Monthly Archives: September 2019

Book Notes: Essential Kanban Condensed

Essential Kanban Condensed by David J. Anderson & Andy Carmichael
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

This is a really brief but neat book, although it goes into the Kanban board/cards etc the piece which I felt was a very nice and useful summary was its values, principles etc.

Kanban values

  • Transparency – The belief that sharing information improves the generation of business value.
  • Balance – The understanding that different aspects, viewpoints, and capabilities all must be balanced for effectiveness.
  • Collaboration – The focus on the way people work together.
  • Customer Focus – Knowing the value which the system brings to its users.
  • Flow – The realisation that work is a flow of work leading to value generation, whether continuous or episodic. Improving the flow improves generation of value.
  • Leadership – In Kanban leadership is needed at all levels to achieve value delivery and improvement.
  • Understanding – Kanban is an improvement method, and knowing the starting point is foundation.
  • Agreement – The commitment to move together toward goals, respecting differences of opinion or approach. It is key to note that this is not management by consensus, but a dynamic co-commitment to improvement.
  • Respect – Valuing, understanding, and showing consideration for people.

Agendas

  • The Sustainability Agenda looks inward to the organisation. Its goal is to balance demand with capability thus improving the performance. Where demand outstrips capability making work visible and limiting WiP will have a positive impact on the amount of work completed, the time needed to complete work items, and staff morale.
  • The Service Orientation Agenda focuses attention external to the organisation on performance and customer satisfaction that meet and exceed customers’ needs and expectations.
  • The Survivability Agenda looks into the future and is concerned with staying competitive and adaptive.

Change Management Principles

  • Start with what you are doing now
  • Agree to purse improvement through evolutionary change
  • Encourage acts of leadership at all levels

Service Delivery Principles

  • Understand and focus on customer needs and expectations
  • Manage the work let people self organise around it
  • Evolve policies to improve outcomes

General Practices of Kanban

  • Visualise.
  • Limit work in progress.
  • Manage flow.
  • Make policies explicit.
  • Implement feedback loops.
  • Improve collaboratively, evolve experimentally

Book Notes: Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!

Don’t Just Do Something, Stand There!: Ten Principles for Leading Meetings That Matter by Marvin Ross Weisbord, Sandra Janoff & Jack MacNeish
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

We spend a lot of time in meetings so making them more effective will likely greatly improve the performance of bussiness, however people are rarely taught how to run meetings well.

  1. Get the whole system in the room
    • Who should be in the meeting
      • The decision makers
      • Data – contracts, time or money
      • Expertise in the issue or field
      • Information about the topic (where the expertise is missing)
      • Affected parties who can speak of the consequences
    • Match the timeframe to the agenda
    • Give people time to express themselves
    • Differentiate then integrate
      • Differentiate into functionally similar groups to clarify their stakes
      • Integrate with the whole group or mixed groups
    • Where it is not possible to get the whole system ensure you have at least three levels and three functions. Providing access to other functions and levels speeds up the whole system.
  2. Control What You Can, Let Go What You Can’t
    • Know your role – Do you have content? Are you managing the meeting?
      • No No – You are only observing and commenting
      • Yes No – You are likely an expert who is providing advice
      • No Yes – You are facilitating the meeting
      • Yes Yes – You assume great deal of responsibility for process, content and results.
    • Clarify the purpose yourself
    • Monitor the meeting
      • Seek fight or flight
      • Check for someone being excluded
      • Arrange seating for the style
      • Establish time management norms in breaks
  3. Explore the “Whole Elephant”
    • A “go around” – get input from everyone who wants to contribute
    • Use timelines – get all the history from the many peoples views
    • Make a mind map – get all the points out so people have a common view
    • Group flowchart – get all the flows e.g. processes on the table so their is common understanding of the environment
  4. Let People Be Responsible
    • Accept everyone is doing their best
    • If people have hidden agendas that is their choice
    • Do less so others will do more
    • Encourage self management
    • Contain your “hot buttons”
    • Encourage dialogue
    • Legitimise opposition in tense meetings
  5. Find Common Ground
    • Hold off problem solving
    • Get conflicts into the open and leave them there
    • Focus on the future
    • Back cast from the future
    • Stay with anxiety and ambiguity
    • Depersonalise conflict
  6. Master the Art of Subgrouping
    • Ask “anyone else … ?”
    • Differentiate then integrate
    • Listen for integrating statements
  7. Make Friends with Anxiety
    • The four rooms of change
      • Contentment
      • Denial
      • Confusion
      • Renewal
  8. Get Used to Projections
    • View things in perception not in objects by making yourself the subject. such as It this and that become I or me. e.g. “I’m bored” is “I bore me”.
  9. Be a Dependable Authority
    • Everyone reacts to authority – could be good or bad
    • Recognise dependency – going along with everything
    • Recognise counterdependency – not happy with everything
  10. Learn to Say No If You Want Yes to Mean Something
    • Be dependable only commit to things which will be done and no to the rest

Book Notes: Nine Lies About Work

Nine Lies About Work: A Freethinking Leader’s Guide to the Real World by Marcus Buckingham, Ashley Goodall
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Lie #1 People care which company they work for

Truth #1 People care which team they’re on

Statistically there is a bigger range of differences between teams which are at the same companies than the average between companies. As such the team you are in and how you feel there is key to your feeling about the company you work for. ADP present eight questions (similar to the ones below) which identify how an employee feels about the team they are in.

