It helps that I have my own startup Engineer Your Life; tools and support for engineers to find the next best steps in work and life.  *Shameless plug alert!*  So I have been through my own process of defining who my customers are, how I can serve them in a way that is sustainable, practical and benefits them and me.

So I’ll begin with full disclosure:  I’m a rookie in the world of startups, and a seasoned vet in the land of Lean.

As I heard the questions flying around the conference, I had to chuckle.   The crowd assembled at MaRS Discovery District (a member of a chain of startup incubators) was looking to poke holes in the Lean Startup formula:  ”Is this stuff all just labels and bullcrap?”  ”Does it apply to me?”  ”Can a company be too Lean?”

It reminded me of my early days as a Black Belt when I encountered massive skeptism to Six Sigma.  New methods always make people who know a lot a little tetchy.   Call it healthy skeptism, call it resistance to change, call it flavour-of-the-month burnout.  It’s normal.  The best way forward that I know is to treat any new methodology as a hypothesis to be tested.

So is Lean just labels?  Yes and no.  It’s a set of ideas and processes that, when used skillfully, will lead to greater probability of success.  In some cases, paradoxically, success means detecting failure – so you can bounce back, or pivot, quickly enough that it doesn’t tank your entire venture.  Truly Lean companies (like Toyota) work on exposing waste so they can eliminate it as soon as possible.

Good tools become good company culture

There are lot of good ways to do that; Lean is just one of them that happens to have been proven out in numerous industries.  It’s no silver bullet; it’s a good set of tools and over time it becomes a habit; just the way you do things!  Over time, Lean changes culture for the better.

For example, the habit of Gemba (which means ‘the real place’) in Lean methodology becomes ‘get out of the building’ in the Lean Startup.  Either way, it means not relying on assumptions without testing them out with realtime data, whether that be a trip to the shop floor or an iteration of testing with future customers.

Shared language saves time (and relationships?)

It’s also a shared language – a shorthand that your team can use to get on the same page and stay there.  Judging from the talk about the woes of technical and business co-founder relationship, it seems a common language would be a blessing; a bridge between the two skill sets, personalities, and approaches.  It could save arguments, save precious time and keep startups from failing due to co-founder fall-outs.  But I digress…

The question of whether a Startup can be too Lean is an interesting one.  I’d say there are a few ways that a company could, through over-zealous and incorrect use of the Lean Startup methods, end up in a ditch:

Over-mapping & over-measuring.  If you’re trying to measure everything, test everything, gather data on everything, you’re going to spend all your time playing with numbers and not actually moving forward to deliver value to your customer.  Unnecessary testing is non-value-added activity, which is a form of waste.  Adding waste to a process is the opposite of the definition of Lean.  Therefore, doing lots and lots of loops of testing just for the sake of doing them, or measuring every measurable you can think of, is NOT Lean.  Anyone who thinks it is should have their mouth washed out with soap.  There, I said it.

Eric Ries defines the entrepreneurial condition as operating ‘under extreme uncertainty’.  Put another way you can’t test and pivot your way to absolute certainty.   Successful entrepreneurs know when it’s time to pull the trigger and go.

Giving up too quickly (or with insufficient data).  A variation of this error could be pivoting too quickly, before you have collected enough data to understand what is really causing the effect you’re seeing in testing.  Starting all over again is costly (if your idea was good and you just abandoned it too quickly).  Going ahead could be disastrous (if your idea was bad but you didn’t know it because you didn’t collect enough data).  In Six Sigma methodology, you are required to determine the correct sample size for your studies in order to ensure that you are measuring a true signal, not just picking up on random variation, in order to avoid both these type of errors.

Lose sight of the big picture.  Silicon Valley veteran enterpreneur turned venture capitalist Marc Andreessen outlines a few other exceptions to the Lean Startup formula.  I especially like ‘fetish for failure’, which involves becoming so enthusiastic about embracing the process of testing and defeating your prototypes that you lose sight of the real endgame – to deliver value to your customers and make a profit.  How about that?

I applaud Eric Ries for making the wisdom of Deming and Drucker accessible to a wide and ravenous-for-wisdom audience across the startup universe.  Here’s a video of him chatting at Toronto’s Rotman School of Business.

If you’re a member of the Startup community I would love to hear what you think of The Lean Startup.  Has it worked in your business projects?

If you’re a member of the Lean community please drop a comment.  What do you think of Lean methods showing up all across the product development and Startup world?   Do you spend a long time defending Lean to non-Lean folks?

Now I’ll throw it to you!

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One of the presenters, author and business strategist Sandy Richardson talked about GDP (Gross Domestic Product) and true progress.  She proposed to us that despite its longstanding status as the benchmark for economic success (therefore prosperity, productivity, growth and happiness for a country), GDP is not in fact the best way to measure true progress.

GDP as a Measure of Progress?

Why not?  It does not distinguish between transactions that increase well-being and those that decrease well-being.   Put another way, if the economy is doing well but the people are doing badly, are we really getting anywhere?

Why did we start using GDP in the first place then?  Right after World War II, then US-president Herbert Hoover held it up as the most effective way to measure recovery from the war.  Growing the economy was the best way to distribute wealth and increase well-being at that time.  But since we are no longer in post-World-war recovery mode, different metrics now apply.

The Hidden Art of Measurement

Deeper social, economic and historical analysis aside, I like the way her talk called attention to the art of measurement.  Deciding which metrics are important is actually quite a profound exercise, since it drives everyone’s behaviours, goals and mindsets toward improving those metrics.   This is equally true inside a company as it is within an entire national economy.

