Neuro-Bollocks or Neuro-Fact? Leaders often inhibit performance, improvement & profit.

"Humanity will benefit from a basic understanding of psychology and neuroscience."
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That is to say, in any education, service or manufacturing organisation, there's a ton of stuff to be known about the brains behind the minds behind the culture, behind the organisational culture behind the strategy
... and...
the brains behind the minds behind the successful deployment of that strategy (Top-floor to Shop-floor communication, co-operation, alignment and relations)
...and...
​the brains behind the minds behind the policy and process changes required to realise that strategy... for improved margin, profit and ROI.

​It's a big system of systems! No wonder people run projects that focus on Profit from Process improvement and hope the rest will sort itself out!

Isn't it a shame the Process-Profit mindset only delivers a fraction of the benefits available from a broader view... and we systematically ignore that broader view!

E.g. Kotter and Heskett's study - Corporate Culture and Performance - A study of 207 US companies in 22 industries over 11 years, is largely unknown in business, but it found the following;

You'd think a 2X ROI would grab investor attention ... but it doesn't.

One of the problems is that these numbers (1000's of % multiples) are dismissed as impossible. This is an excellent example of denial, the 1st step in our defence mechanisms. I'll touch on the reasons why a lack of neural network is the cause of such reactions in a minute.

Another problem is that if you ask anyone for a comprehensive description of 'Culture' or 'Change', if you get a response at all, what you hear won't get anywhere near the 'Root-Cause' of the imprinted beliefs behind thinking, feeling and ultimately, re-actions, actions and behaviours. Or, if those imprinted beliefs are working to our detriment, what the change process (neurogenesis) looks like. At best, the conversation goes along the road of values and other proxy terms that fail to provide any direction or need for specific actions.

We are our brain.  We are our culture.

So why do we react like this to facts that would be of immense benefit if we opened ourselves up to new possibilities? Why do we stand in our way? Why do we sit in a board room and allow our pre-conceived assumptions about the world and other people filter the facts?

(See my other article in which I consider the story of Ignaz Semmelweis and how long it took for the medical world to acknowledge 'Child Bed Fever' https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/word-mightier-than-process-david-bovis/  ).

Our brain is designed to keep us alive (survive in our surroundings). Any social or physical change to our surroundings ... new processes, targets, consultants etc. (especially those imposed upon us) will automatically be assessed by the brain in terms of the process / consultant being a threat to our survival.

It's just what we're designed to do, we all do it automatically... we function based on WIIFM (What's In It For Me), but sometimes, if we don't have the right neural network established around a new subject (we don't have the language in our heads), we're unable to determine the benefit and our perceptions of 'WIIFM' are out of date.

We're all human and all susceptible to these machinations of our brain... if we want to admit it or not ... in fact, failing to admit it (denying we need to understand more than we currently do) is one of the brain functions that catch us out and inhibit our personal progress - ironic huh!

It applies to everything. Your brain will be assessing this article in terms of the degree to which it may pose a threat.  If my words are not a direct match, supporting your already established beliefs (i.e. brain wiring and firing patterns) and for some reason your brain interprets what I'm writing as 'wrong' (bad - because it's a threat), the little voice in your head will be starting sentences with dismissive phrases like,

"Yeah, but ..."

This use of language allow you to move 'away from' my take on the world and justify your own. (Make me wrong). We all do this ALL of the time, unless we're already 'open to' (are psychologically pre-disposed to 'go toward') the 'New' thing in our world.

It's just how we humans roll!

Because our brains are always functioning on auto-pilot like this, it stands to reason that a change to  operational results in business, require a change in the thinking and emotional [fear based] reactions to sub-conscious perceptions of threat, which all so often underpin our performance at work.

For change agents and leaders this means establishing trust comes a long way ahead of any change to process and procedure... without trust, we can easily become the threat people respond negatively to. The same applies to KPI's and target driven behaviours that conflict through value streams (e.g. Quality / yield and procurement cost-down).

And there's the rub ...
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The support most organisations need (top-floor to shop-floor) is not process focused, it's thinking and feeling focused! (i.e. Understanding Brain and mind responses to, let's say ... strategy deployment methods, employed as a result of leadership beliefs (what god looks like) and intentions (purpose)).

It's impossible to ignore the human factors that influence the functional / transactional activities within a business, but that's exactly what we do.
We promote project management frameworks (People-Process-Technology) in pursuit of Performance and Profit, but fail to understand the People piece in enough detail. i.e. the Belief - Behaviour part of the cycle.

