Aaron U. Bolin, Ph.D.

A deliveryman carrying a bouquet of flowers walks up and knocks on the door of a small home. When the lady of the house answers he says, "Are you the Widow Jones?" The lady says, "Well, my name's Jones, but I'm no widow." The deliveryman says, "Oh Yeah, just wait till you read the card!" Ba dum dum crash! As a business consultant, sometimes I feel like the guy delivering the flowers. I know the bad news (and the good) well before the intended recipient. And like the deliveryman, sometimes I have to repeat the bad news several times with ever decreasing levels of subtlety. I used to think the need for repetition was a communication issue -- perhaps I was unclear in my description of the root causes of the organization's problems. My views are evolving though. I'm starting to think that the inability to process information that threatens the status quo is a root cause of root causes. Chris Argyris (1985) covered the topic of defe...

I've been working on adapting our yellow belt curriculum for presentation via the web. The long-pole in the tent for this curriculum conversion is the process simulation. When I teach the class in-person, we always do a hands-on production simulation that the students "fix" over the course of several rounds. To replace the hands-on production simulation, I need to come up with about six hours worth of meaningful activities to simulate aspects of a process improvement project. The catch is that I have to be able to facilitate the activities with a large group of remote students. One idea I'm kicking around is to develop a standard work instruction for writing English sonnets. On the surface, writing a sonnet might seem difficult. However, most people can produce a sonnet in about 25 minutes when you break down the process into a series of steps. Notice that I didn't say most people could produce a good sonnet -- only that they could produce a sonnet that mee...