What to do if PDCA stops working?
Change the system level to the higher one or, the lower one. Let’s bog down into the details.
I am passing exams now for a Spanish driving license. And at one moment, I realized that the current PDCA cycle no longer works. I look at the data (my error sheet), and I don’t know what should I change in my driving habits and what skills should I train to score the passing grade. The data is not consistent anymore. Earlier iterations of exam simulation surfaced deficiencies I had, and I followed those data to make and implement decisions on changing my driving style. Still, the last couple of simulations gave me nothing. A mistake here and there, but nothing that can be tied to the predefined list of skills that one must obtain to pass the test successfully. I could do as many cycles as I wished, but the plan apparently doesn’t work anymore; its PDCA cycle is broken.
Obtaining a driving license here can be lengthy and costly, and my project, as any other project, has its constraints. So I went for a bicycle ride, but this time I did not go in the mountains or the beautiful fields; I took the “dirección centro.” That is absolutely wonderful that you can ride a bike here on the streets. They are remarkably safe for bicyclists and pedestrians, nothing compared to the streets of Moscow. I hung them in the early morning, looking at road signs, lanes, and youngsters, returning from the night party, crossing the streets wherever they wished, and imagining I was driving a car. And at some point, the insight came to me. I was driving a bit too fast in the car to navigate the city streets properly. When I ride a bike, it’s natural to follow all the rules, with its speed somewhere 15–20 km. So, I thought the speed limit of 30 is for drivers who already know the city very well, and they can drive that fast and still follow them, but to pass an exam, you need to go a bit under the limit, not a bit over the limit, how my instructor taught me.
Do you see what has changed here in this consideration? A system level. Passing an exam requires thinking not about a vehicle’s behavior but about the traffic flow you are in. You are a part of some train — other cars, trucks, bikes, and motorcycles around you. And road signs apply to all of them, so their maneuvers should be coordinated, and that requires following the rules, even the ones that look excessive, like very smooth acceleration, breaking, overpassing, “Yield a way” without stopping, and things like this. A car does not provide you the transportation capability, and a vehicle is an element of more extensive capability — city, national, and European transportation capabilities. And on each level, architectural aspects change; for example, achieving the EU road safety goals on the higher system levels requires many restrictions and additional rules to be applied on the level of a single car.
My PDCA cycle stopped working because I was improving the wrong process on the wrong system level. It required fixing, of course, but that’s not enough. Every driver is a trained operator who contributes to the overall safety of the transportation system, which I enjoy so much. Following the strict rules during an exam becomes certification guidelines for safety-critical system operators. And PDCA starts working again because you see your car driving process through another perspective. And it ultimately makes another line of questioning the data from the exam simulations. Not what did I do wrong when driving a car? Because there will be many things that will not make any sense. But “What did I do wrong for a traffic train I was part of?” And that question makes much more sense.
