Awareness: Why Limit WIP VIII

Whether you call it Buddhism or another religion, self-discipline,that's important. Self-discipline with awareness of consequences. ~ Dalai Lama

below the water line

Self-discipline with the awareness of consequences.When we become self-aware, we shed learned helplessness. The inability to act is replaced by the polar opposite – a desire to act.We have seen the repeated with teams that previously had given up. A corporate culture of failure acceptance is created and is so pervasive that people say, “continuous improvement is impossible in my culture.”What we’ve seen, however, is quite different. People that have been in a low-trust, punitive environment where action is shunned do develop learned helpless and they do shut down, BUT … they create pent-up demand for change. They may have learned that they can’t help now, but they’re STILL THERE.So Eldred is still there, even though he was beaten down by years of five projects. Eldred is still there.For years, Eldred has had to keep only the self-discipline of not going insane being pulled in so many directions. The structure of the company limited his ability to have the self-discipline of good product development and completion. Eldred never had to be aware of consequences. Other than internal political ones, he was sheltered.Now, Eldred is a little scared. He recognizes that now Team B is on the hook for completing a product. A real product. To be really released to real buyers. And, not only that, he recognizes that Markus Blume isn’t going to tell him, or his project manager, what to do.Eldred is also aware that no one got laid off. There was so much work not being done that the staffing still seems insufficient even for just these two projects. How is that possible?Eldred is becoming aware.Eldred sees that he could suggest working groups to get out features faster. It might work. He’s always wanted to try it, but never could because even he couldn’t commit to it. It’s an experiment, but … it just might work.

Don’t Be the Costa Concord

When teams become aware, they tend to want to make decisions.Risk-averse people (management and workers alike) tend to fear this shift because it means that decisions are made by people not in authority. The issue here is that we’ve had this pendulum so well stuck at the other end of the spectrum that no one can make decisions at all.  Small, daily course corrections for projects and the company should not require edicts from the highest of authorities.The rule of thumb that we’ve used is something called the water line.If you are about to make a decision, ask yourself, is this fails does it poke a hole in our corporate ship above or below the water line?If it’s above – we just say, “ooops,” we patch it and we move on.If it’s below – we should have a conversation or set of conversations with those in command of the ship so they can either say, “Um, let’s not do that” or “Okay, let’s do it and we’ll prepare if something goes wrong.”And yes, that’s vague.In general, there are going to be three water-line zones.Obviously safe, obviously dangerous, and that annoying transition band in-between.As the work force is transitioning to becoming more fully aware of their actions and their potential consequences, you might have a transgression or two. However, we’ve never seen a ship sunk because of awareness.What is more likely is that ships no awareness end up like the Exxon Valdez.

Eldred’s Unexpected Bonus

Limiting WIP for Eldred and Team B has led to a keener understanding of their product. They have been able to focus, as they are each only working on a very few tasks at a time. Extremely limited context switching has raised the productivity of the group. Increased project coherence has made them much more effective (they know what they are building and why).Greater awareness is creating an efficient operation. They can see inefficiencies, they have more time to talk to customers, and they have a shared understanding for the product itself. This is post 8 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP.  Read post 9 Communication: Why Limit Your WIP IX in the Why Limit Your WIP series.  Also, see the index for a list of all of them.

Focus: Why Limit Your WIP VII

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. ~ Mark Twain

DerekKanban

Eldred comes into work on Monday. He is instantly besieged by requests for work, information, meetings, and product from all five of his teams. His co-workers, his bosses, his clients all need things from him now.Eldred cannot judge the relative importance of these requests. It’s possible, in fact, that they are all equally valuable. Therefore, there is no clear direction for him to take.Eldred calls his five bosses together and cries out, “Just tell me what to do!”

Eldred’s Got No Focus

Knowledge work happens within our brains. It is a product of the mind. Without imagination, without insight, without inspiration, it is simply work.Value creation includes the work creation for a reason. It’s not value reproduction. Or value copying. Knowledge workers create. They invent. The innovate.When we lose our ability to focus, we greatly impair our ability to do these things. We become reactive. We begin to ask bosses things like: “tell us what to do.”What’s worse, we believe that’s what we want.As a boss, if your employees or team members are asking that question – you know they have no focus.

