Silly aliens!

In business, we mistake inanimate objects for our customers, our employees, our teams, and everyone else. Our inanimate objects are metrics. Just like the telephone, they are things we make to convey information, but we make a key mistake: we believe that metrics are in some way arbiters of reality.

But just as we are what we eat, we become what we measure.

The aliens here are vice presidents coming down to talk to the workers.

They descend in their ship and approach the area in which their intelligence tells us the workers reside.

In lean parlance, they are going to the gemba.

Now, here’s the really funny bit: the telephone really isn’t the metric. The worker is the worker.

Well, it seemed like a good idea in committee.....

These are workers who have been supplying management with meaningless statistics that measure output on a dual axised BRRRRRRRING scale. The longer and louder the BRRRRRRRING the better.

The managers approach the worker who, after getting three consecutive raises for BRRRRINGing like there’s no tomorrow, is on the fast track to becoming an alien.  That worker, after a time, does everything to satisfy the metric – to the point that it becomes the only way he can conceive of doing his job.

Initially, the managers approach the worker and try to discuss things in English, then hunt around for other languages, only to learn that BRRRRING is all anyone can say.

And the scary part is the end, where they are happily BRRRINGing along with the employee, because now it’s the only thing the company can say.

In his 14 Points, Deming said “Eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals. Instead substitute with leadership.”  The more we rely on metrics to tell us what happened, the more we distance ourselves from the actual work being done. We lose sight of changes in context and cannot deftly react when necessary. Further, we build games and systems that reward paying attention to the metric and not the success of the company.

People will care about what the system cares about. If your company has reams of reports generated daily or weekly, you are not “managing by the number” you are building a culture of BRRRRRRING.

This is fourth in a series of Lean Muppet posts. For a list of Lean Muppet posts and an explanation of why we did this, look here. -> Lean Muppets Introduction

I will not be accused of burying the lead here and say right up front:

Your Value Stream Is Wrong

And it always will be.

This is a good thing, as we work from day to day the steps we take to complete work subtly or even violently change. When we move from home to work to a special project, there are subtle and important differences to how we do what we do.

Today’s anti-pattern is is painful to watch. When people fall into a certain way of visualizing their work or a certain value stream, it becomes comfortable to them. So comfortable, in fact, that they are reluctant or downright resistant to change or improve it. They then flounder in increasing painful work because their value stream doesn’t match their actual needs.

Let’s say for example that Mozart is the manager of a record store in Bavaria.  He has three main types of work over a given month. One is order new stock from a variety of suppliers. The second is make sure the books are in order. The third is … everything else.

Everything else is actually easy – even though it may be rather chaotic at times. We visual this type of work with a standard Personal Kanban value stream of READY | DOING | DONE. The work is going to be varied and extremely task-focused. Each of Mozart’s tasks is its own element of value. The best way to manage this work, to weigh these options, and to get these tasks completed is in a model that accepts the complexities and inherent chaos of day-to-day work.

However, in other more project centered types of work, he may get more from value streams geared toward tracking of that specific work or project.

For example, when ordering stock, the ideal world would tell you that orders are placed and received each month at set times. Mozart’s store has a mix of goods provide through suppliers ranging from large vendors to one person in their basement. Order responses are highly varied, leaving Mozart having to track not only the rate at which inventory is sold, but also the average response times for ordering popular items.

So here we see Mozart’s order processing kanban. The value stream is quite specific to the value created. This is repeating value created in a fairly predictable way. If Mozart was only using the READY | DOING | DONE value stream for this type of project, he would have dozens of tasks polluting the rest of his work. The stages in these value streams may not actually be tasks. So, say he finds it’s time to order a new set of Buddha Machines – so he contacts the people in China via email. When he does that he can move the Buddha Machine ticket to ORDER.  A few days later, they might send him a letter saying, “We received your order and will get to it soon.” Mozart can then move the ticket to CONFIRMED – even though he really didn’t do any task himself. The point here is that there is new useful information about the state of the Buddha Machine order. A few days later, he gets an e-mail saying that the Buddha Machines have shipped. Mozart again can move the ticket.

