Kaizen & Abracadabra Innovation

 

There are more things in heaven & earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

There are two kinds of innovation: incremental improvement (aka Kaizen) and ‘create-something-new-seemingly-out-of-nothing – ‘Abracadabra’. Both are magic and essential to sustained prosperity. Our challenge is to understand the very different methods & mindsets that underlie them. Indeed, this is an essential leadership skill, and the basis for what I call ambidexterity.

Kaizen is Like Compound Interest

Kaizen is magic the way compound interest is magic.  Imagine we’re able to engage all team members in finding & implementing small improvements that contribute 1% per month for an entire year. Where are we at year-end?[1]

Doing Nothing: Year End = (1 + 0.00)¹²  = 1     

Kaizen (1% per month): Year End = (1 + 0.01)¹² = 1.127    

At year-end we’re 12.7% better than if we had done nothing.

Now imagine we sustain this for then years.

Kaizen (12.7% per month): Year End = (1 + 0.127)¹⁰ = 3.30

After ten years, we’re better by 330%

An astonishing result, no? As with compound interest, benefits compound. Skill builds upon skill, confidence & teamwork build upon the same. The power of Kaizen blew me away. When you’ve lived it, you never forget it. I remember looking around our Toyota factory, seeing the intense focus and continuous improvement, and feeling sorry for our competitors. And our competitors were smart, capable & hardworking.  But they had yet to discover and apply the power of Kaizen.

There is a rich literature describing Kaizen culture, and more importantly, its blockers. Let me add that the long latency period is an insidious blocker. Like compound interest, incremental improvements are invisible in the short term.  ‘We had a 1% improvement last month – ho hum…’  And so, most Kaizen efforts run out of gas, or more common, we get a new leader who doesn’t understand or care about Kaizen.

Perhaps the most famous practitioner of the 1% improvement principle is Tom Brady, who turned continuous incremental gains into massive competitive moats.

Creating Something Out of Nothing is a Different Kind of Magic

People love ‘Abracadabra’ innovation – creating something new (seemingly) out of thin air. Innovation masters like Steve Jobs are akin to magicians. Nothing up my sleeve, he tells us, and then Presto! - an iPhone or iPad appear.

At first I confess I was suspicious. Apple quality is not so hot, I muttered to myself, missing the magic. In an odd way, my kaizen experience was a blocker! Then I went to Singapore and began the next phase in my apprenticeship. I learned that Kaizen was necessary – but not sufficient. 

Creating something new out of nothing is the key to igniting new Growth. So-called 'exponential' technologies, of which AI is the latest & likely most powerful, expand our ability to innovate, but the underlying mindsets & methods are essentially unchanged. How do these differ from those of Kaizen? Are there any synergies?  Do you need both types of innovation? If so, what’s the leader’s role in developing them? Stay tuned. 

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

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Soft Consensus vs ‘Prove Me Wrong’

 

Everybody knows the boat is leaking, everybody knows the captain lied. Leonard Cohen

How you think determines what you see. As a Toyota acolyte, I learned to see & think in a different way. The past decade I’ve been immersed in Innovation thinking - how to create something valuable seemingly out of thin air. This is the first of a series of articles on what I’ve learned.

A human being drew this.

Decision-Making: Consensus or Prove Me Wrong?

Soft Consensus:

When it comes to Innovation (or Strategy), avoid ‘soft consensus’. Here’s a common scenario: Our path forward is unclear. We have conflicting data or no data at all. So, let’s go around the Board room or team room & try to reach a consensus. Let’s give everyone a chance to speak & weigh up what we think it all means. Everyone’s voice gets equal weight, regardless of how much expertise or skin in the game they might have.  People who are most emotional get extra points. Sometimes this devolves further into HIPPO or ZEBRA or WOLF management.^[1]

Everybody pretends things are ‘just great’, and such sessions often end with heartfelt paeans to engagement & inclusiveness.  But to quote Leonard Cohen, ‘Everybody knows the ship is rotten. Everybody knows the captain lied.’

