Improve Something Today

Looking back at some courses I taught in 2015, I noticed that I had been teaching the lean principle of respect for people using these 4 pillars:

1. Develop skills; give authority.
2. Assume good faith.
3. Create space to share ideas, problems, wisdom.
4. Show how today’s work fulfills the organization’s purpose.

It’s #2, ‘Assume good faith,’ that I’m no longer comfortable with.

Two things this misses

• The idea that people are conditioned to behave in certain ways, and that there are causes underlying behavior. This is true for behaviors we need more of (e.g. thoughtful collaboration) as well as those we must extinguish (e.g. discrimination, cruelty).
• The reflection that causes and conditions of individual behavior run impossibly deep. All of the hurt in the entire world is contained therein. We move through the same process of dependent origination. Most of that motion occurred across lifetimes, before everybody came to work or into being. What we can still do—today—is work our asses off to produce better conditions, with kindness.

My regret

I regret recommending that people ‘assume good faith’ as a way of enacting respect for people. Why? Because it assigns extra work to the person dealing with whatever trash someone else has handed them. It opens a door through which a bunch of sexist and otherwise awful shit enters. It tolerates behavior and hides problems that are intolerable.

A huge part of the project of lean is to fix problems at the source. The exhortation to ‘assume good faith’ sets us up to do precisely the opposite.

I am grateful for I could not care less about your positive intent, a short, illuminating article from Lauren Howard that clarified the situation.

And I’ll keep working at a better articulation of a principle I believe in, but have only clumsily expressed.

I joined a call where people spoke about “optimizing” this and that, and it gave me some time to reflect.

Optimization is ultimate jargon. It means less than nothing.

The idea of optimization—especially that of prescriptive optimization, where optimization is committed to or smuggled in instead of a strategy—is an absolute liability unless you can answer two questions:

• First, Dr. Deming’s pure but irritating question, “By what method?”
• Second, a generic concern for human flourishing, expressed as, “To what end?”

If you tell me you have 50 top-priority focus areas to optimize, and don’t say how you’ll do it (no method) and why you’ll do it (no purpose), we’re all just wasting time and effort.

“By what method?” is the easy question

Methods exist, many of them super well-tested. All of the bumps and squiggles ironed out. The best methods will replace or upgrade themselves as you apply them over time.

“To what end?” is the hard question

First, you have to actually have an answer. Then, everyone you share the answer with must agree—or at least reach a working, tentative consensus—on the content of that answer in order to fully engage or commit to the project of “optimization.”

If you want water, you need a bucket.

If you want improvement, you need PDSA.

That’s Plan-Do-Study-Act (PDSA). Sometimes you’ll hear it called Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA). Same thing; the distinction is a story for another time.

Conceptually, PDSA seems simple. In practice, it’s super difficult, especially as groups increase in size and work gets complicated.

PDSA is easy

This is the whole thing:

• Zero: Begin with sensemaking and understanding the problem.
• One: Plan a small, reversible change to test things out.
• Two: Do what’s in the plan.
• Three: Study—how did it go? What did we learn anything?
• Four: Act on what we learned—standardizing on good ideas, spreading what works based on the evidence and narratives we produced above.
• Infinity: Begin again.

PDSA is hard

We act without planning. We plan but then don’t do any god damn thing. We plan but do something different from the plan. We plan and will not deviate from plan even when the world changes. We overlearn. We underlearn. We do just fine, but flub the reflection and decision-making. We find awesome ideas but can’t find energy for transformation. Systems revert to mean, people fall back on old ways of doing things. We skip a step. Someone laments, “we already tried that and it didn’t work!” or “we’re already running behind!” We get distracted. We are managed by crisis and punished for experimentation.

PDSA is hard because you have to do 4 steps, in order, at scale, with attention, in community.

Have bucket, carry water

Take good care of that bucket.

Run PDSA and you can improve. Take good care of that PDSA system.

I am reminded of Chiyono’s lament on a cold night 900 years ago:

With this and that I tried to keep the bucket together,
and then the bottom fell out.
Where water does not collect,
the moon does not dwell.