A good person and a bad system - my take

W. Edwards Deming is one the big quote-machines in the management business and one of the most often cited is this:

A bad system will defeat a good person, every time - W. Edwards Deming 

It's not only sad - it's also true. Sadly. (Oh wow - that was an recursive sentence almost :)). I believe this and I have seen it in practice. But i have also seen the opposite. Like this:

A good person will defeat a bad system, eventually - Marcus C. Hammarberg

Let me try to clarify what I mean and what I've seen to support it.

How I prepare and create presentations

I've just been to Agile Singapore and had a blast. What a nice bunch of people I met there! And the event was super; fun well organised and informative - that's all i want from conference.
I also had an opportunity to give a presentation there. It was quite some time since I created one for scratch so I took it (the opportunity) to rewrite my Kanban In Action presentation.

Some people have asked me how I create presentations and I thought that it could be good idea to write it down for myself as well. Hopefully I will do more presentations... then I can use this.

I don't consider myself an expert on desimomomooahahahaaa (sorry could not keep a straight face... ok - once again...) on design of slides nor do I have deep communication education. I have failed a lot though and I really enjoy doing presentation. Below works for me - your milage may vary.

It's just an experiment - experiments in practice

At my current client we're starting to work with improvements, as I wrote about before. The things I talk about in that post is small changes, but bigger things we handle on separate lines. For now. That might change.

Today I tried to introduce an idea of experimenting to the team. Let me walk you through it, because I found that by just changing the language a little bit, we got a much better understanding and reduced anxiety. Also I think they all like it.

We are trying to bring our profitability up and hence try to find new ways to serve more customers. In this case there was a suggestion to prolong the opening hours for one department to 1900 on weekdays and keep it open on Sundays too. It's now closing at 1400 and is not open at all on Sundays.

(Ok, it's a bit of a no-brainer. Of course we should open it. But it serves as a good example).

The time I found myself wanting stuff waiting...

One of the best and shortest explanations to what Lean really is about, I've found in the "This is Lean"-book by Niclas Modig and Per Åhlström.

The thing that made it "click" for me was a diagram that contrasted Resource efficiency with Flow efficiency. I love it! Even though I might have talked about Efficiency versus Effectiveness... Well it's not my book - and that's why it's famous and I'm not, I suppose :).

Basically;

• scoring high on Resource efficiency, for example, is a melting plant for steel. You want that running all the time. You keep a lot of material ready to be processed, because the plant is so expensive to shut down
• scoring high on Flow efficiency is for example the fire department. Most of the time they have enormous over capacity. Just sitting around waiting until they are needed. We want much less work waiting (none that is) than our capacity
• Scoring low-low (lower left) means that nothing gets done and there's also nothing to do. There's only waste in our process and no value gets created. The dessert if you want.
• Scoring high-high (upper right) means that work gets done just as it's needed and everyone have just enough to do. There's no waiting times and no waste in our process. One-piece continuous flow is one example of this Nivana-like state. 

Now, with that diagram in place, we can describe Lean; Lean is a business strategy to reach the Nirvana-state by focusing on flow efficiency. That means, since it's a strategy, that there are other ways to get there. Lean is just one of them. And Lean focus on Flow efficiency.

If you think that sounded wise and good it's because it's not me; it's Niclas and Per. Buy the book and thank them.

Now I can finally write my blog post. Because for a number of years I've been teaching this, trying to focus on Flow Efficiency. Keep your stock low, limit work in process and move things fast through the process. Which made me the more surprised when I yesterday found myself saying;

This should never be empty. In fact I want as many things as possible in here. 

Effective revisted

I'm talking a lot about effectiveness and how it difference from efficiency. This probably have to do with two things; first - the difference between these two concepts is at the heart of the lean mindset. The second fact is that I'm Swedish.

Swedish is a very poor language compared to, for example English, that is much richer. If I was to translate the first sentence of this blog post in Swedish you'll get what I mean:

Jag pratar ofta om effektivitet och hur det skiljer sig från effektivitet

Ah, the poverty! It's the same word. There's no difference... in Swedish. I've still to understand if that means that Swedes are focused on effectiveness of efficiency.

Vision statements - why not say what you REALLY mean?

I'm working with vision statements and strategic planning right now. Man - this an area that is really misunderstood and misused I think. Also, and that's what this post is about, I think it's deliberately this way in order to get some wiggle room. I don't understand that. We'll get there.

