Overcoming the “Institutionalized Excuse”

May 11, 2021 | by Keith Yeater

“We can’t get the parts we need because the supplier has a COVID outbreak.” Or, “We can’t machine the parts because the print isn’t right.”

As business leaders, how many times have you heard “causes” like these and simply accepted them and moved to the next issue? I know in my 30-plus years in business, I have both given and accepted these types of causes to explain away an underperforming condition. Yet, it’s important to know that if you are not careful, you will allow excuses like these to become “institutionalized,” which will prevent you from digging into the real organizational issues and solving them.

Recently, I was talking with a prospective client who was struggling to see the improvements expected from their daily management system. They had followed all the standard templates and management structures, but they simply were not seeing the improvement that was expected. When we reviewed their pareto chart focused on productivity misses, it became apparent that most of the causes for the misses were “No Gauge”. Conventional thinking would suggest that we need to fix the “No Gauge” condition, and all will be well.

As CBS launched with the client to work on this issue, it quickly became apparent that the organization had been conditioned to use “No Gauge” as a get out of jail free card.  By using some very simple probing, the team was able to quickly differentiate when no gauge was the legitimate cause and when it was the convenient excuse. By taking control of the institutionalized excuse, the team was able to focus some of its resources on fixing the other issues that had been going unidentified. The result of this additional probing was a daily management system that provided the organization the expected results.

What is the point of all this? Too often in our busy day-to-day schedules, we allow ourselves and our teams to become complacent with the often-convenient institutionalized excuse. I would encourage everyone to be on the lookout for this in your organizations and start to probe into the validity of the reasons. You might be surprised at how quickly you can reveal the real causes of your performance misses.

CBS is a team of experts who help organizations identify and fix problems of all complexities. If you think a tune-up of your system would be valuable, consider giving us a call.