Content Follows Form or Acting Your Way to New Thinking

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

By walking, I found out where I was going
Irving Layton

Acting your way to new thinking is easier than the other way round. (Tip of the hat to my colleague Mike Rother.)

That’s why Politeness is called the door to the Great Virtues – (another tip of the hat, this time to Andre Comte-Sponville.)

Politeness is pure form. Our children don’t understand why they have to behave in a certain way. But the more they do it, the more they come to understand Gentleness, Humility, Compassion and other great virtues.

Content follows form. May I suggest that form helps to create content? The imitation of virtue over time becomes the real thing.

What’s this got to do with Lean management? Quite a bit.

Lean excellence rests on a set of mental models or mindsets, which I’ve described in some detail (Getting the Right Things Done). These include:

• Leaders are teachers


• Go see for yourself


• Make problems visible


• Engage everybody in improvement work…

What’s the best way to change one’s behavior? Why, through a set of routines – even if you don’t fully understand why you’re doing them.

Understanding will come: “Holy cow, I had no idea what was actually happening. If I hadn’t gone to see for myself, I’d have made a disastrous mistake!”

Or, “Good thing we committed to involving the front line in planning our launch, and giving them the authority to stop and fix problems. It’s our best launch ever!”

Or, “I thought standardized work would hinder my creativity. But it’s freeing me up. I now have time to reflect, coach and make strategy!”

In our old Toyota plant, I often didn’t understand why we did certain things – daily stand-up meetings, scheduled & purposeful gemba walks, PDCA cycles around all significant activities and the like.

But I did all these things because that’s what you did in a Toyota factory, and because I intuited a deeper, richer pattern, a chessboard grander than any I’d imagine before.

By walking I found out where I was going.

Best regards,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Value & Waste at the Imperial Grill
Value in an Age of Endless Innovation
The Power of One Page
Strategy in a Time of Explosive Change

Value & Waste at the Imperial Grill

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

In honor of my late father, Frank.

I learned the fundamentals of management at my dad's restaurant, the Imperial Grill

Value & waste, standardized work, visual management, flow & pull -- Mama & Dad practiced them all.

They didn't call it Lean, of course. It was just common sense.

Value at the Imperial Grill meant good food at fair prices, a welcoming atmosphere, and a deep sense of community.

People liked the food, and they liked hanging out there.

At the Imperial Grill, I experienced each form of waste viscerally. Motion waste, for example, meant sore feet.

The best waiters and waitresses effortlessly served multiple tables with minimal motion. They added value whenever they moved -- by greeting a customer, clearing a table, or closing out a tab.

Waiting waste meant unhappy customers who wouldn’t come back Conveyance waste meant unnecessary trips to the farmers market to get our meat and produce.

Correction or scrap waste meant making the wrong thing, or overcooking something, and having to throw it out.

Over-processing meant too many steps in a process, so you fall behind -- a killer during the breakfast and lunch rush.

Inventory waste meant carrying more raw materials than you need, which meant either throwing stuff out when it goes bad, or buying a bigger fridge.

Knowledge waste meant wasting your time doing the above when you could be improving the business.

Overproduction -- making more than we could sell -- was unthinkable, a sure way of going out of business.

My parents understand value and waste in their guts, had a deep connection with their customers, and were open to any suggestions for improvement.

As a result, the Imperial Grill thrived against tough competition from national restaurant chains.

Best,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Value in an Age of Endless Innovation
The Power of One Page
Strategy in a Time of Explosive Change
The Function of Leaders is to Produce More Leaders

Value in an Age of Endless Innovation

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Enterprise, in all its glorious variety, cacophony & unpredictability begins and ends with value.

We seek to create products, services, experiences…that elevates our fellow human beings, that make their lives easier or more enjoyable, that reduce hassle and free up their time & energy.

Otherwise, why bother? We are human to the degree we are connected, and Value is an excellent measure of connectivity, no?

