Tag Archives: lean

Making a case for “leadership disciplines”

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Evoking the 70′s bumper sticker “A dog is for life, not just for Christmas“, I suggested in my last post that

Agreement is not just for the kick-off meeting

Let’s extend that thought to the first group of Kanban’s values. What if we positioned understanding, agreement and respect not as initial conditions for a learning environment but as leadership disciplines expected of everyone who has responsibility immediately around it?

Putting Kanban to one side, what would your Agile implementation or other significant change initiative have looked like had there had been sustained outside commitment to the following principles:

1. Understanding is a prerequisite for effective change

  • Change will be based on an understanding of genuine problems or opportunities, framed such that upsides and downsides can reasonably be demonstrated and managed
  • Change increments will be sized according to our understanding, safety never compromised (recalling J curves, bet-the-company bravado and so on)

2. Agreement will not be taken for granted

  • Change will be implemented through agreement between those (or between representative of those) who
    • request or recommend change (the instigators)
    • understand what needs to be done and estimate its impact good and bad (the designers)
    • will implement it
    • will be impacted by it

    Clearly, the more these groups overlap, the easier it gets.

3. Respect is a key test

  • Each change will be conducted respectfully
  • Collectively, change will
    • remove sources of frustration and other barriers to success
    • raise levels of trust and safety
    • create the space for creativity and excellence

What if the “skin” of your “culture bubble” was made up of a group of people who are committed to using their authority to represent and defend those three values? What effect would that have, both on the team and on the wider organisation? Rather than those inside the bubble, perhaps it is this group that should be our first concern?

If not our first concern, then at least a different concern. A focus on leadership discipline at the boundary that promotes change inside in the direction we want (including but not limited to customer focus, flow and leadership), sustained internally by the drive of the more practice-focussed values of transparency, balance and collaboration.

It strikes me that this formulation (a minor refinement to the model I presented in Chicago) begins to tackle two common misgivings around Agile and Lean.

Misgiving #1: Hierarchy vs collaboration

This misgiving is most commonly associated with Lean, although similar misgivings are sometimes expressed about Agile, in particular around the Scrum roles. How can an apparently hierarchical management system be reconciled with a culture of collaboration?

Let’s be clear about one thing: I have no interest whatsoever in replicating a shop-floor management hierarchy with its team leads, supervisors and so on. But what about leaders already at the periphery of the change initiative? If they’re expecting to see understanding, agreement, and respect and have learned to live those values themselves, won’t that have an effect? I see this expectation catalysing creative collaboration inside the boundary and facilitating collaborative problem-solving across it (thereby growing the initiative’s scope). Doesn’t this give a good picture what the effective leader (or manager) as coach looks like?

To further illustrate the potential for de-emphasising hierarchy, let’s see less of this (me, 2012):

alignment

and more of this (me, 2013):

change-team

Perhaps hierarchy is like iteration – just as it’s interesting and useful to see how far we can take these ideas (many people now assuming that they’re axiomatic to Lean and Agile respectively), it’s also interesting and useful to describe and explore universes that don’t depend on them quite so fundamentally.

Misgiving #2: The “mindset get-out clause”

I have long wished to challenge those who say that Agile can’t work here because the organisational mindset is wrong (or that Lean failed for the same reason). I find this chicken-and-egg excuse hard enough to swallow when expressed with genuine regret; when it’s accompanied by disrespect (of which “pigs and chickens” is but a mild form) I despair!

If we’re agreed that an incremental, evolutionary approach makes sense both for product development and process improvement, wouldn’t it make sense to approach mindset and culture in the same way? With some kind of plan of attack maybe?

Here’s my starting approach in two steps:

  1. Find the skin of the bubble: I’ve learned the hard way that improvement that isn’t end-to-end is often futile; reaching out upstream and downstream is therefore essential. It’s also natural for me to reach out (or up, if you like) to managers – I was one myself and I have no difficulty in identifying with them.
  2. Speak there the language of values: Don’t just gain an understanding of the problem for yourself; insist that shared understanding and agreement are essential, that respect is both a means and an end, and that their discipline as leaders will be critical not only to initial wins but to lasting success. Then explore the other values as you seek alignment between external and internal goals. Balance was for example a key theme of the early part of my last engagement, moving later into transparency and customer focus.

Real life is of course a little messier than I’ve described but I’m glad to have crystallised much of what I’ve been doing over the past few months.

