 Click here to open BIOETHICS (see the English version after the Spanish version) . |
EPSON
MEXICO
A Knowledge Management Success Story Using Social Cybernetics
by W. DeGregori
“In
1999 I was in search of a school of thought and creativity”,
says Mr. Carmona, 45, an Electronic Engineer Director of Epson Mexico
(pcarmona@epson.com.mx). It was a time of swift
and sweeping changes in Mexico after a financial turmoil, particularly
in the information technology market, one of fierce competition
and very narrow marginal profitability. Mr. Carmona posed a typical
Knowledge Management challenge1.
Epson
serves the information technology market with printing peripherals
such as DeskJet printers Stylus C83 and Stylus C63; Multifunctional
printers Stylus CX5200; Photo printers Stylusphoto 900 and 825;
Plotter Stylus Pro 10600; Videoprojectors Power Lite Home 10 and
S1; Scanner Perfection 2400; Laser Printers EPL 6100L and Aculaser
C900; Needle printer FX-890; Miniprinter TM-T90 and others.
“I
climbed up the career ladder more by self-education than by following
straight, explicit and clear method, training and procedures”
manifested one of Epson Directors. He went on contending that Mexico
is way off a Knowledge Management culture: “there is a vague
scientific training mixed up with old reli-gious traditions and
a lot of improvisation and “cantinflism” (an allusion
to Cantinflas, a Mexican comedian portraying a complicated, large
and void com-munication style). That there is a Mexican way or method
of thinking and man-agement is but a myth”.
How
to pump the right, meaningful and up-to-date information regarding
the internal and external context into the manager office - was
the challenge Mr. Carmona was facing. He started requiring monthly
written reports followed by scenarios for a month ahead. Mistakes
did not matter since they were recog-nized, reported and corrected
on time. As a Dr. Juran’s2 follower, Mr. Carmona knew it was
all about mental processes and communication – Knowledge Man-agement.
And there was a disorganized, mismatched and stressing information
process, far from consistency and efficiency, which he decided to
face by means of retraining his staff.
By
this time he met José Salcido Blancas one of Social Cybernetics
ex-perts in Mexico (josalpragma@compuserve.com.mx).
According to Epson needs, Salcido concentrated his training program
around the information and communication collective process. The
key tool he used was one that linked complementarily the thinking,
creating and doing processes in just one piece, denominated “Tricerebral
Innovation Cycle” based on the triune brain theory3.
In
fact, Salcido and Epson staff had to go a large and slow journey.
They had to start raising awareness of each one’s as well as
of the collective tricere-bral process going through successive measurements
using the “Tricerebral Quotient Detector” in four levels,
followed by personal commitments to correct underdeveloped areas and
unbalanced scores.
And
then came the painful assembling of the three brains functions and
training of the full “Tricerebral Innovation Cycle” going
through exercises for each of its steps. We can offer here but a short
overview of what it means to drag people form the darkness of unconscious,
compulsive and uncontrolled mental habits to clear, sequential and
complete mental cycle.
1.
SELECT THE SUBJECT or the issue, the problem, the project.
It is not as simple as it appears. A corporation is always struggling
with numerous problems, ideas, opportunities and threats. Choosing
a given subject and path implies renouncing to other possibilities.
This involves strategic vision, and drawing very clear cut boundaries:
what the subject/project/problem includes and what it does not;
what it means and what it does not; what it is and what it is not.
In summary, selecting a subject has to see with cost-effective strategy,
relevance and priorities. The small circle or cycle around number
one in the “Tricerebral Innovation Cycle” indicates
that to select a subject one ought to go through the other nine
steps as in a simulation to check implications and conse-quences.
2.
INFORMATION GATHERING. There should be a previous general
model of the market and the corporation as an integrated triune
game (two main competitors and others in-between) within a systemic
network pointing out who holds the official, the anti-official and
the wavering position and in which level of competitiveness*.
Where
does the subject we have chosen fit and how is it related within the
network moving rather chaotically? What else we need to know, discover,
and prove? Where is the verbal, the non-verbal (implicit) and the
factual infor-mation and who are the persons holding it? Here come
the questions and de-vices we organize to gather meaningful information
to make good decisions and to guide the corporation to success through
the labyrinth of ever changing triune games. Looking at the model
above we identify the main frame of the local tri-une games being
played and the information needed as the game move ahead in kaleidoscopic
transformations. Globality implies that the local game is influ-enced
by larger games and even by the top international game. Since Epson
is a Japanese brand and Japan is an international competitor to USA
and China, information to track this game is also essential.