Learned Helplessness

When people specifically ask someone else to tell them what to do, one thing is quite clear:

THEY DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO.

As the person who is directing knowledge workers, I have bad news for you.This is your fault, and you need to fix it.Eldred’s bosses all start to argue. They all have the highest need for Eldred right now. Things are behind and they, personally, cannot abide any more delays.Not only does this create an unnecessary meeting of people to argue about Eldred’s time – it also is a playhouse of something psychologists call “Learned Helplessness.”Learned helplessness comes from situations where we feel we are utterly powerless to act.An example of this for me comes from the 7th grade. We had an algebra teacher who was a tyrant. After I had the flu, I sat for an exam that I utterly bombed. When I went to him for help, he told me I should study harder. When I said that I had been sick, he told me that wasn’t his problem. I had nowhere to turn and my shame made me not approach my peers. Whenever I talked to the teacher, he let me know this was my problem. My lack of understanding of things at the beginning of the class led to me falling farther and farther behind, ultimately I failed the class – believing it was all due to my inability to learn algebra.I was convinced this was my substandard brain.My parents were concerned, but also were under the impression that this was just Jimmy “not applying himself.”But then they went over to Fred and Donna’s for dinner. They were eating with a group of parents of my friends. Someone mentioned their kid had failed algebra and they were disappointed. My parents said, “Really, us too!” Soon the whole table was filled with the parents of apparent algebra dunces. Coincidence?Root cause discovered, they went to the school and demanded to have us re-tested at the end of the summer.  The school, who apparently didn’t notice the flood of failing grades before, said, “Sure, whatever.”And the lot of us found ourselves getting algebra tutoring over the summer. … and oddly enjoying it.We all tested at the end of the summer, got our A’s and went on with our lives.But to this day, math upsets me. I still feel that learned helplessness and can’t shake it.

Why Eldred Can’t Read

Learned helplessness is insidious. Eldred and his bosses and his co-workers have been buried under a mountain of work. They can not see the mountain. They would not have the authority to react to the mountain even if they could.Lucy is not going to just sit up and say, “You know, this company has too much work. I’m going to kill my project and give my people to the other projects.” First, it’s her job on the line. Second, why her and not someone else? Third, she likely believes her project (as do the others) is the most important. Fourth, she simply lacks the authority to make that kind of determination. And fifth, she and the other project managers are not paid to sit around second guessing corporate decisions.Eldred is in an even worse situation. He cannot get away from any of his five projects. He knows they are all doomed. He is also quite convinced that nothing he can do will improve the situation – because he is also convinced of the necessity of all five projects and his role in them.Learned helplessness here means that rather than attack the root cause of the company’s problems (too many projects in flight) – the groups work on treating symptoms as if they are problems.We see Eldred and his colleagues exhibiting new traits: they appear anxious, less talkative, or depressed. They begin to say things like, “Just tell me what to do.” Managers often like this and will give them direct orders. The workers will then merely do their task – never ask for the context and never work to make things better.This means that tasks begin to more and more be done without an understanding of the actual end goals. The tasks may be completed in a way that meets the description of the work – but does not actually fit into the final product. This creates more work at the end of a project to make ill-fitting work fit into a final product – causing more delays, rework, and shoddy product.That, in turn, creates more learned helplessness.