Acknowledgements

Joshua Kerievsky for broadening my understanding of “safety” (see #techsafety) and Liz Keogh for “respect is a test”, both at #LKNA13; Michael Sahota for “culture bubbles”; Steven J Spear whose book The High Velocity Edge (mentioned here) is still exerting its influence.

I’m grateful also to Jim Sutton and Martin Burns for feedback on earlier drafts of this article.

When transparency is not enough (or too much)

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Maria Alfredéen (one of my behind-the-scenes collaborators on the LKNA13 conference version of Introducing Kanban through its values) recently prompted me to consider the limits of transparency, something most of us in the Kanban community value very much. Could too much of the wrong kind of transparency get in the way of flow, either because we’re looking at the wrong things or because it keeps our attention too narrowly on the concerns of one part of the end-to-end process (and “suboptimising”, the cardinal sin of systems thinkers everywhere)? In other words, can transparency and flow sometimes be in tension with each other?

At the BCS-organised London Lean Kanban Day last Saturday, Clifford Shelley spoke of productivity metrics whose publication would cause more harm than good. I couldn’t help wondering whether they should have been collected in the first place (which I think is Clifford’s view too, though I didn’t verify this). On Twitter afterwards, I discussed with Pawel Brodzinski and Paul Klipp whether the appropriateness and effectiveness of transparency was a function of existing organisational culture, in particular of the amount of trust that pervades the organisation. We had surprisingly different perspectives on that, but I think we mostly agree that transparency does have its limits.

Customer focus to the rescue

Without making major changes to teaching materials, keeping the Kanban value system at the front of my mind when teaching does seem to make a difference. For one recent group, customer focus was the value that seemed to touch the most nerves, got conversations going (both lively and reflective), and influenced even their initial attempts at kanban system design. To me it seems significant that one of the values that doesn’t immediately jump out from Kanban’s principles and practices should have this kind of impact when made explicit.

For example:

  • When identifying work item types and their respective workflows, “Know what you’re delivering, to whom, and why” was the catchphrase (and it stuck – I had it played back to me the next day)
  • When exploring what self-organisation really means – and it’s not “working with people you like” as Dave Snowden joked on Saturday – we saw customer focus supplanting excessive role focus and task focus
  • Sensing near-completed work getting “pulled” towards the customer, this feeling strengthened by the deliberate way we reviewed board designs and later conducted stand-up meetings
  • Considering the positive impact on team and customer behaviour (I’ve seen both) made by introducing post-delivery validation. Did we deliver to the customer’s satisfaction? Is it meeting their needs as hoped? Are we happy that what we did is supportable and sustainable so that the customer and team will stay happy?

Revisiting those conversations on transparency and flow I now wonder: is customer focus the thing that will keep them in balance? I have reason to think so. Seeing work pulled towards a customer whose interests we care about surely puts local efficiency into proper perspective. So too does measuring things that matter to the customer (lead times, predictability, quality) rather than things that don’t (lines of code, hours spent in the office).

I now see customer focus not just as something nice or important, but as one value (of three) that help give processes and process improvement a good sense of direction. Part of an “outlook for improvement” as the current draft of my Chicago talk has it.

How complex systems fail

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From Steven J. Spear’s The High Velocity Edge, chapter 3 – How Complex Systems Fail:

In all the cases that we examined, there were common characteristics that led to painful results. People lacked a systems view – a full appreciation of how the work they did was affected by and affected the work of other people. Granted that, as Perrow pointed out, it was exceptionally difficult to understand all the nuances of how such as complex system worked, but the people in these cases did not advance their understanding when there were warnings that they should have. Rather than push for ever-better clarity as to how things should work, they were exceedingly tolerant of ambiguities regarding who was supposed to do what, how to convey information from one person to the next, or how to perform a particular task. And even when it was obvious that something was wrong, they worked around the problem, relying on extra vigilance and extra effort. Thus they imposed on themselves the same set of problems day after day, constantly turning down the chance to understand the complex interactions of people, technology, place and circumstances better and thus improve the system as its flaws were discovered.

Hear me interviewed on SPaMCAST

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I had the pleasure last month of being interviewed by SPamCAST’s Tom Cagley. It’s now up as SPaMCAST 224 – Mike Burrows, Kanban Values. I’ve never appeared in a podcast before and I’m very pleased with the result. Thank you Tom!

I reference these posts:

We touch on some more general aspects of leadership, on what it means to be a change agent, and on why some improvement efforts are ineffective. It may become apparent that the issues raised by “Potato, tomato” and “Agreement: it’s not about you“ were on my mind at the time too.

