Improve Something Today

It is 1976. Neil Diamond saunters onstage at The Last Waltz and introduces his performance of ‘Dry Your Eyes’ by saying:

I’m going to do one song for you, but I’m going to do it good.

Isn’t that what we all want? We want to do something once, and to do it good. And easy enough: the first step is to be Neil Diamond.

The rest of us should probably acknowledge that—whatever the work is—we’ll have to do it more than once, because it almost certainly won’t be done good the first time.

My friend Dan gave me the notion of a “now that I see it” moment. This occurs when a work-in-progress becomes real enough that people can say a sentence beginning with “Now that I see it…” and ending with things like:

• “…it’s completely wrong” or
• “…we forgot this important detail” or
• “…this will never work for this particular reason.”

Methods for building quality at the source, shifting left, set-based design, and so forth all help elicit “now that I see it” moments as early as possible.

By arriving earlier to “now that I see it,” we also arrive earlier to the wrong place, to the just-revealed insight, or to the key constraint. It is hopefully early enough that there is wiggle room to learn and iterate and retry.

Airbrushing the side of a van is delightful. It is a job that takes as much time as you care to give. But you need only outline those first few flames and/or wolves to wedge open space for the objection that what we really need is a bicycle, or for the idea that we might be able to take the train.

I leave you with this dismal little project management couplet:

“Now that I see it” is certainly true;
That’s why to use tape first & then glue.

(This advice does not apply to Neil Diamond or to his beaded shirts.)

I’ve been visiting these particular trees for years. Each time, I wonder: is this a view of perfect stability, or of a system building up potential until it changes—collapses, in this case—into something new?

There’s tension, and strength.

When I visit these trees I also see Stewart Brand’s pace layers:

Some things move faster than those trees: animals, water, me, you. Other things move slower. If you sit with this, it might become beautiful.

And then we go to work, where projects are atomized and boxed and shuffled around in tidy intervals, even though “whenever it starts is the right time.”

New beginnings are sudden

Transformation happens when it’s going to happen… and when it’s time, it happens fast, noisily, and irreversibly, like a tree falling.

• As a sandy bank erodes and trees slip into the saltwater, we tend to see that as a loss. The tides and the weather and the climate got to ‘em.
• When a group of people get to a moment of shared insight and identity and possibility, we tend to think that’s good. The choreography and structure and careful engagement got to ‘em.

Either way, what happens is a sudden shift from one state to another. The visible shift is a result of accumulated actions over time.

Not everything starts at the same time

Seven years ago I tossed out the “house of Lean”—with its ossified, layered columns and foundations, it was a powerful vision poorly communicated.

Instead, I taught for a while from this doodle:

(These are shearing layers, after Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn.)

What I liked about this figure is that it helped people sort out their approach to continuous improvement as a collection of things that start and stop and change over time and at different rates.

These days, I get people to the same point using ecocycle planning:

I’d prefer to work from a picture of trees growing than from a schematic of a little house.

For me, creative destruction is not “plowing” or the little controlled burn in the image above, but rather a huge tree slipping off and down into the tide, where it will drift and—at its own pace—break down and provide shelter, enrich the food web, become the beginning of many things. Whenever it starts is the right time.

Open space technology series:

• “Whoever comes is the right people.”
• “Whatever happens is the only thing that could have.”
• “Whenever it starts is the right time.” → now reading
• “When it is over, it is over.” (forthcoming)

Most continuous improvement events fail. I am curious why.

Today’s reason for failure is disconnectedness.

Earlier in my consulting days, I’d say “yes” to any one-off continuous improvement project that came my way—things like sitting with a new group to do an A3, or hosting a half-day event. I figured that if folks had a problem to fix and a sponsor willing to let them to work things out, it couldn’t possibly hurt, and might even help.

The events themselves were always fun. It’s fun to gather people together for a few hours and enable them to learn from each another in surprising ways. It’s fun to go where the work gets done and notice weird things happening there, to fix problems, to enjoy snacks and coffee and the company of others.

But I became dissatisfied with the success rate. Here’s what happened:

• Sometimes the events worked.
  Ideas arose, people made changes, the changes stuck.
• Sometimes they sort of worked.
  Maybe there was a short-term change for the better, but then things reverted back to the way they were before.
• Sometimes they didn’t work at all.

And this is the problem:

Everything is interdependent. We’re all connected. To pick up a particular piece of the muddle and draw a tidy rectangle around it and work on it in isolation is to miss nearly everything.

The ideal

Ideally, specific lean interventions are part of the daily work. In one classic formulation: Work = Job + Kaizen. Ideally, they are supported by leadership through a management system. Ideally, they are broadly understood and intelligible by passersby within and without the organization.

The strongly OK

But if that ideal condition does not exist (it very rarely does), now what? Should you say ‘no’ to everything? Or say ‘yes’ to everything and hope that some of it sticks?

My move—and it’s a pragmatic, or ‘strongly OK’ move—is to connect continuous improvement activities to something that is already valued and understood by the organization. This connection is what you can establish at the outset, and cling to after an event is over.

It’s the hook you hang the continuous improvement hat on.

So, in a ‘strongly OK’ world, try to connect continuous improvement work to (from most to least preferred):

1. Safety, quality, or satisfaction—for customers, employees, or suppliers. Must be quantifiable.
2. Business value—show how the current condition is costing the company money. Must be quantifiable, and something that is already familiar and meaningful to people.
3. A executive’s important initiative. But initiatives don’t last long, even the important ones, and some people will not be on board. This is a weaker connection than it might seem.
4. The organization’s mission, vision, or strategic plan. These things probably exist under a thick layer of dust. They’ll motivate continuous improvement to the same extent they motivate anything else in the organization—very little. If your organization is the exception to this rule, then move this up to the top of the list.

By connecting a continuous improvement event to one of these, and making that connection strong and broadly communicated, you increase the odds that the event—or its results—won’t float away.