kaizen

I have rewritten this post numerous times, I have deleted it and republished it. This is typically a sign of that I have a gut feeling about what I want to write but I haven’t yet been able to put words to that gut feeling. The rest of this post is my latest (but perhaps not last) attempt to find those words.

Everybody is looking for quick fixes to complex problems, especially if the problem initially doesn’t look all that complex and a fix is needed yesterday. Unfortunately quick fixes (with emphasis on the “fix” part) to complex problems are rare. A couple of examples of problems and their corresponding quick fixes:

• Something important is falling between the cracks in an organization. The quick fix is to create a new role or position that has the responsibility for exactly the thing that is being neglected. Perhaps a new coordinator (whatever that means) or even a new manager or vice president.
• A production stop is caused by a poor quality component. The quick fix is to appoint an ad-hoc task force for trouble-shooting.

Some cures, like the ones above, turn out to be worse than the illness. The new role in the first case above might end up having responsibilities that are already partially allocated to some other role resulting in confusion. The new role may also conceal the real problem: that somebody is not doing his or her job.

The task force in the second example may take on the responsibilities that would otherwise belong to the product support organization that for the moment is understaffed. If the product support organization isn’t exposed to the issue it will not be able to take corrective action to prevent similar problems in the future. Also the resource shortage may not be exposed as one of the root causes.

There are no ski-lifts up to Mt Complexity.

Many methods such as Toyota Production System’s A3 [1] stress the need for a thorough root cause analysis when solving problems like this. But fixing the organization or the work processes on a more fundamental level, taking into account all process interfaces and the responsibilities of all roles may turn out to be quite complex. The simple reason is that reality can sometimes be dauntingly complex; a space ship requires rocket science – less will not get it off the ground.

These are the phases I often see in the problem solving process:

1. “How hard can it be?”: The symptoms of the problem are in front of us. We start trying to make sense of it. It all looks simple because we haven’t started to scratch beneath the surface.
2. “Are we making this too complicated?”: Fatigue and impatience is setting in as more and more factors and dependencies are revealed. If we stop here and don’t get the complexity on the table and understand it, then the solution may well be simple but it is also likely to be wrong. Simple solutions are desirable but simple and good solutions can only be created once the complexity is understood.
3. “Over the complexity maximum”: If we have made it past the previous step then we are starting to get all the bits and pieces on the table. Our mental model of the problem is still complex but we begin to see patterns and connections. We see that that part over there is really the same as this part over here, that existing role already has almost the responsibilities that we at first were tempted to assign to a new role. And so on. We can start simplifying our solution from a position of understanding.
4. “The simple and good solution”: Having done all the simplifications in the mental model, we are ready to design the simplest possible solutions. But not simpler.

In a complex world, a simple and elegant solution can only emerge once the messy and initially inelegant complexity has been understood. One has to have the stamina and determination to climb Mt Complexity. Drilling a tunnel through the mountain might get you into the Valley of Despair.

References

[1] The Toyota Way. Jeffrey K. Liker.

Note

I’m indebted for the term complexity maximum to Anna, with whom I worked at a client more that ten years ago. She had many other interesting ideas too including the habit to take a new seat at the table after every break during a long meeting. She claimed it would keep us all flexible and ready for fresh thinking. She might have had a point although I must confess I found it quite annoying.

Scholars believe that the first people came to Australia some 50000 years ago [1]. The indigenous Australian culture is thus probably the oldest surviving culture on the planet. Or at least it was until about 200 years ago. An interesting illustration of this continuity is described in [1]. The Aborigines have some sacred places which they are not supposed to trespass. It turns out that Aboriginal fishermen, while at sea, avoid sacred places that today lie 30 meters beneath the sea and that have been beneath the sea since many thousand years B.C. Their locations still live in the collective memory of the people through very elaborate mechanism described below.

Aboriginal land.

I have been fascinated by the Aboriginal culture ever since I visited Australia back in the 80′s. I spent some time in Alice Springs where not much at all happens so I purchased and read a couple of books on the Aboriginal culture. Then recently I stumbled upon a book about the Aboriginal Nhunggabarra people and their culture written by Karl-Erik Sveiby and Tex Skuthorpe [2]. It explores the mechanisms which made the Aboriginal culture so robust and sustainable in the true sense of the word.

