The act of making is not about creativity or innovation, but rather a challenge to empathize with others different from ourselves. That other may be a character in a play, a fellow actor, a piece of wood, a dancer, or even your own body. We often think we know them, but really… have no idea.

Find out more about the launch of this project at http://kck.st/x2GC4I.

Website: Realizing Empathy

Related Information:
My Engagement Strategy – Appreciative Inquiry
The Strength of an Architect is in their Collaborative Abilities
Critical and Creative Thinking benefits the Problem Solver
Service Design through the Eyes of a Design Thinker

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Basically, attendees will first take a visual workplace workshop on March 27^th in Warwick, RI, then on the 28^th, they’ll travel to VIBCO to observe and evaluate its efforts at implementing a visual workplace, its next step on a lean journey that began in 2004.

Below is the transcription, which incorporates both podcasts that I had with Dr. Galsworth.

A Shingo Prize Examiner, Dr. Galsworth is author of many DVDs and books, including  Visual Workplace, Visual Thinking: Creating Enterprise Excellence Through the Technologies of the Visual Workplace and Work That Makes Sense – Operator-led Visuality, both winners of the Shingo Research Prize.

Podcast:
Be Productive, Be Visual
Be Productive, Be Visual, Part 2

Related Information:
Start your Visual Thinking Process with Mind Mapping
Power of Visual Thinking in your Visual Workplace

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Sara L.Orem, Ph.D. has twenty years of management experience and fifteen years management consulting in and to major financial services companies in the U. S., Britain and Australia. Her current focus is on the development and use of positive methods including Appreciative Inquiry in coaching and group processes. Appreciative Coaching describes in detail the method Sara has developed for her coaching practice which serves women and men looking at self-started transitions.

Related Information:
Connecting Continuous Improvement and Appreciative Inquiry
A Good Architect is an enabling Orchestra Leader,
My Engagement Strategy – Appreciative Inquiry
Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

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An excerpt from the transcription:

Joe: Michael, when you talk about Kaizen, you talk about Kaizen on an individual basis. Can you explain that?

Michael Balle:  Absolutely. Kaizen is always individual. There’s a difference in perspective, and we’re very biased by our Taylorist pasts. Our understanding we usually have is that performance is the result of processes. We all buy that, and its fine. Our thinking is that if you hit each of these processes with an improvement project, and people call it Kaizen but it’s not, then the results should be improved performance.

Evidence over the past 20 years has shown that this is not the case. What you do have is quick hits. You can have some savings, or you have some low?hanging fruit, but you don’t have the improvement we’re looking for.

The other way of looking at this is that any process is just a collection of individuals. If each individual is better at their job, then collectively they will come up with a process that performs better and delivers in performance. I think this is the key to understanding. Kaizen is an individual activity to make you better at your job. This is something we see with Lean students.

After studying Lean for a while, you ask them the question, “Do you feel you’re mastering Lean better?” and they say, “Well, no. The system, it seems still as mysterious and deep and hard to master.” You ask them the second question, “Are you better at your jobs? Do you feel you’re better at your jobs?” They say, “No debate, Absolutely, yes.” They’re confident that they’re a lot better at their jobs. This is what Kaizen is about.

Kaizen is about improving you, Joe. By doing Kaizen, you will improve how you see your job and how you perform at your job. This will make you stop making some classic mistakes, for this will also make you discover innovative ways of doing your job.

As we all pull together with a deeper understanding of our jobs, we create processes that our competitors can never touch. In order to hold those better processes, each of us has to be better at our jobs.

Dr. Balle went on to say:

Really, the essence of Kaizen is building people an understanding, a vision, of the waste their technical choices imposes on the work chain. It is an individual thing as it is their technical choices and it is a collective thing as it’s not the waste they impose on themselves but the waste they impose on their suppliers, the waste they impose on their internal customers.