From time to time, new tasks may appear in Mozart’s regular Personal Kanban that say things like “Order new AxMxAx album”. At that point, when Mozart does do the ordering, he will move that ticket to done, but also start a new ticket in the order processing kanban.

So, here we see that Mozart’s work can have more than one value stream.

Now, let’s say this works for Mozart for a while, but he begins to notice that even after he receives confirmation many orders are not shipped.  Tickets start to back up at the “ordered” stage but don’t progress beyond. Mozart can then come up with ways to fix that problem. For example, he could insert a “remind vendor” column that he can move tickets to if they aren’t shipped in less than a week.

Mozart must change his value streams to meet his needs. So must we all.

This is an “anti-pattern”. A by-product of a beneficial act that corrupts that act into something harmful. It doesn’t mean that pomegranate juice is evil. It means you can use it for better and for worse.

This series discusses some Personal Kanban anti-patterns I’ve been seeing evolve over the last few years.

Over the last several months, I’ve run into several situations where people have uttered variations on a disturbing statement… “We don’t do planning because we have a kanban.” This is our first anti-pattern.

Some teams, weary of lengthy planning meetings in the past, have misinterpreted flow-based systems as systems that – in essence – are self-planning.

A flow-based system is not self-anything – except perhaps self-reporting.

The whole point of having a Kanban is to be aware. It is dangerous to turn control of your life, your work, or your future to anything – especially a white board with sticky notes on it.

You as a person or team using Personal Kanban need to be vigilant that you are making the right decisions at the right time. In order to do that, you need to understand what work is coming on the horizon, why it is there, and what is NOT being done while you are doing something else.

If you are not planning as you go along, you are ignoring what is coming up. It is also highly likely you are missing opportunities to improve, complete, and find efficiencies.

Personal Kanban does not preclude planning, it makes planning more enjoyable.

There were about 8 of us on this team, and while we were a fairly responsible group of kids, we knew that other classes, outside jobs, and our social lives would present us with competing responsibilities and very different schedules. Fortunately for us, the project had only one deliverable – a paper that was due at the end of the term. Being urban planners, we’d all had a few psychology courses, and we knew all about Kitty Genovese, and so we wanted to avoid something called diffusion of responsibility.

Diffusion of responsibility is a negative outcome in groups where responsibility isn’t clearly assigned nor is leadership taken. In other words, it’s a situation where roles are poorly defined. Its ugliest and most infamous example is the 1964 murder of Kitty Genovese. Returning to her Queens apartment late one evening, the 28 year old was brutally attacked in front of her home by a man who shoved a knife into her back – twice. In earshot of her neighbors, her cries for help brought residents from the surrounding apartments to their windows, their shouts scaring off her assailant.

Temporarily.

Newspapers reported that upwards of 38 neighbors heard Kitty’s screams or witnessed her attack that Spring night. While some did call the police, no one ran to Kitty’s aid. Instead, they all assumed someone else would go to help her. Sadly, no one actually did.

Minutes after he fled, Kitty’s assailant returned. Following the trail of blood she left leading to her apartment’s foyer, he stabbed the young woman to death.

It was no one’s explicit responsibility to help the victim, therefore no one came to her aid.

This horrific scenario encompasses two forms of diffusion: social loafing and the bystander effect, elements we likewise wanted to avoid in our work group. We didn’t want parts of the project to be dropped or ignored because no one had taken responsibility for them. So we met during school hours as well as afterwards, regularly taking the group’s pulse. Most tasks were assigned to more than one person, and most were due the next time we had class. We did not assign a leader but instead, equally divided responsibility amongst group members so no one could control the group or lazily benefit from the hard work of others.

Diffusion of responsibility takes other forms as well. It is part of herding mentalities like mob mentality or group think. In these situations, people end up taking part in actions that they would never sanction on their own. In the military and in business, it can also lead to people’s blind obedience, simply because they lack the positional power to object to direct orders. (Just consider the Nuremberg Trials and the events leading up to the collapse of Enron.) This is sometimes called superior orders.

