Noted football philosopher John Madden said:

“Winning’s the great deodorant, and conversely, when you have a bad record, everything stinks.”

Compare to the lean world’s rusty old saw that...

“No problems is a problem.”

I don’t find this formulation useful. The payoff for parsing its awkward phrasing? One is gently scolded.

Instead, go to Pixar co-founder Ed Catmull’s expression:

“Success hides problems.”

That is to say, you should 100% enjoy success while you have it. But remain aware that even as you’re winning, problems exist. Pick off small opportunities and take care of them now, before the deodorant wears off.

Do this with me:

1. Griddle up a pancake on one side.
2. Do not flip it. Instead, remove from heat and set on a plate.
3. Immediately start the first half of another pancake.
4. Continue until you have a stack of five half-cooked pancakes. They should be crispy and fluffy on one side, oozing and dripping raw batter on the other.

Oops. We didn't make a meal—we made a disaster.

The 10x pancake-maker

I’ve met busy, expert-level cooks who spend a great deal of time making only the first sides of pancakes. Everyone is hungry, the food goes to waste, but you gotta see how fast they move. Their bias towards action. Velocity. Look at them: a “flow state.” There is always something cooking, so they must be great at this. And the incredible variety of pancakes their menu offers.

What remarkable flavors their breakfasts must have, if they ever manage to finish a single god damned flapjack.

The best pancake

1. The best pancake is cooked perfectly, ready for someone to enjoy.
2. A strongly OK pancake might be a bowl of batter next to a hot griddle.
3. The very worst is a pancake-in-progress, one that's started cooking, and then a doorbell rings a few rooms away. It’s easily interruptible, delicate, a liability if the mind or body wanders.

Started but not finished

Put on your continuous improvement goggles, go look for work that has been started but not finished. You’ll find it everywhere. Gross. Let it be as much cause for concern as that stack of half-cooked pancakes.

• Given a pancake-in-progress, you can guess how far along it is. Pour, one side, flip, the other, serve. You can even check the batter and guess how many more you can cook.
• But given a basket of nuanced, exploratory projects, everyone believes & reports each activity to be 85% complete… but the reality can be obscure. Plus, everybody is too busy starting all these other projects to quite finish any of them.

It’s enough to put you off your breakfast.

In 1992, Oxford English prof Andrew Nuttall wrote the following:

The human capacity to think provisionally, to do thought experiments, to form hypotheses, to imagine what may happen before it happens, is fundamental to our nature and to our spectacular biological success ... The cleverest thing Sir Karl Popper ever said was his remark that our hypotheses ‘die in our stead’. The human race has found a way, if not to abolish, then to defer and diminish the Darwinian treadmill of death. We send our hypotheses ahead, an expendable army, and watch them fall.

That’s the tidiest explanation I’ve seen of our infinite appetites for catastrophe in media and in the imagination.

There’s much to gain from the activity of worrying about responses to some imagined, awful event. Mental rehearsal prepares us. We imagine. We plan. We ruminate. And as the expendable armies fall, over and over, the mind is cluttered. All this automatically, unwillingly, exhaustively.

We might also stop and turn the armies back and inhabit the silence.

(But that’s for another day.)

This is hard

1. We’re born experts at doing thought experiments automatically, intuitively, and individually.
2. But we’re terrible at doing thought experiments deliberately, or being able to speak or write about them.
3. Even worse, we believe we’re equally great at both kinds of thinking.

The bad news

Think of the containers we’re meant to pour our great ideas into:

• Suggestion boxes where ideas go not merely to die but to be forgotten “even by God.”
• Big-design-up-front schemes that admit only a single hypothesis. Hope you picked the right idea at the outset of that multiyear effort.
• Asinine standards for projects like 6x return on investment, which serve only preclude experimentation and prohibit critical thinking.
• Initiatives where everyone is discouraged by an early failure and gives up, with the cry of: “we tried that and it didn’t work!”

These containers are bad, and you can find them everywhere.

The good news

The good news is: there are better ways of working and deciding, together.