London Lean Kanban Day deserves a link after I described it rather vaguely as being “in London, in March”. I’ll be doing a new version of “Kanban the Hard Way” that (naturally) features values. It’s not quite a values-centric talk – that’s in the works for LKNA13, more on that soon.

 

Potato, tomato

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I tend to avoid direct comparisons between Kanban, Lean, Agile in general and Scrum in particular. One reason for this is terminology – dialogue is hard enough when opinions are strongly held, but try to engage in it when there is confusion over language! Ouch!

That’s the background to this rather cryptic tweet (watch out for another one later):

Here then are some working definitions that I use. Think about how you use these terms; perhaps that in itself could be the starting point for an interesting conversation.

Self-organisation, self-management

Self-organisation is what’s happening when systems reconfigure themselves in response to environmental change, without external direction. Often associated with resilience, it’s a phenomenon frequently observed in nature and in a wide variety of social systems.

A team could reasonably be described as self-organising if it adjusts its structure or process when faced with conditions outside of the norm (that’s an example, not a definition by the way).

Self-management describes an ability of people, teams or systems to manage or regulate themselves.

A team that prioritises its own work in some predetermined manner and can be relied upon to produce some output in a predictable manner with a minimum of outside intervention can justifiably be described as self-managing. We all know inviduals who are like that too. Again, this is not a definition.

Teams can be either, neither, or both of these. When neither are present, we can expect ineffectiveness (lack of direction or failure complete), inefficiency (the team – by choice or otherwise – is highly dependent on people outside of it) or fragility (no expectation that change will be met positively).

A well-functioning Scrum team encourages both self-organisation and self-management by setting clear boundaries for the team and defining certain roles within the team. Kanban encourages us to make process constraints explicit and evolvable whilst allowing freedom of choice within them. Two approaches that are at the same time very different and yet surprisingly similar in purpose. Mutually exclusive? No!

Increment, iteration

An increment is a piece of work or change that is both meaningful from the recipient’s perspective but still small relative to the whole. Loosely, an incremental delivery approach means that we aim to deliver what we can when we can, in (say) shippable features. Predictability is achieved through (amongst other things) careful sizing and attention to flow.

Iteration is about repetition. Loosely, an iterative delivery approach is one in which we aim to deliver as regularly as we can. Predictability is achieved through (amongst other things) careful attention to commitment.

Within a process we often see elements of both approaches. Towards the input and outputs of a process however we tend to see one dominate over the other. We might see for example regular prioritisation meetings at the input and continuous delivery at the output. Conversely, requests might just arrive when they do but releases are according to a fixed schedule.

Over long enough timescales, either approach is capable of supporting evolutionary delivery, in which the key driving force is feedback from the customer or market. In both cases, we may also see evolutionary change happening to the process itself, perhaps to a degree that implies a change of delivery approach.

I bring these up because of the seeming near-identification of Agile with Scrum and iterative delivery in the one hand, and the equally simplistic identification of Kanban with incremental (or continuous) delivery on the other. When I see authors equate Agile with iterations and put up Kanban as a direct alternative, I despair at the sloppiness. Are they really that uninterested?

Potato, tomato

After excellent bread, the humble potato is my carbohydrate of choice. Like Rabbi Lionel Blue (this reference identifies me as a long-time listener of BBC Radio 4′s Today programme) I would happily eat boiled potato with a side order of potato salad and call it a good (if slightly unbalanced) dinner.

Through my childhood, I ate tomatoes almost exclusively in ketchup form. I now enjoy them in a variety of processed and unprocessed forms. Often in combination with potato.

The shock of the different

Does it come as a shock that things can be different and yet not mutually exclusive? Good together, even?

Time for another cryptic tweet:

That was almost a year ago. If I were to tweet that again, I would pick up a baton thrown down by Torbjörn Gyllebring and give it the until now unused hashtag #andban.

The Kanban method is not a delivery process, it’s an evolutionary method that works with your process, whether that’s iterative or incremental, Agile or not. Applying Kanban will very quickly tell you things about your process, help you understand it better, help your organisation learn and improve. Potato, tomato.

Kanban: values, understanding & purpose

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I’ve had a fantastic response to my previous post, Introducing Kanban through its values - it seems to have resonated with a lot of people. Followup discussions in a number of places over the past few days have helped me take the ideas a little further on and finish with some extra clarity.

Here then is the conclusion that I wasn’t quite ready to reach last week. I hope it both satisfies those who expressed disappointment that learning didn’t make my final list and reassures those who worry that values are somehow too fragile to write down.