In teams, when we use a visual control like a kanban or a screen with well-chosen metrics, we actively thwart diffusion of responsibility. Social loafing is exposed immediately for what it is and usually dealt with not by reprimand, but simply by conscience: when it’s obvious to everyone that you are loafing, you’re compelled to stop. If you don’t, it’s pretty easy to dismiss you.

The presence of visual controls make herding mentality less likely because the context of work and the opportunities for meaningful dialogue are heightened. This increase in dialogue also lessens the likelihood of falling prey to superior orders.

In all these instances, diffusion of responsibility results when people have either incomplete information or lack the ability to act on the information they have. When using Personal Kanban, our goal is to give ourselves and others the maximum amount of information available that can aid in better decision making. We are less likely to loaf, follow the pack, or fall prey to blind obedience when the impacts of our actions are directly presented to us and our colleagues.

Image “An Apparently Homeless Young Woman Sits Crying in a Doorway, Ignored by the World” by Arty Smokes

Point of Order! I make a motion to rescind Roberts Rules of Order in their entirety and free us from the inflexible, outmoded, ungainly, and utterly dehumanizing parliamentary procedure!

Conversations are contextual. They meander, move in unintended directions, and give way to discovery. For this to happen, flexibility is key. Control, agendas, and procedures impeded conversation, focusing on the structure of the meeting rather than the topics at hand. If you want people to engage in and feel they’ve derived value from your meeting, make them feel respected, not restricted.

“Only those who respect the personality of others can be of real use to them” ~ Albert Schweitzer

Agendas are so 20th Century.

Los Angeles’ Hollywood Hills are known for their exclusive neighborhoods, sprawling estates, and the people who inhabit them. They aren’t (but should be) known for their perilous and serpentine roadways. Among the most treacherous is Laurel Canyon Boulevard. Those familiar with the area don’t seem to give the twisting roads a second thought. They maneuver down snug stretches of this automotive obstacle course at 60 mph, because it’s become second nature to them. In contrast, newcomers to the area – sweat beading up on their temples – cautiously crawl along at a snail’s pace, at once in awe at the glorious homes around them and terrified they’ll veer off the road and through a gilded gate at the very next bend.

When you are familiar with something, you take it for granted. You aren’t critical of it and so you tend to blast right through it. Just consider what happens when we call a meeting. Are we looking for what we are already familiar with? Are we basing the meeting on our assumptions and expectations that come from past experiences? Are we just going to “blast through it?” Or are we taking it slow – as a learning opportunity – in an attempt to expose hidden insights that can actually help us achieve our goals?

“The most dangerous kind of waste is the waste we do not recognize.”
- Shigeo Shingo (Toyota)

When you set an agenda, you control the conversation. In essence, you define your own road. When you control the agenda, you control the lessons learned. Since we enter a meeting with only our assumptions to guide us, agendas follow our assumptions. Our assumptions are based on what we already know. But what about the things we don’t know? Quite often, it’s the conversations we don’t plan on that give us the most insight. Why not instead run our meetings to learn or to discover?

About a year ago, Jeremy Lightsmith and I discussed starting a professional organization around Lean management. We figured that if we controlled the agenda, we’d control the thought. If we controlled the thought, we’d never get beyond our own thinking. Jeremy and I wanted to grow a community – starting in Seattle – but we also wanted to grow as individuals.

So we set up Lean Coffee. This popular, agenda-less weekly meeting has taken us in directions we never anticipated. Held in a local coffee shop, and with a totally open format, we begin each gathering by setting up a table-top Personal Kanban. Participants vary from week to week, but whoever shows up is free to grab some sticky notes, and populate the backlog with items they’d like to discuss.  Everyone gets two votes for which topics they want to discuss first. This builds the prioritization. The agenda and the order are both popularly devised.

It’s that simple. A kanban for a Lean Coffee might look like this:

Lean Coffee has spawned an active community in Seattle and increasingly in other cities like Stockholm, Toronto and San Francisco. More are coming. The best thing about Lean Coffee is that it has already outgrown its founders. Since we never set the agenda in the first place, Jeremy and I could start the ball rolling and step back.