We people are complex, so we ignore our own complexity and treat those who end up as employees like another item in the cost column of an excel sheet. We're the most highly advanced form of intelligence on the planet and yet, in the majority of organisations we don't even feature in the asset register or as cost reducing innovators ... we're just seen as part of the wage bill ... a cost ... often, a cost to be reduced!

Did you know, when George Elton Mayo, the renowned industrial psychologist behind TWI and the Hawthorne Effect, first used the term HR, he was focused on the psychological development of Human Relations in the workplace. The market, in it's ignorance, changed that term to Human Resources! A great example in support of my claim...

"Culture pivots on language"

or, to be more accurate, pivots on the neural wiring and firing patterns through which we think, contextualise, express and ingest through the brain processing mechanisms we colloquially refer to as 'language'.

PROCESS

We can't escape the fact process improvement tools only deliver time and fiscal benefit when they enable people (brains) to relate to each other and understand action requirements in context. In lean terms, this can be as simple as, where to put something, when to pick it up, what to do with it and who to pass it on to.

As Taiichi Ohno said in the 1973 TPS manual, we must "Protect our people's precious energy". 

With that belief established as part of a deeper / wider philosophy, the tools were designed to do just that.. maximise the benefit to people out of respect for their humanity.

The very practical, tangible result was a rapid solution to the cash crisis Toyota faced in the mid 40's.
The lesson available to us was this, 'Honour people, respect people, develop people, because people are your company, people carry out and improve process and how you treat and relate to people becomes your culture'.

In the East, this was an accepted approach as the prevailing culture was informed by Shinto. We don't speak 'Shinto' in the west, (didn't have the language register required to understand the deeper aspects of people in relation to performance, E.g. Oyobun - Koban relationships, Tatame, Honne within relationships etc.)... so we ignored it.

Today, we can fill the void this has left in our understanding for the last 40+ years with  scientific language that is acceptable in the west ... that is the language of neuroscience and psychology.

In the absence of a scientific (western) explanation, we focused on the cost-down, cash-flow and tools (effect) and ignored the philosophy and thinking that led to the relations required to get people working effectively together (cause). 

When we consider, primary, secondary and tertiary 'purpose' we discover financial benefit is way down the list. People come first in Lean thinking. Financial targets are understood to be an outcome, not a driver. The enabler of that outcome (financial performance) is people and how they think, feel, react and act.

Leaders and Investors take note: Driving by the numbers often has a negative emotional effect on the people who can attain those numbers for you, your employees!

Question: What if your imprinted beliefs and how they cause you  to relate to your 'C' suite & board members, are the primary cause of your portfolio underperforming? Now THAT's an interesting question! (Even if I do say so myself) :-) 

MAKING MAGIC TOGETHER

The training of process improvement tools is analogous to a magicians slight of hand. What the magician is really doing when he performs his trick to the audience, is to understand how to by-pass the cognitive skills of the mind. 

Whether he uses a handkerchief, deck of cards or white dove is irrelevant (they are just the tools of the trade). Wielding the tool is not the point, dealing with the human minds at work is the real purpose of the activity.

The tools used to improve manufacturing processes help the mind avoid the mistakes it is prone to, e.g. bias, habitual reaction, false memory, cognitive processing errors, blame etc.

Just as the magician comes to learn it is 'How' he uses the tools to deal with the cognitive capabilities of the people around him, so must those leading change understand, it is 'How' you approach the audience that will either increase or reduce the barriers toward change in peoples minds... and this will determine to what extent the change is adopted and sustained over time.

A bad apple can spoil the barrel

If you're in a senior position in a business and display emotionally immature behaviours (aggression, self-righteousness, blame, arrogance etc.) you will probably see yourself as the driver of change. The reality is, if you don't kill the change initiative completely you will significantly slow it down! Why? Because provoking fear based responses is part of what most talk about in loose terms as 'resistance to change'. 

Any such emotional response will slow the persons rate of adaption (for neuro-chemical and psychological reasons to do with Brain Derived Neurotrophic factor and Neurogenesis), subsequently increasing time-lines. 

Where 'Time is Money', any slowing to the rate of adaption = increased costs

So if your primary 'Team Role' is shaper (in Belbin terms), you might have to take a second look at the real effect you're having!

Deep alignment of minds around some deep philosophical tenets (Like 'Protecting our peoples precious energy'), is what made the difference when Ohno led Toyota. The reality is, in a fast paced world obsessed with forecast targets and performance against them, these deeper issues are rarely addressed in the board-rooms of western organisations.

