Today I am with a Master Black Belt (MBB) class and we had our guest lecture from Mr. John Daly, of the University of Texas Business School, on advocacy in business. It is a great topic for MBBs to learn about how to advocate for yourself, your project, and the Lean Six Sigma (LSS) effort itself.
He has a lot of good messages for the students, but during a break I had a discussion with one of the students. He was a long term Black Belt from India who had questions about the discussion of “Face” in dealing with the communication with others. If you do not know the term, you Face is what you are proud of, or can be considered where you derive your dignity or prestige. It could be used in the sentence “You are afraid to lose Face.” In this context we discussed how you do not want to step on a person’s face when you are trying to advocate for a project or your program. If you step on their face, you have lost the discussion, possibly for ever. As we discussed it, using the 5-whys came to me.
The role play we were using is when you came up to a leader of an organization and knew they were having a real problem with one of their processes. If you came up and said; “I know you have a problem, can I work on it?” you will probably step on their face. In our discussion, we tried using the 5-whys to bring up the point. It went something like this;
I have been reading the status reports and see a recurring topic show up, the xxxx process. Why is it coming up so often?
Why do you believe that to be what is going on?
What have you tried, so far, to fix it?
Is it getting better?
That must be frustrating? Are there any new approaches being tried to improve the process?
………..
Using the 5-whys turns the subject around from their PROBLEM, to a request to understand what is going on. At some point they will believe you are understanding and you may be asked if you have any ideas.
All of those tools they teach us in LSS are much more useful than just in projects