Boundaries of Kanban

Markus Andrezak is speaking at the upcoming Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference (It is Hamburg, Germany, Nov 4-5, 2013) about Boundaries of Kanban - Disruptive Innovation. An overview of Markus’s talk sums up our conversation in the podcast quite well.

Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference: Kanban is fantastic in the support the flow of product development and self improvement of teams in that area. However, at each time the process defined through Kanban poses an impediment to work in the creative field. While Kanban may very well fit to work in the domains of product maintenance and iterative, feature by feature innovation, it does not support evolutionary or disruptive innovation. These types of innovation dip slightly or even more into chaos and are completely non linear processes which simply do not fit the Kanban board and process. The talk will show how to protect innovation from delivery and how to create the necessary level of communication between these areas w/o creating silos.

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe: I've struggled when I’ve applied Kanban to sales and marketing because it is similar thinking, it is very non-linear. The way I view it is that it's not this linear progression as much as it’s an iterative circle within a certain column. That group could be always there until they come out of the loop somewhere. They could either go backwards or forward. Is that similar type thinking to what you have done or do you have a better way?

Markus: I think it's very interesting what you said because I had this discussion last week with the great guys of TLC Lab in New York, Jabe and Simon Marcus. They came up with the similar idea because they tried to use Kanban in the way that you described it.

What I said to them is that you can put that work on the Kanban board and put a container around it and just ignore that it’s on the Kanban board. What will still happen is that people will look at the container that’s protecting this design work from the production constraints so to speak and somehow feel like it has been a stranger on the board. Now you could have a very great company culture and everybody will tolerate that stuff on the Kanban board. On the other hand, if it's on the Kanban board the Kanban system should be helpful of this work otherwise you would not put it on the Kanban board.

Again, this process is completely non-linear and going on and on as you say, my question would be of what help word Kanban be for the designers and I think of no help. If you look at what's going on in the gaming industry, how they’re coming up with new ideas for the games is in very small prototyping teams which are not working in any method. Maybe Design Thinking or maybe Design Studios, but they’re not working on any development-like or production-like methodologies. Rather what they do is something which Toyota might call set base design, so highly parallel work in very small teams to come up with lots of new ideas for a similar problem. I think this is good but you can't organize it on a Kanban, at least not that it would help so you could do Kanban but I think it would be of no help for anybody.

About Markus: Markus Andrezak has been active in different contexts as Product and Development Manager for high traffic and high revenue web sites. During the last years his main focus has been transitions towards Lean and Kanban product management and development practices across his portfolio. With Arne Roock, he also co-authored 'Replenishment', a free eBook on Kanban. His Blog: Portagile and Twitter: @markusandrezak. You can find more information at his company website: http://ueberproduct.de/en/.

No Steve, Jack or Bill, just The Caterpillar Way

How many companies get Leadership right? Do you always have to have that charismatic leader that makes us think about them before the company? Tomorrow’s podcast is with Craig Bouchard, author of the book, The Caterpillar Way: Lessons in Leadership, Growth, and Shareholder Value. If you know my legacy a bit, you understand the high degree of interest.

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe: What struck me about the book more than anything else is that there was not a Jack Welch, a Steve Jobs, or a Bill Gates. It was a credit to the entire Cat organization. Was that true? Is that how Cat is?

Craig Bouchard:  I really confess. It's incredibly true. I've been the CEO for a couple of companies. I'm the CEO of Signature Group, a public company right now, in a great company. But in the case of Caterpillar, I've never seen such a large group of people so thoroughly dedicated in increasing their revenues and decreasing their expenses as a team - which is kind of simple - but what I'm trying to say is that it's rare in real experience. That company is really - everybody is on the same page and that's a management feat of course that they've accomplished that.

Joe: Yes it's a huge management feat but not to have that person out there waving the flag just amazes me.