Yet
the questions or information strategy must obey some taxonomy chart
or frame of reference determining their internal relational structure
and consistency when processing the data gathered. The most used
taxonomy chart to organize information is the “5 W + 1 H”,
which can be re-named as the “Four Operational Factors”
– space; chronology; personnel; procedures. Any device and
strategy to collect information – experiment, observation,
interview, ques-tionnaire, template etc. – has to be tested
until it works as expected by the de-signer after a simulation of
going through the other nine steps of the Tricerebral Innovation
Cycle. In fact, besides the general information drawn from the news
and specialized magazines, Epson gather information from the external
as well as its internal business environment by means of fourteen
questions applied weekly to carefully chosen sources.
When
the information is going to be processed by computers, every item
needs a code; and the full set of processing operations must be
established.
*Official
subgroup is the market leader, to big shot, the controller, the holder
of the biggest slice of the pie. Anti-official is the main competitor
and challenger of the official subgroup. The waver-ing subgroup is
composed of corporations and other clients willing to take advantage
from the official and anti-official competition and that is the reason
why suppliers make so many efforts to create “brand loyalty”.
The
divisions within the pyramid represent a classification of corporations
according to their size and power. The biggest ones are classified
as maxi corporations, followed by big cor-porations, medium corporations
and micro, small corporations.
3.
DATA PROCESSING. It is the art of pulling out inter-causal
relations and meaning usually hidden behind appearances, first impressions,
gossiping and apparently unrelated facts. To pull the underlying thread
of life it is neces-sary to try different procedures along the “Four
Operational Factors” such as re-lating them in a structured
way (taking one of them at a time as an axis and making the remnant
to revolve around it) in search for reciprocal influences, es-tablishing
comparisons and outcomes usually expressed in statistical tables and
hence checking differences with previous results to see how the game
is mov-ing along the time and whether it is favorable or not. After
having tried every possible data handling, we need reflecting and
meditating about the story the numbers are telling us about the triadic
games we want to see, to interpret and to direct. The road and the
trip are more important than the milestones and signs. What is distant
in space and time is difficult to perceive. What is sublimi-nal, the
very small and slow differences are also difficult to perceive, unless
a systemic representation of the network being studied is used and
we accom-pany it for a long time with our tricerebral modes of perception.
Again, to be sure of a good data treatment and analysis we’d
better go through the other nine steps of the Tricerebral Innovation
Cycle, looking for repercussions and consistency.
When
using the triune approach we must go beyond the traditional mo-nadic
use of reductionist statistics that ends up with a disguising average.
We said disguising because the average denies or hides the existence
of the three subgroups and their correspondent/relative positions
and variance. In addition, a statistical account misses non-verbal
messages expressed by feelings, emo-tions and unconscious attitudes
that only an experimented researcher/observer is able to grasp and
to interpret as part of qualitative (non quantitative) informa-tion
gathering procedures.
4.
DIAGNOSING. It is drawing condensed conclusions from the
data processing step to show what is going on in terms of “good,
not so good, bad” regarding our goals and concerns. But here
are no definitive responses for reali-ties that are always in transformation
and whose contexts and limits are never exact, always shifting.
Nevertheless, conclusions and affirmations of a research help to
declare not only the healthiness or good functioning of a system
accord-ing to a given pattern, but chiefly to:
-explain
the system’s (corporation) dysfunction (flow jam, bad timing,
sectors with no convergence, hyper-oscillations, diminishing returns
in the con-version of inputs into outputs, of costs into benefits;
too much stress or dullness among the triune agents; inefficiency
of the feedback mechanisms, etc.);
-
explain the inter-causality, proactive or restrictive, of the “Four
Opera-tional Factors” (the linear subject/object, cause/effect
doesn’t exist; the influ-ence is retroactive, alternate, showing
some kind of chaotic behavior);
-define
the favorable or unfavorable reality of the moment, in the big pic-ture
of the international context and specifically, in the small picture
of our par-ticular network showing the challenges to be confronted,
the problems or needs to be solved, the proportions to be preserved
or restored. Of course, criteria of good/medium/bad, of favorable/tolerable/intolerable
variances in the outputs of a given cycle need to be previously
established based upon survival and pros-perity expectancies of
a given corporation. What is classified as “problems and needs”
has to be ranked as priorities to be met or to be solved.
