The Paradigm Paradigm

by Don Harkey

I recently read an article (reference: RIP My Dear Saturn) by Mike Micklewright, a former engineer for Saturn in the mid-1980's. Mr. Micklewright was involved with Saturn from its early days as an attempt to split from the GE culture and learn from the likes of Edwards Deming and Toyota.

One of my favorite stories from the article (actually, there are 2 articles) concerns the design of the "repair lot" for the new Saturn facility in Tennessee. GE had laid off some of its employees and forced Saturn to hire them on. This mixed new culture with old and the impact was a paradigm shift back toward "old school". GE facilities had a repair lot that was used when cars came off the line needing repairs. The lots were (and probably still are) huge.

GE Engineers wanted to build a lot that would be plenty big to hold all of the cars that needed to be repaired. After all, why would you want to run out of space, right? Seems like it makes sense.

Saturn Engineers followed the Toyota model and didn't want to build a repair lot at all. The repair lot represented a failure in the process that needed to be immediately investigated and repaired.

The "compromise" was that they built a repair lot 1/2 the size of a normal GE facility. As the author pointed out, this was an absurd "lose/lose" compromise since the lot would not be big enough for the GE model and since the existence of the lot would all but kill the Saturn (Toyota) model.

The point of this story is simple. Paradigms are very real. I have heard people say that they had the word "paradigm". This is largely thanks to some past management movements where managers tell employees to "shift their paradigm". Organizational paradigms are often set at the top of the organization and most fiercely followed by management.

You cannot "shift" out of a paradigm. Everyone lives in a paradigm and every organization has one. Thinking outside of it is difficult, but it is critical for long term survival.