Improve Something Today

It’s been a few months. Life happened in our home this spring, to the tune of a child who became very sick in February and is still slowly coming back into his own. A season of ongoing adjustment—see how much badness one can smuggle into that little word?—with abiding comfort in asinine clichés (“taking things one day at a time”), and big changes in how I’ve used the time. We are fine, and will be fine. I’m grateful for all the people who have given support or slack in one way or another.

All that said, it’s time to get back to words, a whole bunch of ’em, in deliberate sequence. Let’s go. ↓

Online reading

From Tom Wolfe’s absurdly fun 1983 profile of Robert Noyce:

“Some twenty-four-year-old just out of graduate school would find himself in charge of a major project with no one looking over his shoulder. A problem would come up, and he couldn’t stand it, and he would go to Noyce and hyperventilate and ask him what to do. And Noyce would lower his head, turn on his 100-ampere eyes, listen, and say: ‘Look, here are your guidelines. You’ve got to consider A, you’ve got to consider B, and you’ve got to consider C.’ Then he would turn on the Gary Cooper smile: ‘But if you think I’m going to make your decision for you, you’re mistaken. Hey … it’s your ass.’”

The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce | Esquire | DECEMBER 1983

How the sun rose on the Silicon Valley

Esquire | The Complete ArchiveTom Wolfe

From Maria Farrell & Robin Berjon’s essay on rewilding the internet:

“When a failure by cloud provider Fastly took high-profile websites offline in 2021, its share price surged. Investors were delighted by headlines that informed them of an obscure technical service provider with an apparent lock on an essential service. To investors, this critical infrastructure failure doesn’t look like fragility but like a chance to profit. The result of infrastructural narrowness is baked-in fragility that we only notice after a breakdown. But monoculture is also highly visible in our search and browser tools. Search, browsing and social media are how we find and share knowledge, and how we communicate. They’re a critical, global epistemic and democratic infrastructure, controlled by just a few U.S. companies.”

We Need To Rewild The Internet | NOEMA

The internet has become an extractive and fragile monoculture. But we can revitalize it using lessons learned by ecologists.

NOEMAMaria Farrell

Books

It is the English major’s way of scrabbling through a difficult time—I’ve been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson. From his “Circles” essay:

“Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens.”

Essays, by Ralph Waldo Emerson - Free ebook download

Free epub ebook download of the Standard Ebooks edition of Essays: A collection of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays.

Standard Ebooks: Free and liberated ebooks, carefully produced for the true book lover.

During the past few months I’ve collected a few older kaizen books, but haven’t cracked these yet. They’re next, and coming up soon.

Recommended courses & workshops

The second cohort of Fenwick’s “Think Like a Writer” course begins next week, on June 3. (Still time to join up, or you can take it on your own time, anytime.) I was part of the first cohort. I encountered a breezy course loaded with rubrics, questions, and checklists that led to immediate improvements in my own business writing. I appreciate the respect this course extends to participants’ time and attention—I was able to complete it during a busy month of client work and in the midst of the aforementioned family health crisis. Use code PENPAL25 at checkout to knock $25 off the asking price:

Think Like A Writer

Clear writing starts with clear thinking. Practice three questions to clarify anyone’s writing, including your own

Fenwick Writing School

I also recently enjoyed Ryan and Greg’s half-day “Restart” workshop, the premise of which is to guide you through existential and scary stuff related to independent work. You’ll spend the morning designing a business, uncovering ways to talk about your services, and mapping out specific positioning and marketing opportunities. I’ve worked for myself before, would like to again someday, and have many nervous questions about the prospect right now. This workshop and the subsequent bi-weekly calls and take-home activities was perfect for me. When I think about some of the readers of this site & mailing list—well, it might be perfect for you, too. Next one planned for June 17:

Restart: A workshop to figure out if working for yourself is worth it.

Design a business plan you can see yourself in and figure out if working for yourself is worth it.

Jump Ship!Ryan Rumsey

Online reading

SessionLab’s second annual State of Facilitation report is out and it’s great. It covers topics like disability and methods for inclusion:

“Nobody had previously asked how many facilitators identify as having a disability themselves. About 20% of respondents identified as having a disability. Are our gatherings, communities and events designed to include them?”

And changes to facilitated session format and duration:

“One of the inheritances of the global pandemic has been the spread of shorter interventions. The circa 2 hours session is now the most common session length, whether online or remote.”

(Before the start of the pandemic, my experience was that more time-intensive “dedicated” lean workshops turned out better when decomposed into smaller kaizen activities anyways—allowing more time for reflection, getting new data and ideas, etc.)

