Conscious Business Online Course Week 1, Lesson 5: Be – Do – Have
“A defect is a treasure” say the Japanese
And what they mean by that is, that like a symptom, a defect reveals an underlying cause in the process
If instead of just fixing the defect, you ask why the defect is happening and you understand the process that is generating the defect
You can improve the system fundamentally
Now, in Total Quality Management this was used as a technical approach to solving issues
But we can use it in Conscious Business as a human approach
Because really, any system is social and technical
And we can focus on the social dimension using exactly the same tools that the Japanese used to focus on the technical dimension
So, the social dimension, which relates to human beings also has a defect or a gap
That’s what we been discussing in terms of generating human action
A difference, a tension between what exists today and what a person or a group of people would like to bring into existence tomorrow
We said that that’s the source of energy to create action
To create behavior with a purpose
Now, when something goes wrong the temptation is always to fix it
Just to close the gap and make it alright
So, for example, if someone has a fever
We normally wouldn’t say that that’s a defect
The fever is a bad thing
And when you feel the fever or you have a headache
Well, you naturally want to stop the headache, take a pill, do something and just stop it
However, if there’s in an infection and you just stop the symptom
You are going to be in big trouble because by suppressing the symptom you’re not really understanding what is the source that hast to be solved in terms of creating health
By the same token, when you’re working with other people and something is not working out
The temptation to just make everything nice and smooth over differences is very strong
But if you do that, you will never really understand the underlying cause
So, we need a model, we need a way to go back upstream into the process to understand what generates technical difficulties and social or human difficulties
So, we’ll say that every defect is a product
And it’s the product of a process
And the process is a consequence of process capabilities that are given by the platform
That gives us again a three stage model
There’s a platform, imagine in a computer system there would be an operating system
This is the platform of the computer that you are going to use
On top of that platform, given by the capabilities of the platform you’re going to implement processes
This would be like the programs
And then these programs are going to generate an output
Which would be the product
Well, in human systems the infrastructure and the platform is: mental models
