Rules, Motivation, & Systems Thinking: Lean Muppets Post 10

It’s a horse! It’s a cow! It’s a cotton ball!

Okay, we’ve reached the 10th episode of Lean Muppets, and the last one, I’m sorry to say. Over the last six weeks, I’ve had great conversations that started with, “You know where Fozzie ….” and ended with deep thoughts about lean. I’m taking that as a sign of success.So in this final installment we find Kermit as a middle manager. He has empowered his staff to provide value by employing an elegant system.His system is “get employee to guess what is in a box and reward them by getting what is in the box.”The payoff of receiving the thing in the box is a fiscal payoff. We call this an extrinsic reward – or a reward that has an external value to the recipient. For example, if I pay you a salary, that is an extrinsic reward. You will value it, perhaps even need it, but it’s value is a market value. If I pay you $90,000 a year to work at an awesome job, you might consider it. If I paid you, $500 a year, you would likely slap me – regardless of how awesome the job is.This is opposed to an intrinsic motivator. This type of motivation appeals to what is inside of us – what we love. I don’t have to pay you to go see a movie with me. Nor should I have to pay you to read a book. You do these things because you like movies or you want to learn. These intrinsic motivators can outweigh or exacerbate discrepancies in external motivators. So, if you could make $110,000 a year in a crappy job or $90,000 in an awesome one … the better lifestyle and less stress might make $90,000 more attractive.In this video, Kermit has set up a system with an extrinsic reward and no intrinsic rewards at all. Kermit feels that the reward of what is in the box is enough to buy his employees’ time. Unfortunately for him, his employee quickly surmises that the contents of the box doesn’t match with the currency he trades in. Cookie Monster solely deals in cookies.The moment Cookie Monster states that he doesn’t want to participate, Kermit exercises positional power and lays down some rules.Rule 1: You Must Guess What is in the BoxAt first Cookie Monster negotiates. The rule now places them in an adversarial role. Kermit is laying down the law, Cookie Monster responds with “Reactance.”  Cookie Monster says, “I don’t like being told what to do, you’re going to have to sweeten the pot. Given that I only trade in Cookies, I demand you give me a Cookie.”Getting the system to work is very important to Kermit, so he gives in and says if Cookie Monster guesses what’s in the box, he will give him a cookie.Rule 2: You Must Guess Using CluesCookie Monster still doesn’t care one lick about Kermit’s system, he just wants a Cookie. So he starts guessing what is in the box. “A horse! A cow! A pogo stick! A Cotton Ball!”But that’s not good enough for President K. the Frog, he now tells Cookie Monster that he needs to logically guess with clues.Kermit gives him two clues that sound like a Cookie – You can eat it and it is round. So Cookie Monster draws on his vast expertise in cookie systems and comes to the logical conclusion that it is a cookie. That’s Cookie Monster’s world view – that’s where he’s coming from. You can’t make cookie monster eat raw fruit.Rule 3: You Can’t Be Told What It IsFinally Kermit gives up and tells him that it is an orange. He breaks his own system. When he does that, the unwilling participants in the system hold him to his own rules.Because Cookie Monster never really understood why the system was there, or what it was doing, he also couldn’t tell when it broke down. Cookie Monster lacked systemic clarity.Kermit was so caught up in the result he wanted from his system, he never taught anyone why the system was there in the first place.

What This Means For Lean

When people don’t understand a system and are forced to participate in it, they spend a lot of time trying to learn and negotiate the rules. They first must learn “how” to negotiate their system.  If the system is complex enough, or if there is no motivation, they may never get around to learning '”why” they are doing those things. If people don’t understand the why, they have no way of knowing if the how is really working. Continuous improvement is likely impossible. Systems will begin to break down. When the systems do break down, rather than fixing them, the Cookie Monsters of the world will complain, lament, and game the breaking system for their personal benefit.And why do they do that? Why do perfectly nice Cookie Monsters game dying systems like this?  --> Because the system never respected them either.Build systems that respect those who will be impacted by the system. This is tenth and final (oh no!) in a series of Lean Muppet Posts. For a list of Lean Muppet posts and an explanation of why we did this, look here -> Lean Muppets Introduction

5s in Personal Kanban

Introduction

Personal Kanban is a great tool to visualize your work, to limit your WIP and to take better control of your life, either alone or together with your significant other, your kids or even your team at the office. In contrast to industrial Kanban, in Personal Kanban, the items contained in the value stream are often less defined and more often than not even the outcome is not clear. A "go shopping for dinner" task might be clear enough but you could as well end up checking the shelves in the supermarket and decide you prefer to get a Chinese takeaway instead.Nevertheless, if you have a Personal Kanban in place, customized to your own wishes and needs, suited for the way you like to work, things might or might not improve. After all, Kanban is only a tool, a method, and you still have to find the motivation inside you to make proper use of it. If you are so inclined, a simple Japanese philosophy might help you with this task.

