Knowledge Jolt with Jack

The selfish teamwork created by buffers

2010-03-20T22:35:31Z

I have done a number of Critical Chain Project Management (CCPM) implementations in my Theory of Constraints practice, and I am always amazed at both the results and the business world in which these implementations happen. What I mean is that the specifics of CCPM are the same, but each business has different underlying issues that come out in a variety of ways. And it is often in the resolution of these underlying issues that the biggest benefits appear to be felt.

For example, IndustryWeek has a short piece on Tata Steel using CCPM in their scheduled maintenance, Bargain Machine Maintenance by Jonathan Katz.

The goal is to complete the entire project on time -- not just individual tasks, Sarkaread says. It also encourages teamwork. "The vice president of Tata Steel made a comment once, and he said, 'What happens when you have a formal buffer and it is visible to everybody, everybody realizes that he has a share in that buffer," Sarkaread recalls. "If somebody is consuming the buffer because he is stuck, then everyone wants to help him -- not because they want to do social service, but because they want to protect the buffer for themselves.'"

I like the spirit in which this statement is made. While people may be selfishly thinking that the buffer is "for me," they also see buffer consumption as a hazard that they have a responsibility for helping to recover. This is a behavior that can only be created by making it visible and available to everyone. And making it clear that while buffer consumption is neither good nor bad, the overall goal of the system is to complete projects on time.

Innovation in the time of revolutions

2010-03-15T10:25:32Z

[Title with apologies to several authors] For my Dad's birthday this year, I gave him a copy of Steven Johnson's The Invention of Air. He burned through it quickly, and then gave it to me to enjoy. And enjoy I did.

I don't quite know how I got on this kick of reading, but in the last year or two, I have read a number of books that are centered around the 18th and 19th Centuries and many of the discoveries and social upheavals that happened around that time. It's fascinating to learn about how these things are all inter-related.

The Invention of Air is a perfect combination of those topics. Just get a load of the subtitle: A Story of Science, Faith, Revolution, and the Birth of America. It is primarily the story of Joseph Priestly, credited with discovering oxygen and many other scientific finds - his book on electricity was a standard textbook for ~100 years. But he is also a theologian, founding the Unitarian Church. And he looked at social theory/politics, believing the revolutions in the fledgling United States and in France would happen in the UK and elsewhere. He even wrote on English grammar.

The book is engagingly written, describing Priestly in both his positive and negative qualities and how his work fits into the greater context of what was happening in England and on the larger global stage. One theme that was repeated throughout the story has to do with his deep interest in many areas: natural philosophy, religion, and politics being the primary areas. He was deeply curious in all these areas with the best evidence being his prodigious talent for writing in all these areas. The fact that he was interested in all these things was not enough to make him an important figure. He had the opportunity to interact with many of the leading thinkers of his time from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson to Antoine Lavoisier to the members of the Royal Society. Along with this wonderful social network, Priestly's vast interests also gave him an intellectual and idea network that was perfect for the age of amazing discoveries and thinking in this age. And on top of these fantastic networks of people and ideas, Priestly (and many others of this age) had another key quality: he had the leisure to explore these things.

Steven Johnson also makes the suggestion that we still need people like Priestly and Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin because they were able to blend ideas across many disciplines and do something with them. Having politicians who are only politicians, or scientists who are only scientists, or religious leaders who only know religion is not a good thing. We need people leading us who understand things like climate science, rather than dismissing it as something only eggheads can understand. I couldn't help think of my friend, Shannon Clark and his attempts at bringing together network thinkers of many varieties in MeshForum.

Speaking of chemistry. I just love the Periodic Table of Videos about each of the elements in the Periodic Table, thanks to the chemists at University of Nottingham.

Watch out, you have a constraint

2010-03-10T22:09:56Z

A friend pointed me to Leo Babauta on the creativity of constraints

Yes: constraints force us to be creative.

Often, constraints, limitations, are seen as a negative, but to me they’re a feature. They might restrict freedom and force sacrifices, sure, but they also force us to choose. And to work within and around the constraints.

