A man goes to a doctor and says, “Doctor, it hurts when I raise my arm like this, what should I do?” the Doctor says, “Don’t raise your arm like that.”
I first heard the Henny Youngman joke from my first boss in Mexico, Joe Garcia, the general manager of a manufacturing plant. I went into his office needing help on a problem. He responded by telling me that joke. I chuckled but missed the point and didn’t bother to ask what it had to do with my problem.
From then on each time I brought up a problem his response was: “If your arm hurts don’t raise it.” I would just shrug, ignore it, and keep talking about what was on my mind.
It wasn’t until a year later when I was in charge of a plant of my own. Each time that a line wasn’t producing as it should I would tell the industrial engineers the problem was that they hadn’t designed the production line properly. They argued that it was not the case; production had gone well during the pilot run. After they turned the line over to the supervisor, output went down. The problem according to them was simply that there weren’t qualified supervisors to be found in our city; supervisors who could run production lines successfully on their own.
We went through that discussing a couple more times. Each time the answer was the same—we didn’t have qualified supervisors. (I didn’t agree with that, by the way.)
Then one day the engineers were explaining each part of their drawing of the floor plan for a new product line. After they went through the process of how the units would be assembled, I pointed to a rectangle on the right hand corner of the drawing.
“What’s this?” I asked.
“It’s the supervisor’s desk.” they replied.
That’s when the light turned on. That’s when I understood what Joe meant by the joke he had told me long ago. I reminded them that for months they had argued that there were no capable supervisors in the city. If that were the case why did they design a line that included something that they had insisted didn’t exist—a supervisor.
I then suggested that if they truly believed there were no supervisors available they should design a line that didn’t require one. As in “if your arm hurts don’t raise it.”; “If there are no supervisors, design a line that doesn’t require one.”
The Henny Youngman joke always struck me as funny, but it took the situation with our production lines to make me understand its profound meaning. I have used the concept on many problems after that. If you don’t want anyone going through a door, seal it. If a culture rejects conflict, create a system that functions without it. If something doesn’t work don’t keep struggling with it—do something different, “don’t raise your arm like that.”
— Mike Grunsten