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Six Tools from Six Sigma

Last week, we looked at the over-arching process used for correcting and improving within Six Sigma, DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyse, Improve, Control).  DMAIC and Six Sigma are supported by a huge toolkit of quantitative and qualitative tools to support measurement and analysis.  Not all of them need advanced statistics or sophisticated training to use with some benefit.

Any competent manager should be building your own personal toolbox and here are six that can be readily and widely applied.

Five Whys

A simple means to get to the root cause of a problem is to start with a statement of the problem and to ask ‘why?’  Then, starting with your answer, ask ‘why?’ again, and repeat until you can go no further.  Now you have a root cause.

Why five?  There is no magic to five, but it does seem that you rarely need many more stages and too few steps will usually only take you to an intermediate cause.  Five seems to be at the sweet spot for many problems.

Fishbone Analysis

Also known as the Ishikawa (after Kaoru Ishikawa) Method, this is another way to help find causes.  But its emphasis is on breaking down the multitude of causes to an effect.  You represent the outcome (often unwanted) as the head of a fish, and then show/facilitate identification of as many causes as possible, representing each as a fishbone.

Fishbone (or Ishikawa) Analysis Step 1

Some causes are sub-categories or root causes of another cause, creating ever finer fishbones.

Fishbone (or Ishikawa) Analysis Step 2

SIPOC Analysis

SIPOC analysis looks for the source of a problem or poor performance in one of five places, with the:

  1. Supplier
  2. Inputs
  3. Process
  4. Outputs
  5. Customer

SIPOC Chart

The Five Cs or 5C Process

It does not get simpler, conceptually, than this.  This will help you stabilise, maintain and improve a process or work environment.

  1. Clear Out
    Get rid of clutter and non-essential assets, materials, processes.
  2. Configure
    Create a tidy and effective working space:
    ’a place for everything, and everything in its place’.
  3. Clean and Check
    Keep everything clean and use the cleaning process to spot damage, faults and abnormal conditions.
  4. Conformity
    Ensures that everything conforms to the standards that have been set.
  5. Custom and Practice
    Ensure that everyone knows and follows the rules, and understands what purpose they serve.

Box Plots

Box Plots are a good way to plot data to see the effects of variation.  Rather than plot single data points, representing an average, such as the average height data for boys, below…

Average Heights of Boys (WHO data)

We can plot the ranges of heights for most boys (70%) with a box and nearly all boys (94%) with the bars.  This allows us to see two ranges on one chart.  Use the box for the commonly occurring range and the bars for either the whole range or, as here, for all but the extreme outliers, as in the chart below…

Range of Heights of Boys (WHO data) - 3rd, 15th, 85th and 797th percentiles

Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (FMEA)

Perhaps the most complex and sophisticated tool here, so, in a nutshell, we examine every possible failure mode and assign it a score.  Scores over a certain threshold lead the failure to be considered ‘critical’.

The score, or ‘Risk Priority Number’ is given by:

RPN = Severity x Occurrence x Detection

The individual scores for severity (how bad the fault is), Occurrence (how frequently it is likely to occur) and Detection (how hard it is to spot prior to release to customer) are calculated separately according to standard tables.  Examples of these tables are on the DMAIC Tools website, here.

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The DMAIC Solution Process

In last week’s Pocketblog, we took an overview of the Six Sigma approach to process improvement, and left readers with the statement: ‘it is time for the most interesting bit: the practical tools that non-experts can apply to making simple improvements from day to day.’

For all of the levels of certification that practitioners can acquire, most of us can simply understand and apply six sigma’s tools to day-to-day projects, problem-solving and improvements without training, just by understanding the basis and applying our own good sense and intuition.  I am not arguing against the value of full training and certification, but it is a huge investment if all you want to do is fix a small issue.

Indeed, many of Six Sigma’s tools have a life of their own outside the methodology and have simply been co-opted in to provide strength in depth for practitioners’ toolkits.  Next week, we’ll do a round-up of some of these.  This week, we’ll focus on the beating heart of the Six Sigma methodology, the DMAIC Process.

The Beating Heart: DMAIC

DMAICDMAIC can be viewed as a problem solving process, but I prefer to think of it as a ‘solution process’ because it starts with defining the solution you need to find.

