Okay, so there's nothing about this video that isn't cute. And that's fine. But what does it have to do with Lean?One of the most important lessons that Lean can teach us is how to appreciate variation and make the most of it.When Jim Henson and this little girl went on set, it was to create a product - an item of value. The task, as originally written, was to create a short video where Kermit and the little girl sang the English alphabet. A simple progression of 26 letters. So simple that variation was inconceivable and no other product was possible.But little girls do not have SixSigma Black Belts or PMI certification (thank heavens!).So the cameras roll and the little girl suddenly becomes a point source in variation, undermining the original scope of work and putting the project in danger. She keeps injecting "Cookie Monster" in the alphabet, as if he were a letter in the English Alphabet.Cookie Monster is not a letter in the English Alphabet.The little girl thinks this is very funny. Kermit does not, because Kermit is a project manager locked into one irreversible type of value.Jim Henson, operating Kermit, knows that he can use rewards and penalties to get the product he wants. He knows that the little girl is really excited to be there with Kermit and that taking Kermit away will get her to settle down and sing the alphabet. So Kermit storms off.But rather than saying "Kermit, come back, I will sing the alphabet!" this little girl finds the true value - the honest value - and says with a sincerity that anyone can admire:"I love you!"And, even in the video, you can actually feel the impact this had on Jim Henson. Another day at the office turned into a beautiful gift.All because of variation.The real beauty here is that even though this product was fundamentally broken - fundamentally it did not achieve its initial goal - Jim and the people at Children's Television Workshop thought this lesson was worth sharing. They saw that through variation in their youngest of knowledge workers, there was innovation and inspiration.There was value in variation.
The Lean Muppet Series: Introduction
I am 46 years old (at the time if this writing, it would be kind of nice to just keep on being a healthy active 46 year old, though).Being 46 year old and American, I was raised by three parents: Don and Jennifer Benson...and Jim Henson.Like most kids when I was growing up, I lived with Muppets. On Sesame Street, on the Muppet Show, in the Muppet Movie, even on Saturday Night Live a few times. Muppets like Kermit, Ernie, Bert, and later Yoda are as much a part of my generation's psyche as anything can be.But as we've aged, we seem to have lost sight of Jim Henson's vision, his message, and his passion. In this Lean Muppets series, I hope to re-introduce a lot of us to Jim's message and show how we might either learn from or be actually living out some classic Muppet skits every day.This series is for everyone who works in an office, has an idea, follows Lean / SixSigma / 5s / Lean Startup / Personal Kanban / Kanban for software development / Lean medicine / Lean government...you see how adults complicate things?This series is for everyone who feels dissatisfied, but would rather not.This series is for people wondering why their business is broken, and who are tired of non-Muppets telling them why.In a recent (April 2012) interview with iSixSigma magazine, I was asked what I thought Lean was all about. I talked about Deming's Theory of Profound Knowledge. (I will post a link when it is published).When I thought about this a few days later while enjoying a bout of jetlag in a Swedish Hotel, I realized that Deming's vision was Jim Henson's vision...and it's a vision I too share.To engage my hubris muscle, I will now say what I believe that distilled shared vision is:
If we care, we create.
If we create, we improve.
If we improve, we live.
That is my vision. That is Lean. That is Muppets.How to implement the vision? Here come the guides (updated as they come out over the next month):
Failure Demand and Unthoughtful Production:Lean Muppets Post 2
Sunk Cost, Loss Aversion, and Cannibalism: Lean Muppets Post 3
Disclaimer: Jim Henson and the Muppets are a global treasure that we all share in the legacy of. We learned to count, spell, cooperate, and respect each other through Jim's work. Modus Cooperandi and Personal Kanban have no legal relationship with the Muppets, but we sure were influenced by their wisdom.
Depth in Progress: of Wine Snobs, Audiophiles, and Agilistas
“Wine is to enjoy, not to judge.”~ Hwi Woong Jeong (웅가) Wine Enthusiast
hwi
The gentleman next to me took out his laptop and began typing, he had a large pile of wine labels and a notebook filled with wine notes. He began systematically copying them into his laptop. I figured he was a wine critic.Other work he went on to do involved software development and airplanes so my curiosity overtook me and we began to talk. It turned out that he was a software developer that worked with airplanes. But … he was also a noted wine critic enthusiast. He had been to the Pacific Northwest of the US on a wine excursion as a guest of the major wineries. He had been all over Washington and Oregon tasting.When I was in my 20s, I decided I wanted to be a wine snob. So I went and took courses on wines, read books, and started a collection. I became rather good at it. So good, in fact, that I found I wasn’t actually enjoying wine any more. I was always critiquing it. I could always find something not quite right.I told him this and he smiled and said, “wine is to enjoy, not to judge.”We will always suffer from snobbery – to this day, I cannot listen to music from laptop speakers. And I know more than my share of agile adherents who actively hate every team they come into contact with because of their flaws.We tend to fall in love with our ideas and nothing kills romance like familiarity. Richard Dawkins once said, “There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence.”We do this all the time with our work. We get excited about a task or an idea and we go deep. Too deep. Beneath the layer of effort that separates excitement from boredom. From energizing to draining. From inspiration to drudgery.We might call this “depth in progress”. Just like we can have too much work in progress, we can also have too much depth. It’s simply doing too much of something. We go beyond what would be an acceptable level of completion and strive for “perfection.”
