“It’s not enough for engineers and leaders to simply know the right thing to do—they must also have the courage and conviction to do those right things. We excel where theory meets reality, as we instill not just knowledge, but the courage and conviction to apply that knowledge effectively.”
See Reality, Accept Reality, Deal with Reality
As a junior engineer, I was excited to take the full-week training program building and using reusable components. Not only was it refreshing to get a week out from behind the keyboard, but “reuse” was touted as the next big thing in tech. Reuse was going to solve all of our problems and bolster productivity 10x. I was excited!
The training was, in fact, energizing, interesting, and fun. Unfortunately, it wasn’t very sticky. The theory made great sense, but the application in our messy world was problematic. Organizationally, we only realized a fraction of productivity gains promised. Eventually the program went by the wayside only to be replaced by the best next thing. Sadly, this scenario repeated itself many times throughout my career.
There has got to be a better way!
At Exceptional Difference we focus on creating Cultures of Excellence by empowering engineers, teams, and leaders to address the problems that plague most systems engineering teams. Making commitments they can keep, building products that they’re proud that are of high quality, providing value to the stakeholder, managing technical debt so they can go faster, transferring knowledge more quickly to deal with the coming wisdom gap or the silver tsunami or whatever your organization calls it. I know that that sounds cliché, what consulting company isn’t doing that? But our company is in a space that I haven’t seen and that I think is unique in the industry. We focus on that space between theory and reality. I’ve been in this industry a very long time, 35 years now, and I have seen so many really good improvement efforts come and go. Six Sigma, TQM, capability maturity models, and Agile just to name a few. None of these had the impact they were touted to have. And what’s more interesting, when you look at them, they are generally based on a common set of principles. These are true engineering principles. Theory is always very clean and neat, but reality is messy and complicated. It’s not enough to know the right thing to do, you have to have the mindset to do it. For example, it’s easy to say eat right and exercise to lose weight but it’s a completely different challenge to actually do that.
In the system engineering world, we can teach an individual or a team how to build a very realistic, robust, high confidence engineering plan but if that plan goes counter to management’s expectations and you don’t know how to give management bad news, this skill goes unrealized. When you get into schedule pressure, the first things that get skipped are quality steps even though everyone knows it’s going to take more time in the long run. It takes a lot of courage and conviction to step up under that pressure to insist that those steps not be skipped. We have found that when you marry engineering judgement with data, you build conviction. Conviction is what it takes to have the courage to make changes. We believe that one engineer can change a team, and one team can change an organization. In fact, that’s the only way change happens
Real Clients, Real Results
Our focus is on working is working our clients to understand how to tailor those tried-and-true principles to their specific environments and then also provide the mentoring to build the conviction and confidence to stand up for those principles. Our clients are often surprised that courage and conviction are skills that get better with practice, just like estimation, design, or other engineering activities. The more you do them the better you get at it. The first time a team leader has to give bad news up the chain it’s terrifying but then the second time it’s easier and it gets easier from there on.
Next Steps
So, if you’re tired of not getting the results you expect, reach out to us. We would love to work with you to get tried and true principles into practice in your organization.
Contact us at info@exceptionaldifference.com or visit www.exceptionaldifference.com to learn more about these offerings and how we can help your team navigate the messy intersection of theory and reality.
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