Let’s break it down:

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Define

Define the solution you need, in terms of: who it affects (customers, clients, colleagues, stakeholders), the process involved, and the extent of the process (whether it is the full process or a part of the process).  Choosing the right problem to solve is an important part of the Six Sigma process.  It means making best use of necessarily limited resources.  The Define stage ends with a team charter that sets out the scope and status of the project.

Measure

Six Sigma is nothing if not couched in mathematics and quantitative methods.  This gives it its robustness.  The second step in the DMAIC process is to measure the current performance level, to give a good baseline against which to evaluate improvement measures.  This is a good opportunity to talk about Six Sigma’s Xs and Ys.

A Y is a measure of output performance.  It is an effect of the process.  Motorola talked of Big Ys as the things that matter most to the business’s most critical  customers.  The Measure stage of DMAIC concerns itself with Ys.

An X is is a cause – a factor, variable or process element which can affect the outcome.  The Big Xs are the factor that have the greatest impact on Big Ys.

Analyse

Now it is time to find the cause of any failing in performance.  At the Measure stage, we understood the performance (or Ys) – now we find what factors affect that performance (the Xs).  Six Sigma has collated a host of quantitative and qualitative tools to gather data for the Measure stage and to interrogate it for the Analyse stage.

Improve

An effect Y is some function of one or more Xs so, in mathematical speak:

Y = f(X1, X2, X3, …)

If you can understand what Xs are important and how to change them to improve Y, then you can implement valuable changes.  Having a strong philosophy of quantitative, evidence-based interventions, Six Sigma practitioners will always look for opportunities to conduct limited (low risk) trials to test the validity of their evaluation before a full implementation.

Control

The final step is about evaluating and sustaining the improvements.  Practitioners will set up a regime to monitor and control the relevant X factors and monitor the resultant Ys.

… and one more step?

In the UK, the Six Sigma Group (training and consultancy) advocates an extended DMAICT process that I would wholly endorse.  Other organisations may, too.  The final step is…

Transfer

DMAICT

Transfer what you have learned and the principles you have used to the operational staff who can then use this knowledge to maintain and further improve the processes.  This is very much a step that is essential for external consultants to offer, if they want to avoid client-dependency.  Of course, some consultants relish such a dependency, but transferring learning is more respectful, more sustainable and, ultimately I believe, more reputation-enhancing.

Learn More: References on the Web

The best website I have found, by far, is iSixSigma.  It is a commercial site offering many related services, with free membership if you want additional information like newsletters.  It has a lot of valuable articles and a Six Sigma dictionary.

MoreSteam.com is an online Six Sigma training business that also has a lot of freely accessible resources on its website.  The link will take you to the Knowledge Center (US Site).

My third recommendation is DMAIC Tools – another site with a wide range of free resources to help you learn about aspects of Six Sigma.  As its name suggests, this has a big focus on the tools and especially has a good coverage of the statistical side of the methodology.

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Six Sigma: Belt up and Reduce Errors

There is nothing that is more likely to evoke an aura of ‘science’ than a Greek letter, judiciously applied.  Couple it with a number and our science antennae are twitching excitedly: Six Sigma.

Even I find myself seduced – and I grew up with Greek letters, numerals, and strange sub- and superscripts.  My PhD was liberally sprinkled with α’s, γ’s, Δ’s, θ’s, λ’s, ξ’s, τ’s, φ’s, χ’s, & ω’s.*

So it is little wonder that Motorola’s 1986 innovation in quality management has become a massive success and an industry in itself.  I am talking, of course, about Six Sigma or, to dress it in its seductively scientific clothes, .

So, what is Six Sigma?

Six Sigma has variously been described as:

    • a management philosophy
    • an improvement process
    • a business strategy
    • a statistical measurement
    • a culture transformation methodology
    • a development toolkit

And it is all of these things.  But, in particular, Six Sigma is a structured methodology to drive process improvement.

You get what you pay for…

The easy belief is that quality costs money – ‘you get what you pay for’.  The philosophy of Six Sigma – like other quality methodologies, like TQM (Total Quality Management) – is that the opposite is true; errors cost money: quality saves money.  If you can drive down the error rate, you also drive down costs.

Add to the mystique

To add to the mystique of the scientific-sounding statistical term ‘six sigma’, the developers have introduced a flavour of the orient, by labelling the levels of training Yellow Belt, Green Belt, Black Belt and, wait for it… Master Black Belt.  These echo the westernised grades in martial arts like judo, karate and aikido.

Yellow Belt
Typically one to two weeks’ training to learn to use the basic tools of Six Sigma.