What gets measured gets managed, according to the late great management thinker Peter Drucker.  So it is essential to pick out the metrics that represent short-term goals in alignment with long-term strategy.

Operating on Yesterday’s Agenda

An example could be to acquire some new investors in order to acquire the cash required to invest in upgrades – to improve energy efficiency, or drive new product research – that will permit the business to fulfill its overall mandate better.  Dollars of  investment acquired makes sense as a short-term metric but only in service of the long-term goal.  If it was the only thing you measured you would, theoretically, go on searching for investment forever but never moving on to the other activities which will enable achievement of long-term goals, value and mission – i.e. true progress.

When companies (or countries!) forget to update their metrics and continue behaving as though yesterday’s priorities are still the most important thing, you get sideways or even backwards progress.  You lose sight of mission and long-term goals.  It’s critical to update the metrics you are measuring and working towards to today’s reality.

The importance of balance 

Ms. Richardson also went on to talk about the danger of only measuring one thing, since no metric can adequately describe your entire operation.  I agree. I recently designed a management operating system for a client (that chart full of lovely green post-it notes you see above left!) which allows them to review the 48 top metrics that will drive excellence across their organization.  Balance in measurement is extremely important.

The small country of Bhutan has made international headlines for its adoption of ‘Gross Domestic Happiness‘ as a key metric for measuring progress.  It will be interesting to see how that experiment works out.  There are alternative metrics coming out  all of the time:  Happy Planet Index, the OECD’s Better Life Initiative, and though displacing GDP, even partially, will be a challenge, it is a very exciting and promising time to be alive as these ideas surface to balance out the economic factors.

What is your definition of true progress?

Do you have metrics for success in your life and work?  Do they make sense with what you believe is truly important for yourself, your business, your family and your country?  When was the last time you checked for alignment between what you are working on day-to-day and what you really want to accomplish in the long-term?

Take a cue from Bhutan and try updating your progress metrics to something that represents true success to you.

(Incidentally, I definitely want to see this movie about Bhutan when it comes out!  It is great to see that they were successful in obtaining their Kickstarter funding.)

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“Get off your butt.  Don’t sit at your desk all day.  Go out in the factory and talk to the people. ”

As it happens this is also a Lean concept.  This simple idea has a Japanese term:  gemba, which derives from the term for ‘the real place’.  It’s where the real action happens.

The Gemba walk is related to another practice called ‘Management by Wandering Around‘ (which is exactly what it sounds like!) first appeared in the vernacular of Hewlett-Packard executives in the 1970′s.

Gemba is where the real action happens

In a study of customer experience, the gemba, or real place, would be where the customer uses your product: the bottom of the ocean for a manufacturer of scuba-diving equipment; the running track for a producer of running shoes.  It’s where the rubber hits the road for your users and they most intensely experience what you have provided.

In the context of company culture, which is the way that I will discuss it today, the gemba is the shop floor.   As your people interact with your company’s systems and processes first hand, what they are experiencing?

What’s really going on out there?

Are they having trouble using a particular tool or system?  Do they not understand a part of the job responsibility that they have been given?  Are they skipping a key piece of the procedure entirely?  Is that great new system you spent all that capital on last month actually a source of great mystery, collecting dust in the corner?  Are they missing a broom or gloves… or a marker (sometimes the little things make all the difference!)?   The particulars will vary depending on your business.  But you’re always looking to find out the same thing – what part of the story is your monthly report missing?

A leader who embraces Gemba does not rely exclusively on the data from monthly reports, nor on reports from middle-managers.  He or she does not stay behind a desk all day.   A leader who practices Gemba goes out into the shop floor and talks to people in an unscripted, informal conversation.  And, as you can imagine, the insight they gain cannot be found in any report!

Go and See Leadership as Culture

Whether you’re working in a factory or an office or a virtual team, this principle applies equally.  Walking the floor of your own operations is not only a powerful way to learn about your business, it’s also a way to pay respect to those employees whose hands-on work make the company function.  Asking for their observations validates that those observations have value.  Asking about their experience shows that even if you can’t fix everything, you care.  Instead of feeling less important than the big boss, an executive assistant or technician or supervisor who has a chance to interact with a leader out on a Gemba walk can feel more like a teammate.

Too busy to walk the shop floor?

Too often leaders feel they are too busy to get out on the “shop floor”.   They might dismiss it as unnecessary.  After all, isn’t that why we have data collection systems – so I can understand what’s going on from the comfort of my own office?

More likely underlying this excuse is a fear about what would happen if they were to talk face-to-face, and risk an unscripted interaction with their rank and file.  They may have good reason to fear; they might not like what they hear.

The visibility of problems

Out on the floor, they might get a lot of complaints.  They might see a lot of problems.  In fact, it’s quite likely that they will because the more your company evolves its Lean culture, the more visible problems become.  The more you invite employees to point out problems and give you their observations, the more they will tell you!  This influx of input can become quite overwhelming.  It may scare some leaders back behind their desks again.

But over time, the benefits outstrip the risks for the determined leader.  Identifying problems is the first step in being able to solve them, and Gemba walks are a great way to gain that insight and turn resources toward solving the problems, small and silly right through to big and systemic.  Learning to listen, prioritize and respond to problems that your employees bring up will allow you to build trust as a leader and build a more constructive, healthier and ultimately more productive culture.