These are just two items from this very thorough free report:

State of Facilitation 2024 – Report and Expert Insights

The second edition of SessionLab’s State of Facilitation report. Data, trends, and insights from a survey of workshop design and facilitation professionals.

SessionLabKeith McCandless (2014)

Next, “Zombie leadership: Dead ideas that still walk among us” in The Leadership Quarterly:

“By only looking for leadership amongst leaders we only find it there and bury all signs of leadership from below. By only recognizing, training, selecting and nurturing a few in positions of leadership we ensure that only a few develop the qualities associated with leadership. Elitist theory scaffolds elitist practice which creates an elitist world. This helps us understand the true extent of the threat posed by zombie leadership: not that the world it describes is false but rather that it may help to create a world in which it becomes true.”

Finally, I enjoyed this thought-provoking article about a family’s day trip to visit a data center in a suburb of Dublin:

“Ireland is no exception to the rule that what we remember and what we forget are always contingent upon the power structures and hierarchies that shape our contemporary moment. At the birth of the state, we burned our history in an act of carelessness; we also freed ourselves to create a new national history. We entrusted the church with our moral guidance and guardianship, and then allowed it to commit unspeakable cruelties on our citizens … At the latter end of the century, and in the wake of joining the European Union, we moved away from our old bad memories and toward a prosperous new era, placing our faith in international investment, almost at any cost. But in a small country like Ireland, the old names — whether they be companies or state organizations or political dynasties — crop up again and again. Sometimes our faulty memories flash up a warning. But often that history is stored in the cloud: intangible, vulnerable to exploitation, and degrading over time.”

Ireland’s Memory Machines — The Dial

Data centers have proliferated across the country, at great cost.

The DialJessica Traynor

No books

I haven’t read much this month due to some family/schedule things. It is weird to not be reading a few books. I miss the sustained attention that comes with it. Also, that’s where the ideas are: inside books. I’ll get back to it soon!

Upcoming event

The Global Lean Summit returns for its fifth year (and second in-person). It will be held in Indiana in mid-September with a 3-day conference format including an onsite tour at Toyota Material Handling.

I went to the 2023 Summit and it was a remarkable experience. I hope to attend this one, and hope you consider it too. As of this writing, you have a week to dial in early-bird pricing:

The Global Lean Summit – The Global Lean Summit

Online reading

This month I’m remembering the life and work of David Mann, who passed away in late December. He was one of those Michigan lean people who had a big effect on me, although I only met him once, in passing, at a conference. That big effect was through his book Creating a Lean Culture: Tools to Sustain Lean Conversions. It helped me and Andre more skillfully support a couple of lean projects back in the day, including the one where I saw that when it all worked, it really worked. So, thanks, David.

Ruth Malan shared a free systems thinking (“systems seeing”) month-long daily journal. She encourages you to work through it, spending ~15 minutes on each daily exercise:

Ruth Malan (@RuthMalan@mastodon.social)

The System Seeing Journal “starter kit” (daily prompts and related quotes to reflect on) is up: (Pdf) https://ruthmalan.com/systems/2024SystemSeeingJournalStarter.pdf It expands on the #AdventOfSystemSeeing prompts (to a full month) and is a revision/extension to last year’s version.

Mastodon

Finally, Anne-Laure Le Cunff’s “The Science of Learning to Let Go” is one of those pieces I’m still thinking about a month after reading.

The Science of Learning to Let Go

Learning to let go is much harder than holding on. Why do we cling onto past sorrows, bad relationships, old things, meaningless goals?

Ness LabsAnne-Laure Le Cunff

(If you like that, and want something short enough to carry with you forever, contemplate Tilopa’s Six Nails.)

Books

Mike Rother posted a thing that included a citation from Ignorance and Surprise: Science, Society, and Ecological Design by Matthias Gross and I immediately picked up a copy. (Ever since I encountered one of the key concepts of my consulting practice in a tossed-off back page column about fish scientists in a 1995 ecology journal, I know to pay attention to these people (ecologists).)

I owe Mike and his outfit more detailed notes on this book, but for the moment let me share this amazing illustration. I give you the “house of the unknown” ↓

The ecological interventions (or experiments) Gross is concerned with tend to happen in “the real world” instead of a laboratory. And that’s the ledge I use to climb up into this book. Kaizen is the choreography that happens in order to allow people to make improvements to their own “real world” work and relations. I think we can learn a lot from this book’s framework about how people respond to various kinds of surprising conditions or discoveries.

On the site

Recent changes @ improvesomething.today:

• Added to the Junk Drawer → a placeholder for LinkedIn carousel postings I’ve been doing. These mostly reiterate items from the site, but in a format people seem to enjoy.
• Some changes to e-mail newsletter delivery, formatting, and list membership that hopefully go smoothly. (If you’d like to join, unsubscribe, or change delivery of the e-mail newsletter, this is the link.)