5S

Like Lean and Kanban, 5S comes from Japan and is regarded as one of the fundaments for what literature named "Just-In-Time" production. It basically is a set of steps that streamline the way people work, eliminate waste and inefficiencies and help in reducing variation in the process. Of course, your daily schedule is not such a process but the basic idea of these five steps is still helpful. If you pay attention to them, your Personal Kanban will prove fruitful for you and you will reap the benefits. If you are reading this, chances are high that you already are, without knowing it.

Step 1 - Seiri

Seiri means as much as cleaning, throwing your junk away, and in a certain way, this is what you need to do when implementing your Personal Kanban. If you have used (or still use) different ways of keeping track of your tasks, get rid of them. No scribbles next to your keyboard, no sticky notes next to your phone, no random reminders in your mobile phone. Do a spring clean, if it's a task, put it in your Personal Kanban (the backlog, if it's for later on), if it's useless information, dump it. Make sure that there is only one place for you that contains all the information you need.

Step 2 - Seiton

Seiton means to bring things in order so you can use your Personal Kanban efficiently. It doesn't matter if you are using a big whiteboard, a table or your office door but whatever you use, you should have everything you need accessible. Stock up on post-it notes in different colours, have pens at hand, maybe even a filer so you can store your finished tasks for later. Whatever it is, you should not have to search for it when you want to work with your Personal Kanban, and the tools should neither be far away nor in an uncomfortable position. A corner in your room for example is a bad idea, as I guarantee that you'll lose your motivation if you constantly have to bend down to get a new post-it note.

Step 3 - Seiso

Seiso means to clean things or to shine them. This does not only mean that you should regularly take a cloth and scrub your whiteboard, if you have one, as noone likes dirt and dust. The bigger part of this means that you should keep your Personal Kanban tidy and in good shape. At the end of your workday, take a look at it, and ask yourself whether it is still a representation of your work. If tasks have become obsolete, then mark them as done. If you like to make notes to your tasks for later retrospectives, then now it's the time to do so. Rearrange what's left, reorder, make it look good. These minutes are not a lot of effort but if you start the next morning with a clean and up-to-date Kanban, you will feel better than if you had to start your day with cleaning things up first.

Step 4 - Seiketsu

Seiketsu is the task of standardizing things. Define for yourself a method for your Personal Kanban, and stick to it. If you use different colours or shapes for different kinds of things then be consistent with it. If you usually categorize doing your dishes as house chore, don't suddenly use a different category just because you couldn't find a post-it of the correct colour at hand. If you like to add deadlines to task items, make sure that each task with a deadline is marked accordingly. You want to be able to rely on the information your Personal Kanban gives you to make your decisions.

Step 5 - Shitsuke

Shitsuke means to sustain things and to be disciplined. Pay attention to the four steps above regularly. Use your Personal Kanban. Keep things clean and tidy, stick with the system you defined for yourself, restock on tools and whatever you need. And, above all: commit to what you are trying to achieve. Without discipline, your method will deteriorate over time and you'll gradually fall back into your way you worked before you introduced Personal Kanban. With discipline you will not only maintain but also over time improve your flow (through Kaizen), and you will have more often successful days when you see what you've done.

Conclusion

Most likely, all of the five steps mentioned above will sound obvious to you. For me, personally, they have formed a ritual and a mindset that help me maintain order and stability in my Personal Kanban, which leads to clarity and allow me to make the right decisions.

Customers, Respect & Value: Lean Muppets Post 9

Respect is a fundamental value in Lean

Profit in business comes from repeat customers;customers that boast about your product and service,and that bring friends with them.~ W. Edwards Deming

Everyone has been in this position before.  You’re doing business with someone – your only goal is to give them money for their services – and they make the simplest request onerous. In this case, the customer has ordered a bowl of soup and it is, apparently, defective.  We can feel his dread of calling support when he notices the fly. He knows frustration is just around the corner.

But, he’s not getting value for money and he calls Grover over. Grover goes through several emotional phases before confronting the problem.