In the absence of such deep alignment (about what good looks like), the conflicts (internal politics) which result, often pull change initiatives and companies off-course... 

Despite this, the culturally approved starting point is with cost reduction projects realised by changes on the shop-floor. Usually while board members are sending mixed messages, pulling in different directions, assuming their communications are effective and expecting SLT members to perform irrespective of the current challenges they've been handed, whether they match their personalty type and skill set or not.

In the immortal words of Homer, "Doh!"

The tools (of Lean for example) are not truly understood, until they are seen in the context of 'Support to help human brains avoid the mistakes their design necessitates'... once you do understand this, the tools become less relevant, as they are seen as a means to an end, not the end in itself.

But just like parents at Christmas, leaders of business and change don't buy magic lessons, they buy the tangible box of tricks and further subscribe to the culture of 'what', ignoring the importance of 'how' & 'why'.

Without a working knowledge of psychology (mind) and neuroscience (brain) built into the standard approach to leadership (& Lean) development, we fail to ask the right questions. In the absence of questions about 'People', we fail to consider all the issues we face and systematically fail to understand what it takes to create a CI culture.

We fail to consider the 'transition' people have to make (brain change / neurogenesis) to adjust and adapt to the new processes they are expected to adopt and design (CI / Lean / Agile / OpEx / IT) ... and, with this systematic disconnect firmly established between brain and behaviour from top-floor to shop-floor, we wonder why we have a sustainability issue surrounding the world of process change and organisational performance improvement.

If you think of Emotional response in people (brains) as 80% of effective change (How to do magic) and Tangible process change (swapping the dove for a hanky - Tools), you can see the sustainable issue is there because we only deal with 20% of the components of change.

We fail to recognise the purpose is to understand human brains and do all we can, to stop them tripping over themselves.

No change in brain = No change in reaction / action (toward process and tech)
+ve change in brain = +ve change in reaction / action (toward process and tech)
-ve change in brain = -ve change in reaction / action (toward process and tech)

It's how people react to process and technology that will determine the benefit they get from it, not the process and technology itself.

Provoke people to react negatively to the new process or technology and they will (consciously or subconsciously) find ways to make it 'wrong', avoid using it, or undermine it, until it goes away or can be ignored with no recompense.

It's just how we're wired, but we fail to consider 'sustainability' in terms of neurological adaption and psychological defence mechanisms, preferring to talk about headlines like 'Resistance to change', which are no more than proxy terms for the Human Factors we ignore.

I’ve been banging this drum for almost two decades. During that time, i've discovered this:
Language is the barrier!

To get over the language barrier, we have to 'simplify' (Dumb down).
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Example: A simplified training story about brain stuff might go like this ...

A Marathon runner will set their own goal, to run 26.2 miles in as short a time as possible. Training for the big day, they regularly increase the distance they are able to cover. Their brain chemicals give them a reward for their success, in the form of a positive emotion.
They feel 'good' as a result of the chemical (Dopamine) being active in certain parts of their brain. After the race, many runners experience a week or two of what they can only describe as depression, a feeling of being lost and unmotivated. This is the emotional experience provoked by a reduction in dopamine. They suddenly have no goal, no sense of progress and achievement and therefore, no release of feel good chemicals. No Goal, no sense of progress = no trigger to release dopamine. It's the the absence of dopamine by comparison to the presence of dopamine that makes them feel down.
Goal setting in business can take many lessons from this analogy. e.g. People will work hard towards goals they want to achieve themselves, but leaders need to encourage a new goal, just before the existing goal is reached, to avoid issues of demotivation. Right?

WRONG!
This is the trouble with 'dumbing down'. Some aspects of what we've just proposed are right, but there are multiple other factors to consider psychologically. The psychological safety of the team, the maturity of the team, the self concept of the individuals within the team .. all of this will determine who can thrive in chaos and who needs boundaries ... Leaders must be able to 'Relate' (Know their people) if they are to be able to create the conditions in which those people can co-operate and perform at their best.

A one size fits all, ill-informed approach to policy and procedure is just plain lazy. It is not good leadership and it reduces the performance of organisations.

Proposing to design processes and systems from half-baked information like the Marathon example, has huge potential to lead to poor process design and thus, poor performance. No wonder the suggestion that leaders have to know more about brains and minds quickly got labelled as 'Neurobollocks' and dismissed as irrelevant. It's too complex and requires to much effort to understand enough about it to make a positive difference to approach .. so for those brains out there already doing OK in the world, it's easier to do what they are programmed to do and tolerate the results from 'managing change' rather than pursuing the much bigger results of 'managing culture change' already dismissed as irrelevant.