Values

Kanban has at its heart a value system that includes Understanding, Agreement, Respect, Leadership, Flow, Customer Focus, Transparency, Balance & Collaboration.

Having this list as a commentary on Kanban’s principles & practices is helpful at three levels:

  1. We can cross-check and perhaps reframe (e.g. for teaching purposes) our understanding of the method. As it turns out, this reconciliation will pick up areas where perhaps the method definition itself could usefully be strengthened, though that wasn’t in my mind at the beginning.
  2. At any given time, we can use them to help us reflect on where we are as change agents and validate the approach we’re taking on the ground. This may heighten self-awareness &/or help identify areas of risk or weakness (as it did for me, though retrospectively).
  3. It identifies some characteristics of learning organisations (in the sense of, say, Peter Senge) that Kanban helps to foster. I don’t mean (as some have worried) “Kanban defining for me my company’s values”, but it suggests some good things to expect and encourage, as implicitly or explicitly as your situation demands.

A note of caution: at any level, don’t expect anything good to come from espousing values inauthentically. When in doubt, understand and reflect first.

Purpose

Some time after identifying that third level I had a lightbulb moment: we often say what the Kanban method is (an evolutionary approach to change) without saying what it is actually for! Change what? To what end?

Let’s fix that then:

The Kanban method is an evolutionary approach to building learning organisations.

Put like that, learning is right up there in Kanban’s purpose. That’s a relief! In retrospect I might have done well to start there but I’m journalling my thinking process as honestly as I can.

Interesting Addenda

On agreement, Greg Brougham brought to my attention Ackoff’s distinction between agreement in principle (a theoretical kind of agreement) and agreement in practice (an agreement to live with the consequences of a decision, accepting that agreement on “better” can be effective where consensus on perfection is impossible).

David Anderson would add Pragmatism (with a big P), referring to a philosophical tradition that describes a process in which theory is extracted from practice and applied back to practice. I expect we’ll see that one again.

Doing some blog archaeology, I revisited my Kanban in a nutshell post (March 2010) and confirmed that I took the same tool-first (or worse, tool-only) approach that I worried about in last week’s post. Health warning needed! I’m relieved to find that Learning together (June 2010, a collaboration with Jabe Bloom looking at Kanban and Agile principles) came not too long afterwards

Acknowledgements

I really do value collaboration, and I’m grateful (proud, even) to have these as collaborators: Dave “Value System” White, Arne “Learning” Roock, Hermanni “Understanding & Purpose” Hyytiälä, Patrick “Variety & Resilience” Steyaert and Jabe “Learning Together” Bloom. David “Leadership” Anderson has on multiple occasions actively encouraged me to pursue lines of thought or language even when they seemed to be in conflict with his. And if you tweeted, left a comment, posted on kanbandev or Google+ or in any other way encouraged me to explain myself better, thank you.

Introducing Kanban through its values

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[German translation]

Introductions to the Kanban method tend to start with a description of the kanban card wall (a tool) and lead on to a description of its core practices. If you’re lucky, you’ll get to hear about Kanban’s foundational principles too.

Here, I’m attempting a different approach, one that gives equal weight both to the principles (which I believe should come first – they’re not called “foundational” for nothing) and the core practices by identifying the values that underpin them. In doing so we’ll cover most of the main elements of the method, so perhaps this works as a teaching framework too?

Regardless, the result is holistic (the values are widely applicable at multiple levels), remains true to Kanban’s purpose of driving evolutionary organisational change, and helps to address three misconceptions:

i.         that Kanban is somehow a software development process

ii.         that Kanban doesn’t have at its heart the kind of values that will both challenge an organization and guide its agents of change, and

iii.         that Kanban is only for number-crunching tool-heads in control-driven organisations (I exaggerate this last misconception only slightly)

Moreover, I hope to demonstrate also that a values-based description is useful for other, more constructive reasons.

My starting point

From Kanban’s Foundational Principles in their usual sequence I identify four values: Understanding, Agreement, Respect & Leadership. The first of these requires a little justification but the other three can be read directly into the principles as they are typically worded.

The values behind Kanban’s six Core Practices are a little trickier, not because the they aren’t there but because the correspondence isn’t exactly one-to-one. I chose another four (that’s eight so far): Transparency, Balance, Flow & Collaboration. However, I found it helpful to depart from the this obvious sequence and was compelled to add an additional one, making nine in total.

As I expand on each of these we’ll uncover a few more candidates for inclusion – I’ll highlight in bold anything that looks like a value (abstract nouns, basically). With the one exception to which I’ve already alluded, they’re less important, less axiomatic, less “core”.

