Yesterday evening I was back in Paris to give a presentation about “Lean and the Toyota Way“. As I walked from the train station to the offices of Zenika, I came across a large billboard announcing “Dorothy et le magicien d’Oz”. It’s reassuring to see that the fairytales are alive and well.
My friends at Zenika had arranged a nice place and provided some fine drinks and snacks. More than 100 people showed up, among them many of the French Agilistas. I chatted for a while with them about agile, lean and the upcoming XP Days France.
And then it was time to start the presentation. The auditorium was almost completely full.
The Toyota Way
The presentation explained the 14 principles of The Toyota Way of Managing and the many parallels with Agile methods. As I go through the principles I illustrate them with stories from projects I’ve worked on. Each time I do this presentation it changes, as I learn more and discover more great ideas in Lean.
There were some great questions and discussions:
“What can I do to introduce more Lean and Agile in my organisation?” – Apply the principles and values, set an example. Support and collaborate with others who apply these values.
“Are there any incompatibilities between Lean and XP?” – None that I can see.
“For Agile and Lean transformations to succeed we need support from management and workers. Often, we only have support from one of them.”
“Lean coaches are very direct, not afraid of saying it as it is to management. Is that something they’re taught?” – It does seem so, judging from the documentary Kenji Hiranabe showed at Agile 2008, where a Lean coach almost made a factory manager cry by bluntly pointing out all the flaws in the production line.
“Does Lean make you lose weight?” – A Gemba Walk a day helps 🙂
Unfortunately, I couldn’t stay for drinks afterwards because I had to rush to catch the last train back to Brussels. The next day I had another team to coach, another opportunity to “Develop exceptional people and teams”, the tenth principle of the Toyota Way.
Jean-Claude Grosjean summarizes the principles and contrasts them with the 7 principles of Lean Software Development and Agile.
Nicolas Martignole wrote a very extensive report on each of the principles and relates Lean, Scrum and XP.
Claude Aubry thinks “Obeya” is more beautiful than “War Room”. I fully agree. He currently tries to recreate the Obeya experience for an offshore team.
Thank you for the rapid and very detailed feedback!
Father Christmas brought me a large stack of books. First off is an easy read, the new Malcolm Gladwell book “Outliers: The Story of Success“. In the book, Gladwell tries to dig deep to explain the causes of unusually successful people, the outliers that are so far beyond the statistical norm that they seem magical.
Why do some people become hugely successful corporate lawyers, wealthy captains of industry, billionnaire IT entrepreneurs or hockey stars?
First of all, there’s talent. But talent isn’t enough. It takes effort, practice and hard training to develop that talent. Gladwell states that you need at least 10,000 hours of practice and illustrates the number with examples of The Beatles, Mozart, Bill Gates and Bill Joy.
But talent and practice by themselves are not enough to explain the cases Gladwell examines.
It’s not only who you are, but where you come from
For example, if you look at the month of birth of successful Canadian hockey players, the statistics show that most of them are born in the first months of the year. A few years ago I heard about the study that showed the same weird result for Belgian football players. Coincidence? Fluke? Is there something in the air in those months that gives babies an edge in sports? Gladwell doesn’t think so.
You see, there’s a cutoff date to select promising young players. That date happens to be the end of the year. The children who are born in january are just a few days too young to be eligible, so they have to wait until next year. By then, they are 11 months older than the eligible children born in December. They are stronger, smarter and have had more practice. They are more likely to stand out, get selected and profit from intensive training given to talented children.
A similar case can be made for successful IT entrepreneurs: they were all at the right age and in the right environment to profit from the availability of computer time to develop and apply their skills.
Held back by systemic constraints
In the case of the hockey players, it is likely that children born in December are (on average) as talented and hard working as those born in January. If they don’t get selected, a lot of talent and effort is wasted.
Gladwell calls the rate at which talents make it the “capitalisation rate”. The capitalisation rate for hockey players is lower than it could be. Why? Because of an arbitrary systemic constraint: the decision to select and sign young talents based on one cut off day. This effect is known and repeatable across the world. When the cut off date changes, the distribution of children is changed accordingly. We’ve all been subject to this systemic constraint because schools work with a fixed calendar.
If we wish to raise the capitalisation rates, we need to tackle similar systemic constraints. One hopeful chapter describes how a school system improves the results of its pupils. First they notice the systemic constraint:
children from richer backgrounds do better after the summer holiday as they have lots of stimulating activities;
children from poorer backgrounds do worse after the summer holiday as their environment is much less stimulating.
The solution: less vacation and more school. Which also leads to more hours of practice, the second factor of success. Which leads to more opportunities to succeed and provide a stimulating environment to their children.
The chapter about plane crashes is chilling. The chapter contains several transcripts from cockpit conversations right before a crash. One common element comes back: the pilot makes a set of small mistakes and no one dares to speak up.