Leo's focus is on personal constraints and creativity, but they apply in business as well. In fact, rewrite the above to be business-centric and it's the same.

Your business has a constraint. Find it. If it's not actively providing value, it is being wasted. If it isn't a constraint, it cannot by definition be providing value all the time. (And please don't attempt to balance capacity everywhere - that will guarantee more waste at your real constraint.)

[Photo: "Entrelac Torus" by fuzzyjay]

Planning is very important ... it doesn't work

2010-03-08T19:17:18Z

My kids (and the adults in the house) have been enjoying the "Rube Goldberg" OK Go video for the song, This Too Shall Pass. It's an impressively convoluted machine. There is also a "behind the scenes" video from Adam Sadowsky, president of the company that put the machine together. These are both embedded below.

The "behind the scenes" discussion talked about the setup of the problem and the requirements of the machine and the overall video. Right about in the middle of the video (3:40), Adam Sadowsky says something interesting in terms of what they've learned from doing this project:

planning is very important
planning doesn't work

Great, right? How do you respond to this?

Both statements are right on the money. If they hadn't planned, there is no chance they would have been able to accomplish what they wanted to do. At the same time, if they had decided that the plan was exactly what they were going to do, they would have never made it either.

The plan is not the goal of the project. The plan is the current, best picture of how we think we are going to get from here to there. It's important to get that picture in the minds of the people who will be on the project. But if you don't allow them to deviate when the bridge washes out, how can you expect them to reach the goal? They must deviate. And in the case of this video, it sounds like they deviated all over the place: many of the original elements of the machine didn't make it into the final cut.

So. The goal is to finish. And the plan is the path we think we are going to take. But once the project is alive, do whatever it takes to make it happen.

The OK Go video for This Too Shall Pass.

Behind the scenes on the construction of the Rube Goldberg machine by Adam Sadowsky, president of Syyn Labs - the people who helped design and build the machine.

Digital Barbarism: one angry guy

2010-03-05T17:30:21Z

A brief review: Mark Helprin is one angry man.

U.S. Copyright is embedded in the Constitution, thanks to James Madison in a provision "to secure to literary authors their copyrights for a limited time." (from the US Copyright brief history)

Mark Helprin wrote Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto in reaction to the massive and overwhelmingly negative reaction he got in response an op-ed he wrote on the extension of the term of copyright. As the majority of this reaction came through in comments on the piece directly or in blogs, wikis and other electronic media, the title Digital Barbarism seems to fit.

Helprin runs through the wide array of arguments thrown at him by members of the anti-copyright crowd. He uses analogies. He references events and stories from his own life. He references the same authors as the anti-copyright movement to refute what they are suggesting. He brings in references to literature and thinkers that inform the argument - asking/forcing the reader to see the bigger picture. And over and over again, Helprin is angry or annoyed or bemused by his critics.

My reaction to the book - not knowing the full scale of the sentiment against copyright - is that Helprin could tone down the anger and present the arguments in a much more condensed fashion. But then, as becomes clear, the scale and tone of the onslaught was such that this was the only thing that made sense for him. It has also given me a better appreciation for some of the aspects of copyright that I gloss over or don't understand as well.

And amid all the anger that he directs back to the anti-copyright crowd, he also admits that nothing is perfect. His understanding may not be complete, and he acknowledges that there are some aspects of the current practice of copyright that need to be updated and improved in response to the new technologies - just as the idea of copyright had to be invented with the widespread ability to make copies with printing presses. And if he wasn't so incensed, the book would make for pretty dry reading - or might not have gotten written at all.

Disclaimer: I am not an anti-copyright person. I have seen Lawrence Lessig speak (a proponent of copyright overhaul). My father-in-law is an intellectual property attorney. I keep a Creative Commons copyright on my blog. I've published a PhD thesis that has copyright attached.