• Instead of suggestion boxes, create listening systems.
• Do set-based design and allow for new trade-offs and discoveries without blowing the budget.
• Validate ideas through rigorous PDSA, with small, reversible changes.
• Celebrate failure as the thing one can learn from.

All those continuous improvement methods, all the great facilitation approaches, the techniques for self-organization? That’s what they’re for. They’re here, they’re tested, and they’re effective—and they are not easy.

From where I sit, this is the job. Let’s get to it.

Imagine this. A big, important change is happening: reorg, strategic shift, start or stoppage of significant work.

How do folks across the organization want to learn about these changes? Here’s the breakdown from the change management boffins at Prosci:

• 73% of people surveyed want to hear about the scope and importance of big changes from their executive leadership.
• 67% want to hear about the impact of changes from their direct supervisor.
• And only 4% want to hear ANYTHING from the change management team (hey, that’s me!).

When I first saw this data, my reaction to that 4% figure was a big old “eep” as I thought back to the times I’d communicated change messages myself. Although it wasn’t something I did often, it was clearly something I should do… never.

Instead, it was time to get good at creating space for the right people to send the right messages. To learn how they talk and give them their talking points. To schedule the sessions, invite the people, buy the food, and get the heck out of the way. This is where I learned the importance of visible, participatory, energetic sponsorship for change efforts. Sponsors need to show up, over and over, and speak to the change and why it’s happening now.

This is one of a million (approx) things I’ve learned from Prosci, the outfit behind the figures I mentioned above. Prosci researches change management, then pours what they learn directly into a container of excellent, thoughtful change management tools + methods.

I now believe that, in the same way that every project can be a lean project, every project can be a change management project. None too big, none too small. Maybe the strategy is simple, but it’s still worth thinking it through.

And if you ever find a project where the sponsor won’t speak up, RUN! Life’s too short to try to talk one’s way out of that dismal 4% figure.

TL;DR:

• Communications about big changes should come from the right people:
• Those in exec/leadership roles…
• …And the managers of everybody affected by the change.
• Prosci has super great methods to help.
• Don’t waste time on projects without active sponsorship.

Process maps are the worst. I hate getting paid to make something that immediately goes onto the shelf, never to be looked at again.

And you know what every organization’s shelf is full of? PROCESS MAPS.

People love to make these damn things, or hire consultants to make them, and then bask in the sensation of accomplishment. Of having “documented”—or even worse, “understood”—the current state. What a waste of everybody's attention!

Next time somebody gives you a process map and shrugs, saying, “well here it is, although it’s a little out of date,” here are three things you can quickly add to it.

One: Clearly identified wiggle room

Even in the most dialed-in, locked-down business process there is some wiggle room. Find it. Circle it. Shade it in on the diagram. If 90% of the process is utterly inflexible due to agreements, requirements, contracts, deals, budgets, SLAs, suppliers, etc., there are still some things that can be changed. Find that 10% and make sure everybody else can see it too.

Two: Controls and why they’re there

Controls exist to mitigate risks. Identify the controls built in to this process, and draw them into the process map if they’re not already there. For each control, write down how often it happens, whether it’s automated or manual, what risk it’s there to guard against.

Sometimes processes have too many controls built in. Sometimes, not enough. How are you going to tell unless you map them out?

Three: Process behavior stats

For each step in the process, get some baselines. It’s OK to guess. Build a wee little table with these elements: How often does this happen? How long does this step take? What’s the percentage of time work enters into this process step 100% complete and accurate (%C/A)?

Now you know where the constraints or bottlenecks are. And you know where things break down. Remove constraints as best you can, build in quality where it’s needed. (Easier to not make mistakes in the first place than to have to sort them out later.)

TL;DR:

Process maps gather dust since they don't explain much on their own. Improve them by...

• Identifying wiggle room or degrees of freedom, so people can see opportunities.
• Listing controls, so people can argue about risks and mitigation.
• Measuring process behavior, so people can see where work breaks down.