Knowledge Jolt with Jack

Personal effectiveness learns from many areas

2012-05-25T02:39:02Z

I just listened to Joe Dager's Business 901 podcast with Dan Markovitz of TimeBack Management on Individual Lean, the Root Cause of Success? and found myself nodding my head and smiling at many of the familiar themes I have taken with my interest in the topic of personal effectiveness.

The short form: Start with what you know. If it works in your organization, then it could work in other parts of your life. More broadly, if it helps you be more effective in one area, why wouldn't it help in other areas of your life? The concepts should translate between areas.

If you are a Lean organization, take those principles and apply them to what you are doing in your individual workspace or at home. If you do Kanban with your work group, look for ways to apply at home or out on the shop floor. If you are a Getting Things Done aficionado, how can you use those concepts to your team or organization? If knowledge management is important to you, how can the ideas of KM work at the individual level?

The examples discussed in the podcast were familiar areas for me. Information overload is a classic: rather than merely dealing with the effects of overload by being more conscious about when you consume, think about the underlying reasons behind the overload:

too much email! Why do I get so much email in the first place?
Not enough time to read everything! Why do I have so much to read? Why do I believe I need to read everything?
Too much to do! Why do I have so many balls in the air?

One thing that catches in my mind is that I am not seeing as much writing about the "personal" aspects of Theory of Constraints. TOC does apply. There are tools within TOC that work for the individual - in particular the Thinking Tools can be used in many situations. Specifically, the idea of Evaporating Clouds or Conflict Clouds can apply anywhere - and many examples used in the books and training are from personal life. And there is the TOC Odyssey Program that is designed around applying the TOC Thinking Tools to personal life.

As a cautionary example, the podcast discussion also talked about the difference between translating the idea versus the application of the idea. Don't follow this example:

9 years ago today

2012-05-19T01:41:20Z

I started this blog nine years ago on 18 May. And I am still going. And I still enjoy it!

Of course, I write less frequently, but that is because life interferes and I don't have a regular rhythm to the blogging any more.

[Photo: "Nine" by Xurble]

Day 2 and 3 of #LSSC12 - lots to learn

2012-05-17T04:08:38Z

Tuesday and Wednesday at the Lean Software & Systems Conference found me full of interesting thinking and ideas. Almost too full. I have been happy to run into and chat with people that I have known through their blogs or other online interactions. And a few people who I've met in person previously. The tweet stream for the conference went crazy. Oh, and the organization is changing names to Lean Systems Society (announced Monday). Some topics from the day...

Communication. Throughout the whole conference, I heard many people talking about using Kanban and visualization in particular as mechanisms to help open up communication. This is one of the big elements of knowledge work - you can't change it until you can see it. And several people talked about taking the this communication to the next level: change the system, based on the feedback you get from the visualization.

But the visualization is just a representation of the system - not the real thing - as Jim Benson (and others) would remind us. The visualization does a great job of externalizing the pain. But then we have the responsibility of doing something about it: talk about what we see; change the visualization to better represent reality; change the system to reduce the amount of pain. Go. Try. Do. Learn.

Learning. Many of the talks at the conference talked about learning loops and continuous improvement. I was surprised at how many had versions of the improvement loop. I particularly liked that many of them talked about elements where learning occurs. Try something and observe the effects and change based on those observations is a form of single-loop learning. But if you go back and change the model on which you are basing your experiments, then you are doing some double-loop learning. Don Reinertsen warned that there are several different kinds of these loops. Some are focused on speed with OODA as the parent model. Others focus on different elements and get different types of results.

Benjamin Mitchell used the topic of "what comes after visualization" to start a conversation of what to do once you've got some visualization. He particularly talked about Chris Argyris' Ladder of Inference (and expanded by Peter Senge), which he used as a way of thinking about how we see things and how we interact with our colleagues and coaching / consulting clients. He particularly warned about staying away from making assumptions and working at the levels of Select and Describe (rather than Explain, Evaluate, Propose Actions). Since Argyris is one of the promoters of double-loop learning, it is not surprising that Benjamin discussed the Mindset -> Actions -> Results learning loop. I liked the discussion of taking different actions to get results vs changing one's mindset because the Actions aren't getting anywhere like where they need to go.