Course recommendation

I recommend The Center for Humane Technology’s free, self-paced, multi-mode course, “Foundations of Humane Technology.”

If you design or make decisions about technology products or experiences, you might take a couple of afternoons to work through this material. The shift you’ll grapple with:

And the course:

Foundations of Humane Technology Course - Center for Humane Technology

A free, self-paced online course for professionals shaping tomorrow’s technology. Join thousands globally, including people from top organizations such as Meta, Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and the United Nations.

HomeTom GruberCo-founder of Apple’s Siri

Online reading

First, a remembrance of Freddy Ballé—the French popularizer of lean—after his passing last month. You may know his name from a few of the books he cowrote with his son, Michael Ballé. Dan Jones writes:

I can still hear his voice saying, “Keep your focus on the detail of the work and understand its significance for the customer and the system as a whole.” Thank you, Freddy, for your example and your inspiration.

Remembering Freddy Ballé

Rose Heathcote and Eivind Reke

Product-Quantity-Routing (PQR) Analysis and its close cousin, Work Unit Routing Analysis (WURA), are super underutilized continuous improvement methods for discovery and group sense-making and generally sorting things out. I’ve used WURA a bunch recently in my client work, and would like to write it up here soon. In the meantime, I am curious about how other people use PQR. Shahrukh Irani had this to say, in a very detailed post:

Kaizen event teams usually don’t have time to collect relevant data for all products. But with analyses already complete, the team could easily use just the PQ Analysis to segment their product mix into at least two areas, high volume and low volume. Then, using the PR Analysis for at least the high-volume segment, they could seek product families in that segment. Any product family found in that segment could then be the focus of a high-impact kaizen to implement a cell.

Minding your P’s, Q’s, R’s--and revenue too

Incorporating the PR Analysis (relating product mix and routing similarities) into a PQ Analysis (relating product mix and quantities), creates the PQR Analysis.

The FabricatorLean and Flexible LLC

We’re now a solid year into the impossibly tedious and generally underwhelming LLM/spicy autocomplete/ChatGPT era. Looking past the OpenAI+Microsoft clownshow currently underway, two things are clear:

1. These LLMs aren’t actually good enough to use for anything besides some Cal Newport style deeply evil “Deep Work” (aka middle-management strivers getting ahead by pushing lower status work onto lower status people in/outside an organization); and
2. They waste too much water.

I’d encountered that second point repeatedly, but not really understood it until I read this, by Manuel Pascual in El País:

Many data centers use cooling towers to prevent overheating, the same system used in other industries. It is based on exposing a flow of water to a current of air in a heat exchanger, so that the evaporation cools the circuits.

This method is more energy efficient than electric coolers, but it involves a significant amount of water evaporating (i.e. not returning to the circuit).  Approximately 20% of the water used in cooling systems (that which does not evaporate) is discharged at the end of the cycle into wastewater treatment plants. “This water contains large amounts of minerals and salt, so it cannot be used for human consumption without being treated first.”

Artificial intelligence guzzles billions of liters of water

The growing thirst of data centers, which use water to cool their equipment, is beginning to cause tensions in the territories where they are located

Ediciones EL PAÍS S.L.Manuel G. Pascual

(Thanks Bill for passing that link along.)

Finally, all the chatter about spicy autocompletes “ruining” software development brought to mind one of my favorite pieces of online writing—Ellen Ullman’s 1998 two-part essay “The dumbing-down of programming.”

The computer was suddenly revealed as palimpsest. The machine that is everywhere hailed as the very incarnation of the new had revealed itself to be not so new after all, but a series of skins, layer on layer, winding around the messy, evolving idea of the computing machine. Under Windows was DOS; under DOS, BASIC; and under them both the date of its origins recorded like a birth memory. Here was the very opposite of the authoritative, all-knowing system with its pretty screenful of icons. Here was the antidote to Microsoft's many protections. The mere impulse toward Linux had led me into an act of desktop archaeology. And down under all those piles of stuff, the secret was written: We build our computers the way we build our cities—over time, without a plan, on top of ruins.

My Computer. This is the face offered to the world by the other machines in the office. My Computer. I've always hated this icon – its insulting, infantilizing tone. Even if you change the name, the damage is done: It's how you've been encouraged to think of the system. My Computer. My Documents. Baby names. My world, mine, mine, mine. 

Read “The dumbing-down of programming” part 1 and part 2.

On the site

Recent changes @ improvesomething.today:

• I culled books from the reading list (eventually I’ll add new ones), and
• switched the site appearance from Ghost’s previous/old default theme to its current/new default theme.