YellowBelt

Green Belt
Typically two to three week’s additional training, to handle problem solving tasks, leading small teams.

GreenBelt

Black Belt
Typically an additional two to four weeks’ training, experience of two or more Six Sigma projects and passing a test, will bring you to black belt status, where you can lead your own project.

BlackBelt

Master Black Belt
With lots of experience and lots of training, you can train, mentor and advise black belts.  Eventually, Master black belts progress to a higher state of being where they can reconfigure whole production lines through thought alone.**

MasterBlackBelt

What does 6σ actually mean?

The lower case Greek letter s, or sigma is the standard symbol, used by statisticians for the ‘standard deviation’.  In a distribution, the standard deviation is a measure of the variation from the mean.  If there is a lot of variability, then the standard deviation will be high.  If most instances are close to the mean, the standard deviation will be small.  In a common distribution of values – called the ‘normal distribution’ – these two examples look like this, with the small standard deviation belonging to the narrower graph.

image

You can see the 1 and 4 standard deviations distances.  You can also see that there will be almost no instances at 6 standard deviations’ distance from the mean.  In fact, six sigma posits 3.4 defects per million instances.  This is pretty close to the ideal of ‘Zero Defects’.

(For technical reasons, this error rate is actually calculated from a 4.5σ deviation from a mean shifted 1.5σ from the desired mean.)

On to the interesting bit

Now you have had a whistle-stop tour of some aspects of Six Sigma, it is time for the most interesting bit: the practical tools that non-experts can apply to making simple improvements from day to day.  Except…

You will have to wait until next week for that, because we’re out of space for this week!

The next articles in the series are:


* No, those aren’t grocers’ apostrophes.
They are there to ease readability.

** This sentence is pure hyperbole.
Only Jedi Master Black Belts can do that!


 

A Management Pocketbook you might like

The Improving Efficiency Pocketbook, by Philip Holman & Derek Snee

The Improving Efficiency Pocketbook, by Philip Holman & Derek Snee

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On Competition: Internal Forces and the 7-S Model

Tom Peters is a maverick thinker with a provocative style and use of language.  We introduced his work in October 2011.  However, far earlier in his career, while he was still at international consulting firm McKinsey, he co-developed a tool that rapidly fell into the mainstream.

Like last week’s Five Forces Model, the McKinsey 7-S model is provocative in a conservative sort of a way: it can provoke deep insights into your organisation, but is far from revolutionary.  It is radical in the true* sense of the work, rather than in the ‘way out’ sense it has come to adopt.

* Radical, from radix, meaning root.  As in radish.

The Origins of the 7-S Model

The 7-S model was created by Tom Peters and Robert Waterman (and, I am sure I read once, somewhere, another colleague, un-credited in the book) and was published widely in their business best-seller, ‘In Search Of Excellence: Lessons from America’s Best-Run Companies’.  The authors do credit Anthony Athos and Richard Pascale for their help in developing the model.

They acknowledge its ‘obviousness’ but rightly, I think, assert its great utility.  In last week’s Pocketblog, I suggested that Porter’s Five Forces Model needed an additional element to account for the forces within a business.  I think this is a great model for that purpose.  It also serves very well for non-profit organisations in the public and charitable sectors.

The Seven Ss

Okay, the authors also recognise that, at times, they needed a shoe horn to force the model into Seven Ss, rather than, say 4 Ss and a few other letters.  But it works very well, and the alliterative nature makes it memorable and therefore more useful.

McKinsey7S

The fundamental tenet of the model is that, for an organisation to succeed, it must bring seven dimensions into good alignment.  Gaps and mis-alignments will be sources of failure or, at least, internal tensions and therefore performance challenges. Let’s illustrate this with an admired company.

Shared Values

At the heart of the model is the need for shared values.  Apple’s whole business is aligned around the values of design and user experience.

Style

Led by  Steve Jobs, the business had a style that combined ruthless attention to detail, with an entrepreneurial flair that encouraged ideas.  People have been free to innovate – as long as they met Jobs’ exacting standards.

Staff

Consequently, Apple is able to attract the very best staff, and is very demanding of them.

Skills

Staff come with passion and a lot of skills, but Apple invests massively to keep staff at the peak of product knowledge and technical excellence.

Structure

I can only speculate about the business structure, but I would expect it to echo the style – loose in the sense that alliances and collaborations are promoted in the development arena, but tight around the operational details, like supply chain and retail.

