A passage from Jerry Weinberg’s The Secrets of Consulting:

“Your ideal form of influence is first to help people see their world more clearly, and then to let them decide what to do next. Your methods of working are always open for display and discussion with your clients. Your primary tool is merely being the person you are, so your most powerful method of helping other people is to help yourself.”

I first read Jerry Weinberg around 15 years ago. At this time, I was comfortable working as an independent consultant, but remained deeply uncomfortable with existing in the world as a human being. I wasn’t yet ready to take seriously the projects of caring for myself, or for others, or understanding what it was like to be a person.

That passage really stuck with me. Let me tell you why.

“Your ideal form of influence is first to help people see their world more clearly, and then to let them decide what to do next.”

The best job description for a continuous improvement leader I’ve ever seen. It opens space for questions like:

• Which people? Who is excluded yet should be included?
• What constitutes their world?
• How do they make that world intelligible to themselves or to others?
• How might they (as a group) produce explanations, find consensus, or make a decision and stick to it?

“Your methods of working are always open for display and discussion with your clients.”

If you’ve worked with me, you know what this is like. The garage door is up, somebody is always making a mess and then cleaning it up so it shines.

As a consultant, I will come and I will go. After I’m gone, I hope that some of those methods of working might be retained. This is why I am pleased to cycle through many approaches, methods, and techniques. At the start of an activity, neither you nor I know what will work best, but we can hope to uncover it together.

“Your primary tool is merely being the person you are, so your most powerful method of helping other people is to help yourself.”

It’s only in the last few years that I’ve come to recognize myself as an object truly capable of being helped, much less being worth the effort. Weinberg’s words gave me an important, early reason, which I now see as evidence of how deeply damaged I was (and still am) as a subject of capitalism. But that’s fine: you’ve got to go at the rate you can go.

On speeding things up

What I’ve learned from the hourglass and from the snake.

Improve Something TodayBrian Kerr

These days, I work to keep things quiet in my head, so I can listen carefully to others. I sit still on my cushion so I can get up and move skillfully. I practice kindness so I can act kindly. Would it be better if I had come to these on my own, or earlier? Certainly. But I am grateful they came when they did.

No two go by one way; this one was mine.

Thanks, Jerry.

People want to go faster. I’ve made my career helping people speed up things they care about: foster care placement, order-to-cash cycles, school transportation, weather radar rendering, customer support escalations, replacement part ordering, academic award selection, environmental site reviews, and on and on.

During these adventures, I’ve learned two points about speed—one from the hourglass, and one from the snake.

1. The hourglass: how to speed things up

Imagine an hourglass. Two glass bulbs, a skinny bottleneck connecting the two, an enclosed volume filled with sand.

• The rate at which sand falls is controlled by the width of the bottleneck. The bottleneck is what makes it an hourglass, not a jar.
• The hourglass is filled with an amount of sand. The rest is filled with air.
• The duration it takes for the sand to fall from one side to the other is a function of these two:
  • the rate at which sand passes through the bottleneck, and
  • the amount of sand.

Hourglasses are compelling because all parts of the system are in clear view. To see an hourglass is to use it.

Complicated systems—the ones that matter—are not self-explanatory. It takes effort to make a system visible enough that the rates, amounts, and durations it produces might be adjusted with skill and care.

Bottlenecks & key constraints

The simplest way to adjust an hourglass is to add or remove sand. Sand is easier to change than glass.

You don’t make an hourglass run at a faster rate by yelling at the bottleneck, or putting it onto a performance improvement plan, or planning an outing to a baseball game. Encourage the sand to do more with less and see where that gets you.

To adjust a complex system, first, figure out what the bottlenecks are. In this line of work, call them constraints. Go look, measure, count. Once you’ve found those constraints, get comfortable with them. There’s always a key constraint. Remove the key constraint and the second-worst constraint rises, smiling, to take its place. Continuous improvement is the practice of removing constraints, one at a time, without hurting anybody. Contrast this with typical improvement projects that merely push problems around until they are held by the unluckiest manager.

To adjust the system, you must discover the system under adjustment. We learn from the hourglass that it’s possible: rate, amount, duration.

2. You can’t rip the skin off the snake

This page from Ram Dass’ “Be Here Now” helps me find patience. And patience is what makes me effective.

For example, on the meditation cushion, I appreciate—laugh off—moments where I notice a desire to produce more stillness, but faster.

For example, when changing systems for my clients, I remember that things only happen so fast, especially inside large, disorganized organizations, where people suffer under autocratic leadership, and where safety is not established and maintained.

You can’t rip the skin off the snake.
The snake must moult the skin.
That’s the rate it happens.

This is not a discouragement against change. It is a reminder that each moment prefigures the next. It is an encouragement to allow change to happen, to keep certain that it will, to create the conditions for it, to not rip the skin off the snake.

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.