Nine core values of Kanban

1.    Understanding

Understanding is one of the less obvious values of Kanban. I read it into the first foundational principle,  “Start with what you do now”. Understand the thing you’re changing, whether it’s the nitty-gritty details of a process, the way a process performs under conditions of stress, or something as abstract as your organisation’s overall approach to change.

Insist on understanding because a healthy process that can’t defend itself is a sign that you’ve forgotten what you believe.
The Process Myth, Rands in Repose

In our Kanban training we teach a Systems Thinking approach that places understanding very high on our list of priorities. It’s right there in our early introductions to the method, the basis of the very first class exercise. Where does work come from? What characterizes different kinds of work? What approaches to the problems of change and improvement tend to succeed or fail, both generally and in your organisation specifically? Why might that be?

By definition, the absence of understanding is what characterises cargo cult implementations. Even with good intentions there’s a likelihood that understanding will be lost when change is driven top-down, justified weakly (over-relying on appeals to best practice for example) and passed unthinkingly between organisational layers.  It’s no small surprise therefore that change projects have a tendency to disappoint. Unfortunately for the lazy or unskilled manager, understanding and its allied values of learning and alignment take effort.

2.    Agreement

Agreement is right there in the second foundational principle, “Agree to pursue incremental, evolutionary change”. I like to turn this around: would you reasonably expect to be successful in implementing change without it? Could it be that it’s lack of agreement that’s limiting your progress? Or perhaps there is some agreement but it’s not deep enough – you’re agreed on the existence of a problem but not on its impact or causes (see understanding)?

This principle might seem to suggest another value, that of incrementalism. I would however shy away from describing this this as a core value, for the reason that we promote incremental, evolutionary change because it has a high chance of success, not because its alternatives in radicalism or conservatism are never better alternatives. And if pragmatism is a value, it is a rather slippery one.

3.    Respect

“Respect for people” is a pillar of Lean. Kanban applies this to the problem of organisational change in its third principle, “Initially, respect current roles, responsibilities & job titles”.

As in life, respect is a good guide when implementing change. Will it increase your chances of success if you start by implying that people are doing a bad job, or their roles are worthless? Probably not. Is it helpful to assume bad motives? Again, probably not. But does respect just mean “be nice”? Again no:

Showing respect for people does not mean you have to like them, agree with their views, and fail to challenge any half baked reasoning.
Stephen Parry

That kind of respect takes courage, taking us to our next value.

4.    Leadership

Leadership features in most stories of success but it was only in 2012 that it was added as a foundational principle, in the form “Encourage acts of leadership at all levels in your organization – from individual contributor to senior management”.

Much has been written on leadership and I won’t add to it here except to make a few quick observations:

i.         You might wish for an autocrat – a Steve Jobs (or a Steve Ballmer) perhaps – but the “at every level” kind of leadership is something different.

ii.         Not only is leadership something to value, management isn’t inherently something to despise either (remember respect?).

iii.         Furthermore, neither leadership nor management precludes self organisation, where individuals, teams and systems have the capacity to adapt without central or senior direction. Rather, good leadership and good management create the conditions in which self organisation thrives.

iv.         Good leadership involves challenge (we’ve used this word already). As agents of change we must be prepared both to challenge and to be challenged.

5.    Flow

Turning to the practices, we start with the third one, “Manage flow”.

The management part of this practice speaks of tactical organisation and decision-making aimed at progressing work for optimal outcomes (effectiveness). At some level – though with widely varying degrees of success – this is universal.

Flow adds something much less common, a sense of smoothness and predictability; addressing impediments to these systematically is a powerful improvement approach, exemplified in Lean.

We also value flow in Csikszentmihalyi’s sense, that very positive state of complete absorption in what we’re doing. This kind of flow is hard to find when distraction, interruption and constantly changing priorities dominate the work environment.

6.    Customer Focus

We haven’t finished with “Manage flow” yet! An expanded version of this practice might read something like

Manage to timely completion the smooth flow of customer-recognised value over a range of timescales

Value is meant in the sense of purpose (understanding the customer’s “why”) as much as in any monetary sense (taking care not to confuse utility with mere cost). A customer-focussed concern for completion means going beyond an activity-centric “task complete” or a product-centric “potentially shippable product”. In my experience, this is a surprisingly challenging concept whose impact can be dramatic.

Work done but not yet benefiting the customer is just sunk cost. We’ll return to this issue and address the “over a range of timescales” phrase when we look at the value of balance.