Craig:  Yes and when I look at Cat is and the most remarkable thing going back to the 80's. They had basically six incredibly large complicated decisions to change the company during this past thirty years. Six times, they turned the entire place upside-down strategically requiring such a flexibility of their management and their workforce - it's just really remarkable and each one of those decisions could have turned into a disaster and each one like them have turned into disaster for other companies, and Caterpillar went six-for-six. Basically with four different Chief Executive Officers through that time period responsible for those six decisions. Not only did they go six-for-six in decisions, they managed to get it right who was the right person to implement and come up with an implementation for each of them. This kind of a record is almost unheard of in terms of these types of gigantic decisions were implemented.

Joe: Did the CEOs get picked based on the needed initiative, or because they were good at, or did it happen because they were at that?

Craig:  We talked about that a little bit in the book. How much of it is luck and how much of it is that the board of directors, they had at the time, picked the right guy for the right job in the challenges that existed at that time. Between Donald Fites, Glen Barton, James Owen, Doug Oberhelman and George Schaefer before, these five guys are very different people with different skill sets. In whatever way that it was accomplished with the board of directors at Caterpillar and its succession planning is a very determined and thorough process in the company. To put in place the right person at the right time in those challenges during those thirty years and my conclusion because they got it right five times in a row - it is not luck.

About Craig Brouchard ( http://www.craigbouchard.com): Entrepreneur, writer, art collector, great father and pretty good husband. Crafted the first and only "hostile reverse tender merger" ever successfully completed on Wall St and founded two public companies; Esmark and Shale-Inland.

• 2013 - Founded Cambelle-Inland, named for my daughter Cambelle
• 2010 - Founded Shale-Inland, named for my daughter Shale, now public in the bond markets (A3)
• 2003 - Founded Esmark Inc., the highest appreciating stock on Nasdaq for the full year 2008

Improving Interactions through the Lean Value Chain

Making products fly involves more than just the development team. So how do we involve, interact and improve with the non software parts of the value chain? Let Mattias Skarin walk through lean techniques and thinking that helps drive improvements across organizational borders.  Mattius is one of thought leaders of the Kanban Movement and is speaking at the upcoming Lean Kanban Central Europe Conference (It is in Hamburg, Germany, Nov 4-5, 2013). He is speaking about: Improving the full value chain & Visualization – What‘s my brain got to do with it? (Lightning Talk)

Mattias Skarin works as a Lean and Kanban coach, building systems that enables you to cut time to market and improve quality. He has helped several software teams deliver with confidence, scaled Scrum over multiple teams (cutting game cycle time from 24 months to 4) and improved life at operations using Kanban. He is an author of the book, Kanban and Scrum – making the most of both, and regularly train and coach in Lean, Kanban and TDD. He blogs on http://blog.crisp.se/mattiasskarin and the blog has one of the best set of sample Kanban boards on the planet.

 

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Marketing Magic of Moses: Content, Stories and Targeting

Everyone will tell you it is about Content, Stories and Targeting (Relevance) your audience. Well, sure it is, we have been talking about that since before the days of Moses. Just look at what Moses offered:

1. He was born a Hebrew, he was one of them.
2. Evidence to lead: He was practically king of Egypt   
3. His Call to Action was a better alternative to slavery, independence.
4. During the journey at certain moments of truth he brought a few (10) plagues,  parted a few seas and received the 10 Commandments to help form a nation.

This is not attempt to discredit Moses. I could have used the “marketing” campaign of our founding fathers that resulted in the creation of the United States. It is just an attempt to demonstrate that most “marketing” campaigns have contained the same successful platform for the last thousands of years. Today, marketers have taken this construct online with the tools that exist today.

I have always operated under the philosophy that the best indicator of future performance is past performance. We could argue this point, but I am betting my evidence on a few thousand years of history. What I do believe is communication happens at a more accelerated rate which causes change to happen quicker. Once when Moses campaign may take a lifetime, we now see an overthrow in Egypt materialize and happen in a short time span. It is the speed of communication.

