Gemba Panta Rei is one of my favourite blogs about Continuous Improvement and Lean. Here is a great recent post that is worth a read:  A Life of Mistakes by Cynical, Unreasonable People

It includes three nice quotes from George Bernard Shaw that you might want to use in discussions about continuous improvement and Lean

• A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable, but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
• The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it.
• The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.

Worth a read

Jim Trott

If your team is involved in providing services or product to “clients” and you want to learn to continuously improve and to delight those clients, I highly recommend the book, Radical Management by Stephen Denning. This book applies equally well to small teams, micro-business, not-for-profit, and larger corporate entities. It offers a repeatable and scalable approach.

Denning has put into one package a number of the project / program management techniques I use in my consulting practice. He discusses seven basic principles:

• Focus work on delighting the “client”
• Do work through self-organizing teams
• Do work in “client”-driven iterations
• Deliver value to “clients” in each iteration
• Be totally open about impediments to improvement
• Create a context for continuous self-improvement by the team
• Communicate interactively: stories, questions, conversations

And then does a good job of describing the practices under each one and showing how they relate to many different contexts, both commercial and not-for-profit (i.e., it is not just for business J)

He does a great job combining stories, theory, and specific practices.

I put this on my bookshelf right next to Michael Gerber’s E-Myth Revisited (also highly recommended).

Learning to delight more.

Steve Denning writes a great article in Forbes, “How Do You Change an Organizational Culture.” It is worth reading. He begins by noting that

“Changing an organization’s culture is one of the most difficult leadership challenges. That’s because an organization’s culture comprises an interlocking set of goals, roles, processes, values, communications practices, attitudes and assumptions. The elements fit together as an mutually reinforcing system and combine to prevent any attempt to change it. ”

That’s why single-fix changes, such as the introduction of teams, or Lean, or Agile, or Scrum, or knowledge management, or some new process, may appear to make progress for a while, but eventually the interlocking elements of the organizational culture take over and the change is inexorably drawn back into the existing organizational culture.

My friend calls this the “Organizational Immune System.” Change can happen for a little while but then the cultural systems surround and block off the change. Inertia is one of the hardest forces to overcome. And lots of attempts to change just fail because they don’t take this into account.

After reviewing the experience of the World Bank (one of the most widely noted example of knowledge management in the literature) and its leaders, he offers a few conclusions about what that would-be leader of change should do:

• Do come with a clear vision of where you want the organization to go and promulgate that vision rapidly and forcefully with leadership storytelling.
• Do identify the core stakeholders of the new vision and drive the organization to be continuously and systematically responsive to those stakeholders.
• Do define the role of managers as enablers of self-organizing teams and draw on the full capabilities of the talented staff.
• Do quickly develop and put in place new systems and processes that support and reinforce this vision of the future, drawing on the practices of dynamic linking.
• Do introduce and consistently reinforce the values of radical transparency and continuous improvement.
• Do communicate horizontally in conversations and stories, not through top-down commands.
• Don’t start by reorganizing. First clarify the vision and put in place the management roles and systems that will reinforce the vision.
• Don’t parachute in a new team of top managers. Work with the existing managers and draw on people who share your vision.

It is interesting how much this resembles other writings on effective change. Such as the great book, Engaged Leadership.

I am in the planning stages of a transition in my organization. The change itself is pretty straightforward: introducing a new form that will help teams assess their performance over time and relative to other teams. The form helps the team have a routine intentional, reflective conversation about how they are doing in specific, known good practices. It sounds pretty normal and yet it is still a big change. Most of these teams are used to doing things their own way and naturally are skeptical of the “central office” poking its nose where it is not wanted. It is pretty much like many other KM-related projects I have done.

The challenge for us at the moment is to be sure that leadership is paying attention to the change, to the transition from ending the old ways and starting the new ways, while not making such a big deal about it that we don’t cause problems unintentionally. Clearly, leaders are worried about this.

A friend runs the organizational development arm of a large company here in the Pac Northwest. He turned me on to William Bridge’s excellent book, Managing Transitions: Making the Most of Change. Bridges offers a number of interesting articles at William Bridges and Associates Articles.