The book describes many remarkable aspects of the Aboriginal culture which western anthropologists have only recently come to recognize and appreciate. I will only touch upon a few of them and try to draw some parallels with our life today.

Mission

The first remarkable thing about the Nhunggabarra is that they had a shared and a clear mission for their existence on earth: to keep everything and everybody alive. Everything they did reflected this mission and led to a sustainable way of hunting, fishing, cultivating the land and behaving in general.

I can hardly think of a more positive and meaningful mission than that of the Nhunggabarra. It’s so simple to state, yet so powerful. It certainly rhymes well with what nature is striving for in general: to proliferate life. It is my feeling that this mission would sound foreign to today’s nations, corporations and even most individuals. Maybe this is an indication of how “unnatural” our lives have become.

In today’s corporations we talk about a mission and a vision. I’m not sure that the Nhunggabarra had or needed any vision in this sense, only a mission. Modern corporations would do better with a shared mission as strong as that of the Nhunggabarra irrespective of what their vision is.

Knowledge management

The second notable thing about the Nhunggabarra is that they had created what we would today call a knowledge-based economy. Sveiby cites estimates stating that between 50% and 80% of the economy was based on intangibles such as information, education, diplomacy, entertainment, ceremonies, decision making and maintaining order in the society through a legal system. The first settlers from the west entirely missed this part of the economy and considered the Aborigines plain lazy. When Aboriginal boys turned 12 years old they were sent on a literal learning journey where they learned about the land, the law and many other things. The women were trained at home and acquired solid knowledge in what today would be called pediatrics, ecology, biology, sprituality, and medicine. The women were responsible for all training of children up to puberty. The boys’ journey lasted for 14 to 16 years and the boys were not allowed to marry before they had completed it.

Knowledge was stored in cleverly constructed stories with multiple levels of meaning. The stories referred to the landscape which therefore in effect came to codify parts of the Aboriginal knowledge. Each story was typically known by four people. They were only allowed to teach their own part of the story but knowing the rest of it they would have been able to correct the story custodian would his memory have failed. In addition each story custodian had an appointed “back-up” person, a Tuckandee, living at some distance from the first custodian. The Tuckandee would step in if something happened to the first custodian. This way one could in computer terms say that each story was remembered with eight-fold redundancy.

The “knowledge management strategy” of the Nhunggabarra is really a combination of what today is called a personalized knowledge management strategy and a codified knowledge management strategy. The personalized strategy relies on people having knowledge constantly being involved in dialogs with people who need that knowledge. This was certainly a significant part of the Nhunggabarra knowledge management strategy. In addition to this interaction, the knowledge was also codified into the stories and also in a way in the way the stories related to the landscape.

Stories are often used in today’s corporations to manifest the corporate culture and values but not for anything more formal. Could we use stories in the quality management system manual to convey the recommended way of working? With not too much effort it would at least make the quality system manual less boring.

I find it very intriguing that the Aborigines seem to have made a choice not to pursue more material wealth than they needed to stay alive and healthy. Most sources indeed agree that the Aborigines lived good lives with healthy food, a fair amount of exercise and few illnesses. Instead they chose to spend the rest of their time on spiritual and social activities and on learning about the nature. This way they did not stress the fragile Australian nature too much and were indeed able to live in a sustainable way for all those thousands of years. As a comparison, the European cotton growers managed to erode and otherwise spoil the land in less than 100 years.

Leadership style

The third thing I want to mention is the leadership style of the Nhunggabarra. They did not have chieftains in today’s western sense. Instead leaders were defined per activity area. One person would take the lead for a hunting party. Another one when fishing was on the schedule. There was always the option not to follow the leader and the leader would in those cases not try to enforce his decision (recommendation). The leadership roles were hereditary. A very complex system of maintaining the leadership roles was maintained by the women who planned all marriages to this end.

Sveiby speculates that the Nhunggabarra were very aware of the downside of centralized power and had, in addition to the context-specific leadership discussed above, also other mechanisms preventing the concentration of power to “testosterone-filled males” (of which there were probably as many as in any culture).