And creating a culture that is open and less hierarchical, in which leaders engage in genuine dialogue with their employees, is infinitely valuable in driving higher performance and business success.  One of my former clients, a Plant Manager, takes the time to walk the floor and take observations once per week.  As you can imagine he is well-known to his 400+ employees and well-liked because he takes the time to listen and respond.

Changing a culture is a tall order.  But getting off your butt to practice some Gemba is a great place to start!  How can you engage with one ‘real place’ in your business today?

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Okay, so I was dreaming.  What emerged (as you know if you watched as well) was a bit of a trainwreck:  two passive aggressive dudes in ties, smirking at each other and speaking into the middle distance with a series of vaguely connected, numbers-loaded responses, and lots of dancing around the questions the too-timid moderator asked them for 90 minutes.

As one of my favourite twitterers Umair Haque (@umairh) put it:  ”This debate was like that weird and creepy internet date you know you shouldn’t have gone on but did anyways.”  It did not feel right.  As another tweet put it: “Too much scattery wonk.”  They were able to throw numbers around without justification, quoting the ones that suited their purposes.  They danced around.

Poor, scattered performance

If they had been consultants/employees (the candidate) giving their report to their client/boss (the voting public) in a normal boardroom, they would have been fired (or at least disciplined) for delivering such a disjointed narrative.

But you know, you get what you design for.  A mild-mannered PBS news guy on the side in a high-stakes debate on complex, multi-faceted issues will yield what we got: a muddle of rhetoric with a couple of (as in one or two) memorable lines and absolutely no heart-winning moments.  It’s great for comedians, and for the pundits on Spin Alleys who can pull out whatever conclusions they went in with, and for those love nothing more than to make up clever memes about Big Bird.  Tonight’s debate was also great for those who thrive on policy wonking - an avid but small sector of the voting-aged population.  It leaves the voting public with little more than a general impression (Mitt seemed confident so…) to make a hugely important decision!

Note:  I am Canadian but I care about American politics because we are aversely affected by what happens South of the Border.  In my country we have an interactive tool called a Vote Compass, that allows you to enter your positions on specific policy, economic and social issues, then it tells you which political party most closely shares your views.  It’s very helpful!  It cuts through the confusion of sound bites, personal bias and attack ads, and lets you make a choice that reflects what you think.

Begin with the outcome you want

So back to last night’s debate process:   what if there was a different way to do the debate, based on a desired outcome of engaging a bigger portion of the public, and helping them make a well-thought-out choice that is appropriately fact/data-based?

What if the debate had been designed to inform voters, rather than just to provide them with good sarcasm fodder for the twitter feed?

For example, instead of a side-by-side Q&A format:

1) Leave the format the same but add in some additional requirements to improve clarity and accuracy.  For example, only allow the candidates to use numbers, figures and facts that have been checked by Politifact ahead of time.  Waiting for after the debate, when the winner has already been declared, to check the facts is like waiting until your teeth are rotting to go to the dentist.  Prevention is always better in any kind of system; why not apply that logic to block the lie before it happens?

2) Leave the format the same but require them to use visual aids. Print out those pre-checked facts in 48-point font on laminated cards and the candidates have to hold them up when they want to reference them. Charts and graphics would be great too. Both candidates play with the same deck of fact cards. Whoever violates the rule by going off-script (aka making stuff up) has to wear a yellow hat and go sing Oh Susannah in the corner by himself for 2 minutes while the other gets to speak to the audience without him.

(Okay, I was kidding about that last part. But I do think that if hockey players can be subjected to a ‘time-out’ for behaving badly, then politicians should too. After all, realtime feedback with direct consequences is the best way to learn from one’s mistakes!)

3) Require them to work together on a task, like analyzing a case study together then presenting the results as a team.  It would be like a two-man group project unfolding before your eyes.

4) Have them run through a brainstorming session together on pre-selected topics, then form the resulting ideas into a vision of what their country could be, then present it to the audience.  Essentially, make them work – together.

5) Make them take turns debating with the National University Debate Team Champion on the pre-selected issues, observing the time limits and sticking to the topic at hand per official debating rules.  (Bonus idea:  Make them argue the other guy’s side.)  This would expose their skill in the art of true debating.

6) Give them exactly 25 words to answer each question.  Let them write it down before answering, like Final Jeopardy.  After all, as Albert Einstein said, If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.

7) Pose job-interview questions:   What makes you right for the job?  What are your weaknesses?  How would your friends describe you?  Describe a time that you were very angry; what did you do?  What is your MBTI personality type?  What are your salary expectations? (Bonus idea: Ask them while connected to a polygraph).

Engagement vs entertainment value

I know, I know, this line of thinking could easily devolve into total farce (make them build a tower out of newspaper!  See who can hold their breath the longest!  make them compete for Jim Lehrer to give them a rose!  See who can do the most push-ups!  hey, what about a swimsuit competition?).  For the record I am completely in favour of unleashing creativity just for its own sake.  Of all of Edward de Bono’s Six Thinking Hats, the green one (where you get to be as random as you want – the crazier the better) is my absolute favourite.

But I am not talking about heightening the spectacle to pander to our reality-TV-conditioned viewing appetites, or humiliating the candidates just to make it more interesting.  On the contrary, a redesign would make for more informative viewing and enhance the dignity of the proceedings.  More delicious and nutritious!

Designing for genuine insight

I am talking about designing in elements that would allow the viewers, the consumers of the debate content and therefore the most important people in this whole grand equation that we call democracy, genuine insight on two levels.