A
way to check and control the quality of a diagnosing process is
going through the other nine steps of the Tricerebral Innovation
Cycle.
5.
FUTURITION of SCENARIOS: It is the foresight of how the
system and each one of its subsystems will evolve, in each of its
three subgroups’ ten-dencies, in short, medium and long term
cycles, facing dilemmas (mutually ex-clusive solution paths), uncertainty,
risk and dangers, taking into account the sensitivity to initial
conditions, transition phases and fractal recurrences, bifurca-tion/trifurcation,
the oscillation span of the Four Operational Factors, etc. The more
stable (“independent”) a system, more predictable its
behavior; the more unstable or chaotic (interdependent), less predictable.
The probabilities and forecasts are projected in macro, medium and
micro-scenarios or international, national and local interconnected
spheres. Futurition requires great doses of charisma, of feeling
and meditation, of daring and optimism, to envision future with
greatness and to face it enthusiastically. Futurition can be helped
by projection of current tendencies and also by sheer inspiration
or feeling. After envisioning possible paths within the swirling
of reality and devising boosting and restrictive factors, what really
matters is a daring will to build our own future or to make it happen.
In
fact, Epson Mexico keeps monthly meetings with its top executives
to scrutinize the future of its market and that of the corporation.
Every
considered path has to go through the other nine steps as a simu-lation
of feasibility, consequences and prices to pay for.
5.1
CREATIVITY: It is the use of diverse right brain techniques
such as intuition, alpha brain waves, imagination and brainstorming
exercises in the search of innovative solutions for the dilemmas
envisioned in the futurition exer-cise, finding new strategies and
then the tactics to win the games posed by competitors and to bring
about the dreamt future, forecast before. Since every problem to
be solved is part of a web of inter-causality, creativity should
also in-dicate the point where the “leverage” (intervention,
innovation) can be more ef-fective. This step ends up ranking three
or four alternative paths of action to be considered by the decision
makers in the next step. Each one of the alternatives has to go
through the other nine steps as a simulation of feasibility, conse-quences
and prices to pay for.
6.
DECISIONS: It is applying viability criteria, nurtured
by the vision of a future, to the alternatives discovered in the
stage of creativity, and to select the corresponding actions. The
quality and correctness of decisions depend on all previous steps
of the Tricerebral Innovation Cycle and on all the accumulated experience
by individuals and by the collective mind of a corporation. Making
decisions means success or failure. That’s why this step is
considered a point of no return. Here we see the importance of the
previous steps, the importance of building teams of Knowledge Management,
of three balanced subgroups dy-namics striving for convergent goals
and the success of the corporation. Al-though a decision seems to
be drawn from the sky by the manager, in fact it has been fed by
previous information and experience, by group discussion and also
by inspiration. That is why “deciding” is considered
to be an operation in which the right brain predominates because
decisions are taken on a context in which uncertainty and the unexpected
predominate.
Caution:
In small and obvious issues, without many consequences and at low
cost, everyone wants to say the last word. But, the more important
the is-sue, with higher costs and graver consequences, the fewer
people care about it. While millions go unquestioned, war is made
because of cents.
Before
closure, every decision must go through the other nine steps pon-dering
consequences and prices to pay for.
7.
PLANNING: Each decision taken is a strategy, a project,
a program that must be carefully visualized in intermediate activities
of input-transformations-outputs until its final concretion: it
is the FLOWCHART. Each stage of the flowchart will be submitted
to the questions of the Four Operational Factors (space, chronology,
personnel and procedures) to determine the tac-tics.