This is a great way to kill Innovation & destroy Value. We thereby institutionalize Confirmation Bias - the Lord Voldemort of bad thinking. New offerings sink like stones & good riddance.  Toyota acolytes are familiar with that great company’s deep understanding of Waste. Is anything more wasteful than designing & releasing an offering nobody wants?

Prove Me Wrong

If you want to innovate, encourage dissent & disagreement. Encourage those who disagree to explain their thinking. Prove me wrong conveys great benefits. For a start, it encourages people to challenge the weakest elements of your hypothesis. It compels the Innovation team to validate their ideas with data. Prove me wrong reinforces the fact that Innovation entails experimenting your way to Value, in the dark.  Rarely do we have a deep understanding of the key questions:

●      Who is the customer?

●      What does the customer value?

●      Why do they buy or not buy?

Pretending otherwise, is preparing to fail. Only through quick, smart & binary experiments can we begin to understand the problem we’re trying to solve. ‘Quick, smart & binary’ are antithetical to ‘soft consensus’, which is commonly slow, thick & data-poor.

Innovation thrives on the margins, with the oddballs, eccentrics & iconoclasts. The ones that challenge that status quo, the ornery & quirky.  Soft consensus, by contrast, cuts off the so-called ‘long tails’ of the distribution, and with them, the interesting, eccentric & profound.

Last Word

Prove me wrong is perhaps the most challenging Innovation mental model. Companies that seek to emulate Toyota rightfully emphasize ‘Respect for People’. Prove me wrong is easily mistaken for disrespect. Mature leaders will understand that the opposite is true. Another common mistake is giving a platform to ‘Grumblers’.  [Please refer to my earlier series on Fukuda’s Parable.] Grumblers and iconoclasts are not the same thing. The former are cynical & disengaged and we must ignore them. The latter are passionate, may be angry or frustrated, but are fully engaged. Listen to them.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

 

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[1] Highest Paid Person’s Opinion, Zero Expertise But Really Arrogant, Works on the Latest Fire

The Two Faces of AI

 

I’m torn…My vocation entails teaching leaders how to solve complex problems both to protect the core business, and to ignite new Growth. My avocation is music - I’m a member of an international band comprising two grizzled veterans & brilliant young players from Europe’s best music schools. In both my vocation & avocation, AI is a blessing and a curse.

Which one will prevail?

AI and My Vocation

AI helps us protect the core business by enabling our management system and helping make problems visible. AI collects data, analyzes value streams, and helps predict hot spots. At the same time, I’m painfully aware that AI agents are shrinking entry level jobs. AI agents are good at core admin tasks & the basic research & analysis new team members used to do. Nowadays, getting that crucial first job is much harder.

Our new Growth work is focused largely on the consumer goods & financial services industries. AI agents enable our sprints. We can run many more experiments & harvest learning quicker.  AI agents also help us analyze & repurpose the existing assets. Years worth of social media content, for example, can be quickly analyzed & reused for new sprints.  We ‘fail fast, fail forward’ with breathless ease.  New assets can be developed & tested while we sleep.

As an engineer, I’m admire & celebrate the splendid engineering & continuous problem solving around neural networks the past twenty years.  Bravo!

I’m also aware that my fellow engineers & I lack the moral & philosophical chops to grapple with the biggest moral challenge of our age: How to deploy the AI genie so as to enhance our lives and reduce suffering while sustaining our core values?

AI and My Avocation

As a musician, I’m acutely aware of AI’s devasting effects on the creator economy. Musicians, writers, journalists, graphic designers, filmmakers and other creators have largely been obsolesced.  Tech companies ‘scrub’ everything they can find and thereby train their ML monsters.  Then they resell us AI slop at twenty bucks a month. Some say we are witnessing the greatest theft of IP in history,

I try to be a good mentor for our young players. One of my core messages is: “AI has destroyed the willingness to pay for creators’ work. We have to accept that hard fact & adapt.  How do we adapt? By becoming ambidextrous.  Develop a second capability that will put food on the table. Be a carpenter, electrician, engineer, teacher, lawyer etc. I do not want you to end up homeless.”