First of all on the facts:   Which facts check out as accurate?    What position does this candidate actually hold?  What will they do if I help elect them?

and then secondly, since facts and arguments may be hard to pin down and future actions are nearly impossible to predict,  on person they are thinking about sending to the White House:

Will this person play well with others?  Is he (or she) good at leveraging areas of agreement, and able to get things done?   Is he (or she) humble about mistakes and own their opportunities to improve?  Does he (or she) have discipline, generosity of spirit, quick thinking skills?

Or (this one strikes me as a rather important albeit worst-case-scenario consideration):

Will this person start a Third World War?

Is this person lying?  (Can’t you just picture a big red light coming on above their head when they make a statement that doesn’t check out, or if their polygraph spiked?  Wouldn’t that be helpful to know?)

… or anything else they might want to know.

No doubt people would still snark and make fun if that was what they most felt like doing, and what I have mentioned above is just a first-cut, off-the-top-of-my-head set of ideas.  It would be bettered by those who understand the clarity that voters need the most.  Changing the process would present its own challenges, as change always does.

But wouldn’t it be great to supply voters with some genuine substance, tailored to make their decision-making process at the polls easier?   If our goal is to find someone about whom we feel some trust and pride, with whom we share positions on issues, and to whom we feel some connection and confidence, then the  political process should be explicitly designed to expose and/or create those things.

Clear out the noise, focus on the substance

Democracy is one of the great institutions that we North Americans claim defines our society, and our collective identity.   The live debate is one of the few truly pure interactions that we as voters get with our candidates.  It’s too precious an opportunity to be wasted.  Clear out the noise, focus on the substance.  Enough with the rhetoric and the weird ‘I love Big Bird’ statements.  Don’t let them off the hook so easily.  Design the process so it produces something that really matters, really informs, and really inspires.

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Well, yeah. Except it’s been nearly 13 years since the outbreak (of E coli from an improperly fixed well, a massive rain storm and a tangle of factors including insufficient chlorination of the water that killed 7 people and sickened some 2,300 – for those just tuning in).

I haven’t found a cheerful way to spin the subject yet. It was awful and many people still suffer. But I chime in in the hope that it will make us all think about it. The book is closed on the inquiry, jail sentences have been set, and most people think of it as over and irrelevant, but (though I hate to be the bearer of bad news) the root of the problem is far from gone.

Even the most embittered and devastated E. Coli survivor would agree that if the citizens of Walkerton had one voice, it would wish that no other town ever go through what they did. A thorough root cause analysis is necessary to understand the origins of the disaster, which we clearly have to do if we want to make lasting changes that will truly prevent something like this from recurring.

The correct verdict for the implicated parties (in this case the Koebel brothers, though it could be argued that it could have been anybody) is important.

But equally necessary though less obvious is an analysis of the system as a whole. This is the only way to serve and protect people well into the future.

Let me switch into an industrial analogy.  A factory must send a prescribed number of widgets with no impermissible defects to its customer on a daily basis. The factory has a set companies who sell us the raw components (collectively known as a supply chain) and set of inspection procedures, errorproofing measures, machinery and operators (collectively known as a process) designed to help achieve their mandate.

Let’s say a screw on one of the clamps on one of the inspection machines came loose. Let’s say that that screw got wedged on the face of the clamping pad. Now the screw is positioned so that it imprints each widget housing with a little dint.  The product keeps coming out of the assembly line, a little dint on each one. The dint compromises the seal on the leak testing device on the assembly line, but the volume of air escaping is sufficiently small that each unit still receives a ‘pass’ signal from the machine. The dint is undetected by the unloading person’s visual check, who is busy looking for a different defect on a different part of the widget.

You with me so far?  Bad parts getting through.  No one has noticed yet, and dints are to widgets as poisonous E Coli is to water.

Now the dinted product is being loaded into the carry totes by the thousand, and being shipped to Illinois (or Michigan or Korea) to be assembled onto engines at the customer’s plant. The first 500 dinted units are unpacked and assembled there without notice, but when the first dinted widgets hits the equipment that tests the leak rate of the whole engine, each begins to fail. Customer workers stop their assembly process and discover the dint on the product that we shipped to them, and pronounce it the root cause of the failure. Several things now happen:

1) Sorting: a) Customer workers begin a manual inspection of all product in stock at their facility to determine whether they have the same defect.

b) Workers at the home factory begin a manual inspection of all product in stock inhouse to determine whether they have the same defect.

2) Containment: Appropriate measures are taken to separate good units from bad units.

3) Charging: The home factory is charged for the labour involved in 1a) and b), 2 and sometimes an additional fee. (For certain customers it is $10K automatically for a new Quality issue).

4) Root Cause Analysis and Elimination: The home factory analyzes the defect and brainstorms on where it could have been created.  If they are on the ball they will figure it out, check on the assembly line, find the loose screw and tighten it.

5) Systems Review: A team of process experts comes together to investigate the root of the problem to ensure it never happens again. This team would examine such questions as: Why did the screw come loose? Why did we select that type of screw? Where was the vibration coming from that made it loosen? Why wasn’t the loose screw detected? Why wasn’t the dint detected by the leak tester on our assembly line? Why wasn’t the dint visually detected by the operator? Was there not sufficient lighting? Not sufficient time? then follow up to correct them. Through this they might learn that the operator should have caught the defect, that the leak tester’s parameters were mis-set, or that the maintenance mechanic’s failure to do preventive maintenance on the assembly line that day resulted in the screw coming loose.  Or perhaps all of the above.  Most often, a combination of factors is found to be the root cause of the problematic outcome.

