Reading: Sheena Iyengar, “The Art of Choosing”

Sheena Iyengar, a Columbia Business School professor who lost her sight to a retinal disease in childhood and went on to become one of the foremost behavioural-science researchers in the United States, published The Art of Choosing in 2010. The book is, on its surface, a popular synthesis of three decades of her own and others’ research into how human beings make decisions — including the celebrated jam-shelf experiment, in which a tasting display of twenty-four jams produced ten times fewer purchases than a display of six. The book is more useful, however, as an extended argument for a discipline that operations practitioners ought to recognise: the discipline of redefining what counts as the choice in front of you, and noticing what you have been refusing to choose.

The Lean canon’s framing of waste — the eight wastes of Defects, Overproduction, Waiting, Not utilising talent, Transportation, Inventory excess, Motion waste, Excess processing, conventionally remembered by the acronym DOWNTIME — is, in practice, an exercise in seeing familiar processes with fresh eyes. The eyes have to be trained. Most operators have learned to ignore the wastes their daily work depends on, and the kaizen event is the first occasion on which they are asked to look at them deliberately. Iyengar’s book is full of examples of what changes when the looking is done.

The example the practice has borrowed most often:

> Every year, I tell my MBA students a near-legendary story about Roberto Goizueta, who was CEO of the Coca-Cola Corporation in the 1980s. When he was first appointed to the position, he discovered at a meeting with the senior vice presidents that the company management was celebrating: they owned forty-five per cent of the soft-drink market. They seemed quite pleased with themselves and had set a goal of increasing shareholder value by about five to ten per cent in the next few years. Goizueta thought they were playing it too safe, so he decided to challenge their notion of growth. He asked them, “How much liquid does any given individual consume in a day?” Then he said, “How many people are there in the world?” Finally, the most important question: “What percentage of the entire liquid market — not soft-drink market — do we have?” That number turned out to be a measly two per cent. > > By reframing the issue, Goizueta encouraged his colleagues to broaden their vision and think more creatively. They had been content with their modest view of the market and with the place Coca-Cola occupied within it; Goizueta showed them that the company’s current position was less secure than they believed, but the good news was that there were many more shares to be won. This led to a dramatic shift in the company’s mission, the results of which were awe-inspiring: in 1989, the total value of Coca-Cola stock was four-point-three billion dollars; by the time of Goizueta’s death in 1997, it had burgeoned to over one hundred and fifty-two billion.

The Goizueta question — what is the system you actually compete inside, rather than the one you have agreed to count yourself a leader of? — is the question every kaizen team has to answer in the first morning. The current-state map a team produces during current-state mapping is, in effect, a redrawing of the system boundary. Where the team has been making excess parts to absorb downstream variability, the boundary now includes the downstream variability. Where the team has been working around a piece of broken equipment, the boundary now includes the broken equipment as a deliberate choice. The wastes are not visible until the boundary is correctly drawn.

The book is also useful on the cost of forced choice. Iyengar’s research consistently shows that operators presented with too many simultaneous decisions, or with decisions they have no useful basis for making, will defer or refuse rather than risk a poor outcome. The Lean implication is direct: an operation that pushes decisions onto people who do not have the time, the information, or the authority to make them well will tend to accumulate exactly the kind of paralysis the discipline is meant to remove.

The book is not a Lean text. It is a book about choice. But it bears on the Lean practitioner’s first job — which is to see what has stopped being seen — more directly than most books that put Lean on the cover.

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