Definitions

As always I've learned a great deal while diving into this area again and here are the definitions that we are using and that I think is clarifying:

• Mission statement - Why are we here? What is our purpose? For example; Why do the Salvation Army exists in Indonesia? 
• Vision - when we are doing the mission perfectly - what would that look like? This is a dream, a target and something to aspire to. 
• Strategic plan - how will we get from where we are today to the vision? 
• Business plan - what kind of actions and resources will our strategic plan require from us? When or in which order are we planning to do the actions? 

What is this good for?

Guidance. If you read this blog you know that I'm not specifically into detail planning. I don't think it's feasible. For one simple reason; the future is unknown. It's really the only thing that we know about it - it will not be exactly how we planned it. 

However - the list above is very handy anyway I think. Most of the points are not about planning but guidance, alignment and policies for how we act. In that regard this is greatly valuable. 

Hey, it's one of those days, I even think that the last point (that is planning) could be useable. This too will show us where we planning to go. From where we are now. With what we know. 

As long as we understand that these things will change, there's no problem. 

There's a problem here

However... I found that many organisations are VERY reluctant to change these lists. To be quite frank the first point (the mission) maybe shouldn't change. That would mean to change the whole reason for the organisations existence. That is basically destroying the organisation and rebuilding it into something completely different. 

But the vision... might change. If we need to do some drastic adaptations to a new reality for example. Just imagine how the Internet has changed business models. The vision for companies like N.Y. Times and CNN I imagine shifted radically with the new possibilities in a new media.  

From Kanban in Action

Strategic plans is very interesting, I think, and here we should be prepared to change much more than the previous ... levels. This has to do with a very important part that I've wrote in italics above: "where we are today". 

This is also one of the really powerful tenants of kanban: "start where you are - change in small steps". 

The Commissioner of the Salvation Army (CEO in business terms) in Indonesia told me an old English joke that is suitable here:

A man drove up to a woman on the sidewalk, in London, and asked: 

"How do I get to Piccadilly circus from here?" 

The woman responded:

"Oh... that's hard. I wouldn't start from here" 

This is funny (or well...) because it shows that we often don't take the reality into our plans. You know what - it's out there. There's no use lying to ourselves and plan from a place where we not are now. This is how it looks, this are our financial state, these are our customers etc. Now - let's improve towards the wonderful state our vision talked about.

The last part, business plans, is just an example, suggestion in my mind. Here one could benefit greatly from the thinking behind rolling wave planning; for things that is close in the future (next week) we have more details planned, for things that further in the future we leave details out.

Remember that you hold the dial for how much details you put in there. And hence your disappointments... 

You were speaking about a problem?

Oh, forgot about that... Well the problem I have seen a lot is that people and organisations in them are very reluctant to change. About anything. Especially vision statements. 

So we write very lofty statements, with big fluffy words like "holistic", "empower", "best within selected areas", "leading" and "famous".
Often when I don't understand or if I question if what we do really fits into the vision the answer is (had this experience with many clients):

Well, you could say that holistic means... 

Best really means that we are ...

The intention of leading was more like ...

This is playing the victim blame game a bit. If it was your intention - why not write that then? How am I supposed to understand what you mean when your vision said something that was so lofty that I didn't get it the first time around?

Either it was a mistake or, you didn't want to be clear and crisp on purpose. Most organisations spend a lot of money and time doing these statements, so the it's probably not lack of competence. So why are we unclear on purpose?

The answer that comes back again and again to me is; because it's hard to change those. In some organisations the vision statement is written into the constitution. I'm in one right now. Updating the vision means that we need to reregister legal documents etc. etc.

So what? To me it's much better to be clear and understandable with the vision that to avoid work. The vision is intended to guide us and show us what to do. Please make those directions clear.

Summary

Good indicators and guides are hard to write. It's hard to get it right. But once created can prove invaluable to help and guide people in your organisation. 

What is your approach to the problem that they are hard to write? 

Do you think really, really hard and then carve it in stone write it once so that you never never have to change this again? 

Or do you change your process here so that you think hard for a short while and then make it easier to change and communicate - so that you have a living dialog about your vision and strategy. 

You choose. 

cc all the things

We are working a lot with trust and transparency in my current team. Specifically on the transparency item one "trick" we have been using is to cc the entire team in as many conversations as possible.

I picked this practice up from the Stripe company and specifically this article, which is a great read if you haven't seen it before.

Yes, they cc the whole company on everything. And I've seen this practice in action at Spotify to certain extent as well.

By now some of you need oxygen; MY GOD! My inbox will be flooded. And how could anyone be expected to read all of that?! Do these people do any real work?