Avoidance – Grover puts him off. “Just a moment sir,” and “Not now sir.”Misdiagnosis – The customer tells Grover there is a fly in his soup. He’s been around soup enough and knows full well the scope and extent of the problem. Grover however, then goes through a set checklist of problem solving provided to him on his first day in customer support. First, the checklist tells him to look under the soup. The customer tells him it’s not under, but rather it is in the soup. Grover returns to his checklist and looks next to the soup. Again, the customer clearly tells him the fly is in the soup.Disbelief and Blame – “I will look in  the soup now, for this supposed fly.” Grover first insinuates that the customer is wrong, and then looks “on” the soup.At this point the customer loses his cookies and lays into Grover, to the point that the two almost come to blows.Admission – In the heat of this exchange, Grover asks, “Why did you order fly soup!?” It turns out that the system (his restaurant) specially serves bowls of fly soup. What was a feature for the restaurant is a defect in the eyes of the customer.Complete Communication Breakdown – To placate the customer, Grover then goes to get another bowl of soup. He returns and offers, “I think you will be very happy with this.” When the customer asks what it is, he replies “Cream of Mosquito.”While we could certainly  talk about failure demand, like we did in back in post two when Ernie painted Bert’s portrait, here we’ll talk about respect.Customers who have a choice will not continue to deal with companies that do not respect them. If you are in a business where you are lucky enough to enjoy a monopoly or near-monopoly you can treat your customers poorly or even regularly insult them. But if they have a choice, you may want to think twice.In general, people do not feel respected if they feel “processed.” So checklists, forms, and formalities do not set a stage for repeat customers.But let’s take Deming’s quote one level further. In business, you get profit from repeat customers. But our customers are not always people buying services from us. If our spouse asks us to take out the garbage, they become our “customer” for that task. (If you don’t believe me, dump the garbage on the floor and tell me if your spouse doesn’t act like Grover’s customer).Each day we engage in myriad transactions. Some of them are economic, but most are social. Consistently disrespecting people will eventually erode our social capital and leave us with no friends and distrusted by all. If we respect others, then we will have friends that boast about our product (ourselves) and bring more friends with them.

~

This is ninth in a series of Lean Muppet Posts. For a list of Lean Muppet posts and an explanation of why we did this, look here -> Lean Muppets Introduction

Practice, Practice, Practice: Lean Muppets Series Post 8

Practice Makes Perfect for Fozzie, Maybe Too Perfect

If you will recall in the Introduction, I said that the shared vision for Lean, Muppets, and Modus was:

• If we care, we create.

• If we create, we improve.

• If we improve, we live.

But there is something underpinning all of these, and that is practice. When we practice, a few key elements lead to the evolution of our mastery:

1. We learn more about how to do it.

2. We learn more about if we like to do it.

3. We learn more about what “right” looks like.

4. We become more comfortable.

A state of continuous improvement does not come easily to people or teams. While it is not quite an unnatural state, it is nevertheless, one most of us are not accustomed to.Like Fozzie here, we are going to have some misses, some near misses, and some very strange successes.And pain.Lore has it that it took the Beatles' 18 takes to get “Helter Skelter” right, at the end of which Ringo Starr cried out, “I’ve got blisters on my fingers.” Practice sometimes can even be scarring.But practice leads to (while never quite reaching) perfection.

To think is to practice brain chemistry. ~ Deepak Chopra

Eventually, Fozzie will learn the right pressure to apply to his hat rim to receive only one rabbit.  The blisters on Ringo’s fingers eventually healed.But in order to improve, they both need to practice. In practicing, our brains actually reorganize internally – adjusting to new patterns, looking for others, and becoming more of an “expert” at what we are practicing. So, imagine if in continuous improvement we constantly practiced improving. Our brains would actually optimize for improvement – which would involve all the awareness, learning, and compassion required to do so.

Practice and MetaPractice

We have two types of practice here:

• Normal Old Practice: the repetition of something either in preparation  or actual production that results in learning about the action, and

• MetaPractice: the practice of practicing in which we internalize the need to rehearse, repeat, and relearn what we do.

I consider my friend John Von to be a pretty stunning musician. He’s played all around the globe in front of packed crowds in mega stadiums. He played the bass for years, then stopped for a few years to do digital music work. Sometime around 2006, he decided to return to the bass and so he spent weeks practicing for 8 hours a day. I was confused. For me, it seems like John naturally has a bass guitar attached to him. It’s been that way since we were in grade school.But John has always understood both practice and metapractice. In order for him to improve he not only needs to practice what he’s doing, but also practice practicing. He needs to incorporate practice into his daily life. John understood the drive for continuous improvement long before I did.