Jeff Patton had a talk about the myths and other misconceptions that seems to appear in Kanban projects. He was also very proud to have finished his talk on time. He had a top 10, but the highlights seemed to be: Value is hypothetical (in the eye of the beholder); Learning cycles validate hypotheses; Think beyond the edges of the Kanban board. The last item sticks in my craw. The work that happens on Kanban doesn't exist in a vacuum. There are the feeding streams; the coordinating teams; and the processes to whom we handoff our work. They all need help too.

Claudio Perrone described a journey he has gone through with an organization doing Kanban with some interesting stories. One element that was the focus of the talk was that of using A3 Thinking to help solidify descriptions of problems and how the group was going about resolving them. Along with the A3-sized templates, he also seemed to be showing 3x5 cards with quick summaries of the changes to highlight incremental improvements they made to the (Kanban) system over time. I also liked his comment that simply filling out a template (that you get from someone else) is not thinking. Develop what makes sense and move. He closed with a great sentiment - that "Lean is a strategy for reaching objectives through the development of people." and gave us a nice Chinese proverb:

If you want one year of prosperity, grow seeds.
If you want ten years of prosperity, grow trees.
If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people.

Yochai Benkler (Harvard Law and a bunch of other associations) opened up the day on Wednesday with a great overview of The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest. His book has been on my reading list for a while, and it has now been bumped upwards - along with several others this week. The discussion of cooperation was based in a lot of research, but the general idea is that research appears to be swinging in a direction that suggests there are elements of self-interest and elements of cooperation built into the way we work. Which behaviors you get depend on a lot of things (nature, nurture, context). But if you work from a basis of "people are selfish" you tend to design a system that rewards individual behavior and punishes deviation. If you work from a basis that people are cooperative and want to help, then you design systems that have different elements (for example: unlimited vacation policies at Netflix and other organizations).

Don Reinertsen spoke about centralized and decentralized control models and how decentralized control could work with examples take from wildfire containment and the US Marine Corps and some anecdotes. Both of these examples focus on fast reaction situations, but I think there were lessons in his talk that extend beyond that context. He described the doctrine that guides these groups, and that sounded a lot like core principles that might apply anywhere. I particularly liked the communication idea that lateral communication is critical to organizations: we need to know what our colleagues are doing and we learn that best by hearing directly from them - not by getting it passed up and down the chain of command. I also liked the reminder that "firefighting" is NOT exemplified by people running around in a chaotic fashion. The underlying situation may be "chaotic" but the responders have to be as level-headed and methodical as possible. I suspect most organizations envisions headless chickens when they think of "fire fighting."

Yuval Yeret asked a version of the question, "Why aren't we doing retrospectives?" This was a good pairing with Karl Scotland and Larry Maccherone's talk on Kanban Metrics. One answer might be that we aren't looking at the right things in retrospectives - taking a scattershot view. Another view might be that we are letting the metrics drive the conversations, rather than the goals (objectives). Both Yeret and Scotland / Maccherone referred to the Golden Circle idea of Simon Sinek - start with the Why and work outwards. Scotland / Maccherone talked about the ODIM model: measurements, insights, decisions, objectives.

And lots of great conversations over coffee, food, couches, and in hallways. I was sorry not to get to do a lightning talk, but I know to craft a better title next time. And maybe there will be some Lean Coffee in Boston to continue these conversations.

Gregory Howell on commitment and collaboration at #LSSC12

2012-05-16T16:57:39Z

Real collaboration happens when we agree to move money across borders.

Tuesday opened with a fun, story-filled keynote from Gregory Howell of the Lean Construction Institute. I think most of the audience could have listened to him for another hour.