Just like Lean, Six Sigma and all the other 'Fads' (and their spin-offs) that we've endured over the last few decades, in the wrong hands, these 'tools' provide no more benefit than any other box of tricks that leaders don't know how to use.

We all had a magic set one Christmas didn't we? It didn't make us magicians! 

That said, not knowing anything about brains and minds at all, has a much higher rate of realising poor process design and poor human performance.
So when I say "Humanity will benefit from a 'BASIC' understanding of neuroscience and psychology" ... We have to be careful how the word 'basic' is interpreted.

Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
If it actually was Einstein who said this, I suspect he was warning us against 'KISS'.
It turns out, 'Keepin' It Simple', can keep us Stupid!

It's for these reasons we need to introduce new language. The Dopaminergic Mesolimbic Pathway (DMP) is a good example. Other basic aspects might be the science of agonist / antagonist opiate based neuro-receptors and how they link to the principles of goal setting. Scary long words with no context or meaning ... yet!

Being open to such new language requires those you’re teaching do not respond from a psychologically defensive position when first introduced to it.

For brains designed to react like that, this is a big ask! Any ‘new’ stimuli, even a few new words, are automatically interpreted by the brain as a threat until proven otherwise.

Example: You may have already experienced a negative emotional response to the words 'Dopaminergic Mesolimbic Pathway'. Your inner voice may already be saying, 'Never heard of it', ' what can this have to do with change', or, 'I'll never remember medical names like that!'

If you can recognise that you've just had these or similar thoughts, you've just become aware of your defence mechanisms at work and the negative language you employ to defend yourself from excessive neural glucose consumption.

Now ponder on it. That's what is known as 'Thinking about your thinking' (or Meta cognition). If your brain is wired like this, to reject anything new before you've had a chance to consciously consider integrating new knowledge into your existing world view, what are the chances you will be able to make any change to your brain, and thus, your reactions and actions?

FACT: This kind of sub-conscious defence is going on in all people (brains) about all things all of the time.

Raising and dropping defences can happen in milliseconds of course, but, even if it's quick, as far as our brain is concerned, anything it hasn't experienced before is guilty until proven innocent.

What this means, is any new sensory stimulus coming into our brain through our body (eyes, ears, nose, mouth, skin) has to be matched to an existing neural pattern in our brain that has been previously qualified as 'No threat'.
It's much more complex than that, involving action potentials, cytoplasm, CREB (a transcription factor [master protein]) and Calcium de-polarising to enable connectivity from cell surface to nucleus, but that is going too deep with the detailed mechanics of synaptic wiring and firing.

For the purposes of change in business, we can stop at the Hebbian Law level and say "What wires together, fires together."... so long as we understand the chemical / emotional aspects which link to that principle.

At that level, we have to understand any negative emotional responses in employees, toward change agents, will put the employee brains in a place where the new tools and methods introduced by the change agents are automatically associated to an existing wiring pattern (the change agent as a threat) and opposed.

The links the brain can make to 'oppose' know no bounds, if your mum used to bang pans in the kitchen sink when she was angry and the consultant drops his briefcase loudly on the table when you weren't' expecting it, that can be enough to establish a negative emotional response. Our defence mechanisms are far from rational!

When people do react 'emotionally' the first line of defence, in psychological terms, is Denial ... e.g.
"I don't need to know anything about brains to run a business!"
"Lean principles don't apply, our business is different" 
"Not even Toyota could keep a plant open in Australia, so Lean must be crap" etc.

Each one of these statements is a fantastic demonstration of primacy, recency, confirmation and other biases that allows our brain to filter out relevant information and ignore it. This serves to let the brain hold onto it's current world view, confirming it, and ourselves, as right, as we construct our reality in the moment.

This is glucose efficient. But that's another part of the puzzle we don't have to go into here.

Provoking a positive emotional response to something new is next to impossible given the way we're constructed to defend against it.

Like any magic act or sales activity, you slowly introduce the audience to the new language while engaging interest by selling the benefits of knowing it or paying attention to it.

Interest in something new, has to be relative to the recipients own scope of interest / self-interest / self-concept and previously imprinted world view. e.g. Values = bigger profits for leaders in business, cost down for local authorities etc. … which i'm sure we'd all agree are capitalist greed based drivers, but, if you don't hook brains on what they are already wired to process (what they believe to be true / good), you're just another threat.