This
requires new minor decisions, taking into consideration the conver-gence
of individual, group, entrepreneurial, social and ecosystem goals;
the lo-cal self-direction and responsibility; the realism of installments,
investment, the burden tolerable by the system and the provisions
for the unforeseen, etc. This kind of planning starts with a raw draft
by an individual and it is submitted to group discussion until final
approval. Every flowchart has to go through the other nine steps looking
for bottlenecks and consistency. When every deci-sion/project flowchart
is ready, we add and combine them in a wider map like a spider’s
web that can be read in three dimensions. In the horizontal dimension
we can follow the physical panel (space, installations and equipment);
the chronological panel (timetable); the personnel panel (division
of labor/power and assignments; Epson organizational chart carries
everybody’s picture not only allocation and assignments); and
the procedural panel (activities flow, budget, delivery and outcomes
control, after-sale support etc.). In the vertical dimension we can
read and check the matching and synchronized movement of different
projects of the whole plan. In the transversal dimension we can see
and check the easiness/hardness of each project and their reciprocal
boost-ing/restrictive influence.
8.
MANAGEMENT: It is the nurturing of the corporation’s
or sector vision of the future, the communication of such a vision
in a contagious manner, to ob-tain the enthusiastic adhesion of
participants for doing what has been planned, for attaining what
they desire to attain (instead of what they want to avoid). That
requires an awakening of the positive, doer side of people, to nurture
their aspi-rations for greatness and victory, in tune with those
of the institution as a whole. No one enjoys being a mercenary,
but all enjoy being members, partners, and counterparts. It is necessary
to emphasize objectives and the tricerebral earn-ings (knowledge;
money; and emotional fulfillment) instead of emphasizing the ritual
of the process. This tricerebral and four levels management has
to be car-ried on by the upper levels influencing the lower ones
and also by recipro-cal/circular nurturing. In order to do this,
the hierarchy must be more “circular”, radial, horizontal,
reversible, de-centralized, and not too vertical or repressive.
There are some pre-requisites implied here: The individuals and
the whole team need to be aware of the Tricerebral Innovation Cycle
and to make a profes-sional (not random) use of it; Sharp awareness
of the corporation functioning as a system and everyone and every
sector being complementary; Positive and complementary subgroups
performance to avoid obstructive triune games, dis-ruptions, boycott,
sabotage and private information leaking to competitors. The final
result should be that every person, level and sector of the corporation
be-haves as a manager in some way, striving for their tricerebral
earnings.
Here
is where everyone’s Tricerebral Innovation Cycle has to be
per-formed as if it were on line and collectively, running through
the other nine steps in every action undertaken.
9.
COACHING: It is the daily supervisory accompaniment for
encour-agement, dialogue about activities and what is being accomplished,
to offer support and orientation. The rectangular physical arrangement
of desks and people in a very large room office keeps Epson people
of different levels close, and in direct communication facilitating
on time supervision. Epson Mexico is a distributor so it also keeps
an information technology peripherals warehouse with strict stock
control. The corporation has a monthly quota of sales imposed by
the factory, which can be checked weekly. But it cannot be only
a matter of auditing, control and rising pressure to sell more and
more. Responsibility and outcomes, or earnings and losses are for
everyone, not just for the bosses. It is a search for the proportionality
between subgroups and levels, committed to everyone’s success.
Without a very clear, fair and convincing reward system, people
will not be fully engaged. When there is a discrepancy, when there
is a need for correction, then negotiation and mediation are better
than reprimands, impositions or quarrels. Coaching also implies
an incremental top down and retro-circular educational process to
upgrade everyone’s performance, eliminat-ing errors and adding
improvements. That’s why the Human Resources sector developed
a set of values for the corporation and a set of competencies for
in-dividual and subgroup evaluation, besides periodical recycling
courses and seminars. Each of the main values displayed around the
room could be organ-ized according the triune brain paradigm so
to keep in mind that there is a fun-damental organizing principle:
The
competencies to be evaluated also have to be organized according
to the triune brain so to make people aware that they have to continually
im-prove their abilities throughout the four levels of tricerebral
development:
The
design and delivery of seminars and courses have the same design for
the sake of consistency. Otherwise the corporation would hurl back
to frag-mentation and divisionism typical of the monistic/Cartesian
paradigm, existing before investing in the triune paradigm. The set
of values and the competencies to be developed and evaluated will
change according to the evolutionary mo-ment and needs of the corporation.