Some airlines have many more accidents than others. These statistics correlate with the culture of the country of the airline. Geert Hofstede has compiled a set of cultural dimensions for countries. One of the dimensions is “Uncertainty Avoidance”. A high score indicates a culture that doesn’t like ambiguity, relies on procedures and plans and is likely to stick to procedure regardless of circumstance. Another dimension is the “Power Distance Index”: a high score indicates that authority is very respected and a more powerful or knowledgeable person will not be questioned easily.
Do high Uncertainty Avoidance and Power Distance scores correlate with high numbers of airline incidents? Yes. If something goes wrong you want people to speak up and consider alternatives to the routine. Knowing this, training can take into account the differences. For example, techniques to lower the power distance can be taught and applied in the cockpit. Again, dealing with the systemic constraints brings dramatic improvements.
What have we learned today?
I got two lessons out of this book.
First, the capitalisation rate on our teams. It is sometimes said that “Agile only works with really good people and teams”. That’s true. But Agile also makes the people a lot better by providing them with a better environment, support and many learning opportunities. We create communities, conferences and help each other get better. We raise the capitalisation rates within IT. But we can do a lot more if we have the courage to tackle the systemic constraints. For example:
Why are there fewer women than men in IT?
Why is IT seen as a “young man’s game”? Why don’t we value experience more (and keep reinventing yesterday’s mistakes)? Don’t we need to put in our 10,000 hours to become proficient? Well, at least many of us put in many hours in death marches. I don’t know if that’s useful practice, though…
Why the division into “Business” vs “IT”? Aren’t we in this together?
Why the division into development, testing, maintenance, operations? Isn’t it all one value stream?
<your favourite constraint here>.
What small thing can you do to raise the capitalisation rate?
Secondly, Belgium was used as an example of a country with a high “Uncertainty Avoidance” culture. Yeah, we’re great at creating little rules to organise everything. We’re also great at breaking the rules, because they keep us from doing any useful work. But nobody must know we broke the rule, because we’re also a culture with a very high “Power Distance Index”. In this, we’re quite similar to France. Now, that’s not a culture that’s naturally predisposed to accept Agile methods. Except maybe, when they’re introduced top-down and are very structured?
On the other hand, The Netherlands and Scandinavian countries have a much lower Uncertainty Avoidance and Power Distance Index score. One would expect that they would accept Agile methods more easily.
Have a look at the scores for your country. Do they correlate in any way with the success and ease of introducing Agile?
Watch Gladwell present some of the ideas in the book:
On the 21st of January 2009 I’ll be in Paris to present an evening seminar on how to apply the Toyota Way management principles to Agile software development. The seminar is organised by Carl Azoury and Olivier Huber of Zenika.
To me, Agile is the application of Lean principles to software development. So, the presentation contains a lot of parallels between the two. A lot will be very familiar if you already know and practice Agile.
So, what’s left to learn? Some of the Toyota Way management principles aren’t in Agile methods. These principles are useful when we go beyond software development. There comes a moment in any successful Agile enablement when the development team is no longer the bottleneck. Suddenly, we’re faced with a completely different set of issues. Now that Agile gains more and more acceptance, we need to be able to deal with these new challenges or accept that most Agile transformations will either die or bring limited extra business value.
The more I read and learn about Toyota, the more I realise how much I don’t know and how many preconceived ideas I have to abandon. I need to keep learning. The Toyota Product Development System, for example, contains many counter-intuitive ideas like set-based design. Real Options thinking can help us understand why some of these techniques work. We’ve only started to scratch the surface of Lean ideas.
Toyota losing money? Impossible!
In the news, even Toyota is affected by the economic climate. They might even have to post the first loss since the early years. Isn’t Toyota invincible and perfect? Of course not. It will be a real show of faith in the Toyota Way if Toyota continue to keep on their workers, keep training them and keep improving to be ready when sales take off again.
Secretly, top Toyota management must be happy that this crisis happens now. One of their main concerns is complacency. No one should ever think that the work is “done”, now that Toyota is the biggest manufacturer. Hansei and Kaizen should be applied relentlessly, it’s always possible to do better. Nothing better than tough economic times to bring back the sense of urgency.
See you in Paris
The seminar is free, but you must register here. Don’t wait too long because places are limited.
Dennett used the metaphor that “Consciousness is Fame in the Brain”.
Lots of stuff is going on all the time in our brain. Information is changed, updated and revised (the “multiple drafts” model), distributed in time and space. Some of this activity wins a competition for attention and becomes “famous”. That’s when we become conscious of the activity.
We can make a clear distinction between conscious and unconscious, but we can’t pinpoint an exact time when something becomes conscious. A thought becoming conscious is like a “speciation event” (the start of a new species): the moment when it happened only becomes important in retrospect. An observer who was there at the moment it happened wouldn’t notice anything very special. Consciousness isn’t an all or nothing phenomenon. Are animals conscious? A lot less than humans. Is a baby conscious? Less than an adult and in a more limited way. As it grows it becomes more conscious and conscious of more.