This conversation was one of the reasons I delayed publishing the Lean Engagement Team and more specifically the chapter on the iCustomer and iTeam. It did not change my thinking of teamwork and individual responsibility but it did re-frame the way I viewed and described those two subjects. The book is available as a PDF download on the Business901.com website or on Amazon:
Lean Engagement Team (Marketing with Lean, Volume 2) [Ring-bound]
Lean Engagement Team (Marketing with Lean, Volume 2) [CD-ROM]

The Kaizen Series
Dr. Balle Friday Video Series
Audio Collection of Dr. Balle on Kaizen

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Ankit told me before the podcast, “The basic concept is use AI as the starting point. It’s the starting point to a strategic initiative and then go into the traditional tools once there is a “pull” from staff on what they want to become. It’s a great way to do strategy and other process improvements.  Basically the best way I’ve seen to introduce changes via an AI methodology and then go into the specifics, strategy, process improvement, etc.”

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download Here  or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

More about Ankit Patel: Ankit was a Lean consultant for Dell Inc. overseeing Dell’s Manufacturing and Re-Manufacturing production processes in Lebanon, TN. He has helped guide the multi- billion dollar plant in strategic planning, coaching executives at the plant, facilitating Kaizen events, and training Lean leaders at all levels of the organization. Ankit combines a unique approach of positive psychology, culture improvements, strategy, and process improvement to get companies results. His latest venture is in bringing Appreciative Inquiry to the field of continuous improvement.

Related Information
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Appreciative Inquiry and Organizational Change
My Engagement Strategy – Appreciative Inquiry
Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative

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Our primary problem is not leadership but a long standing culture that is engrained within our organizations. It’s the way we do things. But worse it is also the way others help us do things. The outside forces that surround us to include vendors, customers and for that matter our entire supply chain simply supports the way we have always done things. So, not only do we have to create change internally but externally as well. It is not only a pain but it has to be someone else’s pain. Or does it?

The predominant response has been that I am flat out wrong. Leadership is always ultimately responsible. I encourage you to participate. There are a boat-load of great comments. In addition, a few of mine are sprinkled in. My first reply in this conversation:

Ultimately we can always blame leadership because they are the “leaders.” I am not saying Leadership does not take responsibility, I think most of them do. You listed a long list of deficiencies, how does someone become a leader with that amount of incompetence?

If what you say is true, would we have to agree that Lean must be top down driven? Leaders can mandate a cultural change or in milder terms lead one? My point is that a leader (Superman only comes around occasionally) alone may not be able to effectively accomplish a culture change. The organization alone may not be able to do it. External forces such as suppliers and customers must also be willing (you may have to shed yourself of a couple of each).

I think it is to easy to just say leadership. Does leadership influence everything? Will they be the ones to be help responsible? I agree, no arguments. However, I think the focus of leadership alone being help responsible is outdated. If we encourage collaboration and empower the workforce – there has to be shared responsibility to make it all work.

I challenge these thoughts because I feel for Lean to grow it has to move away from the assumption that it is always Leadership’s fault. I think we are moving towards a more collaborative organizational structure and with that more shared responsibilities.

In that structure, there are influencers based on Internal, External and Methodologies that will be dependent on Individual and Team responsibilities for success. This is the prescription for transformation or change. I believe Lean is the methodology of choice but stop short of accepting the status quo that has been challenged throughout this thread.

For Lean to proliferate it cannot just rely on Leadership and willpower to hold the course. Do you need it, yes. But we also use to travel from coast to coast in a covered wagon and arrive with a whole new group of people. Now we do it in 4 hours and complain about waiting 5 minutes for luggage (Forget which comedian said this).

My point is that if we are moving to a more collaborative work-style and co-producing and co-creating products with customer, should responsibility be redefined? Should this atmosphere create a shorter cycle of transformation? Should our value stream be only an internal process? Will customers ever leave us co-create with them without accountability driven down to our lowest level of engagement?