Systems

Apple’s procurement and supply chain systems have become legendary as they have built capacity for launching and supplying huge new market-dominating products.

Strategy

Under Jobs, the strategy was to focus on a small number of products and to make them innovative and excellent – enabling the business to capture a huge market share relative to its size, and build a loyal customer following.

The 7-s model is represented by seven inter-connected circles arranged with six spaced around the seventh (Shared Values) in the centre.  This networked ‘Atomium-like’ image illustrates well, the network nature of these dimensions and their inter-relatedness.  There is also a big © symbol attached to it so, notwithstanding the numerous reproductions in derivative books and websites, we’ll settle for our alternative representation and a picture of Brussels’ Atomium!

Atomium

The Atomium
by o palsson

Rights granted under Creative Commons Licence

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On Competition, again: Porter’s Five Forces

Back in the summer of 2011, we did a couple of blogs on the work of Michael Porter – one of the most serious-minded academic thinkers in the realm of corporate strategy.

In the first, ‘On Competition: Five Forces’, we surveyed his five forces model from a high vantage point and also introduced his three sources of competitive advantage.  We then, in ‘On Competition: The Far End of the Value Chain’ questioned whether there are not, in fact other sources of competitive advantage.

The Five Forces

I think it’s time to take a closer look at these five forces, and maybe question the adequacy of that model too.  So what are Porter’s Five Forces?

1. The Bargaining Power of Suppliers

If your business is dependent upon the supply of materials, assets, or people, then your suppliers have power over your business – which is increased as the market dominance of your supplier increases.  You need a strategy to keep your suppliers’ interests aligned with yours, by being as important to them as they are to you.  Dependence on a monopoly or near monopoly supplier is a route to doom.  Consider creating alternative supply sources, alternative inputs, or vertical integration to control your own supply source.

2. The Bargaining Power of Customers

It would be great to be a monopoly supplier of a commodity product.  Few are although, if you can differentiate your product sufficiently – for example, as Apple did with the launches of the iPhone and iPad – then you can simulate that position for a while.  Ultimately, the customer is king or queen: without them, you are doomed.

3. Competitive Rivalry

Existing players in your market will be jostling for customers’ attention and preferential deals for suppliers.  For most people, this is where their conception of competition ends.  Porter knew differently . . .

4. The Threat of New Entrants

When Sea and Atari were slugging it out for dominance of the games console market, who would have predicted the arrival of the Sony Playstation?  Answer: anyone familiar with this model.  They would not necessarily have known it would be Sony or that it would be successful, but the threat was there… As it was some years later, when, Atari gone, Microsoft entered the market to challenge Sega and Sony, with the X-Box.

5. The threat of Substitute Products

Somewhere in my stationery cupboard, I have a bottle of Tipp-Ex (probably set solid) and a pack of acetate sheets.  Is there a better supplier of correction fluid or a superior priced transparent paper?  Who knows?  Who cares?  I don’t use either: I print drafts from my PC and re-print when I’ve made corrections, and I project straight from my PC when I need slides.  I doubt many of my clients retain a working overhead projector (OHP).

Are there More Forces?

There you have it in a nutshell: five competitive forces that allow a business to evaluate its competitive strategy.  It is one of the most successful and widely used management models.

The last fifteen years have emphasised the rightful role of regulation as a competitive force or, rather, sometimes the failure of regulation to curb competitive behaviours (Enron, anybody?) I think we would now have to add regulatory forces to any complete analysis.

But I also have to ask, what about internal forces.  How do the social, cultural, political, operational, technological… forces within the business affect strategy.  To me, this is a big gap.

If only someone could plug it . . .

Happily, they can.
But you’ll have to wait until next week’s Pocketblog for that.

Management Pocketbooks you might Enjoy

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Ten Ways to Love your Staff and Get Engaged

Valentine'sHeart

It’s 14 February and we’re all feeling pretty romantic here at Management Pocketbooks.  So let’s take a look at the way managers and employers can really love their staff

. . . without stepping over that line.

10 C’s of Employee Engagement

In their short 2006 paper in the Ivey Business Journal, University of Western Ontario researchers Dan Crim and Gerard Seijts go all alliterative on us with their ‘Ten C’s of Employee Engagement’. (Their apostrophe – not mine).

The original article bears a copyright notice forbidding posting it – but allowing individual downloads, so you will have to go searching for it yourself: it isn’t hard to find.