No one factor could have caused the problem and one small fix would not have contained it; yet together those small factors swirled like the perfect storm and caused a disaster.

6) Documentation and Analysis: The findings of 4 and 5 are written down and communicated to the customer. They are interested in 5 more than 4. The findings are also reviewed periodically within our company to allow designers of new processes to avoid similar issues in the future.

Everyone’s going to have their own perspective on this scenario; their own way of weighting the best way to solve it.

If we had a nurse or development worker in this conversation, he/she might automatically gravitate toward #1,2: emergency relief, getting the problem under control. My lawyer friend Sean’s concern rested nearly solely on finding the right sentence (punishment fit for the crime) for the responsible party – which makes sense, since he comes in on #3. As a Continual Improvement/Manufacturing Engineer, I am chiefly involved in #4, 5 and 6, so I switch into that gear automatically when considering any problem.

There is always new product flowing out the door; regardless of what the problem was, it needs to go away.

So back to the not-so-trivial scenario of the contaminated water flowing into peoples houses in my little old hometown.  After the old tap fixtures are being disinfected and the E coli-stricken are released from being cared for in hospital (#1, 2), the wrong-doers are sentenced (#3) and the issues are probed in a public inquiry (#4). Unavoidably, new water is soon flowing through the taps. The only way to guarantee (or maximize the chances) that the water is safe is through rigourous and extensive and blameless and tireless pursuit of #5. Then make sure everybody knows about it, all the angles, in #6.

It’s natural to want to raise up and demand crime and punishment when things get this scary and awful.  We are human beings and we all deserve to feel safe where we live, work and play.  Framing the situation emotionally, somebody must pay.

In the context of problem-solving, however, determining who’s responsible is only useful to the point that now we now how to fix it – and determining which consequences are appropriate is only useful to the point that implementing them truly prevents the problem from recurring.

This is the frame of reference from which I approach the situation, and the basis on which I base my skepticism that the problem has really been solved. Focusing on Stan and Frank Koebel (the much-maligned managers of the municipalities water system at the time) is the equivalent of yelling at the operator who missed the dint and closing the investigation right there.

It provides us no safety, no comfort, no real solace because there no assurance that it will not occur again. The screw could vibrate right out of the machine again and the ride begins anew – with a different schmuck taking the fall, but no real progress made.   Incidentally, Stan Koebel did get a year in jail, and many would agree that he should have.  The inquiry gave 50% responsibility to the provincial government at the time.  No one to represent the tangled web of factors their negligence failed to capture.  So we punish the man who held the simplest piece of the puzzle, and convince ourselves we have ‘solved’ the issue.  To me, both as a citizen of Walkerton and a citizen of the world, that outcome is simply unacceptable.

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It got me thinking.  And I asked a few more friends who have hired consultants why they hate consultants and this is basically what I got:

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My first UNconference

It was also an UNconference, (not UN as in United Nations, but as in ‘not’) where the participants define the topics and lead the sessions on the fly, so the dialogue is always fresh and relevant.  We talked hootsuite, facebook, twitter, blogging, google + and so much more.  As the organizer pointed out, because the participants so uniquely shape the content, it will never be the same experience twice.  Cool huh?

I left early.  I had a to-do list 15 items long by 2:45 pm and I just couldn’t sit and talk anymore.

This is no slam on the event or the folks I met at the event.  I had a great time!  But I had to honour the shift I felt inside – from the ideas-acquiring phase to the DOING phase.  Or perhaps it was a recognition that I was already in the doing phase, and that I’d reached my capacity for new ideas and socializing.

It’s GO time!

It’s not always time to shake things up, to rethink, to innovate, to create new dreams and connect new dots.   Sometimes it’s time to execute, move ahead on the plan, and follow the focused and stubborn pursuit of excellence.  Like this guy:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hbV6knbeUFE

Grand visions of sushi

As the most accomplished sushi chef in the history of Japan, how much time did Jiro spend learning to be perfect at putting those rice, fish and condiments together?  How much patience and dedication did it take to earn that legendary status?   He couldn’t change things up every week.  (He probably didn’t have a social media strategy either, or spend very much time networking, but that is definitely not my point.)

How in the world did he sustain that kind of attention, resist the temptation to re-invent and re-arrange and switch everything up?  How can any of us resist that temptation in this fast-paced, inter-connected, boundlessly idea-ed world we live in?

Simplicity in doing hard work you love

A possible answer comes from his beautiful advice in the trailer:  ”You have to love your job.  You must fall in love with your work.”  A passion for what you do will sustain you when things get boring.  Becoming the best – or even just great – isn’t always exciting.   There’s a heck of a lot of hard work involved in between the cool bits that might land you a client, an investor, a book deal or an Emmy.  Just ask entrepreneur and digital media guru Natalie MacNeil, who spoke at the event yesterday.

The neat thing about the era that we live in, as opposed to the Jiro-style school of business, is that you can connect with thousands if not millions of others about the process you’re going through.  You can share your love for what you do in real time.  You can share with someone across town or around the world.  For extroverted types like me who gain energy by bantering and bouncing ideas around – whether it be the big crazy ideas that change the game, or the details of how to invent and implement something incremental, social media tools are very powerful and useful.

One hazard, though, is that they can knock you over with the sheer volume of information and ideas they bring to you, like a tidal wave.  Much as I love being submerged in ideas and swimming around for a while, it’s not practical for me to stay there.