[Photo: my own creation]

Managing via email fails

2010-03-05T02:08:56Z

A friend on Twitter pointed me to a simple post from Chance Bliss. It's only one paragraph and the title basically tells you everything: Managing projects through email sucks. But in case that isn't enough, here is the first sentence.

There are many ways to sabotage a project, but the one I find the most effective is email.

Good stuff! This statement can be just as easily applied to the business at large. Email is fine for the transmission of facts and some information, but directing people and asking for more nuanced information via email is just asking for trouble. In most cases, this just fails outright. How many times have you seen emails pinging back and forth when a simple phone call or office drop in could resolve the question then and there?

The struggle for many people and organizations is that they see no other way to work than via email because it has become so deeply ingrained in the way of doing things.

Here is a suggestion: Instead of sending email, step back for ten seconds and reflect on: Does this need to be sent? Can I contact the person directly instead?

Metaphors I like with bikes and elements

2010-03-03T03:44:46Z

I run across plenty of articles, either through friends pointing me to interesting things or via my feed reader and the interesting stuff people write outright. As everyone knows, there are far too many. But... here are a couple articles with metaphors that work for me. And they are related to the interests of this blog.

Chris Grams has Three tips for escaping the creativity peloton without giving up on collaboration which uses the bicycle racing image of the peloton as the connection to collaboration. The members of the peloton must work together, but at some point the winner has to jump out of the pack and cross the line first. It takes leadership, shared vision, and people who are working for the win. Chris argues the same has to happen in organizations.

The ever-prolific Robert Scoble has Coming soon: the disruptive molecular age of information in which he likes all the material out there on the web to "atoms" and the painful job of bringing those atoms together into "molecules" as something that may become more automated. As it stands now, it takes humans time and energy to do this: kind of like I've done in this brief article. Robert wants to see tools that help us be better at making the molecules we want to build. The logical connection here would be to the data-information-knowledge-wisdom hierarchy, but that's not really where Robert is going. He just wants to be able to supplement the human capability to blend and meld disparate ideas - to make it easier for people to make those molecules, rather than mucking about in the laboratory.

[Photo: "Raleigh Record" by Dave Elmore]

Beyond lurking - Modes of participation

2010-03-02T03:50:51Z

There are many modes of participation in a community. You can be the leader, driving action and encouraging others to jump in. You can be one of the many regular people who raise their hand to do things and respond to events within the community. And you can be one of the many more who are members of the community who only actively participate on an infrequent basis.

But even among these big buckets, there are additional distinctions. People who have been leaders fall back into regular participant mode or even idle participant mode. The level of engagement of the entire community changes, and the resulting mix of people in various roles changes. Or the reverse happens: the mix of people changes, creating a change in the sense of the community. Or both. Or a simple change of venue causes the community to operate differently. And for the individual, there are many reasons as to why they "lurk" beyond the first assumptions about time and fear.

Two posts in my feed reader - right next to each other - have me pondering this. First off, Nancy White asks for References on Lurking - or as she calls it "legitimate peripheral participation" - and then there is Lurking, a Personal Story from Andrew Gent. Andrew talks about his personal perspective about why he has gone from active community member to a lurker - an aspect that many of the lurker discussions ignore.

To answer Nancy's question, one of the first things I thought of was a Communications of the ACM article I read and wrote about a while back on Encouraging participation in virtual communities. I liked the notion in that research that the leaders and more active participants have some role in encouraging ongoing participation - beyond the cajoling of people to get their backs up off the wall. And then there is the Ladder of Participation, which delves into the layers of engagement on a different framework. Jakob Nielson generated a lot of excitement in his delving into the 1-9-90 discussion, and I wrote about it too. And finally, one of my favorite comments on the topic of "being a lurker" was in Lurking builds commonality

... broadcast television is (was?) all about building common understanding across the populace. Everyone was a "lurker," but we were being informed, so that next-morning conversations over coffee had a common basis.

