>Tom Peters says "incrementalism is innovations worst enemy," or something
>to that effect. And I agree. The ISO 9000 standard (at least 9001 and
>9002) which I'm familiar with tacitly encourage incremental improvement.
I am not sure that this was Ben's intention and I may be assuming the
wrong thing in the way that this thread is heading because I have not been
reading the content too fully however...
I have a sense that we are talking about and either/or when we should be
talking about an and... I once saw the European HR guy for Toyota speak
about breakthough thinking and innovation and one of the things I took
away from that was that unless everyone in the organisation had the
capability for 'process improvement' then breakthoughs of any kind were
likely to deteriorate over time and a a system of development would lead
to leaps forward and then immediate deterioration (fixes that backfire??)
Recently when working on a system transformation we were working with a
system of projects some innovative and some improvement oriented - we were
using some breakthrough thinking and some process improvement techniques -
the result was the emergence of an amazing system breakthrough - I could
not say where it came from precisely but I have a sense that it came out
of the and - we were working with as much simultaneity as we could cope
with and using transition processes to help us 'stay whole system' ...
Could we explore the *and* in ISO 9000 and other approaches and leave the
*or* behind us?
Julie Beedon
VISTA Consulting - for a better future
julie@vistabee.win-uk.net
--Julie Beedon <julie@vistabee.win-uk.net>
Learning-org -- An Internet Dialog on Learning Organizations For info: <rkarash@karash.com> -or- <http://world.std.com/~lo/>