The Cartesian Fallacy
Dennett warns us against the seductive “Cartesian Theater”, the idea that there is some special place (and time) in the brain where consciousness exists. As if there is some homunculus in the brain that is conscious and that watches and controls all the unconscious processes. But then, how can we explain that consciousness in terms of unconscious processes? We’d be stuck in an infinite regress. Subtle versions of this idea are very common.
Another common fallacy is to confuse the time of the represented with the time of representing. For example, when we hear the sentence “Bill arrived at the party after Tom”, we will first represent Bill, then Tom. But our representation indicates that Tom arrived before Bill. Our mind has clever tricks to deal with time-related issues. Signaling and processing in our bodies and brain is rather slow, so our brain will adjust the ‘timestamp’ of information received by taking into account the expected ‘travel time’ of the signal. Neurological experiments can exploit this adjustment so that it seems to the subject as if actions happen before they’ve initiated them.
When Dennett explains these fallacies, they seem pretty obvious. Yet, only a few months ago I read an article by a philosopher who claimed that a neurological experiment that ‘cheated’ the brain into thinking that actions had been performed before they had been decided showed that people have no free will. More on free will later.
The Heterophenomenological Method
Heterophenomenological Method is a big word to describe a method of enquiry where when someone tells us “It feels like <this> is happening in my brain” we certainly accept that this is how it feels. That doesn’t mean it actually happens that way. Another metaphor: when we investigate consciousness, we should act like a Martian investigator, looking for the objective mechanisms behind the subjective report.
Daniel Hutto questioned, with a presentation on the edge of “Bimbo slides“, whether Martians could really investigate us if they were devoid of a human body like the Martians in Wells’ “War of the Worlds”. Is the Heterophenomenological method really feasible? Hutto proposed to relax the requirements, because experience is crucial to understand.
Who’s “I” ?
Someone asked if consciousness could arise in a distributed “organism”. Dennett replied it could if the architecture was right. In many ways, we are a “colony” of many organisms. After the “Wisdom of the Crowds“, can there be a “Consciousness of the Crowds”? “Fame in the Crowd”…
Another question that arises is: what is “I”? Where is it? Is it the conscious part of me, like the Cartesian Theater would suggest? Or is the I more encompassing, including unconscious processes and the body?
I know how it feels it works.
About heroes
This summer, in a discussion about heroes, I realised that the people I admire have one thing in common: they’ve made me see things in a different way.
“The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeing new landscapes, but in having new eyes.” — Marcel Proust
Yesterday someone told me “Consulting is easy. You just say to management what we’ve been saying for years!”
People tell me that all the time.
My standard answer is: “You’re right. I just listen to people. They usually tell me what the problem is within 5 minutes. They tell me what the solution is in the next 10 minutes. Easy.” (The 5-minute Rule)
The rest of the day is filled with fooling around with word processors and presentation software. And playing with index cards, whiteboards, stickers and other silly stuff of course! 😉
Consulting ain’t as easy as it looks (The Number One Secret)
But if it was so easy, why did this person need to repeat their message for years? Why wasn’t the message heard or acted upon?
Giving advice isn’t easy. Getting advice is even harder. The Secret of Consulting is that you have to be heard to have an effect.
Everybody who wants to be heard, not only consultants, should read this book at least once per year.
But, why does this customer need a consultant if their employees could give them the same advice, essentially for free? Why don’t they hear?
Everybody who wants to hear, not only consultants, should read this book at least once per year.
Real Lean
I hear a lot of talk about “Lean”, including at this customer. When asked about it, most people will say something about “eliminating waste”. Some may even mention “Japanese”, “flow” or “quality”.
Real Lean is making use of the collective wisdom of everybody in the organisation. Real Lean companies don’t need consultants. Everybody’s a consultant in a Real Lean company.
If you can’t accept failure, you’ll never succeed as a consultant (The Hard Law)
Most of the time, for most of the world, no matter how hard people work at it, nothing of any significance happens. (Weinberg’s Law of Twins)
No matter how many books you’ve read, your advice will be neglected, misunderstood or mis-applied some of the time. Or, more likely, you will give the wrong advice at the wrong time to the wrong person.
There are no perfect consultants. There are consultants who work on easy problems most of the time.
Some of the time, in some places, significant change happens – especially when people aren’t working hard at it. (Weinberg’s Law of Twins Inverted).
Helping myself is even harder than helping others (The Hardest Law)
Everybody who wants to hear or be heard should read The Secrets of Consulting at least once per year.
I’ve just started re-reading it. I rediscover at least one gem on each of its 200 pages each time I read it.
A lean evening
The Toyota Way