7.    Transparency

Transparency underpins three of Kanban’s core practices: the first, “Visualise [work]”, the fourth, “Make policies explicit”, and the fifth (another 2012 addition), “Implement feedback loops”.

Kanban creates transparency at multiple levels:

i.         In making work visible

ii.         In making visible the workflows that work items go through and the states that actual work items occupy at any given time

iii.         In making visible the parameters, policies and constraints that guide decision-making and ultimately drive the overall performance of the system

iv.         In making visible the impact of all the above in customer-focussed measures of performance

The first two types of visibility flow naturally from the kanban systems after which the Kanban method is named. The first three together create leverage points – points in our systems at which significant change can be effected for relatively little cost or effort. The fourth (a feedback loop) tells us that change is taking us in the right direction.

Kanban then is a way to evolve systems that learn and adapt, a strategy for organisations to find greater fitness relative to the competitive ecosystems they inhabit.

8.    Balance

The second core practice is “Limit work-in-progress (WIP)”. Limiting WIP across a process has multiple benefits:

  • Thanks to Little’s law, lead times (and therefore feedback cycles) tend to shorten; the customer is satisfied sooner and learning accelerates.
  • Work gets started only when capacity becomes available. This creates flow from the work item’s perspective and keeps supply and demand in balance from the team or worker’s perspective (respect!).
  • With just a little extra sophistication we can easily find balance between different kinds of operational work and between operational work and improvement work.

This last point suggests another principle, “Embrace variety”. Systems that behave well in the face of variety can be described as having a resilience that is good for customer, organization and worker alike, another example of balance. Kanban’s help in evolving resilient systems that can deliver predictability for a variety of work item types with a range of performance expectations (timescales perhaps ranging from hours or days to months or more) really is a killer feature.

For more on the role of balance in Kanban see David Anderson’s talk When is Kanban not appropriate [video] [slides]. My talk Kanban the hard way [video] [slides] includes an exploration of variety and resilience.

9.    Collaboration

Collaboration features in the sixth (and last) core practice, “Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally [using models [and the scientific method]]”.

Building on agreement, respect and customer focus, collaboration creates the expectation that we will look beyond our own team’s boundaries in addressing impediments to flow.

The full version of this practice (with the two optional parts included) speaks of working systematically in a way that improves understanding through observation, model-building, experimentation and measurement (empiricism).

“Using models” has a second sense that suggests values of curiosity and even generosity. Kanban actively encourages its practitioners to look outside the method to a growing body of knowledge. Kanban acknowledges roots in Lean, Theory of Constraints and Agile, foundations in queuing theory and complexity science, influences as diverse as Lean Startup and family therapy. Individual practitioners have their own personal favourite models – I for example draw on A3, GROW, and Influencer.

Why stop at nine?

It bothered me that the Lean value of customer focus can’t be inferred in any obvious way from the standard wordings of Kanban’s foundational principles and core practices – you could say that I had to cheat! I think though it fully deserves its place.

Less so these others that I’ve identified:

  • Learning and alignment have strong associations with understanding. I fully recognise that a strong case can be made for each of these but I’ve gone with the one that I think best reflects Kanban’s roots in System Thinking. My most-referenced article emphasises learning, so this was a tough one!
  • Challenge (also vision) and courage overlap sufficiently with leadership that I don’t regard them as axiomatic. See related post Dole out the 3C’s.
  • Self organisation would rank high as an organisational design value but respect seems to be an adequate guide for the change agent. All else being equal, respect would prefer a solution allowing or building on self organisation over one that doesn’t.
  • Resilience features strongly in my thinking but it describes outcome more than approach. Smoothness and predictability similarly.

Putting values to work

Let’s see our nine values together then:

Understanding, Agreement, Respect,
Leadership, Flow, Customer Focus,
Transparency, Balance, Collaboration

Admittedly, that’s quite a long list – longer than the initial three or four that I have quoted at every opportunity for some time – but not so long that we’re incapable of debating, remembering and referring to them.

Do any of these resonate with you more strongly than others?  What does that say to you?  I might explore that one at a leadership retreat – the differences between practitioners might be revealing!

Do any seem to be missing in your current environment? Again, what does that say to you? Does that suggest to you some things that really need to be put right?

For example, I can look back at times where lack of the right kind of agreement either slowed the pace of change or resulted in change that could revert too easily. From what I read, I don’t believe I’m unique in this.

