Fire, Flow, and Future

Today's business managers benefit from an unprecedented number of quality improvement tools, such as lean manufacturing, re-engineering, Total Quality Management, and Six Sigma. Yet despite substantial investments, many companies continue to see slow improvement in the quality of their products, services, and processes.

Management is routinely troubled by questions such as "Why are my sales dropping off?"; "What can I do about excessive scrap?" and "How do I reduce high turnover?" How they decide to answer those questions has a measurable impact on both quality and the bottom line.

LEO can help organizations find ideal solutions to these questions not because it is a better management tool than the likes of Six Sigma, but because it causes a shift in every person's frame of mind, affecting how they approach problems and how they decide which actions to take. LEO is a broad methodology that transforms how existing management tools are used, and it operates best when used by people at all levels in an organization.

While designing LEO, there are three scenarios with the most room for quality improvement: Fire, Flow, and Future. In a Fire deployment, LEO is used to solve an isolated, often unexpected problem that needs immediate attention and an accompanying change in quality -- for example, when a food manufacturer's product is suddenly and inexplicably underweight.

A Flow deployment seeks to improve quality in the operational processes of an organization--for example, a hospital's procedure for hiring nurses or a manufacturer's process for creating an RFQ (a request for quote). In a Future deployment, quality is built into the process of innovation.

All three of these scenarios are focused on improving an existing product or service or developing an entirely new one. Regardless of the type of deployment, a LEO team should be appointed to follow same three-step process of Listen, Enrich, and Optimize.

While the composition of the team will vary by deployment, in general it should be led by someone from management, and team members should be chosen based on who the scenario effects and requires input from. No deployment can succeed unless the executive cadre is actively supporting it each and every day.

This article is based on the book "Power of LEO." The book summary is available online at Business Book Summaries.