The same principles apply to those on the shop-floor expected to change their behaviour. This is why consultants sell 'tools' with Language that appeals to the company owner / BoD. e.g. Waste elimination = capacity / efficiency = lower cost = high profit against more sales. 

In may respects, it's unfortunate that you have to go to where people are at in their heads (Emotional Gemba) if you want to engage their interest. I say that, because it means you have to promise to solve their problems, remove their pain or provide something they already determine to be 'Good' or of 'Value' (i.e. perceived by their brain to be of Benefit - WIIFM - What's In It For me).

That doesn't leave much room for any interest in anything new... and particularly, no room for any interest in anything perceived as complex that isn't immediately understood as an accelerator of benefits.

If people can't see there's a connection between the response in brains (their own and others) and the bottom line, they won't give a fig for it. It's as simple as that.

In today’s market / culture, few in leadership positions (and the often related financial and emotional comfort zones such a position provides), have the time or interest to go through the required learning curve and adopt a new language register about the brains involved in the changes they want in their business.

This perpetuates conditions in which ignorance can flourish (A lack of Socratic reflection / Hansei) and this situation see's leaders from all walks of life making a pigs ear of change and strategy deployment.

Setting strategy is one thing. Deploying it successfully such that it addresses the social belief (brain & mind) and operational issues (tools & flow principles, belief in value streams etc.) in concert, is another thing all together.
Getting deployment wrong becomes a major block (socially, culturally, psychologically and neurologically) to change and continuous improvement, but it's how we're currently educated to run organisations.

The rational mind we educate for, lacks the humanity to which humans will respond positively.

What people don’t want to learn, is how blame, denial etc. are part of their own defence mechanisms (projection), or how this links to deeply imprinted issues of self-worth … or how this can or can’t be changed, given evidence surrounding neurogenesis (Gould et al) and long term potentiation studies.

This kind of language is alien to most ... there is no neural net established, so there is little chance of such language being comprehended and even less chance it will appeal to people as something they need in their lives (in other words, the HTM (Hierarchical temporal memory) & Sparse Networks at play in their brains, cannot ascribe meaning from the sensory stimulus being received).

There is no hunger for knowledge around the direction of sensory stimulus via the thalamus or directly to the amygdala, or what that looks like in terms of ‘behaviour’ / combined behaviour (& ultimately culture), such that leaders understand what socio-technical conditions they might aim to create, to reduce the release of stressor hormones [cortisol] on a chronic basis (as is typical in an environment promoting control through imposed process and procedure – a la Seligman / learned helplessness).

That’s just a little language to show how to scratch the surface of the kind of things leaders would do well to consider in terms of applied neuroscience & psychology at work … other examples might be, the DMP triggering production of seratonin in the substantia nigra and the knock on benefits higher seratonin levels can offer in terms of cognition, motivation and performance … or the depletion of BDNF when cortisol levels are up (i.e. stressed people adapt more slowly at a neurological level ... and slow change cost's more over longer periods - Brain knowledge = Consciously Creating conditions in which people can perform a their best = Improved Profit).
Example:

• A chemical balance is required in the adult mammalian brain to maximise glucose energy availability to the pre-frontal cortex [PFC] (to power executive function - rational thinking).
• The socio-technical environment (culture / leadership principles) will compliment or contaminate this process.
• Contamination from leadership behaviours (poor policy deployment, confusion over roles and responsibilities, no authority to act, lack of choice etc.) will lead to higher levels of cortisol (stressor hormone), depleting BDNF and diverting glucose energy away from the PFC.
• With glucose energy diverted to emotional responses rather than executive function (rational / logical thinking activities) mistakes on the shop-floor increase.
• Quality problems lead to increased cost, lower or negative margins, reputation damage and falling sales.

This kind of systems thinking and systems psychology reminds me of the old war poem, 'For want of a horseshoe nail, the Kingdom was lost'?

It turns out it's essential for leaders to know about brains if they're to get their strategy deployment methods right. Rather than Tools-Strategy-Culture being addresed over 10-15 years in that order, it turns out we need to detail culture in terms of brain and mind, then use that to deploy strategy effectively in pursuit of a High Performance Culture (purposefully), then use the tools to realise the strategic intent ... rather than PUSHING tools on people, we have to lean in ways that creates a PULL for the solutions that achieve the goal.