If my doctor told me I had only six minutes to live, I wouldn't brood. I'd type a little faster.  ~ Isaac Asimov

Over the course of 72 years, Isaac Asimov wrote or edited over 500 books. If we were to deduct 22 years for growing up, that’d equate to 10 books per year, or nearly a book a month for life. Asimov practiced writing daily. He wrote limericks, postcards, jokes. He would write and write and write. He wasn’t just interested in the practice of writing science fiction, but also in practicing practice.Asimov’s writing could only improve if he practiced other types of writing. So his 500 books actually span every major category in the Dewey Decimal System. In order to write about those things, he had to learn about those things. In order to learn about those things, he had to be committed to practicing learning - and then practicing whatever he was learning about – even if only through exercises.Fozzie’s downfall has always been his impetuousness; he acts well before he has practiced. The Muppet Band, however, seems to always be the surprise antithesis to Fozzie. Floyd is well practiced at practice. He is therefore cool, collected, and seemingly ready for anything. He is practiced and therefore comfortable, even around the craziness of the Muppet Show.

Fozzie’s Alter Ego

This is the eighth in a series of Lean Muppet Posts: For a list of Lean Muppet posts and an explanation of why we did this... look here -> Lean Muppets Introduction

Flow, Cadence, Slack, and Stress: Lean Muppets Post 7

Scooter Reduces Cycle Time to Rowlf’s Breaking Point

Here we find Rowlf singing Coleman and Fields’ “It’s Not Where You Start, It’s Where You Finish.” He sings at a comfortable rate and all is well. Scooter then tells him he needs to do it again, but this time a little faster. So Rowlf turns on the juice, hits more of a ragtime vibe, and blasts through the song, completing with a bit of stress, but still can add a flourish or two on the piano. Scooter then pokes his head in and tells him to do it again in 20 seconds. Rowlf then shifts into high gear, his ears flapping, his head bouncing, and words coming out fast enough to rival hardcore 80s punk. At the end of the third, he's done his work in such a short amount of time, he must close the piano all together and simply concentrate on breathing.In our work, we have lean concepts of flow, cadence, and slack. In our book, Personal Kanban, we describe them like this:

• Flow: The natural progress of work

• Cadence: The predictable and regular elements of work

• Slack: The gaps between work that make flow possible and define cadence

Flow is a little deeper than this, because the concept of “flow” differs slightly for psychologists or lean practitioners. Both concepts, however, are important for knowledge workers and managers.For psychologists, “flow” is a state of mind where we feel in the zone. This is where everything is moving at the right pace, we have clarity and comfort with our actions, and we have a sense of peace with the process under which we are working.In lean, “flow” is more the rate at which work progresses. You have a value stream and work flows along it. Flow is hindered by bottlenecks, constraints, policies, or other ne’er-do-wells.Cadence helps us set flow. It’s like the beat. It’s the rhythm of our work. The right cadence can move tasks from start to completion at just the right rate to maximize completion and quality.Slack is sort of the space between beats. You can’t have a drum solo without silence.All three of these work together to create a natural system of work not unlike music. So we see it in Rowlf.The first round of the song he is fine, even the request for a faster variation is welcome. He can complete his task and is ready for more.The second round of the song, he makes little jokes like, “how’m I doing?!” He’s going faster than he’s comfortable with, his pace is not sustainable, but he can still complete the work. (This unsustainable fast pace is where many companies try to keep their knowledge workers).The third round is where some misguided managers like to live every day. Rowlf is asked to do the song at the very limits of his capability: in 30 seconds. Scooter, the project manager, isn’t even listening to the song, he’s just counting the seconds to on-time completion. Rowlf does bring the project in on-time but, again, he completely collapses after it is done.Between the first and third rounds, Rowlf endures a great deal of stress. When flow, cadence, and slack are in agreement, product delivery is flawless and nearly effortless. The more they are not in agreement, the more effort is needed and the more stressful the work is.At his initial pace, Rowlf could probably play all day, every day. At the second pace, maybe he could play for an hour. At the third however, he'd barely make it through one playing.And as we can see below, even adrenaline junkies like Animal are not immune.

Maybe Buddy Rich is Immune

This is the seventh in a series of Lean Muppet Posts: For a list of Lean Muppet posts and an explanation of why we did this... look here -> Lean Muppets Introduction