There's three comments that needs to be made here, that I have repeated a lot when trying to implement this in all kinds of teams;

First; you are not expected to read or act on this. CC stands for Carbon (moahahaha!) Copy and simply means that you get a copy. I'd suggest you train the rest of your organisation in how to properly us this and DO not answer to emails that you are CC on, only to the ones sent TO you.

Secondly (related to the first); get good at using the email tool and help others to become better too. I have a very simple rule that takes everything that I am cc-ed on and just put it in a separate folder; "Inbox - CC". I read that when I have time over.

Thirdly (and most important): there's a symbolic value in sharing the information with everyone. We trust each other to let everyone in on all the things. We trust each other to act wisely with that information. We believe that more minds are better than fewer and strive to become more and more transparent with our information.

Summary

The main idea here is not that everyone knows everything all the time, but you already have that information at your finger tips. You can just find it in your email. It's already there!

We don't expect you to act on everything - but you are encourage to take part and offer your opinion in matters that are important and interesting to you.

This is where we trying to go.
CC all the things!

You already have that information.
We share everything

Some thoughts about waste and waste reduction

Every Lean practitioner goes through a phase of "waste elimination frenzy". At least the ones I've met. Ah, well.... I did at least.
This usually happen in the beginning of your Lean journey when you realise that if you can remove waste the flow would be improved and value will be created faster and more effective.

Now we go out on a hunt to find that pesky waste. Kill it! Off with it head! We search for it high and low. "This is wasteful - let's stop it!", "This report is that really adding value... I think it's waste", "Why should have this meeting/function/role/process? WASTE!"

I think this is where many Lean initiatives goes wrong. We're so focused on removing things instead of adding value. It's savings, reduction and removals where it should be improvements, values and focus on people.

From time to time I see people myself try to define waste. So we easily know what we can remove and what stays. I'm not saying that this is not fruitful, it's just ... hold on I'll get there.
Yesterday I saw a really fun and good way of having you think about what is waste and not, by Jon Terry:

Everyone is against waste. But what is it? Rule of thumb: Waste is anything that your customer wouldn't pay for if you itemized your bill
— Jon Terry (@leankitjon) October 14, 2014

I shared what I learned from David J Andersson as a good way to identify what is waste or not. It was quite the wake-up call for me, but it's a very sharp tool. David said that standup-meetings was waste, in the true Lean-sense. The agileist in me rebuked of course and then David said:

Well... if it's not wasteful it's adding value. So why don't you do more of it? Let's do it all day long? 

And I forcefully answered: "Oh yeah?! But a......aeeee..... yeah, you are correct. Sir."

What's a little waste really?

Because it's true. Standup is not directly adding value. 

Just as raising the hammer to hit the nail is not driving the nail into the board. It's just preparing to do that. But maybe, just maybe, there's a better, more effective way to drive nails into the board. Like a nail gun. Or do we need nails altogether? The value comes from the finished product, not the individual nailed boards. Maybe we should glue them together? 

Let's bring it back to standup. Most people I've met find these short meetings valuable. But they are, in the true lean-sense, waste. How can this be? 

I learned a little phrase (also from David J Andersson, if I'm not mistaken) that helped me to get this clear:

Value trumps flow, flow trumps waste elimination 

What this means is that we're first of all focusing on getting value - being effective, reaching our goal. After that to have a good flow in our system and then on waste elimination. Or in other words: if there are a way to get more value out of our system without flow (?!) we take that route. And if we can get flow with waste still present we don't need to eliminate the waste - we have flow.

Many Lean initiatives goes the other way; eliminate the waste to get better flow to get value.

What is waste elimination good for then?

I think it's important to understand that waste elimination is just a tool to make our process more efficient. But it's not a goal in itself to eliminate waste. The goal is to increase the value that the system is producing. 

Meaning that the hunt for waste should be treated as you smell the diapers of a baby (to borrow from Kent Beck and his code smells analogy):

If smell something bad you should at least investigate. It doesn't have to mean problems, but it's worth a quick check just to make sure...

Or closer to the topic at hand:

Waste in the system should at least be investigated. Maybe there's problems that are hindering us, maybe not. Better check it out. 

So the next time someone says; "I heard that Marcus said that estimating/standup meetings/[your favorite long held practice here]" you can reason with that stubborn consultant.

• Yes, but we get better flow from this (as the case of standup, due to information sharing)
• Yes, but our system is producing value faster (as might be the case of estimates... who knows)
• Ok, let's see if there's another way to write our code with less errors faster than to do TDD. I'm open to find out, if you can show me the increase in flow or value. 

Waste reduction is about becoming more efficient.... but that's not as important as becoming more effective.