He started out with an interesting claim: that standard project management creates a "commitment free zone." That got my attention. His claim is that the way we organize and plan for projects removes all responsibility for completing the project from the people doing the work within the project - people only agree to their piece of the work, rather than committing to do whatever it takes to complete the project. In this model the project is a web of tasks. The alternative is to come together and figure out what we should do, can do, and will do. The project becomes a network of commitments. This is a very interesting idea for me and has many connections to my work in project management. Requires a good think.

The money quote from this discussion was, "Real collaboration happens when we agree to move money across boundaries." This is in the context of transferring budgeted money from one bucket to another - a huge source of pain and pride in many organizations.

He gave an interesting train of a discussion along these lines:

Greg (to Jane): Can that three-week task get done any faster?
Jane: No, it's impossible.
Greg: Are you sure there is no padding in that estimate?
Jane: No, I never pad my estimates.
Greg (trying another tack): Oh okay then. Is there anything that John could do to help you complete your task faster?
Jane: Oh, absolutely. He could do X and Y, and the task would be done in half the time.
Greg: Great.
Jane: umm.
Greg: Go ask him!
John: Oh, right.

Later...
Greg (to Jane): It's great that we've gotten this commitment from John.
Jane: Yes.
So, what are you going to do differently in handing your work off to Dave?
Jane: Oh, the same as always.
[insert uncomfortable laughter here] It continues.

Many of the talks at LSSC referenced learning loops, and Howell's included something along these lines too. He talked about a loop that looks like Observe -> Actions -> Results. Looping back from results to new actions is one learning loop. And looping back to observations creates a bigger learning loop: what am I seeing? What is the model in which I am framing my actions?

A perfect example of this is the iteration loop. That's the whole point of these learning loops, particularly in the context of this conference. Howell gave some examples from construction where they were able to achieve collaboration and then began iterating on how they did the work. They progressively shortened the time to delivery, changed how they organized the work, and improved the bottom line for everyone.

Another loop that Howell used is from Hal Macomber, called The "Physics" of Coordination which is a large loop of Request-Promise cycles. A request is made and negotiation entered to achieve some kind of commitment. From there the work is done and we declare "complete." But it isn't really done until the customer agrees and declares their satisfaction. It It is embedded in the Macomber / Howell slideshare presentation Five Big Ideas Reshaping Project Delivery (slide 12).

Howell had an interesting discussion of contingency - the extra time that gets put into project tasks and into the project overall to protect from variation and other problems. There are at least two kinds. One is pure waste and is described in the dialog above. Padding added uniformly to all tasks that ends up creating impossible-to-achieve projects from the traditional view. It also generates the behavior of management assuming you have padded your numbers and arbitrarily cutting when the schedules and budgets come to them. This type of contingency is pure waste, and the discussion around commitment and collaboration strives to remove it.

The other type of contingency is needed to protect the overall project and should be managed in a much more strategic way. Howell argues that contingency needs to be strategically allocated to places where it matters most. In his examples, there are times where it is okay for idle time if it protects the overall project. In Critical Chain Project Management, that is the buffer at the end of the project and feeding buffers on feeding branches and use that to manage unknown variability throughout the course of the project. Howell suggests that is sometimes more helpful to explicitly put the contingency where it is most expected to be needed.

Howell's talk also started a day of reference to other written material that I will want to track down and peruse. The collaboration idea is one of Five Big Ideas Reshaping Project Delivery (slideshare) that he wrote with Hal Macomber. I suspect a bunch of the ideas about commitment are in an article he wrote with Lauri Koskela 10 years ago for the Project Management Institute entitled, The underlying theory of project management is obsolete (pdf). Howell also mentioned that there is some interesting data and ideas in Power to the Edge: Command and Control in the Information Age by Hayes and Alberts - and it's currently available for free on Kindle.

Drinking from the firehose - Day 1 at #LSSC12

2012-05-15T22:03:35Z

Man, what a firehose of stuff I heard on Monday. (And it's already the end of Tuesday as I write this entry.) Here are some highlights, beyond the Steven Spear keynote I've already written up.