There is another component that I believe that is happening that couples with the speed of communication, it is influence. We construct our present day messages with more data and information than ever thought possible (I have read that data can now predict where I will be (location) a year from now). As Kaiser Fung said in a Business901podcast (Framing Big Data Transcript):

Having the data and the numbers are really important. Like we said previously, completely trusting the numbers and the analysis is also very foolish. You need human intelligence to interpret these numbers. It is really an interplay of the numbers and your interpretation because ultimately, even though the numbers will never give us cause of information – they can never really tell you with certainty that A causes B, it would tell you that A is related to B. It is human interaction that is needed that kind of tie these things all together into a credible story. Forget the notion that you will find one story that is correct, and everything else is wrong. All we are trying to look for is a story that is our best story, given our constraints of what we can and what we cannot.

Even with all the data in the world, it is the influence of the person delivering that has the most significant effect on our decision. How do you gain that influence? How do you become an influencer? Is it by the number connections? Is it by the books you have authored? Or, do we leave LinkedIn tell us?

I think it can be summed up in one word, participation. Are we participating in the conversation? Are we participating in doing the work? Are we participating helping to create outcomes? I think it goes past  the thinking of the Jobs To Be Done thinking. It goes into what I have always termed playing in the customer’s playground. It requires additional influence which equates to a cooperative structure both internally and externally.

This is what my new eBook CAP-Do (More Info) discusses, The change that is needed in the conversation between the supply and demand side. The change in structure of that overlapping responsibility. That area where we struggle to maintain balance between “whose job it is”. We must assume it is a joint responsibility versus drawing the line in the sand. It is not saying the customer is always right. It not one of assuming the blame. It is about how, we frame the opportunity to move from a solution type thinking to openness that we are willing to be influenced ourselves before asking others to be influenced by us.

Mindfulness for Sales?

I have this on and off relationship with Meditation, NLP and Yoga through the years. An extension of this is the practice of visualization. Many of us will consider this for sports and have at one time practiced the technique of visualizing our next golf shot from behind the ball. Of course, we can argue the success of this technique for ourselves, but most professionals do practice the technique.

If it works for sports, why would it not work for sales? Would it be a crazy practice to sit in the car and just visualize the outcome of the sales call? Would it help rehearsing the problems that may be encountered or the people you might see during the call? There is an easier and more beneficial practice that could occur. It is the act of mindfulness or unloading. If we just take a break to rid ourselves of everything going on around us and participate in the presence – would that make us more effective?

When is the last time you did absolutely nothing for 10 whole minutes? Not texting, talking or even thinking? Mindfulness expert Andy Puddicombe describes the transformative power of doing just that: Refreshing your mind for 10 minutes a day, simply by being mindful and experiencing the present moment. (No need for incense or sitting in strange positions.)

Jose Silva is the person that may be best known for bringing meditation to the western culture or at least North America. He also is one of the few that has taken this type of material and applied to the sales arena. His book, Sales Power the Silva Mind Method for Sales Professionals, provides an outline for the process. It is somewhat dated material but I do enjoy the Silva Intuition System. This program has been updated by his daughter Laura Silva and provides an excellent introduction to meditation. If you try it, let me know your results.

Using Scenarios for Current Applications

This video does an excellent job of explaining Scenario Planning. The most common application of is for futuristic thinking and considering the different scenarios that may play out. In the video, it will comment on how this method is used in lieu of forecasting or maybe even when Predictive analytics, no longer work (Podcast,  The Power to Predict Who will...).

When you view this video take a different approach. Instead of looking at the limiting perspective of Scenario Planning for the future view it from a perspective of building Customer Scenarios along the Customer Journey. Instead of assuming a customer was going to react a certain way, we match them to the Scenarios that may happen as a result of being in this position.

 

If we view the Customer’s Journey as a Scenario Journey does that cause a different reaction? Would that help us to seek to understand first?

Do Personas, Stakeholder, Journey Maps work?

Successful companies are now viewing their marketing as a method for getting the message in from the marketplace versus pounding the message out. It is this inbound marketing stuff we have been talking about the last few years. The new methodologies of User Experience, Service Design, Design Thinking and the Lean Startup^TM are all about using this found wisdom and all expound to be “Customer Centric” and concentrate on the “Customer Experience”. It is that Outside – In thinking.