Limiting WIP as a Cure for Learned Helplessness

Eldred comes to work on Monday and finds that the company has been bought by a new CEO. His name is Markus Blume. Blume walks into the office and declares, “My word! This company has a lot of goals and no products!” Everyone fidgets.Markus says, “You know what? I think it would be a capital idea if we all shelved about half this stuff for Q1 and just focused on completing some things.”Silence.This guy is clearly mental.Everyone, from the project managers to the rank and file, are aghast. “You can’t postpone projects C, D, and E! They are important!”Eldred gives an impassioned speech for D especially.Markus looks simultaneously disgusted and amused.“Of course they are important. But .. just say for a second we actually finish something. Wouldn’t that be important?”Blank stares greet him. Everyone knows that this company doesn’t actually release things. They’ll just lay people off.But, learned helplessness works in Mr Blume’s favor. Everyone goes and does what they are told.Teams are re-formed. Lots of work is put on the back burner, but the front burners are turned way up.Two new, larger and dedicated, teams are directed at projects A and B. A third team, called the Deming team, is built to look around the company and notice where things can be improved. Years of panic-driven management has resulted in tons of bad process, horrible systems, and neglected tasks. The Deming team is there to remove the bad constraints, create healthy ones, and clean up the mess.Eldred is steaming mad for losing project D, the fact that it is scheduled for later in the year is of little comfort. He knows his project, project B, will be delayed just like always.Tuesday, Eldred shows up and gets to work on Project B. At the end of the day, he is still dealing with the loss of project D. So much so that he hardly notices that he was very productive that day.Wednesday, the B team gathers and talks about strategy. They haven’t even been given a deadline! They feel rudderless. How are they going to finish without a deadline? Surely this will take forever.Maybe they need to invent their own goals, someone suggests.And they do. This is post 7 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP.  Read post 8 Awareness: Why Limit Your WIP VIII in the Why Limit Your WIP series.  Also, see the index for a list of all of them.

Healthy Constraints: Why Limit Your WIP VI

Great floods have flown from simple sources. ~ William Shakespeare

flood before and after

When we employ healthy constraints, we encourage flow. In the economy we create, our goal is create a flow of work that results in a flow of value creation that in turn results in a flow of revenue that enables us to keep up with the flow of work.

Healthy Constraints – Flow

As with a river, the right constraints make healthy flow. We have a garden on the shore, as commercial boats travel up and down the waterway. In this controlled environment, we enjoy predictability and they ability to act.In this case, the healthy constraints on the river give us the first picture. Water is tamed and the couple are enjoying the view.

No Constraints – Flooding

When the river does not adhere to these constraints, we get destructive flooding. Water goes everywhere. There is no predictability. Rather than having a garden, we spend our team reacting to the flood waters, working to avoid destruction rather than create value.In this case, a lack of constraints caused by too much WIP (water in progress?) caused destructive flooding which not only drove the couple inside, but also utterly destroyed the beautiful garden.

Too Many Constraints – Diminished Flow

The other extreme would be a huge dam upstream from the property which would remove all water from the river. This would leave a big muddy mess, no commercial boat traffic, and no view for the couple to enjoy.

Balance and Healthy Constraints

When we limit our work-in-progress, we are seeking to place healthy constraints into our work economy that promotes healthy flow.Too Much: If we limit our WIP too much, we will be single mindedly working on one task at a time and ignoring all else – with large potential social costs. We will dry up our ability to converse. We will over-focus.Not Enough: No WIP limiting creates the flood of work we see every day.Balance: You know, there’s a reason that they call it a “balancing act.” The world spins on its axis as it hurtles through space. Our continents are all inexorably continuing their drifting ways. Tectonic plates cause tremors in the most stable of locations.Change is constant. Disruptions are the norm. Balance, forever and without fail, is impossible.Understanding what it is we are balancing – that’s vital.

What Makes a Healthy Constraint

If you're interested in 'balancing' work and pleasure, stop trying to balance them. Instead make your work more pleasurable. ~ Donald Trump