David Anderson is in the midst of updating Kanban for a second revision. He gave a talk that updates the 15th chapter on getting started with Kanban implementations. One of the key elements of the update has to do with the Core Principles of Kanban - he's adding a sixth element to explicitly say, Implement feedback mechanisms.

Bill Fox talked about his interview series, where he has asked business leaders their best improvement strategies. He talks about this on 5 Minutes to Process Improvement Success. His five lessons from these interviews were:

Ask great questions … and really listen
Fix what matters to the business
Visual, flexible, adaptable systems
Keep it simple. Incremental changes
Measurement, feedback and continuous improvements

Kanban outside of IT. Several people have talked about using Kanban in places that aren't software development. I even done projects with companies that make physical goods and a repair shop. Nigel Dalton spread the idea all over the teams within Lonely Planet. He had several great examples from these implementations. One of the best pieces of this was that the CEO could now stop by a wall and decide whether he could drop a new project on a team, based on their workload. He also proposed the idea that maybe a card shouldn't be really "done" until the need that generated the work is closed. The specific example was: the work isn't done until money changes hands.

Portfolio Kanban? There are a group of people within the Kanban community who are looking at how to use the ideas of Kanban at the portfolio level. We met Monday night after hours to see if we had any common thinking behind the problem. I heard a couple of potential directions. One had to do with coordinating Kanbans where the work of one group feeds another or eventually integrates up to another level. Another variety of portfolio has to do with a step into project management and to enable visualization of the work within in projects. The results of the discussion was that it would be taken out to the KanbanDev mailing list.

[Photo: "Firehose" by ZeroOne]

Steven J Spear keynote at #LSSC12

2012-05-14T19:24:28Z

Steven J Spear was the opening keynote speaker at the Lean Software & Systems Conference. He is a well-known part of the larger Lean community and has a new book out, called The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition. Interesting to see OpEx in the subtitle.

The big message I got out of his talk is that the idea of competitive advantage - or greatness of a company - has nothing to do with the specific tools, technologies and techniques. It has to do with the ability of an organization to learn from what they see. This means they need to have the ability and opportunity to See Problems, Solve Problems, and Share Learning. Leadership's role within the organization needs to make space, make "not knowing" the answer be okay.

Spear used an example from the history of the US Navy's nuclear propulsion program and Admiral Rickover's leadership style. He was the kind of person to admit that he didn't know. He'd raise his hand to ask "dumb" questions. And it was never clear whether he really didn't know, or if he knew there were people in the room who didn't know, and they were too afraid to ask. This behavior encouraged them to (eventually) start asking those questions too.

Along with this example was the description of the "typical meeting," where everyone pretends to know what the speaker is saying, and no one admits to not having the answer or being surprised. When this happens, there is no opportunity to ask the dumb question - or to learn something.

Attending LSSC 12 in Boston

2012-05-14T09:55:54Z

I will be staying in Boston (home) this week for the Lean Software & Systems Conference (LSSC). It looks like it will be a great even with many Kanban practitioners and some great thinkers around the ideas of Lean and Kanban and beyond.

If you happen to be there, I'd love to meet.

A Factory of One Webinar

2012-04-30T13:58:08Z

The Gemba Academy hosted a webinar with Dan Markovitz of TimeBack Management around the topic of his new book, A Factory of One. The book is about applying lean principles to your worklife (and personal) performance. It is particularly relevant for knowledge workers and dovetails nicely with my interests in personal knowledge management and personal effectiveness.

The recorded webinar is available for free until mid-May at Gemba Academy: A Factory of One:

Most people spend all their time applying lean tools to external processes and systems. But what about the fundamental machine of production: you? How can you reap the benefits from applying lean concepts to your own work?

Indeed, you can apply lean principles and tools such as visual management, flow, pull, 5S, and kaizen to your individual work to improve efficiency, reduce waste, and link yourself ever more closely to customer value. While it's true that applying lean at the individual level won't lead to an overnight revolution in organizational performance, it can lead to success stories that make you more effective, and can get your leadership to sit up and pay attention.

Dan Markovitz will share specific strategies from his new book, A Factory of One, that will help you use lean principles to make yourself and your teams more effective.