Soon after, I need to climb out and get focused.   I am going to try (mentally) hanging out with Jiro on a mountain top the next time I feel overwhelmed, since it seems like he is really onto something:  focus on one thing and do it really really really well.  Eat it, sleep it, dream about it – let everything else fall away.

How do you avoid idea overload and hold your focus on your goals?     I’d love to know – really!

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I won’t lie – I was really enjoying myself! I zipped through the back and side lawns, but unfortunately the grass on my front lawn had grown so tall and thick that it choked my poor electric old mower into submission about halfway through. It just stopped dead.

Undaunted, I flipped the mower over and pulled out the grass jammed between the cover and the blade that had forced the blade to stop moving – just a split second before realizing that I hadn’t disconnected the main power source. 

If the blade had started up again on its own once the obstruction had been removed, I would have been very very badly hurt. Without even thinking, I had just placed my right hand – the one I need to do everything in my life – in serious harm’s way!

Whoa!  That could have been Really Really Bad!

In that next moment I was so scared – the specific type of useless scared that comes after danger has been averted – and angry with myself.  Me that used to teach safety leadership courses! Me that knows exactly how costly a moment’s lapsed attention can be through studying incident reports of industrial accidents! Me that knows all about the importance of errorproofing!  How could I have been so stupid and careless?

Now, the lawn mower didn’t roar back to life. Rest its soul, its motor is still dead.  I am sad about that.  It was my grandfather’s.  But very happy I get to keep my hand!

So why I am telling you about this non-event in my life? Why embarrass myself by publicly revealing my carelessness – and risk retro-actively really freaking out my mom? Well, it’s worth talking about because what happened with me and the lawn mower was what we’d call a near miss.  Nothing bad happened – but it sure could have.

Forward-thinking leaders in many industries and companies look at near-miss data as a way to help learn from their mistakes before they have had to pay the consequences of a disaster. Statistically, the more near misses there are, the more serious incidents will follow. Many near misses are caused by human mistakes.  Each mistake is an opportunity to learn.

Embarrassment turned resolve as risk management tool

Fire rescue, aviation, healthcare and rail industries all have their own confidential Near Miss Reporting registries to share information and lessons learned. People are understandably jittery about sharing information about their mistakes lest they get themselves fired.  However in a case where their mistake has had huge consequences, they rarely have a choice.

In the case of near misses, reporting is usually confidential – and optional.  By nature of being a non-incident, a near miss is much easier to hide.  But sharing near miss information is a crucial first step.  Adding in proper root cause analysis and internal communication, everyone in an entire company or even in that entire profession can learn what NOT to do – without having to suffer the pain (and considerably more embarrassment!) of a serious incident.

Often people are too embarrassed to admit that they made a mistake and might just want to forget all about their near miss – but isn’t a little embarrassment worth risking if you can help save someone else from injury or worse? When a company learns from near-misses, instead of waiting for something big and bad to happen, they dramatically increase their ability to prevent that disaster scenario.  An organizational culture that encourages employees to speak up about their mistakes, and a system for reporting and sharing learnings from both incidents and non-incidents is a great start.

“The little one that makes sure the big one doesn’t happen”

I remember one winter day ten-ish years ago when a group of friends and I were piled into a car and headed off to Quebec for some skiing. We hadn’t even left Toronto yet when my friend took a corner too narrowly coming out of an underground parking garage, hit a concrete pillar side-on and put a long, deep gash in the back right fender. It was his car. None of us were hurt. It didn’t affect the car’s function at all. Yet our friend was fuming – very angry with himself and probably more than a little embarrassed too. Another friend calmly reassured him with ‘don’t worry buddy – it’s a little one that makes sure the big one doesn’t happen’.

It was the perfect thing to say, and absolutely true – with one important clarification. The ‘little ones’ (the near misses or the less serious incidents) will eventually lead to a ‘big one’ (significant disaster or failure) if the pattern remains unchecked. It’s just statistical law. But if you can absorb the lesson contained in the non-incident and create a shift in the trend, you can successfully prevent ‘the big one’.   Instead of being scared or embarrassed by near misses, we can embrace the opportunity they contain by responding with a better plan for next time.

Little (non)-incidents, big implications

The cost of not responding is huge. Think BP oil spill. Think Chernobyl. Think any number of explosions, fires, plane crashes, accidental medical deaths and other unnatural disasters. I am also curious as to whether the mistakes made during the JP Morgan fiasco couldn’t have been predicted based on a leadup sequence of near misses.

Then there are all those smaller near-miss incidents in everyday life you might put out of your mind – that time you were texting while driving and you swerved just in time to miss a pedestrian, or the time you left a candle burning overnight?  Or the time you used an unsafe ladder ‘just this once’ to finish a job around the house? What can you do to systematically eliminate these near misses from your own work or home life?  What ‘little ones’ has your business been ignoring?

For my part, do you think I will ever stick my hand anywhere near a still-powered blade, even if I jam up my lawn mower twice a year for the next 20 years? No way, not on your life! My internal near-miss retention system (not to mention my limbic/survival system!) is fully engaged – to remind me to heed my Safety Leadership training and be more mindful whenever working with electric machinery.

Pretend it was a disaster (and thank your lucky stars it wasn’t!)

It’s equally true whether it’s a business decisions or something you are doing on your own time:  track and respond to less serious incidents – and near misses – with all the care and attention you would give to a significant incident, and you have a valuable opportunity to prevent and learn from potential disaster before it happens.  May you get through your whole career without that happening.

