Reflection - the Breakfast of Champions

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Year-end is my favorite time of year. A time to hit the PAUSE button & humbly reflect...

How did things go this year? Did I meet my personal goals? Did we meet our team goals?

What worked, did not work – and why?

What have I learned about myself & our team?

What have we learned about our business? What's it mean for the upcoming year?

What skills do we need to strengthen? What new skills do we want to develop?

We are human by the grace of our intellect, by the grace of reflection. But given our inevitable blind spots, proclivities, neuroses, and occasional insanities – it’s hard for any individual to do well.

But we have to try. Even better if we can reflect as a team, which can blunt the effect of individual foibles.

Action without thinking is aimless. Thinking without action is lifeless.

Here's to honest reflection, growth & good spirits - and to a safe & healthy 2018.

Best regards,

Pascal

Reflection - the Breakfast of Champions

By Pascal Dennis

Reflection entails. honest, humble acceptance of successes & failures, strengths & weaknesses.

Hansei, as the Japanese call it.

Reflection is the countermeasure to hubris, overweening pride & arrogance, that destroyer of people and organization.

Reflection is central to all great religions, in the form of prayer, meditation, and rumination.

In some traditions the acolyte leaves civilization and seeks reflection in solitude.

In my experience, reflection requires both solitude, as well as, the camaraderie of one's team.

Thus, questions like 'What have I learned?’ naturally lead to 'What did we learn?'

Reflection, of course, reflects the Adjust phase of Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle.

We close of the loop thereby, and lay the foundation for next year's PDCA loop.

A couple of points here:

To close the loop, we need to observe each PDCA phase.

Otherwise, we suffer the debilitating ailment I call Scatter - one group does the Plan, another Deploys the Plan, yet a third Checks the Plan.

Result: lousy results and little learning.

Scatter is at epidemic proportions, especially in large organizations.

So important activities need a deployment leader, ‘key thinker’, ‘chief engineer’ or equivalent to ‘wrap their arms around the problem’, observe each PDCA phase, and thereby harvest & share the learning.

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reprise - Gary Kasparov & the Breakfast of Champions

By Pascal Dennis

Chess is arguably our greatest strategy game. More books have been written about than for all other games combined.

Chess has enriched our language with words like checkmate, stalemate, opening phase, end game, and gambit.

Chess has such a strong hold on the human mind that chess champions are notoriously eccentric. (Check out the recent, excellent documentary called ‘Bobby Fischer vs. The Rest of the World’)

Gary Kasparov, the greatest chess player of them all, is the exception to the chess eccentric rule. Kasparov is happily married, and a successful entrepreneur and author.

(After retiring in 2005, he devoted himself to confronting corruption in Vladimir Putin's regime. Things are so bad now in Russia that he has had to leave.)

Kasparov’s book about chess and business strategy is especially interesting [How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves - from the Board to the Boardroom.]

“What makes a champion?” Kasparov asks.

His answer: Frequent, frank, even ruthless, reflection and self-assessment.

Think of elite performers like Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Michael Jordan, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods (pre-implosion), Yoyo Ma, and Yitzhak Perlman. We see the same pattern, no?

What's this got to do with you?

The Lean Business System is about elite performance. It's best practitioners ruthlessly self-assess, and adjust based on what they see.

Our improvement kata - tip of the hat to my pal, Mike Rother, is our driving force.

At Lean Pathways we call it Four-Step-Problem-Solving, which we teach through on site coaching, books [Pascal’s Amazon page] and other teaching aids [Brain Booster Pocket Cards].

But it's all about reflection - the Breakfast of Champions.

More about Kasparov in future blogs.

Cheers,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reflection - the Breakfast of Champions

By Pascal Dennis

Reflection entails. honest, humble acceptance of successes & failures, strengths & weaknesses.

Hansei, as the Japanese call it.

Reflection is the countermeasure to hubris, overweening pride & arrogance, that destroyer of people and organization.

Reflection is central to all great religions, in the form of prayer, meditation, and rumination.

In some traditions the acolyte leaves civilization and seeks reflection in solitude.

In my experience, reflection requires both solitude, as well as, the camaraderie of one's team.

Thus, questions like 'What have I learned?’ naturally lead to 'What did we learn?'

Reflection, of course, reflects the Adjust phase of Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle.

We close of the loop thereby, and lay the foundation for next year's PDCA loop.

A couple of points here:

To close the loop, we need to have been there for all phases of PDCA.

Otherwise, we suffer the debilitating ailment I call Scatter - one group does the Plan, another Deploys the Plan, yet a third Checks the Plan.

Result: lousy results and little learning.

Scatter is at epidemic proportions in large organizations - because they're so large & complex.

More to come.