Lean Coffee takes place every week at 8:30 am in Seattle whether we are there or not. It is now truly an open forum for learning.

Learning from a Meeting

“Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage.  The easiest of all wastes and the hardest to correct is the waste of time, because wasted time does not litter the floor like wasted material.”  ~Henry Ford

Conventional wisdom suggests that businesses hold far too many meetings attendees deem a waste of their time. Among the most common complaints are how certain individuals hold the floor too long, that the information being disseminated is worthless, and more often than not, the meeting is held merely to satisfy egos or fulfill political requirements.

To combat this, some call for meetings with rigid agendas. They want to know in advance exactly what they’ll get in exchange for their time, and so they assume that having a control in place will prevent the meeting from wandering off-track. That sounds like a pretty good idea.

Or does it?

Suppose for a second that there is more than one reason for a bad meeting. Certainly poor planning is an easy culprit, but perhaps the bigger issue is that we assume etched-in-stone agendas lead to better results. We assume we know what we need ahead of time, we also assume that we know what the attendees need ahead of time. What is more likely is that we know what we need to discuss, which is different than an agenda.

An agenda is your personal, politicized reason for gathering people, while the discussion of a stated topic is a conversation. In fact, the entire reason we are calling the meeting is to have a conversation.

Why then, if we feel it is inappropriate – rude, even – to dominate the conversation in every other aspect of our lives, would we codify dominating the conversation in a meeting?

Perhaps the reason meetings go off track is that the agenda doesn’t actually address topics of concern to the attendees. People come to your meeting and – becoming bored or frustrated with the content or the direction the meeting takes, or feeling their input is not valued or that they can’t be fully engaged – they switch topics to something that interests them or initiate side conversations. Since there is no established mechanism for discussion in the meeting, a power struggle ensues between the person who called the meeting and the people in attendance. This is not good.

If we want to learn from our meetings, we need to allow the conversation to be set by the very professionals we invited to the meeting in the first place. If they were worth inviting, they must be worth including. If they aren’t, your meeting should serve another purpose: to hand out pink slips.

Allowing the group to have a say in setting the agenda gives them buy-in for the importance of the topics. This helps prevent people running on at the mouth or providing information that goes off topic. Everyone has a stake in an efficient meeting because they all have discussion topics in the backlog. Group ownership means the person who called the meeting no longer serves as the traffic cop directing the conversation.

Instead, as the person who called the meeting, you can now direct the overall topic and even seed a few of the initial sticky notes. Yyou can even set a few “must discuss” stickies at the top of the board and prioritize them the highest. But the group must be able to discuss what their professional direction drives them towards.

The steps for doing this are simple:

1. Framework: Draw a Personal Kanban
2. Personal Agendas: Invite all attendees to write their topics on sticky notes
3. Democratization: Invite all attendees to vote on the topics on the table (each person gets two votes)
4. Group Agenda: Prioritize the sticky notes
5. Discuss

And voila! We have brought democracy to meetings. No longer do we tolerate meeting despots and spontaneous rebellions through filibuster or hijacking. Before these were power plays between the meeting organizer and the person acting now. Now they are interruptions of the group. Let society sort it out.

After the meeting, you can construct your meeting minutes outline by simply gathering up the topics in the order discussed.

(Want more on Lean meetings? Tune in tomorrow for a discussion of flexibility and democratization.)

Mixed Wine and Sour Cherry Reduction

I frustrate people when I give cooking classes. They want measures. They want me to tell them what to do. Cooking isn’t like that. Cooking is about flavor, it’s about texture, it’s about the experience. It’s not about tablespoons or grams or whether something is prepared at exactly 375 for 20 minutes.

So when your grandmother gives you her coveted, top-secret recipe for baked boiled squirrel al fresco, it will never taste the same as hers… if you follow the recipe. Because your grandmother doesn’t use the recipe, either.

Whether it is soy sauce or olive oil or even something as universal as sea salt, a tablespoon from one producer will be very different from another.