“The fact of storytelling hints at a fundamental human unease, hints at human imperfection. Where there is perfection there is no story to tell.” ~Ben Okri
At some point on the path to perfection, we pass the point of diminishing returns. After that point, our efforts do not return profit, only waste. In our pursuit of perfection, we identify all the things that cannot be perfect and then strive to perfect them. Yet, the imperfect is always with us. It is where growth resides.Yet the need for growth, and the imperfection, will always be there. We end up in a doom loop of reductio-ab-absurdum – we manage our products as if the end product were a fine diamond that would last centuries. Well, it took the planet millions of years to make that diamond, and we don’t have that kind of time.Therefore we need to approach our work by asking, “What is the least amount I can do to make this task successful?” In doing this, we want to move our ticket to DONE and have it stay there. No re-work, no additional tasks created because it was incomplete.Can that task be improved in the future? Absolutely. But for now, it is complete. We launch it, watch it work, and come back to improve upon it later if necessary.We want to know what the minimal completed task looks like and then do that. Anything beyond is too much work. Our previous goal of “perfect” is still valid, but now it has an upper boundary. Overly polishing the task does no one any good. Because of this, perfection is no longer gilding the lily - we now recognize the lily is perfect. We want to enjoy our wine, not judge it.
"To gild refined gold, to paint the lily ... is wasteful and ridiculous excess." ~ Shakespeare
Getting Beyond Done–When to Archive
“When do I remove tickets from the DONE column?”The short answer is, every week or so, try to have a short retrospective with your team or alone (if you are working by yourself). When you have the meeting, review what’s happened and archive as you do.Some of the tasks in your DONE column will spark introspection, some won’t. (Hopefully you don’t have to ponder all your work).As you discuss the tasks, you can move them into your ARCHIVE where you store completed tasks. Or, if you are so inclined, you can throw them away.In the video, the ARCHIVE is part of the software. With a physical board you can have your archive be a file folder or a shoebox.
Complexity Calming: Why Limit WIP Series, Post 4
In a wonderful meta moment today, I (Jim) was prepping for this post and listening to a talk on Library Futures by Jabe Bloom, the CTO of the Library Corporation. A large part of his talk dealt with complexity in modern life.
None of us can know everything; each of us knows something; and we can put the pieces together if we pool our resources and combine our skills. ~ Henry Jenkins via Jabe Bloom
This was one of Jabe’s slides.It reminds me of a discussion I had while I was living in DC with a recently retired CIA friend. We were discussing how intelligence was gathered in the past, and how current reality was more complex. Before we had a few, easily defined enemies who behaved according to fairly predictable patterns.
Mean Jabe
The Bad News
Today, we are working against a more amorphous “enemy.” By definition, the amorphous enemy is less defined. Because it is less defined we know less about it. Because we know less about it, it is more scary. Because it is more scary, it is more stressful.In short, our enemies have become more complex, unknown, and scary.This means two very important things.1. We can’t have one standard response to threats2. We are going to imagine a lot more danger than is actually thereIn our own work, we feel these threats all the time. Too many tasks, too many data streams, too much stuff coming from too many directions. We don’t have time to think, let alone collaborate.
Happy Jabe
The Good News
The good news is that we can use Jabe’s quote from Jenkins to deal with this complexity more effectively. And we approach Jenkin’s counsel through Limiting WIP.In our personal lives, we have the same problem as the CIA. The CIA has too many avenues of input. Too many distractions. And, oddly enough, too many experts. The only way they can solve their problems is through collaboration. The only way they can truly collaborate is to understand their own work and have the capacity for collaboration.The CIA used to have a linear problem. One, two, three other countries that were potential threats. Now they have an exponential problem. Potential threats that can form, execute, and disband before anyone knows who they are or why they did it.The CIA cannot solve their exponential problems with the linear problem solving solutions of the past. They cannot rely on solitary agents or even small groups. The organization as a whole needs to collaborate to remain effective.When I was growing up, I could choose between 4 TV channels, the telephone and maybe a movie at the theater for incoming streaming media. Outside that, I could read a book, magazine, or newspaper. Or maybe I could listen to music on my stereo or Walkman.At that time, we thought that was a pretty lengthy list. But it was a linear list. I could filter them out simply by walking away from them.The other day during a lunch with a friend, my Android Phone buzzed non-stop with tweets, text messages, Facebook updates, Foursquare updates, phone calls, and emails. Finally, I shut it off. I had to apply “aggressive filtering” to my lunch. But that was not enough.The number of distractions we have grows as the number of avenues for distractions grow. Not only that, but - like the CIA fearing more danger than is really there - even when the phone wasn’t vibrating, I was waiting for it to vibrate. Even when I shut the phone off, I could feel it was off and was vaguely worrying I was missing out on something. However, I was able to focus much more intently on my conversation.When we limit our WIP, we are filtering our work. We are filtering distraction, filtering data sources, filtering complexity. But that is only a temporary solution. Just like if the CIA only focused on one hot-spot, they could focus, but they would be ignoring everything else. But their collaboration would mean nothing if there weren’t sub-groups actively focusing on specific tasks.In this case, we want to limit our WIP so that we can focus in the service of becoming very aware of what we are doing, what we are not doing, and why. This lets us know, very well, what we know so we can begin to pool our resources and combine our skills. In our increasingly complex world, our role as individuals is changing. There’s too many things going on at once for any of us to take in, process, and act on.When we limit our WIP, we are recognizing that we can either pay attention to some things with great effectiveness, or we can pay attention to many things with little effectiveness. If we choose the first path, we are creators, if we choose the second path, we are consumers.Lastly, when we limit WIP and calm our own complexity, we are better able to find others to collaborate with, to add our unique value, and to create stronger teams. As we collaborate, we learn more about other disciplines and find ways to incorporate that learning our future work.