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14 The PCB Magazine • August 2015 tential solutions to these problems are not go- ing to be more of what is no longer working for you. While the quality programs of the past have brought us to this point in the evolution of our businesses, we clearly need more. In the war on failure, we must move beyond tradition- al thinking and problem-solving techniques to something new. Let's set the stage for what appears to be the root causes for our continuing struggles to cre- ate consistently great businesses and high-qual- ity products and services at ever lower cost. Everything is Systems Science has shown us that everything in the physical universe is made of systems and subsystems from the largest features such as clusters of galaxies to the smallest at the quan- tum level. All systems are connected and work synergistically. That is, until the human mind gets into the act, such as in the workplace. In the workplace, people, for the most part, create their own systems for doing the work, the vast majority of which are informal. People, includ- ing leaders and managers, simply do whatever they feel is best, many times sub-optimizing other processes and people down the line. This isn't bad or good. It's simply the way we've been domesticated to be in the workplace. Quality guru W. Edwards Deming told us that 94% of the results (quality or not) we ex- perience in the workplace are a function of the systems in which people work, not the efforts of people. How many leaders and managers are aware of this fact and, more importantly, how many leaders and managers lead and manage in a systems-based way? Not many! Instead, most leaders and managers look to people as the source of problems and solutions, with the thinking being: If we can get people to behave differently, we can solve problems and get better results. The problem with this thinking is that in most cases it's simply not true and therefore can't be optimized or made sustainable. Ein- stein reminds us that we can't solve our prob- lems with the same level of consciousness used to create them. We must expand our conscious- ness to include systems thinking. As leaders and managers, when we begin to think in systems, the entire world of work changes—dramatical- ly; we see things more as they are rather than how we believe them to be. We begin to see THE WAR oN FAILURE continues FeAture