What’s your near miss story? I don’t think I am the only one who has one!

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But the party never lasts very long. As the pace of your business requires, you are on to the next problem to solve right away. You can’t sit beside your implemented solution to make sure that it works. You have to trust that things will stay in their improved state. There is nothing more frustrating than walking back to your newly improved area only to discover that all your team’s hard work has been undone.

But let’s not be too hasty. That doesn’t always happen. In some cases, the solution implemented will stay in place and work perfectly forever. In other cases it will come undone and cause an annoyance for everyone, or even a risk to worker safety or to your business.

So what’s the difference between solutions that come undone, like sloppy shoelaces, and those that don’t? There are three key factors:

1) The nature of the change you implemented. If your improvement project led you to implement a solution that is by nature unlikely to be interfered with, you will not likely experience any backslide. Some problems can be solved through a highly technical and focused solution: re-programming a processing parameter or removing equipment from a work area, for example. I call these the ‘set-it-and-forget-it’ changes, and they are highly desirable in the improvement world, much the way engineering mistake-proofing solutions are stronger than administrative controls (i.e. things that depend on humans) in reducing risk. You can choose these types of solutions in the Improve phase of your Six Sigma project.

2) The reaction(s) of the people affected by the change. In some cases you will have to deal with the behaviours, attitudes reactions and counter-ideas of people affected by the change. It’s often said that a resistance to change is human nature, but in my experience there is a lot you can do to minimize that friction. Through proper stakeholder management, you show how the changes you’re implementing benefit them, and your most outspoken critic can become your best ally!

3) The overall cultural attitude toward change within the company. The process by which you win folks over one-by-one that I describe above when repeated, sooner or later, becomes a tidal wave within a company. Success stories from improvement (Six Sigma or other types of improvement methodology) become the rule and not the exception, and a sense of pride begins to take hold within the company.

The signs are unmistakable: Employees begin to hold each other accountable in keeping the newly-improved state intact. Leaders within the company reward success with improvement – with handshakes and recognition in front of peers, or with other incentives. Everyone begins to think with discipline: value-added vs. non-value-added activity, speaking with data vs. hunches, standardized repeatable processes vs. everyone doing it their own way. Problems are detected and prevented earlier and earlier in the value chain. The environment changes: there are fewer ‘crazy’ days where everything is breaking down and going wrong and more time to plan for changes in the business. A less stressful work environment is known to promote employee health and well-being, produce fewer workplace injuries and lower employee turnover.

This cultural shift is the ultimate goal of all us improvement leaders, because it sustains the gains reached through invididual improvement efforts and opens doors toward further gains.

No matter what method you use to get there, or what slogan you assign, an improvement in culture transforms the workplace into a happier, more productive place – somewhere everyone would like to work.

Have you seen successes – or failures – in your company’s culture transformations? What made the difference?

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 Ebenezer Scrooge in a skirt?

How did I do that?  Since the terms ‘cost reduction’ or ‘cost savings’ inevitably bring to mind a mean-faced, heartless approach to managing a business – squeeze as much as you can out of your employees, give them as little as possible, and watch your profit margins fatten – you might be thinking that I was a sort of “Grim Reaper of the Workplace”-type character.  Well, not so.

I am not saying re-organizations to eliminate jobs never happened – they did.   But that’s not how I put the numbers that justified my salary on the table.  My part of the puzzle involved engaging employees, listening to them, arming them with new skills and tools, and finding ways to make their ideas work.  It involved bringing about consensus, providing clarity and teaching a systematic way of thinking through problems.  It involved breaking down communication barriers, guiding change, and eliminating headaches for front-line employees as well as making managers and directors look good.

So I know from my own experience that great business results do not have to come at the expense of employee well-being, health, safety or satisfaction.  It just takes a little planning and lot of good old-fashioned hard work.  Let me explain.

Find the key value drivers, and prioritize them.

Simply put, these are the pain points:  the product line with the most quality issues, the area of the plant with the most back injuries, the step in the process that takes the longest, or generates the most complaints from your employees.  The examples I mention are derived from my experience in operations, but these methodologies also work on design cycles, business planning and transactional environments such as banks, hospitals, NGOs and retail establishments.

The questions are the same no matter where you are:  What’s driving that bulge in spending?  What’s fluctuating the most?  What’s keeping you and your employees up at night?   What should you work on now, and what should you leave for later?  There are a number of tools available (surveys, scorecards, financial analysis) to guide this process, as it can be overwhelming when a HUGE number of problems come to mind.  The good news is that you will soon learn to see them as opportunities, not problems.

Choose your weapon

Once you have identified the first area of focus for your problem-solving (or put in the positive, identified your opportunity to capture), you need to pick a method.  Many companies have a ‘silver bullet’ mentality, meaning they think that one tool or methodology will solve every problem they have.  In my experience, Lean is useful when there are many interactions amongst different people, departments or business groups, while Six Sigma is more appropriate for more complex, subtle and intermittent problems in one area or process.  Kaizen is great when you want to pay attention to a very specific problem, while creating visibility and publicly demonstrating your commitment to change.

Simple brain-storming and cause-and-effect analysis may be sufficient to generate massive benefits in some cases.  At other times, a re-definition of goals and objectives, or a reaffirmation of an overall vision will be needed before the correct course of action can be identified.  Someone who understands each of these tools can guide you in the direction that maximizes your chances of success, and help you avoid spending a ton of time and money on training and tools that you don’t need.