[Photo "lurking" by massdistraction]

KM in the media - Toyota recall

2010-02-26T08:44:24Z

One of the original rallying cries behind knowledge management was, "If we only knew what we know."* 20 years ago that got hijacked into building knowledge bases, which didn't answer this cry. And now we have KM 2.0, and if it is still all about the technology, it still won't answer the cry. Here's a current media example of the inevitable result.

The recent Toyota recall and particularly the reporting of the U.S. congressional hearings on the subject turned up at least one tidbit related to knowledge management. Today's article in the International Herald Tribune isn't published online yet, U.S. official takes heat at Toyota hearing by Micheline Maynard, who seems to be a key reporter on this topic for the NY Times.

The KM connection? It turns out information and concerns about the sticking accelerator was known and fixed in Europe at least a year before it became a problem in the U.S.

Mr. Inaba ... acknowledged that Toyota had been aware of issues with sticking pedals in Europe for over a year before accidents were reported in the United States.

What happened? Toyota is regarded as an advanced company with practices in manufacturing and continuous improvement that have made it one of the biggest automobile manufacturers in the world. The Toyota Production System has been the subject of books and education around the world. Toyota are even regarded as a Most Admired Knowledge Enterprise.

This is what happened.

Mr. Inaba said the information had been contained in a company database but that it could have been found only if a staff member had known where to look.

I have no knowledge beyond what has has been reported in the media. This could be an isolated example or an extensive problem throughout the company. Given this one sentence, I will leap to the conclusion that the problem wasn't discovered due to an artifact of how the business operates. The fact that no one in the company discovered the issue in the database is a symptom. Whose job is it to do this kind of thing? Is it one specific person (or role)? Is it the job of everyone in the business to seek out this information? What is the business process when potential problems happen?

* I believe it came from an HP executive. It's also the name of a If Only We Knew What We Know">Carla O'Dell book.

[Photo: "Rallying cry" by joffley]

Communities Manifesto from Stan Garfield

2010-02-23T01:06:47Z

Stan Garfield posted an interesting Communities Manifesto that describes 10 principles of communities and goes some way toward differentiating between teams and communities. This is all based on his direct experience in the area. His description:

Communities are groups of people who, for a specific subject, share a specialty, role, passion, interest, concern, or a set of problems. Community members deepen their understanding of the subject by interacting on an ongoing basis, asking and answering questions, sharing information, reusing good ideas, solving problems for one another, and developing new and better ways of doing things.

I particularly like the sense here that the community is about people sharing common interests without need for specific deliverables. There may be a lot of reasons for those common interests in real-life communities, but the key thing that brings them together is that shared passion for their subject of choice.

The main space for discussion has been the SIKM Leaders group that Stan created several years ago. And that discussion has been one of the more interesting and involved on this particular mailing list. (The main focus of the group is to host monthly live phone discussions on a KM-related topic, but discussions will sometimes bubble amongst the membership.)

And those ten principles of communities? Please be sure to dive into the document, if you want to read more of his perspective and thoughts on these items.

Communities should be independent of organization structure; they are based on what members want to interact on.
Communities are different from teams; they are based on topics, not on assignments.
Communities are not sites, team spaces, blogs or wikis; they are people who choose to interact.
Community leadership and membership should be voluntary; you can suggest that people join, but should not force them to.
Communities should span boundaries; they should cross functions, organizations, and geographic locations.
Minimize redundancy in communities; before creating a new one, check if an existing community already addresses the topic.
Communities need a critical mass of members; take steps to build membership.
Communities should start with as broad a scope as is reasonable; separate communities can be spun off if warranted.
Communities need to be actively nurtured; community leaders need to create, build, and sustain communities.
Communities can be created, led, and supported using TARGETs: Types, Activities, Requirements, Goals, Expectations, Tools.

Thanks for this resource, Stan!

