Executives who will decide are taken to see the problem where it happens, on the plant floor or in the call center, so their judgment rests on what they saw.
An example
For two budget cycles the director of warehouse operations at a third-party logistics company had asked for a dock-scheduling system, and both times the chief financial officer had cut it as a nice-to-have. This year she asked the chief financial officer and the chief operating officer to spend one morning at the company's largest distribution center, starting at 5 a.m., when the trucks arrived. They watched twenty-three trucks queue in the yard while dock doors stood empty because the paper schedule was wrong, heard a dispatcher on the phone with an angry retailer, and saw the detention charges posted on the break-room board. She said very little. On the drive back the chief financial officer asked what the detention charges came to for the year. The system was in that cycle's budget.
Why it works
Seeing the problem makes the status quo look worse in a way a slide cannot. Deciders who watched the queue and heard the phone call carry that picture into the budget meeting, and it outweighs a summary line. The fix looks better too, because the need is no longer the sponsor's claim. The conditions: the problem is visible on an ordinary day, the deciders actually come, and the sponsor lets the scene speak and has numbers ready for the questions it raises.
The thinking behind it
John P. Kotter Kotter and Dan Cohen's The Heart of Change: Real-Life Stories of How People Change Their Organizations (2002) argues that people change behavior more readily when shown something that makes them feel the problem than when given analysis alone; their best-known example is a pile of gloves, each tagged with its price, on a boardroom table. A 5 a.m. visit to a jammed truck yard brings the deciders to the problem instead of bringing the problem to them, with the same effect.
When it fits
Right for a problem that is real, recurring, and visible or audible: a queue, a backlog, a broken handoff. It suits deciders who are far from the work and a proposal that keeps losing on paper. You need the standing to invite senior people and a day when the problem shows up without staging. If the visit turns into a tour, it fails.
How to use it well
Pick a time when the problem is at its normal worst, the morning rush or the month-end close, and keep the visit short.
- Invite the people who will decide, in person; deputies will not carry the picture back.
- Let them see the work and hear from the people who live with it, unscripted.
- Say little during the visit, and answer questions with facts.
- Have the cost of the problem ready, since the first question afterward is usually how much.
Follow up within days with the proposal, tied to what they saw.
What it costs and where it backfires
It costs you a favor from busy executives and carries some risk: if the floor has a good day, the visit can confirm the view that the problem is overstated. Staff may resent being put on show. Show an ordinary day. Picking a freak bad one, arranging a breakdown, or coaching staff to complain turns a site visit into theater, and one honest conversation with a supervisor afterward will expose it.
When it is used on you
Go yourself, at another time, if a rival takes your decision-makers to see a problem, and judge whether the scene was typical. Ask for the data behind it across several months. Agree that the problem is real where it is, and argue the remedy on its merits, since the choice of fix is still open.