The Lean Leadership mindset

In his excellent Gemba Walks, Jim Womack suggests a Lean Leadership mindset. The Lean Leader will:

1. Embrace the practice of problem-solving by going to the actual place of work, seeing the actual situation, asking great questions about the issues and impediments found, seeking root causes, and showing respect for the lower-level managers and for colleagues at the same organizational level by continuing to ask hard questions until good answers emerge.
2. Understand that no manager at a higher level should attempt to solve a problem at a lower level on their own. Instead, the higher-level manager can assign responsibility to a manager at a lower level to tackle the problem through continuing dialogue, both vertically with the higher-level manager and horizontally with everyone actually touching the process causing the impediment. This is where Communities of Practice may shine (such as the ones fostered by our Agile Transformation Offices in our various organizations and accounts), by providing ready access to the people most closely involved with and familiar with relevant topics. Problems are best solved right where they are found, in conversation with the people that live with them, rather than pondered in abstract in some remote executive suite.
3. Know that all problem-solving is about experimentation, preferably by practicing a plan-do-check-act habit of continuous inspection and adaptation. No-one can know the best answer before experiments are conducted, and the many experiments that fail will yield great learning to be applied for the next rounds of experiments.
4. Appreciate that no problem is ever solved forever. Introducing a promising countermeasure is sure to create other new problems elsewhere in the system. This is not bad - it is to be expected, and it is good, provided that the critical, probing minds of the Leaders keep pursuing continuous improvement.

Word cloud for "Describe what you do in three words"

A recent popular thread on the Lean Six Sigma LinkedIn group triggered over a thousand responses. So I took a snapshot on Wednesday July 27th (New Zealand time) and created a word cloud, to see what we were all saying.

By the looks of it, most of us Improve, quite a few of us Make, Learn, Deliver, Create, Analyze, Lead, Drive, etc.

Enjoy!

The Gemba Walk with Jim Womack

Jim Womack just gave an excellent The Gemba Walk webinar (there's also a follow-up Q&A session to watch), under the auspices of the Lean Enterprise Institute. The core message is that the Gemba Walk can be used as a mechanism to give context for horizontal conversations that lead to improved flow. An excellent practice for all leaders!

What's this Kanban thing, anyway?

Kanban is a simple way to visualize and control work (or things-to-do in general), limiting the amount of work-in-process in order to achieve good flow.

For details on how Kanban may be applied at different scales, please see or listen to:

• Personal Kanban and PK Flow: what is it and why use it? - applying Kanban at an individual level
• Becoming an Agile Family thru Kanban - applying Kanban at a family and Team level
• Agile and Kanban - applying Kanban in Agile Teams

Going to the Gemba for Agilists

John Shook's latest e-letter, How to Go to the Gemba: Go See, Ask Why, Show Respect covers four main perspectives from which people generally observe work when going to the Gemba:

1. Solution View - hunting for opportunities to use Lean tools. Tempting but risky - since it implies a hazardous rush to conclusions - potentially disruptive for continuous improvement if used on its own.
2. Waste View - keeping an eye out for wastes of various kinds. Useful, and should be handled carefully so as not to pursue local optimization to the detriment of global outcomes.
3. Problem View - confirming and inquiring into impediments. Handy, and may take many shapes - its weakness (and opportunity) lies in the fact that it lacks an in-built structure. Various problem-solving approaches can be devised to suit the team and organization's context.
4. Kaizen View - seeking patterns, forms, routines. By engaging the people doing the value-adding work into a structured problem-solving pattern, this is the strongest choice.

What does this mean for the business of software-intensive systems development? The ideas apply directly - no significant adjustment required.

To achieve continuous improvement, we must start by respecting our engineers, encouraging and supporting them to create improvements to their work processes, in addition to creating and enhancing features for the systems they develop. We trust them to create intricate engineering constructs. Surely they're best placed to design the improvements to their work processes as well.

We have a responsibility to develop ourselves and our colleagues into intense noticers and tenacious experimenters. We must challenge each other to create better systems that create products in addition to creating the great products themselves.