The context-specific leadership system is interesting in the way that it reflects what usually happens in today’s western organizations: informal leaders rise spontaneously depending on the area in question. In western organizations we sometimes talk about “managing” these individuals; seldom do we give them any formal leadership role though. Instead western organizations are modeled according to male hierarchies that were used for hunting parties in which context it was probably a fairly efficient organization. The military continued the tradition of a male hierarchy. Eventually corporations were organized in the same way. It is interesting to note that today’s corporations still sound a lot like an army at war: they “kill” their competition, they engage in “hostile takeovers”, and Sun Tzu’s On the Art of War has been laying on more than one CEO’s bedside table.

Would it be possible to implement context-specific leadership in modern organizations? It after all worked for 50000 years in Australia.

References

[1] The Kakadu Man. Bill Neidjie et al.
[2] Treading Lightly. Karl-Erik Sveiby and Tex Skuthorpe.
[3] Aboriginal Australians. Richard Broome.

Note

With this post I don’t mean to criticize modern Australians. All Australians I’ve met have been very nice and hospitable. Australia as a nation has also made strong efforts to put right their ancestors’ mistakes. Virtually all western nations did terrible things in the past including my own who treated the indigenous Sami people very badly in the 19:th century. I’m glad that we have all grown just a little bit wiser on average.

It may be odd to start a post with a couple of clarifications but I still want to do that in this case, of reasons that will perhaps become apparent further down. First, this post is not about a problem unique to one or two companies that I may have worked with and second, I do think management consultants can be useful from time to time (including myself). Read on!

I am talking about the situation when the top management of a company or a division realizes that some kind of improvement, e.g. reduction of the number of customer complaints, is urgently needed. A common reaction to this sudden realization is to set up an “improvement project”, a task force geared to improve the situation. The task force may get its own steering group with a few of the most enthusiastic members of the organization’s management team, it may get a reference group (of other interested people), and it will name a number of people to be on an improvement team.

The results from the improvement project set up as described above are often disappointing of several reasons:

• The steering committee members will see this as something out of the ordinary and will give the steering group meetings a lower priority than say the management team meetings or some urgent operational issues needing attention.
• The resource requests for the task force will not end up in the organization’s regular resource management systems and may therefore be ignored.
• The goals of the improvement project may or may not be aligned with the business goals of the organization.
• Nobody is formally rewarded (bonus etc) for doing a good job in the improvement project as it isn’t connected to their regular personal result plans or day to day tasks.
• The results from the improvement project are hard to disseminate to the rest of the organization.

Cajsa Warg’s “A Guide to Household Chores for Young Women”.

Many of the problems above emanate from the fact that we don’t use the regular organization and the regular structures in the organization to run the improvement effort; that we instead build a parallel ad-hoc task force to do the work.

Instead I suggest that the existing regular structures are used for the improvement effort:

• Add goals for the planned improvement effort in the (annual) plan for the organization and break down these goals on the individuals that will participate in the improvement effort.
• Track the goals in the regular management team meetings dedicated to track all the business goals of the organization.
• Use any regular improvement organization or group that may exist for implementing the improvement. A typical candidate group is the “quality group” or similar that usually focuses on managing the quality system manual of the organization and on managing any external audits. These people must not only be informed about the improvement effort, it should be a natural and important part of their day to day activities.
• Document the results from the improvement effort in the quality system manual in the form of updated processes, role descriptions etc., not in Powerpoint presentations stored on the improvement project Sharepoint site.

If any of the structures suggested above like an annual planning process, a quality department focusing on improvement, a quality system manual, or regular management team meetings with tracking of the set goals are missing or are ineffective, they should be fixed instead of by-passing them with a task force. Fixing these things should in fact be a high priority early goal of the improvement project so as to bootstrap the project. This is very much in line with the Toyota Production System’s principle of Jidoka, to stop the production line at any time to fix the process instead of fixing the defect products afterwards [1]. Appointing a special task force will hide an organization’s inability to execute the tasks through its regular structures, just like problems in the manufacturing process remain hidden if one settles for fixing the defects afterwards.

