Communication debts and Brazilian office mornings

As a programmer I often end up trying to explain non-technical concepts for non-technical people using things that I've picked up as a programmer. Often it doesn't pay off. "Don't Repeat Yourself" or "Tell - don't ask" is not always easy to explain or translate. Even if they hold truths and wisdom.

Today I tried to explain Technical Debt to a director of a hospital. That didn't really work - my mistake. However the Technical Debt metaphor is in turn based on something that most grown-up people understands: financial debt.

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).

Gods care through the Band Tune Book

We break for something different. This is not my normal IT/agile/lean post. It's about God and his care for me

Happy that you continued to read.

I've been having some hard days at work. I was very angry and it affected not only me but also those around me. Also I was being affected physically with dizziness and head ache. For the first time in my life I found it better to go home and cool off a couple of days.

I felt so tired and was beginning to doubt if I'm really doing the right thing. In the right place.

So I did things that pick me up. Playing hymns on my euphonium is one of those things. My playing is closely related to my faith, since I've made most religious experiences with my instrument in hand, playing in the most cases.

What happened this time was Gods way of saying: I got you, man. Keep going. I've got you.

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. 

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...

Ugly clothing, symbols and values

Here in Indonesia most companies and organisations have some kind of uniform or at least very strict dress code. For example where I work, the Salvation Army, we have Salvation Army uniform on Mondays and Tuesdays, a set batik shirt on Wedenesdays, "pick your own batik" on Thursdays and training clothes on Fridays.

Here's a collage for you to feast your eyes on be scared by, showing some of those shirts:

I must say... most of these shirts I've found really silly and ugly. The don't sit right on me. I feel awkward.

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)

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.

Simple = Good. Complex = Bad. But what does it mean?

I’m a programmer. But I, for some strange reason, often find myself doing management consulting on different levels. Since my basic schooling is in programming I sometimes often find myself using principles that works well for programming in management.

One such principle was something I picked up about 10 years ago and I’m still reaching for that everyday. Here’s my current desktop background, showing that principle to me everyday:

This is a so called truism that nobody says again, but I fail to reach just about all the time. I find it very useful as a guiding north star both in organizations and programming. But what does it really mean?

Move the information to the authority, and not the other way around

There’s no secret that I like the writings (and presentations) of Captain David Marquet.  If you haven’t seen this video do that instead of reading this. It change a whole lot about how I look at leadership.
One of the best tips in the book is the small imperative sentence:

Move the authority to the information!

However, often when I explain this to people and clients I often end up adding the opposite to this sentence. From that I got some interesting conversations going.
Let’s see if I can explain what I mean here.

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.

What I missed, longed for, happy to not have from fasting from social media

Tomorrow I will end a 30 day social media fast.

I got a bit overwhelmed and depressed by some comments and discussions that I was drawn into and aired it with my buddies at Aptitud. 2 minutes later 3 of us decided to go on a fast.

I uninstalled all my social media apps and removed the shortcuts to the sites. The first thing was to make it
harder to use it. I was in real deep, and even felt a bit stressed that if I didn't read my stream the first thing in the morning.  The first couple of days it was pretty close that I got back in a couple of times. I realized that if I was waiting for a slow page (ALL pages when in Indonesia) I often switched over to Twitter to catch up.... And got stuck.

Full disclosure: I have been tweeting pictures from the @kanbanInAction account just to promote the book. And yesterday I was on facebook for my work, gathering examples of social media in the Salvation Army.

After about 5 days I forgot all about it and since then it just been a joy. I read a fictional book for the first time in several years. This has not only to do with not being on social media, but it gave some space and room.

In this post I will just list the things I have missed, not missed and the reasons for me taking it up again...

Do something together - what Indonesians taught me, part I

One of the things that really surprised me and my wife when we were about to move to Indonesia was the schedule for our office. Every Friday there's a scheduled 2,5 hour exercise pass from 8. Special exercise clothing is provided by the office. Except once a month when we're spending that time cleaning or repairing the office. These activities are required and nothing else happens in the office at the time (no meeting for example).

And everyone office (that I have seen and passed by on the streets) are doing this. The bank down the road is exercising or playing soccer in their parking lot. The police office is doing some aerobics in their court yard and even the churches and the people working in them are outside, exercising.

It felt a bit strange, but I can tell you that I have come to appreciate these activities a lot, and maybe not for what you first would think.

This is my second post (find the first post here) on things in the Indonesian culture that I have been happily surprised by and that I think is well worth thinking about in a western culture too.

No... this is how I think

I have recently come to realize that some of the most basic of my thinking is not as evident and obvious to people around me as they are for me. This was a real wakeup call for me and made me think long and hard on what is important to me and how I do work. And consequently try to lead others with this as guiding star.

My ideas is not new nor radical. The  ideas I did meet is not bad, they just strive to achieve other goals (I think) or maybe the same goals but in a totally different manner. I have really tried my best not to portrait my  ideas as better, but rather just another way.
My agile and lean friends will quickly see that this is by not measure unique or new thinking. But I've come to realize that for people that haven't seen this kind of reasoning before it is very backwards and counterintuitive. This will not be complete in the sense that I will give the theoretical back... (YAAAAWN)...ground to why I think this way. Come and ask me.
That means that you can put "to me" in front of every paragraph below. And you can disagree. Please tell me in that case so that I can improve.
[UPDATE: Several of my friends that I hold high in regard in these matters, have pointed out some flaws or ... unclear reasoning in this post. I have updated the post a number of times thanks to them. Anything good in here is probably from them. Thank you.]

Aligning our sights - what Indonesians taught me, part I

I have now been in Indonesia for about 4 months. There's so many new impressions and things that I've seen, learned and experienced that I'm starting to forget them. Some is bad, some is good, some are ugly so I thought that I would write them down.
The first thing is some sort of alignment that is repeated almost everyday. In almost all workplaces that I've seen or heard about. Like a routine checkup on what is important here. I've actually experienced that before, in a very different setting.

In this post I'm planning to tell you a couple of short stories and episodes, to then try to see what this could look like in my "normal", more western culture. I hope it will be interesting and useful.

Team Yayasan week 5: Redoing Todo

This week started a bit late due to a public holiday, the Hindu new years celebrations, (the joys of working in a country that respect 4 different religions and celebrate all the main events publicly!) and then we had been spread out during the weekend. It took some time to gather the forces.

Last week we were a bit confused about the lead times and throughput. Sure enough this week we did some more items, due to the ketchup-effect of doing to big items. We are continuing to track both the lead time per size (S, M and L) and the number of items (or each size) that we are completing per week.
It's still a little too little data to draw any conclusions but we are confident that with this data tracked we will soon start to understand our work.

Team Yayasan week 4: Throughput and lead times

The last week the blog post turned long. Sorry. This meant to just be short updates. Here's another one.

The first thing I did this week was to create a diagram over our throughput; the number of items we're getting done per week. And it looked pretty bleak. And was about to get worse... Here's how it looked at the beginning of the week.

Throughput trend at the start of the week

That's not looking good, right. I think I can explain it... and I think that I shouldn't care too much about data with these few data points.