I’ll share what we are learning as we work through this process. And I’d love to hear your ideas for what works and what to avoid.

Remember my comments about observation? One of the podcasts I pay attention to is the BBC’s Peter Day. He offers a “series of programmes about the whole world of work, public and private, from vast corporations to modest volunteers.”

The 04 April 2010 program, “Who sets our standards?” got me thinking about the importance of standards in stewarding knowledge. This is something you want to embrace in order to succeed in stewarding knowledge.

A “standard” is an agreement between a group of people about good ways to do things. It is a way to preserve what has been learned and make it accessible to other teammates,  organisations, and practitioners. It also becomes a vehicle for improving knowledge and driving innovation because we all have a common reference point for communication, something to critique together. (more…)

Two months ago, we offered Knowledge Stewardship workshops to three NGOs in Iraq. Today, one of the team members describes her experience with After Action Review and how it is proving to help their NGO work. In the process, they offer some practical tips and encouraging words. I have summarized some of their comments below. You can also listen to their 10 minute interview.

Using AAR in NGO work

At the MRDS family centre in Suleymaniyeh, we had been seeing declining enrolments for sewing classes. We held an AAR among the staff to talk about what might be causing this. We began by focusing on the last time we did registrations, which was not very successful. This led us to focus on the need for feedback from the community and especially former students. We gathered 17 of our graduates for tea, cookies, and retrospection: what did they like about the centre, what were they looking for, what we could improve. This was a very positive experience both for us and even more for these women. We learned quite a lot about our “customers” needs and life conditions and what they considered to be valuable. The women felt affirmed because we were asking their opinions. And they gained a new sense of ownership of the family centre, coming to see that they could have a stake in what was offered and where things could go. This has greatly helped our connection with the community and rejuvenated the life of our NGO. (more…)

Are you weary of poor, content-heavy, boring PowerPoints? Have you been subjected to “death by PowerPoint”? Have you had nightmares of bullet points and clumsy animations? When is the last time you remember a slide show a day after seeing it?

This is an issue for almost anyone who has to give presentations. Imagine how it would help your organisation, your NGO or team, your relationship with donors or other audiences, if you could do this more effectively.

I am pleased to announce that Matt Brandon has created the first in what I hope will be a series about ”Creating Presentations that Matter.“ This 25 minute show describes the mindset and approach you need to create presentations that will enage and move people. What is unique about this approach is that the “slide deck” (the collection of slides) is put in its proper place – helping the audience to engage with the speaker and the content.

Presentations that matter are composed of three elements:

• The speaker. The person who is giving the talk (and who should be the main deliverer of content)
• The slide deck. Well designed slides that provide what I call the “emotional wallpaper” that reinforces what the speaker is trying to communicate
• The handouts. The documents, workbooks, and other physical items that the participants use during the presentation and/or take away with them. Written in a readable way, you no longer need to (indeed should not) give out copies of your slide deck.

(more…)

The After Action Review (AAR) is a tool to help a team learn from their experiences in order to gain immediate, concrete improvements in performance. An “action” is any major or routine activity or event that a team of people undertakes, especially those events that they or other similar teams will likely repeat in the future. AARs are easy to do. That is what is deceptive: Teams and organisations only see the benefit when they do them repeatedly, when it becomes a habit.

Download our free AAR for Teams brochure (in English or in Spanish). (more…)

In his new book, How the Mighty have Fallen, Jim Collins talks about how companies who used to do well in improving themselves can quickly go into decline when they forget how to improve. Toyota is a case in point: They used to be so good, admired for their quality and ability to get better; now they are in desparate need for turnaround.

Faced with the need to turn around, these organisations try big breakthrough change initiatives. And when that fails to achieve results, they try something else… and then something else. Down and down.

Aiming for big breakthroughs doesn’t work. The return does not justify the expense. What is more effective is acheiving small improvements continuously. One percent improvement each week is better than 12% each quarter.  And when opportunities for big breakthrough improvements come along, the organisation is capable to integrate them. That is how Toyota used to do it and then they lost their way. (more…)