I believe Lean is positioned to do this but see this future clouded by thoughts of only Leadership is responsible and that Lean is a journey that takes time. The world is becoming more collaborative and doing things in real time. Should Lean not be mimicking that experience? A better question might be, is Lean still on the wagon or is it ready to fly?

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Change Anything: The New Science of Personal Success .
Does Lean need to move beyond Deming?
Why won’t Lean commit to the Demand Chain the way it committed to the Supply chain?

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The methodologies of Lean, Service Design and Design Thinking co-exist with appreciative inquiry very well. Especially, when we are looking at things from a more strategic and organizational level. The above video and the article below when viewed from an existing framework of Lean, Service Design and Design Thinking opens a sea of opportunity. I consider the cultural change and mental models that must occur in a transformation. Why not take a positive approach?

We are all familiar with the many attributes of positive thinking but seldom are they practiced as part of organizational development. In an article by David Cooperrider he discusses the framework called the IPOD (Innovation-inspired Positive Organization Development).  The theory of change underlying IPOD is articulated, including the three stages in creating strengths-based organizational innovation: 1) the elevation-and-extension of strengths, 2) the broaden and-building of capacity, and 3) the establishment of the new-and-eclipsing of the old.

Read the entire article here: Positive Organization Development: Innovation-inspired Change in an Economy and Ecology of Strengths

Related Information:
Getting Resistance to Appreciative Inquiry?
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

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The Appreciative Inquiry (AI) movement offers an approach to organizational change based on the possibility of a more desirable future, experience with the whole system, and activities that signal "something different is happening this time." That difference systematically taps the potential of human beings to make themselves, their organizations, and their communities more adaptive and more effective. AI, a theory of collaborative change, erases the winner/loser paradigm in favor of coordinated actions and closer relationships that lead to solutions at once simpler and more effective.

- From Amazon describing David’s book: Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change

Related Information:
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Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

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An excerpt from the upcoming podcast:

Joe:  When you talk about problem solving, people think of it very much in linear terms. The things that I’ve read on Appreciative Inquiry, they’re talking about circular questions. Is there a difference in that thinking? Is there a basic difference between the two?

Ankit:  I would say that traditional process improvement is a little bit slightly more linear, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. I think that’s actually a very needed skill set. I think where the AI process really excels is at non?linear type, breakthrough type of issues. So if you want continuous improvement, traditional continuous improvement tools are great for that. If you want serious breakthrough types of initiatives, there are some tools in the continuous improvement belt that help with that. AI seems to work much, much better for that because of the non?linear nature. It allows folks to break free of necessarily what they think is possible because it lets them just think bigger. So you do end up getting much, much larger types of initiatives.

So I’ll give you an example. Roadway Trucking. They did an Appreciative Inquiry, what they call, Summit. They actually had their own drivers come up with their initiative for a specific depot that could save $1 million. I think that was, if I’m correct, for Roadway Trucking, about 40 percent of a total revenue. It was an extremely aggressive goal, but they came up with that goal because of this whole process.

Now would they have achieved that otherwise? Possibly. It might have been an edict from the top down, but because they came up with it they were actually able to achieve it and get a lot of good cultural outcomes from that as well. People felt more empowered. People felt more engaged. You get less turnover from your folks. People are happier to be at work. It’s just a really, really neat way to approach any kind of problem or opportunity.

What I have found is that I am actually applying many of these methods through Lean and my continuous improvement efforts. I tis actually not that much of a shift. David Cooperrider, who is generally credited with coining the term Appreciative Inquiry had told Ankit that Toyota is currently using AI in their Hoshin Planning or Strategy Deployment efforts. Recently, I published my My Engagement Strategy – Appreciative Inquiry and discovered it was very Appreciative friendly.

The real attraction of AI to me is that it may provide a better way for cultural change. It may provide a stronger pathway in changing culture in a Lean Transformation. If you think we are already applying the best method or best path, I encourage you to participate in this LinkedIn discussion: When Lean fails, most people draw the wrong conclusion and assume it is Leadership. They blame leadership as being shortsighted. I think this view is not only wrong but it is dead wrong.