We will record this webinar and make it available to all registered attendees within 2 business days. The recorded webinar will also be available to all subscribers to the Gemba Academy Complete Lean Package.

The discussion during the webinar sounded very familiar. Take the Lean principles that people apply to organizations and look at your work. (But bon't be LAME and try to 5S your desk.) Make sure that your work makes sense and that you aren't wasting your time - or the time of your colleagues - through misguided policies and practices. Use the tools available to you to improve your situation.

I loved that he said you don't need to ask for permission to improve your own work and practices. Of course, as your improvement ideas expand beyond your direct sphere of control, you need to have conversations with people about how your work together can change to help one another.

I also enjoyed this quote from Phil Libin of Evernote,

We always try to ask whether a particular policy exists because it is a default piece of corporate stupidity that everyone expects you to have, or does it actually help you accomplish something?

I've already added the book to my queue.

Do people really waste time?

2012-04-27T17:12:00Z

I received a PR email with a link to the "Wasting Time at Work" infographic below. The analysis is along the lines of most of these entertaining infographics. Unfortunately, the whole idea of wasted time is so 20th Century. Knowledge workers don't need to be bothered with time entry and their managers hanging over their shoulder (or monitoring them virtually) to see if they are wasting time. Knowledge workers need to know what is expected of them and be trusted that they can do it. There are tools like Kanban to help them manage their work and uncover breakages in the flow.

The other aspect is that the financial numbers, like those included in the graphic, make the assumption that everyone is contributing to the bottom line all the time - that they should be "always busy." This is the kind of thinking that gives you people rushing to finish a project, only to see the results sit because they weren't needed. Or one group killing themselves to wrap up a task, only to find the next group busy with a different "high priority" activity. Should a firefighter be busy fighting fires all the time? Do you want to live in a world where firefighters need to prioritize which fire they put out?

People naturally see across artificial borders

2012-04-23T18:52:37Z

Rawn Shah has (another good) article on his Forbes.com blog, this time on How To Move Away from the Industrial Age Company Model. While he is focused on social business, his comments remind me of things I see in knowledge management and continuous improvement projects.

If Social Business is really transforming the way we do business why are most of the stories and cases out there focused on changes to a single business function like marketing, human resources, or customer service? Shouldn't it act as a change across several of these functions, or for that matter will these functions go away or change so fundamentally that we can no longer tell them apart?

The larger issue that Rawn is talking about here is the model of companies as several interacting components in the traditional value-chain model. Among other things, this model works the same way it has for all of the 20th century: optimize the individual components and you will optimize the whole. Of course, this assumption wasn't exactly true before, and it is becoming less true as the nature of companies change. (You can optimize one part of a chain and end up creating worse performance of the overall system.)

But what does this have to do with social business? It is the nature of social business activities to see more - see more of the business, the people, the customers. If you go this direction, you cannot help but see what is happening with your colleagues and customers outside the formal scope of your role. The barriers are all artificial - invisible to the people on the ground. And if you have the natural inclination to participate or you cannot see the "barriers" (because roles and positions aren't pushed in social business), then it is likely that you will want to jump into the mix. Have enough people working in this way, and they will naturally discover interesting work that no one would predict from looking at their official job descriptions. Similar discussions show up in knowledge management circles. Social business opens up this world. Are businesses ready for it?

I see connections to my process consulting work. Opening up a constraint in one location can cause it to move to another location. "Optimizing" an area that supports a key function might actually damage the key function. Examples: 1) Fire the paralegals (because they are an "expense"), forcing the lawyers do pick up the slack. Result: Fewer clients served - less income. 2) Getting a "deal" on raw materials from a new supplier, saving a few pennies. But the supplier is unreliable, forcing downtime and stock-outs. Or the materials aren't as high quality, causing more rework, reducing capacity - less income.