So let us heed the advice of the 18:th century Swedish chef Cajsa Warg who in many recipes in her famous cook-book from 1755 wrote “One taketh what one haveth.”

References

[1] The Toyota Way, Jeffrey K. Liker

I watched the Nobel Peace Prize concert last night. The Norwegians know how to throw a party! I immediately fell in love with Esperanza Spalding’s music. And Natasha Beddingfield, who also performed, has been one of my personal favorites a long time. Anyway…

The Peace Prize is about making change happen. Each and everyone on the list of laureates have been instrumental in making this world a better place. Perhaps Obama was given the price more in anticipation of future deeds than already accomplished changes but many of us still have high hopes.

Big changes in the world seem to be associated with strong leaders and role models. It is hard to imagine the civil rights movement without Martin Luther King, the abolishment of apartheid without Nelson Mandela, or the democratization of Poland without Lech Walesa, all of whom have also received the Nobel Peace Prize.

So what does it take to become such a leader? Can we learn anything from the Nobel Prize Laureates? I suggest that conviction and perseverance are the main characteristics of these leaders. While some of them, such as Martin Luther King had a lot of charisma, others such as Martti Ahtisaari don’t strike me as particularly charismatic. (But like most Finns, he had that particular Finnish perseverance and stubbornness that we call sisu.)

In his book Good to Great Jim Collins actually emphasizes that charisma is not required (he says it may indeed be counter-productive) for leading and changing the successful companies that he studied. Instead Collins talks about the ability to keep the core values of the company and being there for the long term. He also believes that leaders should be “clock builders” rather than “time tellers”. He means that they should focus on building capabilities into the organization rather than insisting on becoming or remaining the visionary decision maker.

Indeed, many of the Peace Prize winners and other great leaders have left a lasting legacy. South Africa is well on the road to healing the wounds of apartheid. Mahatma Gandhi’s India is the world’s largest democracy and is rapidly becoming one of the major economic powerhouses. Poland is one the of the best performing former communist countries. And while the US still has its problems, it has come a long way since Rosa Parks was arrested for not giving up her seat on the bus for a white person.

My conclusion is thus that it probably takes an energetic and convinced person to lead big change. But that the person should at the same time down-play his or her role and focus on building systems and capabilities that enable the change to last. I wonder who is going to step forward as the leader of the greatest change project in the history of mankind, the mitigation of the global warming.

Links and references

[1] Good to Great, Jim Collins

[2] The Nobel Peace Prize 2009

Every so often organizations that aren’t happy with their operational performance embark on a process improvement program of the “one-size-fits-all” variety, decide to implement the latest hyped-up development process, or purchase the latest model-based development tool without investigating what their prioritized improvement needs really are. One company that I was helping had for instance planned to ramp up their verification and validation activities as part of a general “quality improvement” effort. When we started talking about their quality and other priorities, we found that both customers and other stakeholders were very happy with the quality of the products but not with the responsiveness to new customer requests. Clearly, in this case, more verification and validation was not what they needed the most.

A simple process for finding improvement opportunities.

A good starting point when looking for the most important improvement opportunities is the organization’s set of business goals as stated in a business plan or similar. (When no business plan exists, key people within the company can usually write a good enough business plan in about one hour.) Information that I want to find in a business plan include:

• What customer segments do we want to target?
• What value do we deliver to the customers?
• What value do we deliver to the customers’ customers?
• With what products and major product features so we deliver that value?
• What are our tactics to lock out the competitors and lock in the customers?
• What are our unique selling points? Why buy from us instead of a competitor?
• Do we have other stakeholders with specific requirements or needs, e.g. authorities or employees?

From this information we can start reasoning about the results that our customers and other stakeholders expect from us and that will make us stand out relative to our competitors; what we need to be really good at producing. Particularly important results are those that support our unique selling points, the product features and our interactions with the customer that make our company different (and hopefully better).

Typical product features that might give us a competitive advantage include aesthetics, availability, ease of buying, functionality, performance, conformance (to standards and regulations) and price. In our interactions with our customers we could excel in e.g. responsiveness, innovativeness, security, accessibility, reliability, competence, credibility, and empathy.

