Great BA fallacies in action?

A colleague of mine recently attended a Kaizen workshop and remarked drily afterwards that perhaps Toyota is not the best example of success to quote for this approach. Toyota has methods and approaches such as Lean and Kaizen and Toyota was successful so the thinking had been "adopt these things and you will be as successful as Toyota." Now that Toyota is struggling, is the converse true?

The post I made "Great BA Fallacies #4 - Non-Sequiturs: it does not follow" proposes that until a causal relationship between these facts is established, then neither is true. These things may work or they may not. We need to define exactly and specifically and measurably what we mean by "work" and then analysis the cause and effects on these measures to see if these things do - in fact - work.

Trouble is the people promoting these approaches often make this logical mistake. And if they are respected people then we can make the logical mistake of believing them - Great BA Fallacies #1 argue from authority. They will also often quote anecdotal evidence such as "I have been involved in [insert a large but hopefully believable number here] projects and they were all brilliant so therefore this must be a good approach/method". Not until the causal link is proved objectively it ain't!

It is especially hard if these authorites use Great BA Fallacies #1 Proof By Verbosity to establish their case. Like I'm doing in this post... :-)

So really, it all comes back to this: use analysis skills, trust no-one, believe nothing - PROVE everything - in other words develop a BA'd attitude...And apply it to anyone who tries to tell you anything - and to this post...and to all methods and approaches that we see come and go in Business Analysis: just cos its fashionable doesn't make it good: Prove it!