Continuous improvement efforts are systemic views by their very nature. Companies that go "all in" on continuous improvement find that the improvement efforts must look at all parts of the business. If operations improves to the point of being able to supply anything that sales throws at it, then the obvious opportunity is to synchronize sales and operations, so that the whole can grow together. Just as with Rawn's discussion of the impact of social business, organizations need to have the ability to look where ever they need to serve the customer. And that doesn't fit the standard reductionist (industrial) model.

[Photo: "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts (1 + 1 = 3)" by Mubina H]

What does a feed reader need today?

2012-04-19T03:29:25Z

A reader of my blog asked me to update my thoughts on what I'd like to see in a news reader today. I've taken several days of thinking about the topic and reflecting on my current reading habits (and desires) to put this least of desired features and capabilities together. Feel free to write your own thoughts or comment on what you would see as being valuable. Below the list, I think some more about the nature of blogging now vs. the mid-2000's.

First requirement: It has to work and work consistently. We've been spoiled in the modern era with mobile apps that seem to just work, and I want that of everything else I use on my devices.
Navigation. Easy navigation within the application. Google Reader and Feedly use a similar set of keyboard shortcuts on computers. My fingers have gotten very comfortable with these keystrokes, and several of them match the GMail keystrokes as well. (Mobile navigation has a different set of conventions, but it should be easy there too.)
Offline capability. Make it easy to read both online and offline. (Yes, people are still disconnected from time to time. It would be nice to have EASY ways to dip into my backlog.)
Save for later. Develop an easy way to mark articles for later reading that archives the article and related media (graphics, videos, etc). Maybe a connection to Instapaper or Evernote that I could sync with mobile devices?
Blogging and sharing. Make it easy to take the current post and write about it on my blog or one of the social media platforms. Along with the link to the piece, I often need to grab a quote to stick into my comments, if the platform accommodate such a thing.
Importance of post. I think this is difficult due to the nature of blog posts and the way people read them. The idea is to give some clue as to how much other people have said about a given blog post. How many comments? How many other bloggers have written about it? How many times has it been mentioned and discussed on Twitter / Google+ / Facebook / etc. etc? Provide links to the mentions.
Threading. An extension of the above: Beyond giving me links to individual mentions, display the thread of conversation associated with a given blog post. Show me a set of references to / from this blog post in some kind of threading structure. Show me how this particular article fits into the conversation that spawns across blogs, articles, and social media. I've talked about this before in the context of blogs that reference one another. I assume this becomes much harder now that social media carry a lot of the referral traffic. And places like Google+ make it far easier to have a conversation than most blog comment sections.
Cross platform (maybe). Feedly is nice in that it uses the same subscriptions to make blogs available on any browser and on mobile apps.
Basics. There are a lot of basics that don't rate much of a mention: easy (un)subscribe; import / export; sorting / categorizing; read individual blogs or categories of blogs; river-of-news or reading-pane style; ...

I have gone through many news readers (aggregators) over my years of reading blogs (since ~2002). This has been greatly facilitated by the news readers making it easy to import and export my feed lists. (I recall not bothering with readers that didn't allow me to export my reading list.) But in the last few years, my behavior around blog reading has changed. For one, I am fairly happy with Feedly, which sits on top of my Google Reader subscriptions. Google Reader also allows other reader apps to use the subscription data and maintain the same status and organization across all the readers. This is nice because I can read on Google Reader or in Feedly or Flipboard or any other interface that can consume the same sources. Feedly sits in the browser on Windows or MacOS, and I can use it on my smartphone (iOS and Android), so long as I am connected to the 'net.

Another reason that my blog reading habits have changed is that people are not blogging nearly as much as they used to do. (Me too for that matter.) There doesn't seem to be as much interaction across blogs, which used to be part of the fun for me in my reading and writing. People are writing in many more places and in different forms. The news reader format isn't the appropriate way to deal with these. Specifically, I think of blog posts as being longer and more reflective than Twitter, and as such I give them more prominence and time, even if I am just scanning. (Interestingly, many of the social services publish as RSS - it's just that today's aggregators aren't the right way to consume.) We are using Twitter for short notes and quick reading. People are playing with Pinterest and finding friends with Facebook. A few bloggers have shifted a lot of their long-form writing to Google+. People are also using various social tools as replacements for their aggregators. If it shows up on Twitter, and I notice it, then it might just be worthwhile for me to investigate. Attention is divided, and news readers can't (or haven't) keep up with all of the options.

