Recently I had the opportunity to meet one of the European gurus of neuroscience applied to Business Management. We discussed how decisions are being taken in organizations, and quickly agreed that in spite of tons of data, analytics tools and smart reporting availability, a big chunk of the decision process is ultimately driven by our subconscious part of our brains.
Based on experience, mainly within operations and supply chain, most of the managers recognize some kind of fragility in their organizations’ decision- making process Symptoms are clear as both behavior (firefighting, blaming, and excusing) and KPIs (stock outs, expediting, overtime, stock levels). But managers do not know how to fully and truly overcome them.
There is nothing new in saying that operations and supply chain professionals’ conscious needs are to reduce costs while improving their response time. But it is interesting to underline that their subconscious needs, those that will bring true professional satisfaction when fulfilled, are to acquire deep business understanding and achieve effective control of their decision impacts. Having those, they would be ready to make decisions, manage trade-offs, optimize, achieve goals, or whatever successful expression of their choice. True satisfaction comes when they can achieve that performance by themselves.
Interestingly they do not believe this is possible - or at least that it is easy to achieve. Actually most of our engagements were preceded by sentences like “we have too many problems”, “it is too complex”, or simply “my company is just different”. All of those operations and supply chain professionals thought their problem complexities made them unique. But that’s not really the case. We have made this journey with many companies that have similar problems.
We help companies to run robust trade-off management, switching organizations from firefighting to knowledge based decision making. This is how you truly satisfy both the company’s goals and those of the operations or supply chain professional. "Optimization cannot last being a goal, but being a consequence of your business knowledge, process robustness, and organizational readiness".