To summarise their ten ways:

  1. Connect
    Talk to your staff, get to know them, find out what they like, what’s important to them and what they are good at.
  2. Career
    Give your staff opportunities to develop a meaningful career.
  3. Clarity
    People need a purpose and a plan.  Give them a clear sense of what they are working for and what you expect of them.
  4. Convey
    Create two-way processes that allow you to convey ideas, inspiration and information to your staff and them to convey their feedback to you.
  5. Congratulate
    Celebrate successes by recognising them and congratulating the perpetrators at team and individual level.
  6. Contribute
    A sense that we can contribute and that our work matters to society is important to people.  Let them know how this happens.
  7. Control
    When we don’t feel in control, we get stressed.  Give as much control as you can to your people – and often more than you dare.  In return, they’ll give you their insight and commitment.
  8. Collaborate
    People like to work together, in teams, with shared aims.  Create an environment that allows and encourages it.
  9. Credibility
    You and your organisation must maintain the highest standards of integrity, so that people can be proud to be associated with you.
  10. Confidence
    High ethics instil confidence, which drives up performance standards.

Management Pocketbooks you might Enjoy

You might also enjoy my extended article ‘Resistance to Engagement’ based on The Handling Resistance Pocketbook.

. . . With lots of love

Management Pocketblog

X X X X X

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Three ways to Stifle Motivation

There are many theories of motivation around, yet most of the ones that turn up on training courses hark back to the 1970s, 1960s and even the 1950s.  Is there any new thinking on motivation, for the twenty first century?

It turns out that there is.  And it isn’t just new thinking: this is research-based and supported by experimental evidence.

Self Determination Theory

Self determination theory (SDT) emerged into the limelight in 2000 with one of the now most-cited papers in psychology: ‘Self-Determination Theory and the facilitation of intrinsic motivation, social development, and well-being.  It was published in the Journal ‘American Psychologist’, and written by Richard Ryan and Edward Deci of the University of Rochester.

University of Rochester psychology professors Richard Ryan, left and Edward Deci outside Meliora Hall May 25, 2010. The two are internationally recognized scholars who developed Self-Determination Theory, which holds that well-being depends in large part on meeting one's basic psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. //photo: J. Adam Fenster/University of Rochester

Richard Ryan (left) and Edward Deci (right) are both at the Department of Clinical and Social Sciences in Psychology of the University of Rochester.  There, they direct a training program focused on SDT and maintain a substantial website that acts as a valuable (but technical) resource on SDT.

SDT in a Nutshell

We are all motivated to satisfy three fundamental needs, which are described as ‘psychological nutrients’.  If one or more of these needs is unfulfilled, we lose motivation.  Critically, Ryan and Deci also see the fulfilment of these needs as essential to our sense of well-being.

These three psychological nutrients are:

  1. Autonomy
    Being able to make your own choices and live your own life
  2. Competence
    Feeling able and confident in what you are doing
  3. Relatedness
    Having safe, secure social relationships (which do not threaten your feelings of autonomy or competence)

Does this sound familiar?

It did to me.  In my well-thumbed copy of Ilona Boniwell’s excellent ‘Positive Psychology in a Nutshell’, I have written against these the terminology from two older and more familiar models: Clayton Alderfer’s 1969 ERG Theory and David McClelland’s 1961 Theory of Needs.

ComparingNeedsTheories

Lots more Depth

So, the needs Ryan and Deci have identified are familiar – although not identical to those described by previous researchers.  What is more convincing in their work is the greater subtlety they characterise in examining how these three factors act to motivate us.

They don’t try to describe all of the motivational phenomena that they observe in their experiments with one grand theory.  instead, they have articulated five (to date) ‘mini theories’ to account for different aspects of motivation.

These make Self Determination Theory a very compelling model, worthy of greater study.

  1. Cognitive Evaluation Theory (CET)
    How we assess our social context and how that evaluation affects our intrinsic (self) motivation.
  2. Organismic Integration Theory (OIT)
    How we internalise external factors, turning them into motivators or de-motivators.
  3. Causality Orientations Theory (COT)
    how we make behavioural and situational choices based on personality orientations towards autonomy, control and our need for competence.
  4. Basic Psychological Needs Theory (BPNT)
    How autonomy, competence, and relatedness are basic psychological needs, essential to our well-being.
  5. Goal Contents Theory (GCT)
    How intrinsic and extrinsic goals have different affects on our perceptions of satisfaction and well-being.  There is a great animated video, made by a colleague of Ryan and Deci, below.