Our band does not use AI to create music – that is unthinkable. We play our instruments with our own hands, we will never use autotune or anything like it. But AI does reduce hassle in the studio. For example, AI can handle the tedious task of eliminating overly loud breathing between vocal phrases.  (I’m a loud breather…).

AI agents help us curate & repurpose our social media assets, as we do in my day job. I engaged a young engineer to develop an AI agent that selects potentially viral content, creates thumbnails & templates for the channels we’re targeting (e.g. YouTube, Instagram, TikTok). AI analyzes a given musical piece’s performance according to our key metrics (Streams, Click-through rate, average watch duration etc.).  Needless to say, I also use him in my day job.

In summary, AI is both a blessing and a curse - in my vocation and avocation.  No wonder I’m torn.

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

Respect for People in an AI World?

 

Is ‘Respect for People’ possible in the age of AI? A generation ago, the Toyota Production System (TPS) doubled down on this idea and changed the world. Their revolutionary idea was to release the ‘genius of the organization’ through ‘Total Involvement’.  Nowadays, more than a few Tech leaders envision billion-dollar companies with ‘very few people – ideally just one.’ Is ‘Respect for People’ a dead idea?

Middle Management is Over…(?!)

At recent conference a well-known Tech leader opined that, ‘Middle management is over.’ His plan to ‘create value’ amounts to 1) continually replace people with AI agents, and 2) maintain a skeleton crew to ‘manage the work’. 

Avarice & nihilism aside, this hare-brained plan ignores uncomfortable facts, the most obvious being: If we fire everybody, who is going to buy our stuff? Other problems include:

·       Work is messy. You have to deal with internal & external customers, supply chain partners, regulators, banks & insurers, and eccentric, quirky people up & down your value streams and customer journeys. How will you sustain these relationships without people?

·       People are good at building essential relationships – AI agents are not. People mentor younger team members. They know the company’s work better than anyone. As Toyota observed, if you release smart, well-trained people on big problems, they’ll release a tsunami of value.

·       AI agents are expensive and can mess up big-time. The question is not ‘Can an AI agent do this for us?’ The question is: ‘Can an AI agent do it better & cheaper than a human, and with less hassle & risk?

The World is More Than Databases & Loops

‘Software Brain’ seeks to flatten the world and all human experience into a series of databases and loops. Big AI agents can then, presumably, issue instructions and ‘manage the work’.  Here’s the underlying mindset: If the word does not align with the database – change the world. 

In fact, all these things that look like a computer are nothing like a computer. The Law, for example (an early, seemingly easy target for AI agents), is much more than databases and loops. It’s messy, ambiguous and full of grey areas. You can argue different sides and come to different conclusions. The same is true of Medicine, Engineering, Accounting, and Actuarial Science, not to mention the Arts including the visual arts, music, creative writing, theatre and film-making.

So, this thing [Life] that looks like a computer is not at all like computer. Not everything is a loop. Not everything humans experience can be captured in a database. Trying to flatten people & life in this way is the polar opposite of ‘Respect for People’.

People do not consider code-writing to be a blessing. The idea of linking all their databases & automating their lives with Claude Co-work frightens & disgusts them. People hate AI because it flattens them. It's not a marketing problem or a bug - it's a center feature of Software Brain.

TPS remains a sharp rebuke to those who dream of a ‘billion-dollar company of one person’. Is eliminating middle management & destroying entire industries something to brag about?  Big Tech leaders are now routinely booed off the stage. Is it any wonder?

Best wishes,

Pascal Dennis         E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org