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

Reflections on True North

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Strategy begins with our strategic & philosophical Purpose, also known as True North.

True North comprises:

1. a "Hard" goal, usually entailing critical end-of-pipe measures, e.g. Revenue, EBIT, fatalities, and,
2. a "Broad-brush" goal (hoshin), a few words defining our purpose, vision, commitment

I encourage leaders to draw a picture of where we want to be, how we’ll get there, and how we will go about our business.

The business chessboard is foggy, multi-dimensional, and unpredictable. Why bother to define a distant, uncertain future?

Because doing so forces us out of the rut of our current thinking. We engage dormant neural pathways thereby, and begin to see the clear blue sky of what's possible.

True North is also the ‘tie-breaker’, to which we turn for guidance at critical moments. “Is this who we are? Is this where we’re going and how’ll we get there?”

True North will tell us. For example, imagine we are a designer & manufacturer of high-end lighting solving challenging technical problems in high-margin niche markets. Our hoshin is Speed Style Invention. Now suppose a major automotive company, say Toyota, approached us and said, “We’d like you to manufacture lighting for our next Lexus model.”

How would we respond? The answer is clear, no? “We’ll have to decline, with great respect, because that’s not what we do, that’s not who we are.”

Our annual plans will be simple & modular one-pagers that express our hypotheses. We’re often wrong, but we adjust quickly. Life never goes according to plan. Clear hypotheses & modular plans enable the rapid PDCA cycles that’ll dispel the fog & get us closer and closer to True North.

Strategy Deployment is messy, humbling, intuitive, a marriage between the Right & Left brain, between intuition & logic, art & science.

I'm reminded of Jack Nicklaus, perhaps the greatest golfer ever, whose swing routine always entailed imagining the perfect shot.

Or of Michelangelo seeing the perfect sculpture in the marble block.

Have a good summer, all,

Pascal



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

Frontiers - Lean & IT
Getting the Right Things Done in a Digital World
On Big Data
Why Lean Outside the Factory?

Reflections on True North

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

A New Year, and a new strategic cycle. Strategy begins with our strategic & philosophical Purpose, also known as True North.

True North comprises:

1. a "Hard" goal, usually entailing critical end-of-pipe measures, e.g. Revenue, EBIT, fatalities, and,
2. a "Broad-brush" goal (hoshin), a few words defining our purpose, vision, commitment

I encourage leaders to draw a picture of where we want to be, how we’ll get there, and how we will go about our business.

The business chessboard is foggy, multi-dimensional, and unpredictable. Why bother to define a distant, uncertain future?

Because doing so forces us out of the rut of our current thinking. We engage dormant neural pathways thereby, and begin to see the clear blue sky of what's possible.

True North is also the ‘tie-breaker’, to which we turn for guidance at critical moments. “Is this who we are? Is this where we’re going and how’ll we get there?”

True North will tell us. For example, imagine we are a designer & manufacturer of high-end lighting solving challenging technical problems in high-margin niche markets. Our hoshin is Speed Style Invention. Now suppose a major automotive company, say Toyota, approached us and said, “We’d like you to manufacture lighting for our next Lexus model.”

How would we respond? The answer is clear, no? “We’ll have to decline, with great respect, because that’s not what we do, that’s not who we are.”

Our annual plans will be simple & modular one-pagers that express our hypotheses. We’re often wrong, but we adjust quickly. Life never goes according to plan. Clear hypotheses & modular plans enable the rapid PDCA cycles that’ll dispel the fog & get us closer and closer to True North.

Strategy Deployment is messy, humbling, intuitive, a marriage between the Right & Left brain, between intuition & logic, art & science.

I'm reminded of Jack Nicklaus, perhaps the greatest golfer ever, whose swing routine always entailed imagining the perfect shot.

Or of Michelangelo seeing the perfect sculpture in the marble block.

Have a good year, all,

Pascal

Content Follows Form or Acting Your Way to New Thinking

By Pascal Dennis

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

Pascal Dennis Bio

Emphasize Strategy Deployment, Not Selection

By Pascal Dennis

"Any damn fool can make a plan. It's the execution that screws you up."

My favorite military adage.

Corporate strategy usually entails spending 80% of our energy devising the "perfect strategy" - and precious little on deployment.

But deployment is what screws you up.

Strategy development entails answering questions like:

1. What are we trying to achieve? (Our "Policy" to use a military metaphor),
   


2. Where, when & with what forces will we fight?
   

Important questions, to be sure, but usually not as complicated as people make out.

The tools of strategy selection -- SWOT, Five Force analysis & the like -- are well known.

Most important is a gut level understanding of your business gained by long apprenticeship, numerous annual PDCA cycles, and by getting your hands dirty.

Often the best strategy is some combination of:

1. Design & make cool stuff
   


2. Sell more,
   


3. Wring out cost, and
   


4. Involve everybody in improvement
   

And the most adroit strategy will falter unless it is translated (deployed) such that each level and team have a focused set of breakthrough activities.

We deconstruct the elephant, if you will, so that everybody has a piece of it.

In summary, in developing your strategy, go see, reflect deeply, and use the core tools in the strategy tool box.

But put 80% of your organization's energy into:

1. Deployment, i.e. translating objectives & means level by level,
   


2. execution, and
   


3. in creating a freewheeling, entrepreneurial atmosphere where initiative flourishes
   

Cheers,

Pascal