The Andon Cord

It’s been a busy week with workshops and talks, so this week we’re revisiting the Andon Cord. Probably my favourite real-world psychological safety practice, the Andon Cord is a brilliant approach to quality improvement. A fundamental part of the whole Lean concept, and an aspect of Jidoka and Kaizen, the Andon Cord empowers people to highlight problems, defects, or simply opportunities for improvement, as early in the process as possible. 

The Andon Cord is, fundamentally, psychological safety in practice. The person who is pulling the cord is taking an interpersonal risk: they’re interrupting other people doing their work, they’re asking for help, maybe they’re admitting a mistake or pointing out someone else’s. And the core aim of the Andon Cord is improvement – we’re not just pulling the cord to point out a problem, we’re doing it so that we can make something better.

Nearly all of the teams we work with adopt the Andon Cord as a practice in one way or another. Often it’s simply a way to establish a shared language; a way to prefix speaking up in such a way that implicitly states that speaking up is a good thing, and is encouraged and rewarded by the group. With our clients, I’ve seen CEOs send emails saying “I’m pulling the Andon Cord”, and I’ve seen midwives use the term “pulling the Andon Cord” when describing an intervention in a handoff (though they’re obviously rather careful to be clear about which “cord” they’re pulling!). Other teams go a step further and implement physical or technological Andon Cords, such as rubber chickens or Slackbots. 

There are underlying cultural and attitudinal foundations required for the Andon Cord to work effectively, and it requires consistent attention and effort to ensure that the practice persists over time, but it remains, to me, one of the most effective and ubiquitous psychological safety practices.Read the full Andon Cord article from September 2022 here.

Further reading:

The Andon Cord
Deming’s 14 Points of Management
Amplifying weak signals
The Theory of Constraints

Psychological Safety in Practice

Some Russell Group academics ‘treat administrators like scum’

This paper by Jess Pilgrim-Brown explores the tensions between administrators in Russell Group institutions and their academic counterparts. The findings mirror what we find in many of our workshops with academic institutions, where relationships between professional services and academic staff oscillate “between being professional and supportive, and being directly harmful”. The paper concludes that professional services staff often face demeaning, fraught and sometimes derogatory relationships with academics. In our work, we find that non-academic staff are often referred to by their grade or level, rather than their name, even when they are present in the room. Read more in the open access paper here.

The Mother of the House

I love Elizabeth Day’s “How to Fail” podcast, and this episode featuring Dianne Abbott is worth a listen:

“If I was a white man I would be allowed mistakes, but I have never been allowed a mistake… I anticipate that I’m going to get a very unpleasant response if I make a mistake and I try my best not to make any mistakes but sometimes you do slip up.”

Working From Home Is Powering Productivity

Working from home increased tenfold following the outbreak of the pandemic and has settled in at about five times its pre-pandemic level. It has benefitted many people, particularly people with disabilities, and women, who typically shoulder a greater share of the childcare burden than men. This article by Nicholas Bloom at the IMF describes how as well as making work more inclusive and accessible, the huge power of this increased labour market inclusion means that the aggregate macro impact of working from home is likely to be positive.