A good example of the ease of buying product feature is Amazon’s one click shopping feature. It eliminates all time-consuming typing and makes it (almost too) easy to buy yet another book or widget. The same company’s success is very much tied to the security of the interactions over the web.

In parallel to identifying customer-oriented results that are important to our success, it is often useful to look at the same issue from an other angle by identifying risks for not reaching the business goals. As a complement to finding out what we need to do right, we here brain-storm what can go wrong. There are various more or less standardized risk analysis methods for finding risks. I will return to these in later posts.

Some capabilities.

Having the desired results and identified risks, we can start to identify what capabilities we need to produce the results and to mitigate the risks. It is also useful to think about what you can do less of (like in the example in the first paragraph of this post).

If for instance aesthetics is a unique selling point, or at least an important product feature, then we probably need to hire a designer or buy a corresponding service that will accomplish exactly that. We may also perhaps add a “look and feel” review in the development process or even a focus group. If conformance to regulatory requirements is crucial or even mandatory, then we need to know those requirements and build them into our work processes.

A number of general capability categories are illustrated in the exhibit to the right. (“Product baseline” refers to the previous version of your product. When developing a new version of a product, the starting point is obviously a very important success factor).

There is no rocket science here of course. But it does pay off to from time to time do the analysis according to the above steps in a structured way. If you are lucky, you may even find that you can actually do less to achieve more.

Jan Brink on Briar, world’s #1 dressage stallion, in one of Briar’s last public appearances in Falsterbo, 2009. When training a horse, there are no quantum leaps, only small incremental improvements reinforced during countless hours of training. I can testify that the human rider is no different from a horse in that respect.

In an earlier post I wrote about the pain that is often associated with changing the way we behave, the prerequisite for all improvement. I use the word “pain” here to mean all negative feelings that may be associated with the change such as uncertainty, lack of self-confidence, doubt, and fatigue. I also wrote about the faith we must have in the improvement effort (or any effort really) to keep going even if we don’t see or feel any immediate results. As I hinted earlier, I’ve seen many improvement efforts fail because of too much pain and because of lost faith.

Most of the failed efforts I have seen have been corporate-wide and large, with many people involved in an “improvement program”. They are often slow to start since many people need to be involved and got on-board. Funds must be requested and budgeted. There is a massive amount of planning of a large number of “tangled” activities and long discussions about goals and milestones. Soon enough, managers and other key persons start to feel that they can’t spend the time needed for the massive improvement program because of urgent operational responsibilities. There is simply a lot of talk, and very little action. Faith starts to fade. And should a big change actually be likely to come out of the program, then there will be pain, sometimes too much of it. (There is a third alternative, namely that the large improvement program only produces a few, small changes. Then chances are that the large improvement program is very inefficient and could be replaced by a smaller, more efficient one.)

The rather obvious antidote for both “change pain” and lost faith is to improve in small, independent increments. After all, if you can’t manage a small improvement, then you can’t manage a large improvement so it’s always a good way to start.

Small changes don’t hurt as much as large ones. Small, frequent improvements also keep the faith strong since you see results on a regular basis. They produce the “early wins” that Kotter writes about in [1]. You also learn stuff from each small iteration that you can apply in subsequent iterations. And if you fail, the failure will not be of epic proportions and you can most likely recover from it in the next increment.

I sometime hear that everything depends on everything else and that everything therefore must be changed at the same time. Or that the market situation demands a “quantum leap” in performance. (People forget that a “quantum leap” is in fact the smallest possible increment.) Usually it is possible to find reasonably independent improvement areas though, suitable for incremental improvements. There is an interesting and inspiring parallel in the software development community called Scrum [2]. It is an incremental project management process in which software is developed incrementally in “sprints” of one month.

* * *

I believe that improvement should be part of the regular operations of the organization rather than done in “improvement programs”. If it is integrated in the daily operations and the corporate culture, then it will almost invariably be performed in small increments and be based on real operational needs and business goals. These factors increase the chances for success considerably. If improvement isn’t a natural part of the daily operations, then it is probably better to fix that instead of kicking off an extraordinary improvement program. If there hasn’t been any, or enough (continuous) improvement for a long time, then a big “bold stroke” change might be necessary as a last resort. More on that later.

