate and experiment, but then punishes people for failing. This threatens feel-
ings of individual competence and superiority—both highly valued in Western
society.
Chapter 20. Leading the Change 465TIP
Consistent Messages Will Dictate Behavior
In Chapter 11 we referred to continuous improvement within
Toyota and how a consistent message regarding what “continu-
ous” means is critical to the thinking and resulting action. We see
other companies attempt to model continuous improvement and
then place several criteria on when the improvements are accept-
able. Many improvements are overlooked because it isn’t clear if
they are “worthy” or acceptable. This is how the process gets
bogged down and innovation dies. If you say you want continu-
ous improvement, you must literally mean continuous, all the
time, under all conditions, without regard to merit, complexity, or
significance. No improvement is too small, and the right time is
always now.