Issue link: https://industrialengineer.epubxp.com/i/826827
June 2017 | ISE Magazine 29 position, the ability to incent things), coercive (threats or actu- al punishment), expert (being perceived as having important knowledge or skill) and referent (power of one's personality, charisma and who we know). Often, ISEs are required to persuade and drive change without any base of power. Therefore, we need other ways to persuade. Many times, young professionals are in situations where they need to persuade people much more senior, much more experienced and with much more perceived power. Prior to a recent webinar on the art and science of persua- sion held by the Columbus/Eastern Ohio Chapter of IISE and the Council on Industrial and Systems Engineering, we surveyed a sample of participants on how important they felt persuasion skills were to career success and results. Figure 1 portrays the results. The responders clearly think persuasion skills and brand are important but that their skill level and current performance levels tend to be lower. The responses to the "quality of cur- rent brand" are somewhat bimodal. That might be attributable to the stage of their careers. This survey shows how learning the art and science of persuasion is important for ISEs. The issue, opportunity, problem Many process improvement or innovation projects fail. Some fail totally; some fall short of the end game; some don't capture the whole "size of the prize." What are the key controllable factors that cause ISE improvement and innovation projects to fail, and what can you do about those failure modes? The focus is on things that you could do that you don't do and things that you should avoid that you often don't. Like FMEA (failure mode effect analysis), here are the failure modes, here's why they occur and here are some countermea- sures you can take to mitigate the adverse impacts. William T. Morris first wrote about the three-ball prob- lem associated with implementation strategies for industrial engineering in the late 1970s. Morris was an outstanding ISE professor who studied improvement project implementation success rates and, more specifically, failure modes (factors caus- ing unacceptably high failure rates of ISE type projects). He concluded that failure often happened because ISEs lacked the skill in juggling what he called the three balls associated with a successful implementation: 1. Solve the focal problem (capture the opportunity and crack the code on how to improve the process) 2. Program and project management (create a strategy and plan for the work, assemble the right people and resources and successfully manage the program and projects over time) 3. Change leadership and management (create a shared vision, gain alignment and attunement and get the right people in the right seats doing the right things) Simply put, he found that effective implementation equals the quality of the solution multiplied by the acceptance of the solution. We use this three-ball metaphor to describe how you can become more effective at the art and science of persuasion. It is a critical component to advancing your career. The three balls are: 1. Manage your brand. 2. Develop your believability index. FIGURE 1 The importance of persuasion Survey respondents clearly think that the importance of persuasion skills and brand outweigh their current performance levels.