Episode 50 - The War on Waste Paradox - Chapter 7 - Audio Book

A Consortium of Problem Solvers Podcast of Len Bertain's Audio Books

Teams are integral to the success of No Blame Management enterprises. The problem with most efforts using teams to create value in a company is that personnel who are not familiar with the work objectives of the teams are assigned to head up these efforts. Perhaps the key to the success of any team, whether it is a work team or a sports team, is that the team has a crystal clear common cause. You may call it a goal or a team goal but when we are talking about team I like to use “common cause” because it means that everyone on the team is buying into the objective. In a baseball game, the common cause is to score more runs than the other team. The same is true for basketball, soccer, and track. However, when we work with business teams, the common cause is to determine the measures of how the team will know it has won. The team needs to know how it will create more value. Production teams have a goal of producing more product profitably; programming teams need to get their services delivered in a way to maximize the value-added deliverable.

But in the War on Waste, the common cause is defining and solving a waste that keeps value from being created. In every War on Waste project, each team is looking for $100,000 of annual waste that can be fixed for less than $2,000. That is a significant common cause.
Best, Len Bertain