DerekKanban

Yes, that’s right, even Donald Trump gets it.When we go to balance, we need to understand that creating too many rules (constraints) is self-defeating. Each rule that we add is another brick in the dam of our river. Yes, it can control the flow – but it’s a brick. Once it’s there, you can only remove it with force and the removal will have impacts.So, as the Donald is suggesting, sometimes the creation of a healthy constraint is based on your point of view.  Often limiting work-in-progress does not require us to make new rules, but to simply accept that overloading ourselves is counter-productive.Simply setting a WIP limit on our Personal Kanban or our team kanban, is a visual indicator of our commitment to this minimal constraint.This Personal Kanban shows the minimal constraint of Derek Huether’s WIP limit of 3. In this board, if Derek were to run into a situation where he had to pull a 4th item into his WIP column – he can do that.Derek has taken no blood-oath saying he will never exceed his WIP limit. This is healthy constraint – not a law.This flexibility gives Derek the freedom and autonomy to deal with situations as they arise. The forth work item in WIP will not make him pay a fine or cost him his job – but it will make him very aware that he is violating the constraint and that there will be penalties for completion time and quality of the items currently in-flight.He will also work, as quickly as possible, to get back to his WIP limit of 3.To drive this point home: let’s quickly definite healthy and unhealthy constraints:Healthy Constraint: Does the minimum required to reward a desired behavior while retaining maximum flexibility.Unhealthy Constraint: Codifies and makes mandatory desired behavior and limits flexibility. This is post 6 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP. Read post 7 Focus: Why Limit Your WIP VII in the Why Limit Your WIP series.  Also, see the index for a list of all of them.Personal Kanban image courtesy of Derek HuetherFlood image courtesy of Melissa Will

Creating an Economy: Why Limit Your WIP V

“Stop starting and start finishing.” – David Anderson

You, right now, are disrespecting your ability to create amazing things.You, right now, are doing more than you should, for more people than is optimal, and in an environment that is too distracting.Well, odds are you are doing those things at any rate.Why?Because right now, odds are (overwhelmingly) that you have no idea the full extent of the tasks you’ve taken on, what you’ve actually left incomplete, and what the costs are for taking something else on.Odds are also (overwhelmingly) that you’re a pretty decent person. You want to help people, you want to do a good job, and you are interested in interesting things.With no penalty for saying, “no” – why would you?Why would we ever say no to interesting, helpful incoming work. Especially when it’s just a little more? It’s just five or ten minutes. It’s just a little bit more work. And it’s sooooooooo delicious…..Just like that one little Hershey’s Kiss won’t kill our diet … one more task surely won’t overload us.But we have a scale – that shows us the impact of those chocolates. And we have a diet which regulates the flow of those chocolates. We built a system, with an economy, that shows that there is an exchange rate between chocolate eating and weight gain.Limiting WIP creates that economy for our work. It shows us that there are direct penalties we pay for taking too much on. That our cognitive system degrades faster than our productivity improves. That the more work we take on, the less we complete.

Ignoring an Economy

In the global economic sense, we have seen that it is easy to overheat an economy and have it burn out with terrific penalties. So, too, can we see this in our daily lives. When there is no penalty to over-use a resource, we tend to do exactly that. In this case, it’s our own time.In our personal lives and in knowledge work, we see regularly that we take on too much, we get bogged down, everything becomes an emergency or a missed opportunity. After a while, panic feels like the order of things, which is neither fulfilling personally nor professionally.Whether we are individuals, teams, or companies, we see the opportunities available to us and want to exercise them. Now, if these opportunities all took up physical space, after a while we’d run out of room.Each opportunity would come in a box, we’d store it in our To-Do room, and after a while the room would fill up. “I can’t fit anything else in,” we’d say, “come back later and I’ll get that done for you.”Well, bad news for us. Promises are ephemeral. We can sit and make promises all day long. They take up no space.Like carbon monoxide, promises are odorless, gaseous, and when they mount to dense enough concentrations – they kill us.Like bundling bad B & C loans into tradable packages, we gather up these promises and shuffle them around, each promise initially buying us good favor – until their debt load becomes so great that our economy collapses around us.