The only easy day was yesterday - this is a message of hope

At my current "client" we have been employing a lot of activities to increase the number of customer we serve per day. I've blogged about this before.
Now it turns out that we have succeeded. The customers are pouring in. And the staff finds themselves with much more work than they have experienced in about 5 years. Yesterday was our best day so far and it was amazing to see the difference from a normal day;

• Everyone was moving fast - compared to sitting around waiting
• Everyone was focused - compared to not really knowing what to do
• Everyone was excited - compared to disillusioned and bored
• Everyone was tired after the day - compared to feeling tired of boredom

From Wikipedia

In the daily morning meeting the day after (today) we saw that people was tired and thought it was very stressful yesterday. I was reminded about the Navy Seals motto:

The only easy day was yesterday

In this post I wanted to describe why this is true for everyone embarking on continuous improvements and why this not is a problem, but rather a message of hope.
Under one condition...

How to make a empty diagram in Excel

If I don't write this down I will forget it before the end of the day. That right there was the reason I started my blog, ca 900 posts ago.

A couple of days ago I was, again, creating a big diagram on a whiteboard. This particular one was pretty high and a lot of data points had to go into it. It turned out to be hard and messy to both update and read.
I have done this so many times that I've lost count. I never found a great solution.
I don't want to use a small A3 report because I want everyone to see it. And I don't want to print a big A1 sheet every day, because it's to expensive.
And I don't want to use a projector because this needs to be physical and tangible. And in front of everyone everyday.

Someone suggested to print an empty diagram in a big size and then laminate it with plastic to be able to enter the data on top of the basic diagram.

"Brilliant idea - let's try it. I'll create an empty diagram in Excel and then we print it!"

I heard myself say. And after ca 2 hours I felt the need to write this blog post

...and then it moved - the greatest feeling in the world!

By Ben Currington used under
Creative Commons

Have you ever try to lift a piano?

If you have I bet you have the same experience as me; you go up to the piano and take a good hold and ... nothing. It's like it's bolted to the floor, or something (oddly enough my exact words the first time I tried to lift a piano).

This is impossible. We will never make it.
But you get one more guy and then you make another try. Maybe if someone could just slid a mat underneath ...
And you try again. 1...2...3... and ... IT MOVED!

Right there!

That split second is my favorite feeling in the whole world.
Trying really hard, and get the first little sign of that your efforts are in the right direction. When IT MOVED!

Why so sad? Can we point to improvements without making people feel bad?

"Fry complaining" by Umberto Salvagnin,
under Creatives Common

- As agile and lean practitioners, why do we always focus on the negative? "It's managements fault", "This needs to go faster", "The quality is substandard", "You don't use TDD" ... tell me when to stop...
- Because that where we have "unrealised improvement opportunities", dummy!

- But it's not very attractive and makes our "sell" much harder.
- Yeah, but it sucks! So it needs to be improved

- Is there maybe another way to say that so that the receivers doesn't feel that they suck?
- Maybe... but it's very much up to them. They still suck, are they ready to hear it or not? Also, I'm not actually telling them that they suck, of course. I just tell them that "we're looking for better".

- But that means that we're never satisfied.
- No exactly! I'm never satisfied.
- Sucks to be there... No highs... never content with where you are...
- Yeah! That's what makes me great.

I don't know. I just don't know.

If you build it - things will improve; turning visualisations to knowledge

My good friend and cowrite Joakim Sundén has taught a great deal about agile and lean... and a whole bunch of other things too. One thing that he said, early in my journey, that I didn't fully believe was:

It's always interesting to see the spontaneous discussions that appear around a kanban board (or other visualisation)... after the meeting

(Not the exact quote, because that would be much more well put and eloquent but still...).

So Joakim says that just by having a visualisation in place discussions arises. For example, after the daily standup around the board, people linger and discuss about the state of the board, about improvements or other work related things.

Have you experienced that?
I have. Often. Very often in fact. But not always. In this post I'll outline a few things that in my experience makes these conversations happen more frequently and some words on how to harvest this nugget of information making.

(The reference in the title is of course from Field of Dream with Kevin Costner)

Ask a simpler question: real data speaks louder

David J Andersson (the father of kanban in the software community) has taught me a lot, and that's probably an understatement too. Because I've learned immensely from him. One of the best hands-on tricks that he taught me was really just one sentence. And I'm not sure he meant to say it at that point, but it's proven invaluable for me:

"Ask a simpler question!"

The longer version is something like: "If you find that you don't get the answers you want try to ask a simpler question". I think this is a general great tip that can be applied in all kinds of situations and contexts, but in this post I wanted to tell you about how I just did that in order to get an entire company to understand their situation and starting to move towards something better (whatever that means, I'll talk about that too).