In John Donne’s timeless words:

No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main…

So what is Value? You all know the standard definitions:

1. What the customer is willing to pay for
2. Quality/Cost

I’m partial to Kano’s model.

I grew up professionally at Toyota manufacturing at the superb TMMC site in Cambridge Ontario. Value was our guiding light, our North Star.

Value was expressed in Toyota’s famous logo, the intertwined ovals representing:

• Something for the customer
• Something for the team member
• Something for the company

Moreover, we further translated Value into our four strategic focus areas: People, Quality, Delivery and Cost. To be sure, our targets changed year by year, as we changed models and customer desires changed. Nonetheless, Value was more or less constant.

Fast forward a couple of decades to 2024. Today Value is an endlessly moving target. Digital is indeed eating the world, and neither we, nor our customers can always define Value.

Indeed, in industries like Banking and Insurance, we can say with some confidence that there’s a good chance we do not understand value.

What to do?

For a start, let’s recognize that Value is no longer a fixed star, but a constantly moving & evolving entity.

Secondly, let’s accept that we have to iterate ourselves to value through continuous experimentation.

Thirdly, let’s commit to radical collaboration, across silos, and partnering with customers & stakeholders.

Lastly, let’s recognize the qualities that will help us untangle the Gordian Knot: humility, openness, humor and a big-picture consciousness.

It all adds up to a bracing challenge and new way of working.

Best regards,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

The Power of One Page
Strategy in a Time of Explosive Change
The Function of Leaders is to Produce More Leaders
Complexity is a Crude State, Simplicity Marks the End of a Process of Refinement

The Power of One Page

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

In times of tumultuous change brevity is king.

Blah, blah, blah…doesn’t cut it when revenue is non-existent and investors are jittery.

Endless PowerPoint decks, no matter how slick, are tiresome and wasteful. The four-hour meeting that goes nowhere is downright irritating.

Less is more remains the cardinal rule in music, art, theater, and the world of business.

Lean masters of the past understood ‘less is more’ in their bones. Toyota in the early 1950’s, for example, was facing bankruptcy, union warfare and public condemnation.

They were a tenth as productive as the American juggernaut car companies, and had little capital with which to buy desperately needed machines.

They created the one-page storyboard, also known as the ‘A3’ (after the paper size), to enable quick effective & communication.

I have a number of friends who are retired Marine corps officers. They tell me that Marine Doctrine also emphasizes clear & simple communication – short stand-up meetings around a board (1-page) are the norm.

Our friends and colleagues in the start-up communities have absorbed this concept and now communicate with various ‘canvases’.

These address broad strategic issues such as Business Model and Value Proposition, as well as, tactical elements like Personas, Empathy Maps and Customer Journeys.

I’m heartened by such cross-fertilization. Both the giver and receiver profit, and develop empathy.

Quality is paramount, of course. A page full of garbage is just that. Clearly expressing a hypothesis and plan of action around a complex business problem or industry takes great skill and understanding.

You have to think deeply, and then get the hell out of the building. (Go see, as the Japanese like to say).

One page takes much longer, therefore, than ten. (You all know the famous Winston Churchill story by now…)

The power of one page emerges in all its glory when use it to tell stories.

Story-telling, narrative, is perhaps our most human quality. “Tell me a story, grandpa…”

“Well, once upon there was a little girl who lived with her family in a town by the sea. And one night she looked out her window and saw a beautiful white horse and the horse had wings…”

Will AI ever be able to make up an enchanting story, on demand (from a loved one)?

That’s the real Turing test, no?

In any event, I tip my hat to our digital & start-up friends. It's fun working with you & I encourage you to continue poaching ‘traditional’ Lean.

Best regards,

Pascal



In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

Strategy in a Time of Explosive Change
The Function of Leaders is to Produce More Leaders
Complexity is a Crude State, Simplicity Marks the End of a Process of Refinement
Can Lean & Agile Help to Fix Our Courts? Part 4