The three tools that have become prevalent are Customer Personas, Customer Stakeholder and Customer Journey Maps. They are tools that we use to understand and improve the Customer Experience. There is seldom a workshop that does not utilize these three tools, and they have been widely adopted in the community. I use them myself and find them quite fun to talk about and to do.

I wonder after a workshop, how many participants actually go back to their organizations and create personas, stakeholder and journey Maps. I am familiar with a few that have, especially the customer personas. However, if you are like most, you go back to your everyday job and work. It was an exercise and only an exercise. If you do make the attempt, you do it in an isolated group with participants that already have a decent idea on what is needed. There is little disruptive change that occurs. We may bring a few “outsiders” in, but those people seldom understand the bigger picture of the organization (said in jest).

The truth is if you try to use these tools you find them cumbersome. There is not the external knowledge of the customer present, and so assumptions are made. If sales is included, they seldom are, the salespeople are disengaged and looking at their smartphones and stepping out to make urgent calls. The innovative organization would like to have both salespeople and customers included but without mastery of the tools find it difficult.

Lately, I have been challenging organizations to turn back and think internally. Think inside-out versus outside-in. At the end of a workshop or webinar, I no longer ask participants to take this knowledge back and design customer facing services or involve sales and marketing. I ask them to do it for their vendors. I ask them to take one of their own particular services or outsourced products that they use internally and create Customer Personas, Customer Stakeholder and Customer Journey Maps. I encourage the Lean Champion to head the project if and only if he can stop it from making it the typical Lean or Six Sigma Project. We are empathizing with the users and discovering how decisions are made within our own company. Our goal is one of discovery and definition. Seek to understand not fix.

We first need to address the users of the service/product and create the Customer Persona Map. Then view the stakeholders and who is influenced by the use of this product and who influences them. Mapping the Customer journey in our organization can also be enlightening. If you want to have a little fun, have your supplier create his own three maps and see how they compare. Now, bring who you would designate as your outbound map makers and show them the results. How valid will one be with your customer? Would it be worth your time? Or, would yours look like the one created by your supplier?

If Value is Co-created in Use, Our Decisions Need to be Co-created

When we approach sales we typically think of how we will address the customer’s problem. What needs we need to address and how we will do this in an engaging way? We are in The Experience Economy says authors Pine and Gilmore. Though many of us dwell on the Experience Economy, I think we are moving past that at an accelerated rate. This movement has its foundation in Service Dominant Logic, where the fundamental belief is that value is co-created with customers. The value is in the use of the product or service. This type of thinking is awkward to many organizations. In my latest book CAP-Do: Connecting Demand to the Lean Supply Chain, I begin the journey discussing sales and marketing from a perspective of being systemic, emergent, and participatory.

My latest thinking has been a result of spending time with stakeholder and customer journey maps and building user personas. These processes have assisted me moving from inside-out thinking to an outside –in perspective. It also helped my clients build better customer experiences. What I realized working with customers was that many of common problems they encountered became rather standard to deal with and many even automated. When we addressed sales issues we found a striking number as either straight-forward or responding to “opportunities” we had little chance of winning. If you would like more information on my sales perspective, read the blog post, Lean Salespeople are Challengers, not Problem Solvers.

The world of sales is on the edge of a collaborative way of selling. We no longer can just sell to a customer; we have to understand our customers’ business and our customers’ customer’s business. This can be done through scenario planning and from a perspective of being systemic, emergent, and participatory or The Cap-Do process.

From the book ' target=_blank>' target=_blank>' target=_blank>Solving Tough Problems, author Adam Kahane classifies problems. His definitions: 

• A problem has low dynamic complexity if cause and effect are close together in space and time.
• A problem has high dynamic complexity if cause and effect are far apart in space and time.

 

• A problem has low generative complexity if its future is familiar and predictable.
• A problem has high generative complexity if its future is unfamiliar and unpredictable.

 

• A problem has low social complexity if the people who are part of the problem have common assumptions, values, rationales, and objectives.
• A problem has high social complexity if the people involved look at things differently.