Building an Economy

Economies actually work better when they have minimal, but responsible, constraints.When we treated Eldred’s time as a limitless resource, we quickly overutilized him. Logical utilization based on Eldred’s time, simply didn’t work. Eldred’s time is more valuable, it seems, than we thought. Initially, we thought that time was important and Eldred simply plugged into it. Now we see that Eldred’s ability to think requires sensitivity to how he processes information.Therefore, we have some elements to build an economy.We understand that Eldred is an awesome knowledge worker and can produce a great stuff – as long as Eldred and those around him understand his work.Our work economy needs to understand a few things:1. Eldred interacts with his co-workers, his products, his bosses, and his clients. These interactions have rules, needs, and transaction costs.2. Eldred’s work is knowledge work. Some days things go as planned. Some days things require him to put his head down and work out a problem. Some days, he needs to gather his co-workers and really pound on a sticky problem. Often these states change without notice.3. Eldred is constantly needing to take in information, learn new things, process changes in context, and discuss this information with others. This means he needs to be able to focus, to build coherence in his work, and to complete.4. Eldred is human. He gets weary (you know he do get weary). He interacts with other humans in and outside of his team. The interactions, information, and changes in context he is experiencing impacts his and others mood, psychological state, and ability to perform.When our economy understands these things, we can begin to alter our working systems to support these parameters.

Limiting WIP in the New Economy

While there are many other elements to managing this economy, limiting work-in-progress is right at the forefront.In this new economy, work-in-progress is a sacred element. We now understand that limiting Work-in-progress provides time to communicate, creates work coherence, and allows us to finish.Further, we are beginning to understand the hidden costs of hyper-productivity. We are beginning to realize that understanding the nature of the work being done creates a more effective work force.Lastly we are becoming aware that creating high quality products is preferable to creating low quality products.What we are surprised to learn is that doing fewer things at the same time means we complete more things over the course of a year. Managing our working economy means we are able to release more, while doing less. Simply because we are spending more time working and less time context switching, status meeting, and reacting to delay.This is post 5 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP.  Read post 6 Healthy Constraints: Why Limit Your WIP VI in the Why Limit Your WIP series.  Also, see the index for a list of all of them.

Context Switching: Why Limit Your WIP IV

context switching

three columns

Context switching is the Red Menace of modern day knowledge work. In every presentation about context switching we have Gerry Weinberg’s chart of productivity loss – so let’s get that out of the way at the beginning. So, if we think about Eldred’s five projects, we can see that Weinberg believes he’s doomed before he starts.

Eldred is doomed, of course, and context switching is yet another reason why. This chart is showing us why limiting our Work-in-progress at any point-in-time is vital. When we context switch, we lose time and fidelity.

We may think we seemlessly move from one project to another, but we do not. Here’s a quick exercise to show you the cognitive penalties for you, personally, to context. You will need a pen, a pad of paper, and a timer.

Now on this pad create three columns like this:Now get your timer ready.In each column, we’re going to write a letter, a number, and a then a roman numeral – in that order.

So our first entry will look like this:

The Second entry would look like this:

We want to do this to the letter “J”.Again, we want to do A, 1, I, B, 2, II, C, 3, III….Start your timer, do A through J, and then mark down your time.Done? Good.Now, do that again, but do the letters, numbers, and romans in sequence. So this time do A, B, C and on to J, then the numbers in order, then the roman numerals.Set your timer, do this, and then mark down your time.

The Penalties of Context Switching

There are many games like that to show the penalties of context switching. Some make fun party games, because it so quickly becomes so apparent that we are notoriously bad at doing it even in the simplest of situations.In this exercise, I would be willing to bet your productivity was about 400% higher in the focused situation than in the context switching one.

With an exercise that is this simple, where we only have three extremely familiar variables to deal with, the penalties for context switching in a more complex environment are obvious. We are now building not just a reason, but a system, for Eldred’s failure.

We are beginning to see that Eldred’s situation is actually violating some basic elements of human and social design. Every time he has to switch contexts, he is running up against cognitive blocks that decrease his ability to product quality work. In turn, his company is hemorrhaging money trying to keep it’s people over-stimulated, over-worked, and under-focused.

Eldred’s company, in a quest for 100% utilization, is breaking the very equipment (Eldred) they are trying to optimize.This is post 4 in a 10 part series on Why Limit Your WIP. Read post 5 Creating an Economy: Why Limit Your WIP V in the Why Limit Your WIP series.  Also, see the index for a list of all of them.