Some Management Pocketbooks you might Enjoy

The Motivation Pocketbook

The Motivation Pocketbook

The Management Models Pocketbook
(for Vroom’s Expectancy Theory and McClelland’s Theory of Needs)

The Performance Management Pocketbook

The Reward Pocketbook

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Boost your EQ

Last week, I wrote about Emotional Intelligence (EI) from a fairly abstract, theoretical perspective.  So, to redress the balance, this week I want to get wholly practical.  I have been through The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook, by Margaret Chapman, and selected my favourite tips and tools to help you increase your EQ, and adapted them for you.

Step 1: Self Awareness

Tune in to mood – yours and others.  Start to notice the way people stand or sit.  Where they look when they are interacting with you or other people, the quality of their voices, and their gestures and expressions.

Now tune in to your own mood.  How are you feeling?  Start to inventory your body for tensions and awkwardness.  What does this tell you?  How do you move and what postures are you adopting?  Listen to your voice, is it steady and confident or hesitant and weak?

Get into the habit of doing this and it will start to become second nature.

* Adapted from Gauging the Mood and Getting in Touch with your Feelings exercises

Step 2: Emotion Management

If you detect a stressful or uncomfortable feeling in yourself, Stop!

Calm yourself by relaxing your muscles and adjusting your posture.  Take deeper, slower breaths.  Recall a time when you felt strong, confident, playful…  Now think about how you want to handle the situation that you are facing.

* Adapted from Freeze Frame Technique

Step 3: Self Motivation

The Build your A Team exercise is spot on.  Margaret offers a useful worksheet which, if you want to identify and create a supportive and life enhancing network of friends and colleagues is worth the price of the book alone.  Think of all of the types of support you would like or need (Margaret has done this) and list them.  Then, for each one, think who you know at work, and who you know outside of work that can best provide that support.

Now make a plan to speak with each of them.

Step 4: Relationship Management

Extend your A Team list in a new way.  This time, list all the people, at work and outside, that you see regularly.  Against each one, make a note of their particular skills, knowledge and expertise.  This will help you to appreciate the people in your life more, and encourage you to call upon help more readily.

* This one’s my own, inspired by Margaret’s Top Ten Tips.

Step 5: Emotional Coaching

I absolutely concur with the top two skills that Margaret suggests.  If you want to coach anyone, hone your abilities to listen and to ask questions.  You need little else when you can do these two.

The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook is rightly a top-seller

The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook

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There’s More to Emotional Intelligence than Daniel Goleman

Dr Daniel GolemanWell, the title is not a controversial statement and I am certain Dr Goleman would be the first to agree with it.  So why is it that almost all business-oriented articulations of Emotional Intelligence (EI) are founded on one or another of his models?

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‘One or another’?

Goleman’s recent work identifies four components of EI, whilst his earliest writing on the subject identifies five.

DanielGolemanEIModels

Brilliant Writing

The simple answer, I suspect, is that Goleman brought the concept to the public’s awareness with his first, 5 million selling, book, and then made it an equally popular topic for business people and managers with his follow-up ‘Working with Emotional Intelligence’.

Each of these books and his subsequent publications are written with a strong journalistic flair that makes them compellingly readable and highly accessible to non-psychologists.  This is clearly one reason.  But I think there is another, even stronger reason.

Alternative Models

EIPocketbookEIModelThere is a wealth of alternative models and mash-ups, including the one in The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook.  This one looks superficially like the earlier Goleman model, but combines the two social competences and introduces a new capability of ‘Emotion Coaching’.

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MayerSaloveyEIModelGoleman himself acknowledges the seminal influence of Peter Salovey, whose joint paper written with John Mayer was his first introduction to the topic in 1990.  Salovey and Mayer’s thinking has evolved, and their current model (1997) sets out four branches of EI.

The difference between this model and Goleman’s arises from the authors’ mission to demonstrate that EI is a true intelligence.  This gives rise to four mental abilities, or aptitudes, that we can develop and harness to practical purposes.

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You can view Goleman’s four or five competencies as practical skill sets that we can develop and put immediately to use.  Margaret Chapman takes this further with her entirely new skill set of Emotion Coaching.

It is the more practical nature of Goleman’s models that, I suspect, has made them far more popular.