Accountability, authority, trust, and all those things

How's that for a little topic to clear out in a blog post? I promise this will be just a short thought... even though the title promise more of a book.

Well, after the last couple of weeks at my work I just wanted to write down a thought that I keep coming back too. I'm very proud to be part of the Salvation Army and right now we have a world wide leader (aka The General) that I think talks about a lot of good things.
Here's video with his latests message:

I like this message for a number of reasons, but the part that stands out for me is "We know we are not perfect. We want to become better. We start Now!" I like that kind of transparency and humbleness.

The keyword in the message is Accountability. I have a bit of a hard time with that word as I think it sends a pretty harsh tone, but it really comes back to where you start.

What I've should done - my Jerk-store moment

Have you ever had a conversation and then a couple of hours later you come up with a much better way of stating your matter or a better phrasing?

This feeling is shown to great effect in "The comeback" episode of Seinfeld.

I almost always have those kinds of revolutions after coaching gigs. Sometimes during the gig which is helpful because I then can change into something better. Sadly sometimes after the gig which just frustrates me since there's not much to do at that point.

The story I'm about to tell you is of such an episode. It's from my, by far, biggest agile (brrrr...) roll-out task. To me it all ended in a big meeeh, but I know that some people there was happier when i left and I supposed that meant something.

DISCLAIMER

Below when I write "I" we actually were a complete team. If I got these aha-moments earlier I could have helped us all to act differently and hence get a better output. But I didn't. It came now. No shadow should fall on my co-workers. If shadows are to fall :)

The “talk about later”-list

When I was a kid (and teenager… oh, well still today too) I messed up a lot. I forgot things or did them in a stupid order and all of a sudden I was in an emergency. For example, I forgot that I should be in a rehearsal 1 hour away and here I was in my home, 2 hours from the rehearsal room.

Quite often in those situation someone, my parents predominantly, of course enlighten me about how stupid this was and gave helpful advice on what I should have done instead in order to not ended up here.

This made me very mad a little upset, since those advice didn’t improve my situation one bit. I often “told” them (talk about re-writing history) about the futility of these tips at this point.

Years after, in my twenties I found support from one of the old Greek philosophers, Aesop, the guy with the fables, in this quote:

Help me first and argue with me later.

(Didn’t find a English translation for this sadly, so this is Greek to Swedish to English)

I have found use for that quote and what it teaches us later in my career. Most recently yesterday.

In this post I wanted to show you how I handle this in a more structured way.

Waiting is bad for you… and it’s worse than you think

I recently ran into a concrete example on waiting that showed me, again, why it’s bad. And how easy the alternative is.

At one of our facilities the cleaning has long been neglected. It was super-dirty in places and you could see that no one had clean here for months, maybe even years. A rescue operation was put into place and in just 5 days the facility was cleaned. About 15 people was engaged in the effort.

That’s really awesome because not only is the cleaning done, but the next time we clean it will not take as much time.

In this post I wanted to share some thoughts on how this is general and what we can do to avoid this situation.

“Waiting” should be a note and not a column

Quite often when you create a visualized version of your workflow you end up with a waiting column. This is where items goes while your are waiting for someone else, or something else to happen before you can continue to work on it.

It might look something like this on your board:

For example, you are writing a report and need it feedback on the report before you can continue. Sadly that person (Daphne, let’s call her that) that can give you feedback is sick, so you’ll have to wait until Daphne is back again. You are blocked for this item and cannot complete it. (Coders, exchange the word “report” for “module” and you’ll be able to tag along ). You move the sticky to the waiting column and pull the next one…

This is a bad idea. Waiting-columns is a place where work items goes to die. Slowly.

I have now explained the contents of this blog post to a number of teams, although it’s simple, and thought that I should write it down so that I don’t have to restate it over and over.

Looking for better

Apparently my last post was not completely gibberish and contained some thoughts that you could make use of. Thanks for the feedback. Let me continue my train of thoughts here. It's not a very long train, but it's still a train.
Here's where we ended: there's a customer, we are here to delight them (thank you Stephen Deming for that phrase). Everything we do right now is just best so far in our strive to more effectively give value to the customer. We can and should, change our current state, process, organisation, tools or what have you, to try to improve. If we do the change in bigger steps there will be bigger impacts in our productivity, in smaller steps smaller impact.

See? Nothing really new or amazing here. In this post I wanted to talk a little bit about where this can take us. Because I see this as a guiding star, as a "true north", designed to draw improvements out of us. Taking us to ideas, places and innovations better than we ever thought. It's a bit "to infinity and beyond", I know.