Reflection

I’ve made values explicit – this is transparency at work – creating an opportunity for challenge (namely that I want to see customer focus feature more explicitly in the core method), and increasing my understanding of at least one source of ineffectiveness. In an eat-your-own-dog-food kind of way, the system works! I like that.

Whether you or the wider community would choose the same values is an interesting question worthy of group exploration. How else might you go about it? I’d love to see some alternative attempts. Could the values I’ve chosen benefit from some additional structure or from being sequenced differently? Or are values so fragile that they’re better left unsaid?

Continuing a line of thought started a couple of months ago in my post How Deep is “How is Your Kanban”, could values provide a better foundation for a second-generation Kanban assessment tool? Does the current tool’s emphasis on practices hide the method’s true purpose? I really think that it might.

As to whether this is a good way to introduce Kanban, this can only be answered by testing it. I intend to!

[Update: I've written some stronger conclusions in a followup post, Values, understanding & purpose]

My 2012 in books

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I’ll get to my book of the year in a moment, but I begin with the two books that have had the most direct influence on my work in 2012.

The first is Coaching for Performance: GROWing Human Potential and Purpose: The Principles and Practice of Coaching and Leadership by John Whitmore (2009). I’ve been using the GROW model described in this book not just as a coaching tool but as a gateway to A3, really appreciating its teachability, memorability and its reminders of the importance of framing and challenge.

Like the first, the second is new to me but not a new book. From Lean Software Strategies: Proven Techniques for Managers and Developers by Peter Middleton & James Sutton (2005) I have taken away a much stronger appreciation of the word customer, and I find myself repeating its advice often.

My book of 2012

I choose Paul Tough’s How Children Succeed: Grit, Curiosity, and the Hidden Power of Character not because it’s still fresh in my mind but because it’s a book that I hope will be read widely. Readable, thought-provoking and inspirational, it’s a book for anyone with an interest in the relationships between environment, learning, character and life prospects. That should be most of us.

For the benefit of UK readers I should mention that I had to import it from the US but it will be available here in paperback next month.

Honourable mentions

I approached How to Measure Anything: Finding the Value of Intangibles in Business (2010) with some caution, the title preparing me for a book that might be overly analytical and worryingly money-centric. Instead, it’s a broad, insightful and practical book about making decisions and managing risk in the presence of uncertainty. I’m delighted that the author Douglas W Hubbard will be a keynote speaker at the 2013 Lean Kanban North America (#lkna13) conference.

Turning to fiction, I’m grateful to Dave Snowden for introducing me to anthropology-cum-science-fiction author Ursula le Guin.  Since reading The Dispossessed (1974) in preparation for the CALMalpha event I’ve enjoyed a number of her books, sharing some written for younger readers with our foster daughter.  This one remains my favourite though – I was genuinely disappointed that it had to come to an end! As a sci-fi fan, how did I not encounter le Guin previously?

Thinking, Fast and Slow by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahneman was for many reviewers a best book of 2011 and I got round to it in 2012.  Well worth the effort.

The surprise package

I carried around a review copy of Agile Project Management for Government: Leadership skills for implementation of large-scale public sector projects in months, not years in my suitcase for several weeks and was more than a little surprised and humbled to discover my name listed in the acknowledgements! It’s not an easy topic topic, but author and fellow Agile North speaker Brian Wernham has done a good job of drawing out valuable lessons from reference projects around the world and calling out the kind of leadership necessary for project delivery in the public sector to improve.

Since first meeting Brian I have myself joined a large public sector programme so the arrival of this book turned out to be very timely. I should get round to a longer review in the New Year.

Next up

Top of my list for next year (already purchased and downloaded onto my Kindle) is The Culture Game: Tools for the Agile Manager (2012) by Daniel Mezick. Do you confront culture and mindset head-on, or regard them as something emergent? That has been a favourite conversation topic on Twitter and in conference bars and I’m really looking forward to reading Dan’s take on this.

Fire-and-forget: what it means, some remedies

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Even as I wrote it, the first item in last week’s little list of process change patterns stood out like a sore thumb, crying out for further elaboration:

  1. Replace “fire-and-forget” with something robust (e.g handover, trackers, visualisation)

Fire-and-forget refers to habits of one-way communication as a way of progressing work, for example:

  • Processes that allow work to be sent to absent staff without anyone noticing (I see this a lot)
  • Documented processes that end in “Send an email” (not unusual either, especially when descriptions are role-centric rather than workflow-centric)
  • The tendency to consider “done” to mean things like code committed, document sent, order placed, edict announced

Here then are eight ways to address this problem:

1. Confirmation

Here the sender expects, requests, or chases for some assurance that the work product has been received, perhaps even understood.

