Podcast episode 0034: On speeding things up

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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 learned two points about speed—one from the hourglass, the other from the snake.

1. The hourglass isn’t listening

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. This bottleneck is what makes it an hourglass, not a jar.
• The hourglass is filled with an amount of sand, and an amount of 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 tend not to be self-documenting like this. It’s work to make the underlying rates, amounts, and durations they produce visible enough that they can then 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 taking it to a baseball game. Tell 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, you might 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. The snake & its skin

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

• For example, on the meditation cushion, I appreciate and laugh off moments where I notice a desire to produce more stillness—and faster.
• For example, when working with clients, I remember that things only happen at a certain rate, especially inside large, dysfunctional organizations, where people suffer under autocratic leadership, and where safety is neither established or maintained.

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

Please don’t take this as discouragement against change. It is a reminder that each moment prefigures the next. Let us allow change to happen, to remain steadfast in our conviction that it will, and that we create the conditions for it, and that we’re not to rip the skin off the snake.

Podcast episode 0040: A lousy time to be a good idea

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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 to 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.