Course recommendation

This season I’m luxuriating in an online, affordable, six-week information architecture course with Dan Klyn and a few new learning friends. Now, I first studied information architecture back in grad school, in a course taught by Dan in 2006 or so. It’s awesome to revisit this way of apprehending and creating environments more than 15 years later, and to do so with one of the people who have really pushed/pulled the discipline forwards. This is absolutely a course you should consider taking in 2024.

Intro to Information Architecture (IA) - Remote Course — The Understanding Group (TUG)

This course meets for six (6) consecutive Tuesdays at 1pm Eastern starting November 14th. Course Dates: Week 1: November 14, 2023 @ 1pm Eastern Week 2: November 21, 2023 @ 1pm Eastern Week 3: November 28, 2023 @ 1pm Eastern Week 4: December 5, 2023 @ 1pm Eastern Week 5: Decembe

The Understanding Group (TUG)What We Do

Trying something slightly different today: sharing a couple online reads, interesting books, and other recent updates. I might end up doing this monthly.

Online reading

First, this great short article from the great Donald Wheeler:

“Adjustments are necessary because of variation. And the variation in your process outcomes doesn’t come from your controlled process inputs. Rather, it comes from those cause-and-effect relationships that you don’t control. This is why it’s a low-payback strategy to seek to reduce variation by experimenting with the controlled process inputs. To reduce process variation, and thereby reduce the need for adjustments, we must understand which of the uncontrolled causes have dominant effects upon our process.”

Can We Adjust Our Way to Quality?

Many articles and some textbooks describe process behavior charts as a manual technique for keeping a process on target.

Quality DigestBio

Next, Mandy Brown wrote about work being too much and also not enough:

“Once you accept (or re-accept) that there is too much, it becomes easier to turn some things away. You may still feel grief or loss at the things you cannot do. You may feel guilt, especially if an institution or person benefits from you feeling that way. But accepting that you must leave some things undone shifts the problem from one of being not enough to one of being in a position to make choices. And even when those choices are coupled to difficult or prickly constraints, they are still choices.”

Too much and not enough | everything changes

Don’t do the hard work alone.

everything changes

Here’s a fun one—this case study by Regina de Melo on a lean project I designed and contributed to several years ago:

“By piloting small and fast ideas and using agreed-upon measures of success, ideas are vetted quickly and objectively by reviewing the attainment of the agreed upon outcomes.”

Lots of specifics about outcomes and trade-offs we encountered during this engagement. I enjoy this because the consulting team (that’s me!) recedes into the background and, as far as I’m concerned, that’s as it should be.

“Work Smarter, Not Harder: A Case Study on Lean Design in San Mateo County Human Services Agency” (Regina de Melo - 2018)

And this, on the topic of listening as a capability for movement-building, from Kelly Hayes and Mariame Kaba in the Boston Review:

“Organizers will often repeat the maxim, ‘We have to meet people where they are at.’ It is difficult to meet someone where they’re at when you do not know where they are. Until you have heard someone out, you do not know where they are, so how could you hope to meet them there? Relationships are not built through presumption or through the deployment of tropes or stereotypes. We must understand people as having their own unique experiences, traumas, struggles, ideas, and motivations that will inform how they show up to organizing spaces.”

How Much Discomfort Is the Whole World Worth? - Boston Review

Movement building requires a culture of listening—not mastery of the right language.

Boston ReviewKelly Hayes

Books

I’m still hung up on Naomi Klein’s “Doppelganger”—this will end up being my favorite book of the year unless something truly amazing happens. Read it. It is somewhat unclassifiable (memoir? polemic? weird-as-hell COVID-19 retrospective? etc.?) but whatever it is, it is an astonishment. If you need more information, start with Cory Doctorow’s review.

Beyond that, I am increasingly impatiently waiting for my preorder of “The Flow System Playbook” from Turner and Thurlow to get in.

“The Flow System” is an invaluable book—several of my projects have cribbed heavily from its pages—but I think the playbook format will really adhere to Thurlow’s strengths. More about this one after I dig in.

On the site

Recent changes @ improvesomething.today:

• I added a links & listens page with selected continuous improvement blogs and podcasts (only the weird/good ones),
• refreshed a couple recommended books on my reading list, and
• updated about this site with more information about your privacy and additional ways of reading.

As the algorithm-poisoned social media landscape decoheres, I am left feeling that web sites are great. I wish there were more of them. So I try to keep this one tidy.

An upcoming event

Makesensemess—the “nerdiest party of the year”—is coming up in a few weeks and I would be delighted to see you there. It’s a two-hour, cheap, online celebration of things people do to make sense of an absurd and silent world. Last year’s Makesensemess was phenomenal.

That’s it for now! Have an awesome day.