Related Information:
Getting Resistance to Appreciative Inquiry?
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

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This is a transcription of the Business901 Podcast, The Strength of an Architect is in their Collaborative Abilities. The podcast was with Zachary Evans, an architect and partner at Kelty Tappy Design, Inc, a Fort Wayne architecture, planning, and urban design firm. A Ball State University graduate (Muncie, Indiana), Zach holds professional architectural registrations in Indiana and Ohio and is certified by the National Council of Architectural Registration Boards (NCARB).

An excerpt from the transcription:

Joe:  Is there a way that you set expectations of projects?

Zachary:  Absolutely. That’s why the early customer involvement is extremely important. We try to spend a lot of time educating the client on what our process is. Every architect and every design firm has a different process that they like to go through and they involve different timelines. We try to lay all that out upfront, typically verbally and in written proposals so they can take it home with them or take it back to their business and absorb it a little bit. But managing expectations upfront is key. If you get down the road in a design project and the owner’s upset for some reason because it took too long or they thought they were going to get a different product at the end. It’s really the design team’s fault for not being outgoing and aggressive in engaging the client and making sure their expectations were managed properly.

The tag line was part of a twitter exchange with @ingvald thanks!

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How to Design like an Architect
An Architects view of Prototyping and Modeling
Critical and Creative Thinking benefits the Problem Solver

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I believe in creating a Lean Marketing system. You can’t write and teach Lean Sales and Marketing. It is a Learn by doing approach. What I do is provide you a platform for co-creation through joint experiences and incorporate feedback as we put them into practice. The steps of Lean Sales and Marketing are first you go and create a current state. Second, you form a working vision from the user (customer) experience, an ideal situation of where the user wants to go. Third, you visualize the user’s process. If you do that, it’s more obvious to see what your next reaction should be and when to trigger it.

Many people respond to the latest fad or solicit the cleverest idea to implement some sort of solution, thinking it will make them better. What makes your marketing better is understanding the user or customer experience and their processes. Then with hard work, take the time to figure out how to engage with them. It’s this process, that empowers you and which leads you to create better and more performing processes. Using this approach, a Lean system will outperform any other approach in engaging the customers you need, maintaining customers and working with people you like and who will be loyal to you and refer others to you forever.

This is the initial sequence of steps we use to create a Lean Marketing System in an organization. It ensures we carefully think through what outcomes we want to create, what supports and barriers we need to plan for, and who we have to involve within your organization to guarantee success. Our starting point:

1. (Definition) What are you presently doing and how do your clients and organization feel about them?
2. (Discovery) What is your present value proposition for retaining customers? What is your present value proposition for acquiring customers?
3. (Dream)What are your targets? How will we measure success?
4. (Design) Do you understand your customer’s decision making process? For each product/market segment?
5. (Destiny) What’s your investment strategy – not only in media, but in time and events?

What I ask for is simply a marketing budget for me to manage. We allocate a percentage of the budget for fees, creative and production, with the balance going to media, materials, internet presence and other out of pocket expenses. At the beginning it is slanted towards the fee side and overtime shifts as we don’t need to recreate materials and programs from scratch. It can be very cost effective if I am able to use my own resources and fold you into existing processes. I host and manage websites, post products to Amazon, handle news releases, create interview opportunities, host guest blog posts and podcasts, orchestrate events, create info product and manage shopping carts at little if any additional costs. There is little time spent by the client except for telephone interviews and final review of materials.

P.S. What I will not do is masquerade as your persona in social media. I believe that this typically backfires both in creditability and expected results.

Unbeknownst to me what I described in the starting points is the outline for Appreciative Inquiry. In parenthesis above; Definition, Discovery, Dream, Design and Destiny is the AI Process, which I detail below:

1. Definition: What frames our inquiry?
2. Discovery: What gives life?
3. Dream: What might be?
4. Design: What should be?
5. Destiny: What will be?

Never knew I was an Appreciative Inquiry guy!

