written, illustrated and performed by
Claudio Perrone
agilesensei.com a3thinker.com
Terraforming
Organisations
Journey of a Lean changer
@agilesensei
Today I’m going to change the world
… (a little).
“A few years ago, I made a world of difference to one client”
28 months later...
“Except… I didn’t.”
“I saw good people swallowed by an enemy they could not defeat”
“innovation and growth being crushed by status-quo, fire-fighting and conformity.”
“the company went through many reorganizations, only to stay the same”
Organization chart Blame flow
Rule makers
Controllers
Enforcers
Victims Organization chart God
Losers
organizations can’t be “agile” if only the development teams are doing Agile
SMs
Typical “Agile” Enterprise
“all was left was a desolate, lifeless place, with seemingly little to offer humans.”
But What if an “alien” technology
could change it?
LEAN MANAGEMENT
1
@agilesensei
And we are reducing that timeline by removing the non-value-added wastes. -‐-‐-‐ TaiichiOhno, Founder of TPS
“ All we are doing is looking at the timeline from the moment the customer gives us an order to the point we can collect the cash.
“but that’s only part of the story…”
Why do you allow your competitors to copy all your tools?
What they need to see… is not visible
What the hell is He talking about?
---W. Edwards Deming
“ 95% of variation in worker’s performance is governed by the systems.
W. Edwards deming believed that…
---W. Edwards Deming “ We should work on our processes, not the outcome of our processes.
Perhaps…
“At Toyota, improving and managing are one and the same”
Normal daily management
+ improvement
Traditional thinking:
Normal daily management
= Process improvement
Toyota’s thinking:
…PROCESSES AND TOOLS TO BETTER SERVE
INDIVIDUALS AND INTERACTIONS.
It took me many years to finally realize that, in lean, we co-design and continuously improve…
“learning to see” involves bringing to the surface what we learn
Value Stream
Learning Stream(s)
With method and guidance, managers learn to become critical thinkers, problem solvers and mentors
-‐-‐-‐ Jurgen Appelo
“ Management is too important to leave to the managers. Management is everyone’s job.
(YOU MAY ALSO CONSIDER THAT…)
A3 THINKING 2
@agilesensei
A3 thinkers are like investigators at a crime scene.
They capture a shared understanding of a PROBLEM and move towards ITS resolution systematically.
Arguably, an A3 report “surfaces” a learning stream around a problem
UNFORTUNATELY, It’s all too easy to develop shallow A3 reports.
… and Good mentors are rarer than plutonium.
So, with the motto: “Toyota supplier in 2 years or less”…
… I released a family of thinking tools…
www.a3thinker.com
to change the world. one problem at a time.
www.a3thinker.com/deck
What other Learning streams
can we seek to surface?
POPCORN FLOW
3
@agilesensei
A while ago, I worked with a team who had not deployed in months
We worked together and evolved using the kanban method
But the real “secret” was our ability to SYSTEMATICALLY DEFINE AND negotiate explicit change experiments…
Problems & observations Options Possible experiments Committed Ongoing Review doNe
… a powerful learning stream that I defined and captured on a parallel “Popcorn board”
It starts with Problems & Observations...
...which I use to elicit options.
Promising options lead to a backlog of possible experiments.
experiments that we Commit to pursue have an action, reason, expectation and Review date.
At Each retrospective, I ask exactly these questions:
Some people fear “failure”…
Gap = Frustration
Reality
Expectation
…but we only really “fail” when we limit our opportunities to learn
Gap = Frustration
Reality
Expectation
Learning
It’s Not “fail fast, fail often”...
… It’s “Learn fast, learn often”.
Right from the beginning, I knew this was different.
... Because the team COULD easily handle 5-10 change experiments each week, rapidly enabling it to DELIVER multiple times a day
…and then it spread. Popcorn boards started to appear to other parts of the organization.
Imagine a continous flow of experiments to dramatically accelerate the rate of change in every corner of your organization...
... How far would you go?
“ -- Winston Churchill
To improve is to change. To be perfect is to change often.
Claudio Perrone
[email protected] www.agilesensei.com
@agilesensei www.a3thinker.com
Thank You!