When any of the problems exist that are coded in red, they are fairly simple problems to address and most organizations know the answers and their preferred vendors. They may make a decision with preferred vendors or research other vendors just to confirm their decision (The dreaded request for proposal we often receive).

The other set of problems, not in red, we struggle with as organizations. They are often described as messy or wicked problems.  The latest inbound marketing programs that are “social” in nature fail to deliver. They are simply built from our old thinking of a marketing funnel, responders, and workflows. We guide and manipulate the customer down some arbitrary path to arrive at the correct (our) decision.

As Kahane says,

Simple problems, with low complexity, can be solved perfectly well—efficiency and effectively—using processes that are piecemeal, backward looking, and authoritarian. By contrast, highly complex problems can only be solved using processes that are systemic, emergent, and participatory.

We as an organization do not have solutions to problems of high generative complexity. They cannot be calculated in advance, in a journey map, based on our past thinking, but have to be worked out as the situation unfolds. Seldom are they miraculously worked out by “single experts” but rather by a team of highly involved people. A coalition or a team made up of customer(s) and vendor(s)  must accept the fact that there is not one right answer. It must emerge from doing or working towards the problem. Just as value is co-created in use our decisions need to be co-created.

We always equated the experience economy to a theater with actors being the customer facing people, the back stage the supporting cast and the audience the customer. I think that is a broken metaphor. A better metaphor may be a race team where the product/service is the car, and the driver (customer) is using it. The pit crew (vendor) is in constant communication and in support of its use. There is no backstage, we are completely transparent and, in fact, the customer’s own support might be part of the pit crew.

Do you have an analogy that might work?

What is your Organizational Persona? Map it!

Do we focus on the customer too much? Most of us would disagree and say no that we should focus on the customer more. However, recently we have seen a tremendous amount of books written on organizational clarity. One of the reasons is that without understanding our purpose as an organization or as an employee of organization we limit our effectiveness. Dating myself, you go back to the 80’s where a tremendous amount of work was done on corporate vision and mission statements.

In a recent interview, Handling Impossible Projects, I asked author Michael Dobson, “When we think of a crisis like that, how much project planning goes into a crisis, such as Tylenol. Were they just winging it in that instance?”

Michael: Well, the part of the background of the Tylenol situation was that a lot of the executives of Johnson and Johnson had just gone through training or some workshop about corporate ethics. Their vision and mission statements and all these good management practices and they really only had one question to ask themselves. Did we mean all this stuff that we were saying? Once they said “Yes, we did mean it,” then they had a basis to go on.

This demonstrates how this understanding will guide is organizational decision making. Simon Sinek message of starting with Why, (Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action)) embodies this message. Sinek has a simple but powerful model for inspirational leadership all starting with a golden circle and the question “Why?” He then draws another circle with “How” and another with “What”. It is powerful message and one of best Ted videos of all time. Not to downplay the effectiveness of the message but it is a very clever packaging of the old mission and value statements created in the 1980s.

How do we convert to a powerful Why statement?

Whether you call it Why or Vision, there is not anything else that maybe more instrumental to your success. Do you believe your organization has a heart? Does that mission pulsate throughout the entire organization? It’s not an iterative process. It is not anything that is cloudy or mysterious to your organization. It is Why you get up in the morning and go to work. With Vision, With Why, a unifying theme of purpose exists. All of your objectives, all the measures, all the targets, etc. become aligned.

I believe the simplest method of crafting our Why is through the use of an Organizational Persona Map. We use build personas to understand and empathize with customers but do we have one to understand our own organization? Can we easily identify what is the personality of our organization? As Sinek says, we know what we do and how we do it but do we know why? A humble attempt at creating an Organizational Persona Map:

Organizational Persona from Business901

Without vision, without why, you seldom provide a unifying theme of purpose. All of your objectives, all the measures, all the targets, etc. become disjointed. In a Business901 Podcast, Ari Weinzweig, CEO and co-founding partner of Zingerman’s in Ann Arbor, MI said, “Vision comes from the heart”. That should dictate how we act and the personality of our organization. Does it? How would your customer complete this?

Related Information:
The Kipling Growth Strategy Map
The Lean Business Practices of a Deli