Perhaps one of the most powerful tools of the Tribal Knowledge Paradigm is the “Yes/No Chart.” I say that it is powerful because I am ecstatic by the results of this very simple tool.
What is a “Yes/No” chart? Very simply, it is a chart that is set up to measure a result. It answers a simple question, a question whose answer is yes or no. In this measurement, “maybe” is not an acceptable answer. In fact, the chart has only two allowable marks, either “yes” or “no.” There is no third category: “perhaps”, “maybe”, “sometime”, etc. The answer is given on a “No Blame” basis; we want to know what is truly happening.
The way that this idea developed has a funny history. At a particular company, we had talked about No Blame and someone in the class raised the issue of the truck leaving late every day. The minute that was mentioned a hush went over the room. I knew something was going on. So I asked the obvious question, why is it a problem when the truck leaves late? No one responded. So I was trying to figure out a way to get to the end of this story. So I went out to the shipping area and put up the first Yes/No chart.
It looked something like this:
It was done on a sheet of flip chart paper and was done so that anyone passing by the area could see it. As I walked by the area with the CEO, he noticed it. He asked me what that was about. I told him that the employees had identified the importance of the truck leaving on time. If it left after 9:00 AM, it couldn’t complete its rounds to the San Jose area from the North Bay and get back before the heavy commute. We looked at the chart and there were three big red X’s on the chart. The red X indicates “No” in response to the posted question: Did the truck leave before 9:00 AM? So when we investigated the why of the question, it turned out that the CEO’s son was not getting in on time, around 6:30 AM, to do the inspections necessary to get the parts loaded on the truck and get it out before 9:00 AM. Once the explanation was on the table, the son got in on time, the parts were inspected and the truck left before 9:00 AM. From that moment forward, the Yes/No chart had earned its merits as a valuable measuring technique.
We have used the Yes/No Chart at a number of companies to manage the truck schedule. In all of those situations, the truck rarely leaves on time, for any number of reasons. And they are usually very good reasons. Again, before the yes/no chart goes up, it must be determined that it is important that the truck leaves by a particular time. Why measure something if there are no consequences from not leaving on time? That is, if the consequences for leaving on time are no different than those for not leaving on time, this is not the right issue to measure. The individuals or departments affected by the truck’s schedule must agree that a measurement is appropriate. However, once the yes/no chart goes up, all excuses are forbidden and No Blame is the rule.
2. Company Can’t Ship Orders on Time: A small company had a long-standing and costly problem; it couldn’t manage to ship orders on time. The cause of the problem boiled down to a major disagreement between individuals in different departments about what constituted an order and who could make a commitment to ship by a particular date. Most problem behavior revolved around this issue. We discussed the problem with the client, and settled on using the yes/no chart as the means to attack the problem. The chart asked a simple question: “Were any orders that shipped today late?” The results were reported by the person most likely to have the information, the guy on the shipping dock; he knew what had been shipped. The President promised a pizza party for everyone if they shipped all the orders (usually between 200 and 350) on time. A simple chart was prepared, and “no’s” were recorded for fourteen days in a row. However, on the fifteenth day, a “yes” appeared, indicating shipping success!
Were All Orders Shipped on Time
The President should have been happy about this. He had to buy pizza when they succeeded. He didn’t mind that but he suspected something was wrong. He investigated and found out that the guy on the shipping dock had shipped 310 orders on time. One of the last few items was going to be 5 days late. So he made it 6 days late by shipping it on Monday. The President laughed because the employees had won. But he raised the bar, pizza only happened with 3 days in a row to get around the earlier problem. On the next Friday, they won again. He raised the bar to earn pizza to 5 days in a row and the employees got it after the 6th week. From that point forward they didn’t have a missed shipment for 8 months. This example drives home the main message of our measurement philosophy: Measure the problem. Measure it simply. Post it for all to see. In the example just cited, no one, including the president, expected a “yes” to appear for several months. After all, the problem had been around for years. The fact that the “yes’s” began on the fifteenth day was more than encouraging; it got everybody in the company excited that they could perform as a team to solve the problem. Everyone knew the goal of the company was to ship 100% of the orders on time. There was No Blame for failure but then again there were to be No Excuses. Measurement like the Yes/No Chart is critical to the Tribal Knowledge Paradigm.
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