Draw the box

Decide what you’re going to do, and what you’re not going to do.  Only this and no more!  This sounds incredibly obvious, but skipping this step is the single fastest way to guarantee you will fail in your improvement efforts.  Defining the scope of your improvement project means identifying your metric (how you measure the problem), your area of focus, your team, your target and your timeline.  I like to think of it as setting yourself up for success, because you are looking forward to the improved state and deciding what it will look like, then looking backwards and asking yourself:  How am I going to know when I have succeeded?  The Project Management Institute has great tools for scoping projects (and for many of the subsequent steps as well).

Run the numbers 

Make sure your numbers and data you collected in your ‘pain points’ exercise line up with the items truly driving expenses according to your financial tracking system.  Your Controller is your best friend for this step; if he or she doesn’t have a line item for the thing you’re trying to address, it might as well not exist.  You may need to keep digging, look under other departments’ numbers, or convince them that they need to modify the way they track things to reflect what’s happening on the front lines.  Numbers are a language of their own so it is truly a process of translation!

Explore the issue – what is really going on?

With your numbers properly in place and your scope firmly established, you are ready to dive in to get a proper understanding of the problem.  To me this is the most exciting part because it is new and different every time.  You and your team will be in charge of interpreting the data you have – both qualitative and quantitative – and making decisions based on it.  You’ll also need to know when the data you have is not enough.  When is it time to ask more questions?  When do we need to get more people involved?  When is it okay to proceed?  It will be iterative and there are many tools you can call about at this phase, to help you strike that fine balance between ending up on the wrong track because you acted too quickly and ‘analysis paralysis’.    It will depend on many factors including the nature of the problem, the time pressure involved and the risks to the business either way.

Spring into action!

Eventually, as fun and exciting as it is to play detective in the exploration phase, you will have to come out of it with some conclusions and recommendations for action.  Often at this point you will have a huge list of suggested action items, ranging from very easy and cheap fixes to expensive long-term revamps.  You will have the budget and time to implement some of them, others not.  Some of the items you propose are likely to have a little impact, some will have a lot.  You’ll want to zoom in on the ones that have that magical combination of high impact, low cost to implement.  Then you do what you need to do.  Take a deep breath and put your credibility on the line:  implement them and see what happens!

Validate and/or Repeat as Necessary

I was kidding about the credibility thing.  (Mostly).  Not everything you try is going to work out right away.  At this stage you are seeing some results from the things you thought would work, and they might not.  Most of the easy problems have already been solved, so yours is likely to be a tricky one.  You will have to be resilient and flexible.  You might need to change course, re-visit your conclusions, re-define your scope, or radically change course.  In my experience, though, a significant change in the project at this phase is rare.  Usually you will have to tweak, be patient and keep the positive communication flowing, inside your team and with your key stakeholders.  Double down on what works, and put the ideas that went nowhere into the ‘Lessons Learned’ folder.  Keep going until the needle starts to move in the right direction on the metric you chose.

Run the numbers (again)

As you watch the situation improve on the frontlines, you will have new evidence to show to your buddy the Controller. You’ll need to check back in to make sure that your improvements are generating the financial benefit that you both expected.  If you did your numbers right the first time, there will be no negative surprises at this stage.  In fact, you will often see additional benefits that you did not predict.  When this happens it tends to make you very popular!  Show your love to your team by spreading the credit around.  It’s tremendously rewarding for them to see that their solution is working.

Hang in there

Usually you will experience a cooling-off period at this point – when immediate action is no longer required but you can’t fully close the book on your improvement efforts just yet.  Your team will go from active problem-solving/implementing mode into a monitoring/maintaining mode.  There are specific tools and things that you can do to prove that your efforts are working as the numbers roll in – a key one being documentation.  In my experience you need to over-communicate for people to understand what you’re doing.  Use it as a chance to build positive communication opportunities for your team members; this helps them share in the victory.  These steps are all part of change management.  You may need to return to the exploration phase if things start to go backwards.  Repeat as necessary until you hit your targets.

Document and celebrate!

Because you’ve kept such complete and accurate notes all the way through, this phase will be easy.  It’s now time to phase yourself out of the project and leave it to the usual process owners to maintain in its new and improved state.  Do everything possible to win them over with your solutions, and make sure that they don’t change everything right back to the way it was the minute you look away.  The best way you can do that is to involve them deeply throughout the problem-solving exercise.  Document document document.  Communicate communicate communicate.  Then have a little ceremony (or a big one!) to recognize the great efforts of the team.  This is a great moment for everyone!

Management is happy, the team is happy, the process owners are happy.  And let’s not forget your buddy the Controller.  He or she is happy too!  It’s especially fun if you can invite someone official and financial to the party to say ‘your team saved $324,194′.  People really do enjoy being a part of something successful.  If the company does profit-sharing, or has the resources to compensate the team members financially for being part of the team, so much the better.  But I have continually been surprised by how happy people are with a simple handshake, a certificate (which costs pennies to print out!) and a simple and sincere ‘good job’.

Repeat

So that’s how it’s done.  Once you’re finished celebrating, you go back to your pain points list and start again, re-energized from your victory and ready to tackle something new.  You can bet that you will have an easier time gaining the support you need the second (and third, fourth, etc) time around, once you have proven that you are capable of generating results.   Don’t worry about your job security – I have never once run out of problems to solve.   Creating value for companies using Business Improvement methodologies is good for your resume, and it’s good for the business and for the people it employs.  And if I do say so myself, quite a bit of fun!

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