[Photo: "Frozen 085 Marius Watz: Sound memory (Oslo Rain Manifesto)" by Marius Watz]

When these tools actually work

2010-02-22T16:26:17Z

Chris Brogan, who I've met once or twice thanks to the active social media network in Boston, always has interesting thoughts on how and where this stuff applies. Today he has an article that steps away from the minutia and looks forward, When This All Gets Cool

Social media are a bunch of tools. They let us see things a bit differently. They empowered new ways of working together. But they’re just the tools. When this all gets cool is when we start really turning this stuff on our own passion projects, on our bigger goals, on what COULD happen.

Software and tools are fun to play with and try out. Check out the workshop of any woodworker or the scrap bin of an avid seamstress. And eventually they decide on the best ways to use the tools at hand to make something.

It's the same with software (social or not). You try out a new package, a new website, a new plug-in. With social software, you try it with your friends - and many people hear about it from their friends and gape or scoff, depending on their own interests. But after the trial period comes the point of really USING this stuff in real life. Does it make sense for me? Does it make some aspect of my life easier (not just different) and more manageable? Does it create some new capability or capacity that never existed before? Does it create a secondary problem that is likely to reduce its value? Even better: does it eliminate or significantly reduce some problem ("pain point")?

Get out there and DO something!

[Photo: "pantograph pattern scraps from Carter Latin" by Nick Sherman]

Expertise is about experience and knowledge

2010-02-21T18:35:44Z

And experience and knowledge are rather difficult to stuff into a database.

The discussion of expertise never fails to entertain and inform - at least for me. I think Harold Jarche has the same sensibility, repeating some bits of conversation in his Information is free; Experience is expensive post. The post consists of tweets and some other quotes relating to expertise, and then he closes with the title quote from @JPBarlow.

@JPBarlow Information is free. Experience is expensive.

And I think this is something that the technologists don't fully appreciate. The technology looks shiny and pretty, so we tend to look at it and convince ourselves that it will solve the problem. It is relatively easy to collect information (assuming it is somewhere) and make correlations about who knows what, based on authorship and social graph information. But then taking that next step into engaging that experts on a new subject or in an area that seems to be related to what they know, that takes you out of the technology and back to the knowledge and experience that they've gained - and that companies pay for. And it is back to the human activities.

[Photo: "Inner Experience" by ecstaticist]

Leaders setting the stage

2010-02-19T19:19:21Z

I get a bi-weekly e-newsletter from the American Management Association that occasionally has an article that gives me a reason to blog. This time it is Super Size Productivity Now: 3% Automation, 97% Leadership by Kathleen Brush. She talks about how organizations can create more real productivity - and it's nearly all down to leadership, according to this article.

Organizations that want to supersize productivity must maintain a dual focus on automation and employee motivation. Companies will soon find that productivity that sustains organizations is 3% automation and 97% leadership. Developing motivational leaders is a two step process: (1) Exterminate demotivating practices and behaviors; and (2) address the drivers of motivation.

As you might guess from this excerpt, the article is mostly around motivation and the depressing statistics from the Deloitte Shift Index that while productivity is up, employee morale continues to drop.

One element that this doesn't address is the need for focus that management can provide - and that they often kill by sending mixed messages. In this sense, management's job is to provide the clear signals about priority and focus. There can only be one priority system and it needs to remain stable over long periods. No more telling people that X is the top priority today and then asking them to shift tomorrow to Y and then again to Z on the next day. And make sure your measurement systems don't encourage behaviors that don't support the focus.

What is culture

2010-02-18T18:54:13Z

What is "culture?" Patrick Dunn asks that question in Culture eats strategy for breakfast - yes! But let's be clear what culture is. I often talk about culture as a key element of knowledge management implementations as well as just about any other large change initiative. If the change and the culture clash, it is often the culture that wins out. But what do we mean by the idea of culture?

From Patrick's article, I liked the bullseye drawing that suggests many different ways to look at "culture" with the center being more stable and (probably) difficult to change. The graphic is his too, in case the formatting doesn't make that clear.