A Combined Model of Emotional Intelligence

Goleman’s model clearly distinguishes the Intra-personal and the inter-personal domains (a distinction also drawn by Howard Gardner, founder of the theory of Multiple Intelligences).  Mayer and Salovey’s model resolutely does not.  So I can’t help wondering what happens if we impose this distinction upon their model.

I hasten to note that they are engaged in rigorous academic research and this new construct is little more than a whim of my own.  But here goes…

EINewModel

Some Management Pocketbooks you might enjoy

The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook

The Emotional Intelligence Pocketbook contains many fine resources.  You may also like:

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Half way between New Year and Valentine’s day

Last week, I was counting basic plots and getting nowhere with the numbers game – I think if you follow all of the references in the article, you get to 18 or 54 or something in between.  I didn’t try to put a number on it.

But have you noticed how many of us like to enumerate and collect?  Mostly it’s men, I hear some of you say, but I am not so sure.  Anyway, Howard Gardner noticed this, belatedly, when he added to his original seven Multiple Intelligences an eighth: Naturalist.

Seven …
there’s another magic number to add to last week’s three:

  1. Seven samurai
  2. Seven pillars of wisdom
  3. Seven deadly sins
  4. Seven wonders of the world
  5. Seven against Thebes
  6. Seven dwarves
  7. Seven habits of highly effective people

One characteristic of the naturalist intelligence is the desire and facility to characterise, categorise and count (ooops three again!).

Let’s get Emotional

This time, I have been wondering how many emotions there are.  Two things may come to your mind: the pragmatists will say ‘but what has this to do with management?’ while the theorists will challenge ‘can you really count emotions?’

Let’s start with the theorists: counting emotions

No.  I don’t think that you can create a full count of the infinite varieties of human emotion, but I did think it may be interesting to try to list the main ones, and see where it takes me.

I started with a throwaway comment I remembered from a training course that there is a ‘big five’ set of emotions.  I can find no reference to these (unlike the ‘big five personality factors’ in any psychology books).  But I did find a Reiki Healing site, and as my NLP teachers were also reiki practitioners, I’m going to make a guess…

Anyway, this led me to:

  1. Joy
  2. Sadness
  3. Anger
  4. Fear
  5. Grief

… which are big and there are five.  But there are other big ones too.  Next stop: Claudia Hammond’s excellent ‘Emotional Rollercoaster: A Journey Through the Science of Feelings’.  Dr Hammond lists

  1. Joy
  2. Sadness
  3. Disgust
  4. Anger
  5. Fear
  6. Jealousy
  7. Love
  8. Guilt
  9. Hope

She doesn’t set out to be comprehensive, just to present fascinating research results.  The web will offer you uncountable numbers of lists, but in my £2.99 copy of the textbook ‘Psychology’ (I love charity shops), I found Plutchik’s Multi-dimensional Model of Emotions.  Oh how I love the idea of a multidimensional model!

Plutchik’s Multi-dimensional Model of Emotions, reproduced as Fig 12.1 in Psychology (Bernstein, Roy, Srull, Wickens)As you can see, Plutchik’s model has eight primary emotions which are shown next to the ones they are most like and opposite the ones that are like polar opposites.  Each has a spectrum of intensity, giving a third dimension, with the peak intensity emotions at the top.  By combining adjacent pairs, you get more complex emotions.

To see this more clearly, we need to open out the solid, and this is done in many places on the web.  Here is my favourite representation (a public domain image from Wikipedia).

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You’ll notice that the two versions don’t quite match up (-  as my editor did!*).  The opened out “net” seems the more current and common articulation, with the levels on the “solid” diagram either poorly represented or from earlier thinking.

Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions

What has this to do with management?

Well, firstly, if you think that emotions and management have nothing to do with one another, you’re crazy.  But my serious point is that a greater understanding of emotions seems to me to be a major gap in much management training and education.  This is even true in many workshops and courses about ‘Emotional Intelligence’.

Yet Emotional Intelligence is one of the most powerful management models of the last twenty years.  I think we can now tentatively apply the label ‘enduring’.  So we’ll be taking a deeper look over the next two weeks.

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* In trying to answer my editor’s comment, I found two absolutely  fascinating articles on the web (30 minutes of displacement activity – thank you Ros) that you might like.  Plutchik’s original 1960 article is not available on the web (unless you have £23 to spare).  Anyway, check out:

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