Related Information:
Accentuate the Positive, Eliminate the Negative
Getting Resistance to Appreciative Inquiry?
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

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You wonder why it has taken organizations this long to start considering this approach.  My podcast guest, Sara Orem, co-author of Appreciative Coaching: A Positive Process for Change (Jossey-Bass Business & Management) expanded on this in the podcast:

Lions and tigers and bears. We lived in caves and there were wild animals and there were maybe not an ever present danger but there was an often present danger so we were wired to look for danger. The worrier in us will look for danger in the fact that we didn’t get a raise or we’ll look for danger in the fact that our significant other didn’t say good morning to us. We are negative beings and to some degree that’s also genetic.

Is that why problem solving is revered? And the feel good approach is not?

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download Here  or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Sara L.Orem, Ph.D. has twenty years of management experience and fifteen years management consulting in and to major financial services companies in the U. S., Britain and Australia. Her current focus is on the development and use of positive methods including Appreciative Inquiry in coaching and group processes. Appreciative Coaching describes in detail the method Sara has developed for her coaching practice which serves women and men looking at self-started transitions.

P.S. My favorite rendition of the song mentioned above is a Bette Midler & Bing Crosby rendition. Don’t miss this! This is my feel good strategy part of the post!

Appreciative Inquiry (sometimes shortened to “AI”) is primarily an organizational development method which seeks to engage all levels of an organization by taking an “asset-based approach.” It starts with the belief that every organization, and every person in that organization, has positive aspects that can be built upon. It asks questions like “What’s working well?”, “What’s good about what you are currently doing?” David Cooperrider is generally credited with coining the term ‘Appreciative Inquiry’.

Related Information:
Getting Resistance to Appreciative Inquiry?
The Strength of an Architect is in their Collaborative Abilities
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

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To learn more about them, I encourage you to read Simon’s PDF on the subject: Service innovation through touch-points: the AT-ONE touch-point cards or watch his presentation: Service Innovation through touch-points: the AT-ONE touch-point cards.

Simon had sent me the cards several months ago and I have used them several times now to explain how to create a Customer Journey Map or to facilitate Brainstorming idea. In these applications, they have met with a great deal of success. However, I have struggled when using them for direct applications ESPECIALLY IN THE SALES FIELD. I created an extension of the Touch-Point card to be used in the field.

These cards are not so much about ideas but the actual use of the Touch-point Card. It is a combination of the features of the AT-ONE Project and  the time management system called The Action Method. The Action Method is my management planner of choice. Scott Belsky’s (founder of Behance) book, Making Ideas Happen: Overcoming the Obstacles Between Vision and Reality, describes this approach. The methodology is based on boiling down projects to the most basic elements with an emphasis on action.

PDF Version of the Business901 Touch-Point card.

The Back of the card describes the WHAT we are trying to accomplish. This is the heart of the AT_ONE project and from Simon’s paper:

Touch-points are one of the central aspects of service design. They describe one of the major differences between products and services, and are the link between the service provider and the customer. In this way, touch-points are central to the customer experience. It is not surprising then, that touch points are mentioned as one of the three pillars of service design.

The Back of the Card also includes my rendition of The Action Method and which I coin ARTIC. It is essentially the elements to perform the touch point. The bottom of the card allows space to take note of several of the preceding and post Touch-points in the process.

The front of the card is specific to an individual Touch-point.  It gives you space to make sure that you have everything in order to perform the touch point and to record any points of interest. I use the term to describe it as a mini sales-report. The cards can be easily duplicated, used electronically and/or as a post-it-note in creating a journey map. Thoughts? Things I missed?

P.S. In Lean Terms these are very similar to TWI Pocket Cards.

Related Information:
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Evolution of Standard Work in my Sales and Marketing
GE CMO sheds her view on Design Thinking
A Service Design Thinking Primer

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Appreciative Inquiry (sometimes shortened to "AI") is primarily an organizational development method which seeks to engage all levels of an organization (and often its customers and suppliers) to renew, change and improve performance. Its exponents view it as being applicable to organizations facing rapid change or growth. David Cooperrider is generally credited with coining the term ‘Appreciative Inquiry’.