I have written on the topic before, but it has been several years. I wrote up an extensive list of features back in 2005, Ideal feed reader features. And there was Waiting for Aggie in 2004 and Smartening the Aggregator in 2006. And in the end of 2006, I had a discussion of information overload as connected to news readers, Feed overload and your tools.

Be conscious

2012-04-18T15:42:31Z

Soren Gordhamer has an article at Mashable on How to Stay Focused in a World of Distractions:

In our connected world, it is easy to think that the more information we have the better our chances of success. While more information can be helpful for, say, logical problem-solving, it is often useless when it comes to innovation. It's not how a game-changing device like Apple's iPhone is born. Steve Jobs believed as much.

The piece is written like a list, but it's very different from the typical "5 ways to do X" lists that we see online. The elements of the focusing suggests are

Pay attention
The impact of mindfulness
Doing less means doing more
Don't just fill your mind, empty it
Create space

My take away on the discussion is that Gordhamer is suggesting conscious reflection as the key to being able to act and get things done.

I'm reminded of the article I mentioned last week: you need a focus list and an ignore list. The lists change depending on your context. It's even more important when you can carry work with you wherever you go on your smartphone or laptop. Be conscious of what you are doing.

QotD: George Bernard Shaw apples and ideas

2012-04-17T14:20:34Z

A classic quote from George Bernard Shaw that sits in the cannon of knowledge management.

"If you have an apple and I have an apple and we exchange these apples then you and I will still each have one apple. But if you have an idea and I have an idea and we exchange these ideas, then each of us will have two ideas."

And where are those ideas? They are "stored" in people's heads and shared among people. Technology can mediate some of that sharing, of course.

Should we benchmark?

2012-04-16T17:52:27Z

Another fun, quick read. This time from James Lawther on the topic of Benchmarking: the Easy and Hard Way

Benchmarking is a beguiling idea. You look at how your competitors do things, work out what is the best practice and then implement it. Benchmarking should create real competitive advantage.

A fabulous concept, what's not to like?

I love that he pokes all sorts of holes in the "easy way" of benchmarking. Either way you do it, he calls out some key questions:

What should you benchmark?
How good are you?
Who should you benchmark against?
What did you learn (from the exercise)?

I think of "the easy way" of benchmarking as only looking to replicate what other companies do without giving deeper thought to the questions above. And in thinking about "best practice" I am reminded of Dave Snowden's prohibition best practices only apply in non-complex situations where the world operates under repeatable circumstances. As the world grows more and more complicated and complex, this kind of repeatability becomes suspect. We need to be even more careful to ask these question - or ask the question "should we benchmark?"

Bill Waddell Q&A from Santiago Velasquez

2012-04-16T12:14:22Z

[Update: fixed Santiago's name!] My friend and fellow continuous improvement knowledge seeker, Santiago Velasquez, has posted a transcript of an interview he did with Bill Waddell at a recent Houston APICS meeting. Special Q&A with Bill Waddell.

I recently had the pleasure of doing a special Q&A session for the APICS Chapter with the one and only Bill Waddell, about continuous improvement and the challenges that lie with it.

Some of the topics covered in this transcript include:

How to get started (in continuous improvement)
What kinds of organizations can make it work?
Resistance to change
Short term fixes vs. Long-term journey
Competing (with China)
Is software needed?

He says a number of things that make me sit up a little straighter and ponder for a minute. In particular, there are a couple questions along the lines of "How do I do continuous improvement in an environment that doesn't appear to support it." He question is fairly consistently, "you can't."

Waddell is clearly of the mindset that continuous improvement is a journey. It's part of the fabric of an organization and cannot be successful as a one off improvement event. That said, it is also necessary to get moving, as some of the best teaching happens in situ.