Links and references

[1] Leading Change, John P. Kotter

[2] Agile & Iterative Development, Craig Larman

What is the purpose of that company training? Or that next presentation you are giving to your colleagues? Or this blog post for that matter?

I’m an engineer by training and like many engineers, teachers and other professionals, I sometimes have this urge to tell people what I know. Perhaps to show off a bit. Or for some other obscure reason. The urge has decreased over the years but I can still feel it from time to time. Unfortunately doing a presentation during office hours just to tell people what you know is a waste of time. I suggest that the only valid reason for communication in a business setting is to change the behavior of your audience.

Have you changed your behavior yet?

Likewise, the purpose of training should be altered behavior. Good course evaluations are nice but if things stay the same after the training, then it is of no value. According to one of the pioneers in the area of learning organizations, David Garvin, learning is in fact the combination of knowledge and modified behavior [1]:

A learning organization is an organization skilled at creating, acquiring, and transferring knowledge, and at modifying its behavior to reflect new knowledge and insights.

Very little is of course new under the sun but sometimes insights are forgotten. The purpose of the art of rhetoric is according to Wikipedia exactly to “move audiences to action with arguments” [2]. It should be done with ethos, pathos and logos.

Even if we realize that our goal is to impact the behavior of our audience, we may still lack the skills to do so. During my Swedish and American engineering training i managed to take exactly zero credit points of rhetoric. I didn’t get a proper training in it until the “rookie training” at McKinsey&Co (unsurprisingly it was rather logos-heavy). Perhaps we engineers are also by nature a little weak in the pathos department which doesn’t make things easier.

Rhetoric is a technique in the greater discipline of change management which I will return to in later posts.

So am I wasting time by using this virtual space to share my opinions and the odd piece of knowledge? Well, I do believe (have faith in) that this blog will eventually somehow add to the impact that I have as a management consultant and change agent but the jury is still out on if and how that will happen.

Links and references

[1] Building a Learning Organization, David A. Garvin, HBR, July-August, 1993

[2] Rhetoric on Wikipedia

Vicious circle of poor quality

Vicious circle of poor physical shape

Poor organizational performance is often the result of a vicious circle. One example of such vicious circle in a product development organization is: poor product quality leads to a large effort spent on rework, customer support and bug fixes leads to lack of resources leads to poorly executed early phases of the next development project leads to poor quality…

Similar kinds of vicious circles can be found in our personal lives, for instance: bad physical shape leads to general tiredness and illness leads to pain when exercising leads to avoiding exercise leads to bad physical shape…

For improvement to happen, a vicious circle often needs to be broken. This requires, yes, faith and pain.

The first runs or workouts after a period of sedentary life are painful. You may become short of breath after a few hundred meters of running and your muscles will most likely be sore the day after. If you can’t endure that discomfort or pain, no improvement will be possible; no pain, no gain. Another type of discomfort is that of sacrificing some other perhaps more immediately gratifying activity for your exercise.

To break operational vicious circles involving e.g. poor product quality, “organizational exercise” is required. Ultimately people need to do things differently from what they did in the past to break the vicious circle. (This may look like a truism but it is surprisingly often forgotten.) The change will require new skills to be learnt, old habits to be kicked, perhaps even slightly modified values to be adopted. Some of these things can be joyful but some can also be painful. To find the time for that extra effort you may need to delay the release of a new product, to hire extra help, to work overtime or something similar. All that adds to the pain.

When starting to excercise, you usually don’t see or feel any improvement in the beginning. You only feel the pain. To get through the first few workouts you therefore need to have faith in the future positive effects of the excercise. Only that faith will take you to the point where you can start to feel or measure the improvement. In an organization you likewise need to have faith in the improvement activities to make the initial sacrifices and take that initial pain.

I will return to faith and pain in later posts.

Links and references

There is a great treatise of vicious circles and other types of systems involving feedback loops in Peter Senge’s book The Fifth Discipline.