What is Lean leadership?

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What is Lean leadership?

What follows is a trail of thought rather than a neat article with a tidy ending. If however you can contribute a fitting summary, conclusion and recommendations I would be very pleased to hear from you.

BACKGROUND

I have long believed you should really understand something before you try and solve a problem. As a young man this meant learning the basics of accounting and fund management before writing fund management software. Later in life this led me to all sorts of academic and hands-on study to get to grips with the problems and tools I was trying to master as a manager, consultant or project and change leader.

Given my logical background I have an affinity for Six-Sigma, Lean, Business Excellence and a head full of other models that help me understand the world in formulaic ways that makes it easier to leap to conclusions. Ironically however this lazy reference to a model is often the source of the problem since in-so-doing I (and others) make the mistake of not doing the basics of sitting with the customer.

In my programming days I would sit with the Partners who would guide me through their requirements and long before I understood either PRINCE, Agile or Prototyping I was delivering incremental solutions on a daily basis to meet the challenges set by my bosses.

THE FAILINGS OF LEAN

I have recently read and raved about The WHITEHALL Effect and of late almost every blog or tweet has made reference to this because I have huge experience of the problems that John Seddon describes so well.

The book makes the point that there is too much emphasis on process (how we manage the people) and not enough on service (what the customer wants) to the extent that systems used to measure and manage people often compromise the outputs and outcomes (for the customer) that they were designed to deliver.

There is no doubt that the lean concept of eliminating waste is good, but what must be remembered is that everything that the customer doesn’t value is waste! That means the charts that talk about productivity, and the metrics which measure performance, all of that stuff is waste (if it isn’t actually something that the customer is prepared to pay for).

If you are buying a widget then as a customer there are lots of things that you may care about but the performance review and appraisal of the guy in the IT Dept probably isn’t something which would motivate you to spend $10 extra on the widget.

Therefore time, money and effort improving that appraisal process may make it more efficient and effective but it isn’t Lean if it isn’t delivering value to the customer. Doing the wrong things better may look slick but it’s pretty pointless. A key observation of Seddon and my own experience is that too often we dedicate time to change things which are not fundamentally important to the customer, or measure things that are easy (how many calls) rather than valuable.

THE BENEFIT OF LEAN

The flip side of this is that Lean can be beneficial in stripping back to focus on what is fundamentally important to the customer providing you give up all the models , guides and recipes (which can distract or deceive you) and actually check with the customer.

Lean Canvas and Lean Start-Up are the next two books that I have read and provide a refreshing advocacy of Lean, whilst at the same time acknowledging the dangers highlighted by Seddon.

So I find myself poised again to revisit “Work-Out” (pioneered by GE and used by me at RBSI) and the tried and tested (and now tarnished) 5S and 8-Wastes. But this time instead of looking at process improvement my starting point won’t be a whiteboard nor post-it pads, but careful observation of what the customer wants (and values!)

Lean Canvas and Lean Start-Up are highly recommended because Eric Ries makes an excellent point and provides great support and guidance to the thinking that lots of work doing stuff that the customer isn’t prepare to pay for is generally what causes start-ups to run out of time, resource, money, patience and goodwill.

LEAN LEADERSHIP

I have been "Drinking the Kool-Aid" of Lean, but there is a fundamental problem if you cannot convince the leadership which may be old, traditional and rather in love with their charts, graphs and metrics that support their lifetime of command and control experiences.

If you work for an organisation that have 100+ projects on-the-go and lots of complex and clever spreadsheets providing an abundance of pretty charts in Executive Board Packs it’s going to be hard to get them to abandon this and think like a Lean Start-Up Entrepreneur.

Yet I believe this is what is necessary to overcome the bureaucracy that is killing the delivery of service, right-first-time to the customer. I’m not advocating the abandonment of sensible controls to help manage the key parameters of on-time, on-budget, to-specification but I am challenging exactly how much bureaucracy is actually needed and what thinking has gone into the outputs and outcomes.

Eric Ries makes the excellent point that there is no value in delivery on-time, on-budget, to-specification if it isn’t what the customer values. He cites many examples of businesses that have worked incredibly hard to deliver a wonderful solution to something that the customer doesn’t regard as a problem worth solving.

So the challenge of delivering Lean Leadership is not about tools or processes (although Eric Ries gives some great tools to “manage” the process of being entrepreneur) but instead it is fundamentally about understanding. And it isn’t about understanding and managing the productivity (for which we have tools like 5S and 8-Wastes) but about understanding and managing the purpose.

I believe that when you get to the basics of delivery of service, right-first-time to the customer, based on a deep understanding of the customer your work-load will go down and your success will improve.

My next challenge is to work out how to do that!

LINKS
http://www.triarchypress.net/the-whitehall-effect.html
http://leanstack.com/
http://theleanstartup.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_the_Kool-Aid





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THE AUTHOR

Tim Rogers is an experienced Project and Change Leader. He is founder of www.ciChange.org and curator for www.TEDxStHelier.Com . He is Programme Manager for the commercialization of Jersey Harbours and Jersey Airport, and prevously Operations Change and Sales Support for RBSI/NatWest, and Project Manager for the Incorporation of Jersey Post. He is also Commonwealth Triathlete and World Championships Rower with a passion for teaching and learning and is a Tutor/Mentor on the Chartered Management Institute courses. He is a Chartered Member of the British Computer Society, has an MBA (Management Consultancy) and is both a PRINCE2 and Change Management Practitioner.

Email: TimHJRogers@AdaptConsultingGroup.com
Mob: 07797762051 | Twitter @timhjrogers | Skype timhjrogers