Just consider the variation among beef:

• USDA select (3rd grade) corn-fed beef from a grocery store that has likely been plumped with water;
• aged, organic, Choice steak (2nd grade) from a natural food market like Whole Foods or Choices;
• a Prime steak (1st grade) from a quality butcher; and
• a super-select Wagyu steak.

All will have flavor profiles and textures that vary wildly. The worst cut of Wagyu will be light years better than even the best cut of choice. So why would you ever expect food to taste the same from mere measurements?

Bone-In Pork Chops with Mixed Wine Sour Cherry Reductions and Asian Pear

Just recently, I picked up a great looking piece of meat at Whole Foods. I decided I wanted to make pot roast in our slow cooker, which I’ve not used in years. I dug it out of storage, cleaned it up, and went to work on the pot roast.

My wife Vivian asked what recipe I’d be using. I looked at her perplexed. What recipe? I simply couldn’t fathom using a recipe. I wanted pot roast. Granted, I’ve never actually prepared a pot roast. But that was besides the point.

Later that evening we had pot roast, and it was quite good. Did I use a recipe?

No.

I used 12 recipes.

The miracle of the Internet means that I don’t have to consult a book and choose one person’s vision of a particular type of food. I can now get 5, 10, even 100 versions of the same dish and see what is the same, what differs, what makes some unique. I learn about what Pot Roast is…not what one person says it is. Then I can begin to cook. I know what types of ingredients I need, what ingredients I have on hand, and what the flavor is I’m shooting for.

Recipes end up being like “best practices.” In business, when a company encounters a problem, they often look for a set series of prescriptive, easily to follow steps that have solved that same problem elsewhere. The clincher here is that most problems are unique.

Like ingredients, people are all different. We interact differently, we deal with change differently. Best practices are often followed as rote guides, and then fail.

Why?

Bison Burgers with Maytag Blue Cheese and Grilled Naan

Because we followed the recipe, but we didn’t actually cook.

We follow what other people say will work, but we don’t find out what the gestalt is of what it is that we are making. We focus on instructions and not on actual goals.

To truly solve problems, we need to be creative. We need to understand the various whys of a problem and then devise solutions. Otherwise we are merely treating symptoms.

Remember, when working with visual controls like Personal Kanban or management processes your goals and the system you have employed to realize them are what’s important. The idea is not to become a slave to your board.  Whether it is building software, finishing a report at work, teaching your daughter the alphabet, or creating a perfect pot roast – other people can offer advice, but you are the chef.

H4M&D is always present in our Personal Kanban

When we wake up in the morning, we have a pretty good idea what we want to get done that day. To make those daily goals explicit, we created the Today (link) column for Personal Kanban.

Our Personal Kanban serves many functions:

• It tracks our current work;
• It shows what we’re excelling at;
• It shows where we may be falling behind;
• It gives us an appreciation for our context;
• It lets us know when we’re overloaded and could use help; and
• It shows the status of our projects.

But our Personal Kanban can also inspire us. For me, there is one major goal I have that drives almost everything else I do. It’s very personal and important to me, so we put it in the Modus Cooperandi Personal Kanban as a reminder. That’s what I’m working for. It’s that yellow task up there, cryptically labeled “H4M&D.”

For me, H4M&D gets a little closer every day. Even though the ticket doesn’t move, if I can close out my day with the understanding that I truly am a little closer to that goal, then the day has been a success. Granted, some days I move only the tiniest bit closer, but closer is still closer.

I would recommend that you be judicious when putting anything like this in your Personal Kanban – make sure it is that important. You don’t want to clutter your board with 20 bits of inspiration that  get in the way of your work.

Use your Personal Kanban to inspire. Make your inspiration visible and begin to work towards it. Like mine, some of your goals can be audacious. Keeping them visual is keeping them relevant. It helps you pull the right tasks, slog through the hard ones, enjoy the easy ones, and see them all in the context of your greater goals.

Clarity Means Completion: The Psychology of Kanban – Jim Benson from Øredev on Vimeo.

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Personal Kanban: Optimizing the Individual Coder – Jim Benson from Øredev on Vimeo.