The diagram on the right is a simplified version of various theorists' views of what culture is (have a look at Trompenaars, Hofstede, Adler and others). It suggests that culture exists and operates at various levels. What's important in relation to social media is that, for example, an organisation can try to cultivate norms and behaviour in terms of social learning, and put in place the infrastructure to do so (i.e. the signs and symbols level); but if the fundamental beliefs in the organisation don't actively encourage social learning, it's all pointless.

I really like this last point. If the fundamental beliefs are out of line with the desired change, you are in for a real challenge. It isn't completely hopeless, but you have to be willing to dig a little deeper with your implementation. Specifically, how does The Change (whether it is a new software or new organizational structure or ...) relate to the core beliefs and values of the organization - of the people that form the organization? What do you need to modify about The Change to align better with those core beliefs? How can you modify the outer rings to align better with The Change?

[Found via a Shared item on Google Reader.]

Simplifying Innovation with TOC

2010-02-10T06:02:01Z

I am on a serious roll with business novels. This time it is the newly-published Simplifying Innovation by Michael A. Dalton. The basic idea behind this book is to apply Theory of Constraints ideas to the process of innovation. Overall, I thought the book did a good job of putting it all together, though it may feel a bit rushed.

The interesting take in this book is that Theory of Constraints is already familiar to the main character - as applied in manufacturing. She doesn't know where to begin in new product development and gets the assistance of an old friend from the local college, who knows TOC. And Dalton uses this connection to present the basics of Theory of Constraints in one or two pages, rather than re-deriving TOC from scratch. For newcomers to TOC, this could be an overly-quick introduction with the characters seeming to "get" TOC very quickly - although some of the characters are certainly hold-outs.

And the book goes through the TOC ideas in a step-by-step fashion, just as a good TOC analysis would do. One of the first things is to identify the goal of the business. For profit-seeking enterprises it is some version of "make money now and in the future." Innovation is all about the "in the future" part of this equation. And from there, one applies the Five Focusing Steps to the organization. 1. What limits your ability to get more of the goal (the constraint)? I like how the book acknowledges that each organization is going to have a different constraint, so the prescriptions have to be taken at this high level. In the book, one company has a constraint at the design engineering step, and a second company has a constraint in coming up with enough good ideas. Obviously, the answers to the subsequent questions are very different, depending on the location of the constraint.

Once you know where the constraint is, the focusing steps take you through more questions. 2. How can you get more from the constraint? 3. How should the rest of the organization align to that constraint? 4. Then consider elevating the constraint, if you still need more. 5. And don't rest on your laurels, check if the constraint has moved, and consider whether you want it to move from a strategic perspective.

A couple interesting things came out of the book, based on my own experience and knowledge. I was somewhat expecting the book to talk about applying Critical Chain Project Management to new product development, but it didn't do that directly. Instead, applying the five focusing steps, CCPM comes up as a technique to help with exploiting the constraint. And the book suggests that several actions taken as part of a CCPM implementation should be considered as the higher-level application of TOC to the entire innovation process. For example, you only need to cut out excess work-in-process if that is actually a problem in your particular environment. And aligning the rest of the business to the constraint? It does not mean simply "leave the constraint alone." The rest of the business should be looking for ways to help the constraint - and the book provides a couple examples where that can be very effective.

For people already in the TOC community some of this material may be familiar - Dalton even acknowledges as much in the introduction. That said, it is a nice description of how the pieces can work together. And, if you don't get it from the story, Dalton provides a decent set of end notes and a website with extra resources, including the entire end notes. Clarke Ching published an interview with Mike Dalton a few weeks ago that provides some more context to Dalton's take on innovation and TOC. If you don't like the business novel format, Dalton said that he's hoping to come out with a "Simplifying Innovation Guidebook" in the near future. And Dalton has joined the Critical Chain / cmsig mailing list and has participated in a few conversations.

One last thought. With so many of these TOC-applied-to-X-business books available, the old argument of TOC being a manufacturing-only discipline doesn't hold much water. Certainly, Goldratt and others have known this for a long time.

[Photo: "Innovation Depot" by Photo Denbow]