Pro: Simplicity
Con: Places a burden on the receiving party to respond to something that might have been unsolicited. Chasing adds a cost to the sender that grows with the number of confirmations outstanding.

2. “Proper” handover

Less send & confirm, more explanation & conversation.

Pro: Appeal to professionalism
Con: “Proper” is very much in the eye of the beholder.

I can’t resist my favourite George Bernard Shaw quote here:

The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.

Substitute “communication” with “handover” for additional emphasis!

3. Collaboration

Instead of handover being an activity in its own right, make the transfer of knowledge and responsibility flow naturally out of the work itself.

Pro: The whole is greater than the sum of its parts (think of your favourite creative collaboration here, not just the sharing of a task)
Con: How to scale?

Collaboration is of course a huge topic in its own right, foundational both to Agile (“Customer collaboration over contract negotiation”) and to Kanban (“Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally”). It can take time for collaborative approaches to take hold, but don’t be afraid to try it in limited ways.

4. Self-organising cross-functional teams

This is collaboration at scale: teams assembled with the full range of capabilities required to meet the customer’s needs, empowered to adapt in accordance with the challenges they face. We seek to address fire-and-forget by eliminating the organisational boundaries that hinder the flow of work or information in the direction of the customer.

Pro: Super-effective when it works
Con: Not a quick fix. The wider organisation may not support the creation of cross-functional teams; it may even actively resist the idea. Paradoxically perhaps, self-organisation needs the right constraints (boundaries, policies etc) and leadership if it is to function effectively; these need nurturing.

5. Tracking

Together with any/all of the above, implement some basic infrastructure that ensures that work does not fall between the cracks.

Pro: Adds a measure of confidence and resilience, reduces the dependency on what’s in people’s heads
Con: The natural tendency for tracking systems to serve their administrators better than they do the team. Potentially therefore the thin end of a bureaucratic wedge.

6. Validation

This means systematically tracking work right through to its productive use/effect in the field, looking for evidence that the work has resulted in the benefits originally hoped for. Validation makes it very difficult to lose work mid-process, even when end-to-end it spans multiple teams. Sometimes it’s the customer that forgets!

Pro: Its effect on quality; gateway to Validated Learning (Lean Startup)
Con: Constrained by time-to-market, inhibitions

7. Visual management

Tracking made so visible and accessible that it is an integral part of the team’s working environment.

Pro: Tracking without the shortfalls; very low overhead if implemented well
Con: Potentially messy. What to do with sensitive information (a consideration even if non-messy electronic systems are used)?

8. Kanban systems

Visual management of work items through their various states, applying designed-in constraints on work-in-progress (WIP).

Pro: Improved flow, a readily-modified expression of process, a natural focus for self-organised improvement; gateway to Kanban (the evolutionary change method), Lean
Con: See “7. Visual Management” above

Commentary

Space does not permit me to include examples – I’d have a book chapter on my hands were I to do so! I’ve seen each of these approaches first-hand multiple times and I expect you’ve encountered most of them too.

There’s some natural ordering here but I don’t wish to give the impression that the simpler/weaker ones are never the appropriate option. Indeed, even fire-and-forget can be the right choice given the right context. That said, in my home territory of software development, the combination of validation and Kanban operated by a self-organising cross-functional team has proved very effective, bringing about change not just to the software development process but to customer behaviour too.  Powerful stuff.

If I missed anything (here or in my catalogue), do let me know.

A modest catalogue of process change patterns

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I have in mind a new talk for 2013 that starts not with Kanban but with day-to-day process change challenges that many people will recognise. Right now I’m looking at a fairly chunky change and I realise that it’s easily described via a number of quite generic transformation steps (“patterns”?):

  1. Replace “fire-and-forget” with something robust (e.g handover, trackers, visualisation)
  2. Refine ready/done criteria for an activity
  3. Move an activity across an organisational boundary
  4. Eliminate a process step (or, conversely, add one)
  5. Change the granularity at which work is managed
  6. Extend process scope upstream/downstream

Each of these are directly applicable to that one particular end-to-end process without being in any way specific to it. In one context easy and obvious; in another quite the opposite (right now, a bit of both). And where, you might ask, does Kanban fit in?  Posing the questions or helping to answer them?  Highly contextual of course – in fact I’m saying nothing yet about the “how”.

I don’t suppose that this list is unique but it seems like a useful starting point and I may continue to add to it. What would you add?