Disruptive technology... or maybe disruptive questions?

I met an old friend for lunch yesterday and we got to talking about 'disruptive technologies' - the kinds of new gizmos and systems that really change the way we live our lives. I remember Charles Handy talking about this in his book 'The Age of Unreason' - although he did not call them disruptive technologies then. One of his ideas was how the invention of the chimney meant that you could have a house with more rooms - and so began the fragmentation of family life.

Of course when we think of disruptive technologies we are now more likely to think of the internet, MP3 players or indeed how my car ESP system helped me manage a skid on snow the other day without ending up in a ditch.

But I got to thinking about what might be disruptive questions? The sorts of questions that if asked of a way of working - might just change we the way we look at a service and encourage people to do things things differently - in a leaner way perhaps.

Over the years, I have been collecting a set of questions which I often present to people to help them redesign a process or a service. I say that they come with a guarantee: if you ask them seriously of any process or service and don't find at least one (or indeed two or three) ways of improving the service, I will eat my hat!

So here are the questions - which I offer as a means to help people reflect on their ways of working and come up with new ways of doing it (in no particular order):

 

• Have we agreed the stakeholder requirements?
• Are the providers involved adequately trained?
• Are there too many ‘handovers’?
• Is the process being done in the right order?
• Could it be made simpler with a ‘triage’ stage?
• Could we make better use of technology?
• Where are the sources of rework?
• Could some parts of the process be done at the same time?
• Could we get the users / clients / etc. to do more?
• Are there too many checks and controls?
• Could we get our partners or suppliers to take action?
• Could we create an expert system to make it work better?
• Is there a ‘standard’ way of carrying out the process?
• Could different people or agencies be providing the service (or part of it)?
• Have we made any cultural or professional assumptions that are getting in the way?
• Are the performance measures helping?
• Could we stop providing the service altogether?
• Are decision making protocols getting in the way?
• Does the process contribute to outcome goals?

I hope this proves useful to people. Please blog here with any results that you come up with.

One of my favourites was from a local authority that looked into its street light repairing process. They quickly realised that when they sent out an engineer to see if the street light was in fact not working (as had been reported by a member of the public) they were in fact assuming that the public probably lied. When they changed this assumption to 'the public are probably telling us the truth' - they saved themselves huge amount of resources by sending out the fixing engineer first.

Jon

http://jonharveyassociates.blogspot.com/