The Appreciative Inquiry model is based on the assumption that the questions we ask will tend to focus our attention in a particular direction. Some other methods of assessing and evaluating a situation and then proposing solutions are based on a deficiency model. Some other methods ask questions such as “What are the problems?”, “What’s wrong?” or “What needs to be fixed?”.

Instead of asking “What’s the problem?”, some other methods couch the question in terms of challenges, which AI argues maintains a basis of deficiency, the thinking behind the questions assuming that there is something wrong, or that something needs to be fixed or solved.

Appreciative Inquiry takes an alternative approach. As a self defined "asset-based approach" it starts with the belief that every organization, and every person in that organization, has positive aspects that can be built upon. It asks questions like “What’s working well?”, “What’s good about what you are currently doing?”

Some researchers believe that excessive focus on dysfunctions can actually cause them to become worse or fail to become better. By contrast, AI argues, when all members of an organization are motivated to understand and value the most favorable features of its culture, it can make rapid improvements.

Strength-based methods are used in the creation of organizational development strategy and implementation of organizational effectiveness tactics. The appreciative mode of inquiry often relies on interviews to qualitatively understand the organization’s potential strengths by looking at an organization’s experience and its potential; the objective is to elucidate the assets and personal motivations that are its strengths.

From the upcoming Business901 Podcast:

Joe:  What are some of the pushbacks that you get when Appreciative Inquiry is first addressed? Is there or do you just approach it positively that it’s really not a pushback?

Sarah:  I would say that I get lots of pushback. When I first was Dr. Orem and I was doing some consulting for a person who had been my boss and I said that I wanted to introduce a new sales program that we were going to do in a bank and we introduced the same sales person in a bank where this person had been my boss. He moved to another bank. I described how I wanted to initiate it with Appreciative Inquiry and he looked at me with his face scrunched up and I didn’t know what the scrunch meant but I knew something was coming that he didn’t like. He said to me, "Could we use different words?" The words for the four or five stages depending on how you characterize the very beginning are define, which is to define your topic, then discover, next is dream, then design, and finally, destiny.

Well, "dream" and "destiny" are woo woo, you know, words that we don’t use in organizations very much. Fortunately, I’d had a learner in one of my classes who was a consultant in Canada, and she dreamed up the four Is or four stages rather than discover, dream, design, and destiny, and I won’t be able to recite those to you right now, but they were essentially had the same meanings. They were much harder?edged organizational words.

One of the areas of pushback is the language of Appreciative Inquiry. One of the things that Cooperrider says is that words are so important; the words we use have different… People have different reactions to two words that essentially mean the same thing. So I think I have to be careful when I change those four stages to different words, and believe that I’m honoring his original intentions.

Words are one thing. The second thing is, there are lots and lots and lots and lots of people in organizations who believe that you should find the culprit, beat the culprit to a pulp, go about something new.

I don’t mean to be too cute about that, but what I’m saying is that the process is to really go looking for what’s wrong, then do a root cause analysis, which is how did it go wrong, and what’s really wrong, even though the presenting symptom may not be the whole thing, then design some sort of solution, or brainstorm about possible solutions, and then design an action plan.

When I tell people that there’s another way to do that and that we may end up in a better place, some people just don’t believe it. They don’t want to consider it; they don’t believe it, because they believe that problem?solving works for them. I don’t doubt it. I mean, I would never say it didn’t.

I just did a brief introduction to Appreciative Inquiry from my own website, and I said problem solving works if there’s something very specific that’s wrong, but if it’s a negative culture, for instance, in an organization, where do you start? I mean, what do you fix? Appreciative Inquiry really, really is, I think, a better way to approach systemic issues.ach

Could this be the missing link between Lean and Sales and Marketing? Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

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