We need to sweat the small stuff. Just like Lean and my ol' man (who was ex-army) used to say, "take care of the edges and the rest will take care of itself".

i.e. Take care of the detail and the big problems disappear (Who remembers the Elephant Eating Analogy?).

Understand brains and you can understand organisational performance.

That's another way to say your Quality, Cost Delivery problems are your problems. Leaders can't just set strategy and expect it to happen (chucking responsibility for their own effect on others, over the wall). Strategy deployment has to enable those who add the value at the coal face to perform. Coal face performance is a brain issue.

E.g. Stress can occur when leaders set unrealistic timeframes for performance improvements. This happens when leaders have no idea what rate of change (in terms of neural adaption) is practically possible, or how nuanced it can be in response to their own behaviours, attitude, assumptions and expectations. i.e. whilst sensory stimulus is reinforced daily by the same socio-technical and physical environment … In such circumstances, just how fast can people [brains] adapt? That's another really good question!

What is visual management actually doing in respect to the mechanics behind the visual cortex?
What impact does the psychology of a common and shared language have on performance [in terms of effective transferred meaning in context of daily activity, as understood in terms of hierarchical temporal memory].
How can such shared language maximise the effectiveness of Hoshin Kanri as a Strategic deployment model …(that BSC / EFQM etc. fail to do by their very design)... e.g. taking financial targets away and replacing them with value stream time-lines that all can associate to.

When we start to answer these kind of 'People [brain] related' questions and demonstrate the direct link to leadership, strategy deployment and bottom line benefits, we see that the world of Neuroscience offers much more Neuro-Fact and much less Neuro-bollocks!

Knowledge around this subject is incredibly valuable and directly connects to every aspect of running an organisation, school or country … the trouble is, in the absence of the language, we’re reduced to dumbing it down to try and get people engaged with over-simplified models (because people won’t expend the neural glucose energy required to re-map their current brain structure to learn the kind of language used above) …

The next issue is, once simple models are in the market, others see them & try to make money from half-baked knowledge (Duning-Kruger effect). They get good at marketing and before you know it, we have news headlines claiming all sorts of miracles with no substance. People think they can perfom magic just because they've got their hands on the box of tricks!

Sheesh! Viva la capitalist democratic Keynesian economic world view of rapid growth over any semblance of virtue and wisdom …

In that sense, it’s the current culture which encourages superficial promotion of half-baked facts to make money, in turn, creating a barrier to the new language which could help improve conditions for all of humanity.

Currently, if something new can't be understood by the recipient in terms of EBITDA, PBT, ROCE etc., (even though it can improve all of these metrics and more), it is quickly dismissed (denial) as not worth knowing about.
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If only it weren’t such a threat to the current status quo … triggering a defence based response toward the subject, perhaps leaders would be more interested in how to leverage the kind of performance improvements Kotter and Heskett identified ... 

... and would be prepared to look at themselves (their own brains and defence mechanisms) rather than going through the logical motions they've been imprinted to determine as 'good', while continuing to project blame onto others.

Unfortunately, most people in the world of business just aren't ready for this yet.

Those already doing well, see a need to know more as a threat, and use their defence mechanisms, (like blame & projection) to come up with names like 'Neuro-bollocks'.

That immediately maps to neural maps in the brains of people hearing it as 'nothing to take any notice of' and automatically disqualifies the need for change in what is known.

In such 'thinking' conditions, all the humanitarian issues that Yoji Akao built into Hoshin Kanri and Ohno built into the tools, continue to undermine operational performance ad infinitum... and the people blame the tools, blame strategy, blame culture ... but do nothing to understand how to remove blame to improve culture, deploy strategy and implement tools so they are embedded and sustained.

This is a travesty. The right knowledge about brains and minds can help leaders understand the science behind the humanity built into the Japanese culture, allowing them to understand 'How' to improve organisational performance in similar ways as Ohno and Cho have been able to at Toyota.

If we change the lens we look through (from logic / rational, to emotional), it's obvious that leaders can inadvertently become the barrier to the change they want to see in their organisations. It doesn't have to be like this, but changing it requires we expand our threshold of knowledge surrounding culture, strategy and tools.
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If you've been around the block for long enough to know there's something missing from the current approach and you're eager to find out what you can do differently (and your defence mechanisms haven't given you an aversion to this fascinating new area of discovery), why not pop along to the Masterclass i'm running with Emiel Van Est in June and learn what it really takes to create a Continuous Improvement Culture. https://leanleadership.eu/how-to-develop-a-lean-culture-two-day-masterclass/