  1. I am very enthusiastic about the mission of my company.
  2. At work, I clearly understand what is expected of me.
  3. In my team, I am surrounded by people who share my values.
  4. I have the chance to use my strengths every day at work.
  5. My teammates have my back.
  6. I know I will be recognized when I do excellent work.
  7. I have great confidence in my company’s future.
  8. In my work, I am always challenged to grow further.

Lie #2 The best plan wins

Truth #2 The best intelligence wins

Planning gives a false sense of security – there is no way that the plan can cover all eventualities and fully reduce risk. The solution is to boost intelligence within the teams by

  • Liberating as much information as you possibly can, as fast as possible
  • Watch carefully to see which data your people find useful and improve it
  • Trust your people to make sense of the data

You should catch up with all of your employees once per week to understand their priorities and how you can help. This should limit the number of people you have working for you – the number you can catch up with weekly.

Lie #3 The best companies cascade goals

Truth #3 The best companies cascade meaning

An example is a sales person – giving them a quota does not mean they will sell any more, instead if they reach their quota they will slow or stop selling so they have more orders for next year. For those who can’t get to their quota they face pressure and fear which can turn to inappropriate and sometimes illegal tactics to meet their goals.

Another challenge is that progress towards a goal is not linear – the example used is you can’t be 68% complete on a marathon as you still might not actually finish in which case you achieved 0 marathons.

Finally it’s impossible to compare people not doing the same task as there is no way to calibrate against each of them or understand their own local markets

Instead cascading meaning is more successful through the expression of values, rituals and stories.

Lie #4 The best people are well-rounded

Truth #4 The best people are spiky

Competencies are impossible to measure, and as such it is impossible to prove or disprove that people who excel in a role have particular skills or competencies. These well rounded people are fictitious – in the real world high performers are unique, distinct and outperform exactly because of their differences.

If you think of a range of top singers – they are a range of diversity and that is why some of them can perform some songs better than others. No footballer is equally good with both feet.

Lie #5 People need feedback

Truth #5 People need attention

Giving negative feedback is 40 times more effective than ignoring people, however positive feedback is 120 times more effective than ignoring people – it helps people be more engaged and more productive.

Negative feedback triggers the flight or flight behaviour, as such negative feedback inhibits learning.

Lie #6 People can reliably rate other people

Truth #6 People can reliably rate their own experience

When rating people the ratings people give are more related to the rater than the recipient (Idiosyncratic Rater Effect). The more complex the rating system the more we revert to our own natural rating pattern. Given that the rating system is more about the rater than the recipient it makes it very concerning that we then use this performance measure to significantly impact the recipient in terms of pay, opportunities etc.

Secondly the rating rate tends to come from a small number of people and they are not all well-informed sufficiently to be able to provide valid data so we have data insufficiency.

  • Human beings can never be trained to reliably rate other human beings
  • Rating data derived in this way is contaminated because it reveals far more about the rater than it does of the person being rated
  • The contaminated data can not be removed by adding more contaminated data

Although we are not reliable to rate other people, people can reliably rate their experience. As such questions like “Do you turn to this team member when you want extraordinary results? this is a question where you look inside yourself – you can’t be right or wrong as this is a feeling the data is humbler and at the same time more reliable (does not fluctuate randomly, does not mean accurate).

Lie #7 People have potential

Truth #7 People have momentum

Potential is a very binary differentiator – in reality individuals are unique and they have a momentum in their own unique direction at their own speed. If we start speaking to people to understand them better then we can also both work with them better, give them more appropriate opportunities, they will enjoy themselves more and ultimately give more.

Lie #8 Work-life balance matters most

Truth #8 Love-in-work matters most

We seem to split work and life from each other – meaning we need to balance them. Research has shown that if you spend more than 20% of your time on activities you love then you feel stronger, perform better and bounce back faster.

Lie #9 Leadership is a thing

Truth #9 We follow spikes

Leading id defined by whether anyone else is following – it is a question of human relationships, namely why would anyone choose to devote his or her energies to and take risk on behalf of someone else. Missing this misses the entire point of leadership.

We follow people who we believe in, it is a feeling we have and no two people can cause us to have the same feeling. So leaders should embrace their own idiosyncrasies and use these as part of their own unique leadership style.

We follow leaders who connect us to a mission we believe in, who clarify what’s expected of us, who surround us with people who define excellence the same way we do, who value us for our strengths, who show us that our teammates will always be there for us, who diligently replay our winning plays, who challenge us to keep getting better, and who give us confidence in the future.