My podcast with , on the mental model of business expertise, is up: share.transistor.fm/s/c74c0ee9
We talk about the triad mental model, about cognitive agility, and about the cognitive science behind her training programs for accelerating business expertise.
Conversation
There are a few things that I wished we'd covered in more detail. One big thing is the bit in the middle where we talk about her training intervention with the Midwest Foundry.
I got unreasonably excited. But it might not be clear why.
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Back in the 70s and 80s, there was real fear that the Japanese had discovered some insurmountable competitive advantage. Western thinkers obsessively studied lean manufacturing. Hundreds of books were written about the Toyota Production System.
But it just didn't take.
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Certain management theorists came up with the notion of 'organisational tacit knowledge' to explain it.
That is, knowledge that cannot be explicated, that is captured at the organisational level.
Certainly TPS seemed quite tacit. It was well known but hard to copy.
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Perhaps the most famous example was the NUMMI plant. GM couldn't get TPS to work. So they did a deal with Toyota to take over one of their plants, just to see the system up close.
The plant they gave to Toyota had 'the worst workforce in the industry'.
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Toyota made it work. Two years after plant closure, NUMMI reopened and immediately started producing at Japanese levels. Same output rates, and same error rate.
More thinkers studied this and concluded 'omg organisational tacit knowledge'.
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This is the context in which DiBello created her Strategic Rehearsals. It is the subtext to our discussion.
The idea behind the Strategic Rehearsal is to run two 1-day simulations of a pretend manufacturing line, conducted under time pressure.
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Under time pressure, workers will default to their default mental models. They will fail to hit profitability targets, production targets, scrap rates, and inventory levels targets that are set at the start of the exercise.
This provokes a state of 'disequilibrium'.
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Disequilibrium is a Piagetian term. It simply means 'they lose faith in their mental models'.
The next day, they come back, willing to rethink their approach.
This allows them to work out, from first principles, a production system that is basically lean manufacturing.
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This is DiBello's contribution to the literature on the cognitive science of work.
One of the earliest interventions where she and her co-researchers were still developing this technique may be found at wtri.com/wp-content/upl
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Anyway, I got unreasonably excited by the story of the Midwest Foundry because of the effectiveness of the intervention.
(I sent this to a friend in manufacturing, and he got unreasonably excited as well).
It's VERY hard to get lean manufacturing to work.
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I've mostly talked about DiBello's work on extracting a mental model of business, but she's actually more well known on the cognitive science of accelerated expertise. Here's another example of her training, this time for Rio Tinto:
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And we talk quite a bit about that in our podcast episode together.
Enjoy!
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