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20 The PCB Magazine • August 2015 THE WAR oN FAILURE continues FeAture emotional content or significant repetition in the emotional stresses within a group, we will find the systems transferring the most stress to the most people and thus, a good early candi- date for systems optimization. Usually with smaller groups, we will distill the data using different colored markers to des- ignate similar groupings. The group must make the choices of what category a given stress will fall into. With larger groups, a manageable size distillation team is formed out of the original large group to do the distillation process. Once the data has been categorized, the team will give each category a name. Now we're ready to move to the next tool, 80/20. Critical 20% Analysis Systems distillation is also highly reliable in identifying the critical 20% of the variables within a system upon which one must focus to receive 80% of the benefits of systems opti- mization. This tool is based in Pareto analysis, but with a few important twists. In addition to looking at systems optimization, we highly rec- ommend to leaders that 80/20 be run for each employee of the company from CEO to stock- room, around roles and responsibilities. Forget job descriptions. Everyone should have their own critical 20% and only work on that criti- cal 20%. Forget the trivial many. Only work on something if it is or becomes a part of the critical 20%. As a systems improve- ment facilitator, ask the group to choose only one category/ problem/system from the sys- tems distillation list, the one they most want to fix or opti- mize. Then ask the group for the second most important category, then the third, and so on, until all categories have been given a priority. Nor- mally, the categories ranked 1, 2, or possibly 3 will be the Critical 20%. This ranking is then taken to leadership to make a decision where to start in doing systems opti- mization. In general, we want to choose something that comes early in the overall process and isn't so big that people can't experience success in less than 90 days, with initial victories in 2–4 weeks. If a system is still too large to get a 90-day handle on, run disrup- tive discovery, systems distillation and 80/20 again or until you have broken the larger sys- tem into manageable subsystems. Don't try to do too much. It's much better to have a smaller but meaningful victory for the team than risk disillusionment working on something too big for too long without seeing measurable results. Avoid the Problem-Solving Trap As a facilitator, there is one trap with the group that must be avoided at all costs—prob- lem solving too soon. It is guaranteed that members of the group will want to jump into solving problems prior to having everything on the wall. If the group is allowed to jump to prob- lem solving too soon, the systems improvement team will degenerate into a committee meeting and systems improvement will grind to a halt. Do not let the team get into problem solving before all the data has been put on the wall and the root causes of systems problems identified. Taking Right Action Rapid progress is achieved through Right Action. Right Actions are small actions taken on