Coaching
the whole internal production process and matching it with the external
market process in times of globalization and increasing complexity
re-quires going smartly through the Tricerebral Innovation Cycle
being able to take any of the ten steps as the axis.
10.
FEEDBACK: The previous planning proposed goals, installments,
deadlines and earnings. At the end of a fiscal year the results
and the process, success and failures, the expectations of workers,
investors and stakeholders are evaluated and the shares –
gains and losses - allotted. To carry on a feed-back and present
a report to a General Assembly we must re-do all the steps of the
Tricerebral Innovative Cycle. The meeting will close after a new
mar-ket/business diagnosing, after new future scenarios envisioning,
after new deci-sionning and planning with previous errors elimination
and new ameliorations adding. It is the feedforward. The present
system of evaluation, one that only rewards the leader or the officialdom,
discourages all other talents and sub-groups and creates individualistic
competition instead of creating collective co-operation.
*****
After
struggling to implement the knowledge discipline of the Tricerebral
Innovation Cycle, Epson Mexico decided to synthesize it in a cube
carrying the five main steps.
The
cube can be seen on everyone’s desk. Besides that, a rule was
es-tablished: Any problem, question, proposal, suggestion to be presented
should be organized according the Tricerebral Innovation Cycle steps
displayed in the cube.
It
meant that the worker asking for an interview with someone of the
up-per level ought to have the topic in question well structured
in his/her mind ac-cording to those steps: Clearly defined subject;
basic and real information to support and to diagnose it; vision
of future unfolding; alternative plausible paths and ranking of
possible decisions. Otherwise he/she would be asked to go back,
to be better prepared for the interview and to return when ready
to meet those requirements.
The
same rules were implemented for submitting a written subject. The
templates or forms to be filled out have been designed according
to the steps of the Tricerebral Innovation Cycle displayed in that
already famous cube.
In
each exercise of the Tricerebral Innovation Cycle, a special meeting
technique was also being trained: Explicit Group Dynamics. Its design
started with the “Minimal Tricerebral Innovation Cycle”,
progressively enlarged until reaching the complexity of the full
Tricerebral Innovation Cycle. It is easy to un-derstand why: any
human action – dialogue, interview, research, project, prob-lem
solving, politics, economics, etc. - is created/driven by the three
brains’ good or bad cycle.
In
Mexico, Robert’s Rules for meetings are unknown. Some guidelines
ought to be established. They started with a very simplified model
as above re-ducing the tricerebral cycle to three main steps. After
accepting and being able to follow the discipline of the three sequential
steps, they started adding more steps to the flowchart, sharing roles
previously concentrated by the coordinator, voting rules to regulate
the participation, until mastering this meeting flowchart fully covering
the Tricerebral Innovation Cycle:
In
a Latin American culture, time is not a critical issue and the taste
for “cantinflism” is the rule. It means: spontaneity prevails.
Edward de Bono4 had to use the trick of different hats to make people
aware of the sequence of the Tricerebral Innovation steps, each marked
with different colors matching hats colors: When moving form one step
to the following they had to change their hats accordingly. Really,
the disciplined training is always threatened by the more comfortable
trend for spontaneity. In spite of training hard the above Meeting
Flowcharts they are no longer fully applied in Epson meetings. What
remains is the use of some critical roles such as “Time Keeper”
and “To the Point” - meant to shorten the “cantinflism”.
Lately,
Epson Mexico has been given many awards by international su-pervisors
for its Knowledge Management success. The main confirmation of this
success was pointing its Director – Mr. Pedro Carmona –
as a regional su-pervisor for Mexico, Central America, and Venezuela,
Ecuador and Colombia in South America.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
1.
AMIDON, Debra M. The Innovation SuperHighway. Boston: Butterworth
Heinemann, 2003.
___________________.
Estrategia para Innovar en la Economía del Cono-cimiento.
El Despertar del Ken. México
DF: Editorial Kendra, 2000.
2.
JURAN, Joseph M. Juran’s Quality Handbook. New York: MacGraw-Hill
Pro-fessional, 1998.
3.
DeGREGORI, W. Capital Intelectual y Administración Sistémica.
Bogotá: MacGraw-Hill, 2002.
4.
De BONO, Edward. De Bono’s Thinking Course. Checkmark Books,
1994.
|
