Email is where knowledge goes to die

Posted March 15th, 2010

“Email is where knowledge goes to die.” *

Think about that for a sec. Think about the treasure trove of information that lies buried in your email inbox, or somewhere in the painfully complex taxonomy of email folders that you’ve created to hold each message in just the right place — your own private, generally poorly-functioning, Dewey Decimal system.

I started thinking about this issue after reading one of Jeremy Sluyter’s recent blog posts. He points out that the inability to access the information locked away in individual email boxes creates waste. You ask a question via email, a colleague answers, and both you and the company benefit. But when you save the information in a mail folder six layers deep in Outlook,

The transaction, the knowledge gained, has died in your email, for you to forget and for no one else to see.  And what about the next time someone asks the same question?  In fact every time someone asks the same question over and over again, we are wasting time.  And we all know that time = money.

Jeremy says that each time you answer a question over email, you should ask yourself what you could do to ensure that the answer to this question is available to everyone. Even if your organization doesn’t have an intranet, there are ways to make the answer available to a Google query. [For more technical ways to transform information into usable knowledge, read Bill French's post here. Much too advanced for me, but it might make some sense to you.]

To me, this is another way to view 5S for knowledge workers. It’s not about putting a tape outline around your stapler and mouse — probably you can find the damn things without the tape, and if you can’t, you probably won’t be holding your job down much longer. 5S is for information — for making it easy to find and easy to use for the rest of the organization.

When it comes to “set in order,” don’t worry so much about organizing your inbox and mail folders. Think about how you can make that information readily available for you — and for others — when you need it.

Don’t let knowledge go to die.

* Hat tip to Bill French for this unbelievably felicitous turn of phrase. I stand humbled before you.

Tags: ,
Posted in TIMEBACK BLOG | Leave a Comment

Why do we spend so much time putting out fires?

Posted March 10th, 2010

What does your typical day look like? It’s probably not very predictable, except insofar as the first thing you do is check email to see what crises broke out between the time you went home for dinner and the time you finished your morning blueberry Pop-Tart. As for the rest of it, it’s probably a series of fire-fighting exercises, studded with pointless meetings and punctuated by the occasional 20 minute oasis of calm where you get to, you know, think.

Not so for Jim Lancaster, president of Lantech. Jim has brought standardized work and problem solving to all levels of management — including his own. At Lantech, there’s a strict cadence for the plan-do-check-adjust cycle. Even if you’re not in manufacturing, bear with me for this description — I promise to make the connection to your banking, or alumni development, or accounting job.

Individual operators check their machines and review production at 6:00am. Then the team leader meets with all the operators at 6:10 to discuss the day’s work and any potential problems. Then the area supervisor meets with all the team leaders at 6:20. Then the plant manager meets with all the supervisors at 6:30. Then the VP of manufacturing meets with all the plant managers at 6:40. Then all the VPs meet with the executive team at 6:50, and so on. Problems are solved right then and there at the location of the problem and at the affected level. If solving a problem requires a trade-off of resources, then the decision is escalated to the next level — but the analysis and the countermeasures are done at the location of the problem, where the work is done.

Now the coolest part: this process is repeated throughout the company, not just in the factory. Accounting, sales, marketing, credit — pick the department, and you’ll  have the supervisors, managers, directors, VPs, and president at your desk at the same time everyday. They’re there to see your work and help you solve problems, right then, right there. You don’t have to try to herd cats and schedule a meeting with the necessary people three days later (a meeting in which half the people are checking their Blackberries anyway). You don’t have to suffer through the spirit-sapping chain of emails that somehow seem to only confuse the issue and delay its resolution.

As you’d imagine, this standard work of going around to where all the work is done takes a lot of time. But the power of this standard behavior is that it eliminates much of the wasted time, effort, and energy that we unthinkingly spend trying to solve problems in a conference room long after they’ve occurred. The process keeps everyone up to date on where things stand throughout the organization — no tedious, long-winded, meanderings in the 60 minute weekly (or god help you, 90 minute monthly) meeting.

When I used to work in product marketing at Asics, I remember the frequent conflicts and problems that cropped up with sales. There were miscommunications about pricing and inventory levels that we didn’t identify until it was too late — after the sales rep had made a promise to a customer. And we had frequent issues with the product development team that could only be resolved through tedious meetings long after the fact, when it was expensive to make product changes. I’ve seen the same types of problems crop up between sales and the credit department, with a customer being put on credit hold, taken off, put back on, taken off again –  and all the while, his shipment of product languished in the warehouse.

In hindsight, I think that most of these problems could have been avoided in the first place with standard work that formalized communication and brought problem solving down to the place where the work was being done. Think about it: firefighting vs. standard work. Sexy vs. boring. Stressful vs. calming. How do you want to spend your days?

Tags:
Posted in TIMEBACK BLOG | 1 Comment

The cost of communication waste.

Posted March 8th, 2010

Dwight Frindt over at 2130 Partners just published a white paper on “Lean Conversations” (download here). It’s an interesting look at how the way we communicate within an organization can create waste.

Dwight defines lean communication as a style that uses

less of everything: less intellectual effort, less time devoted to non-value adding conversations, less emotional energy expended, and less time to produce outcomes desired by a team of people or the organization overall. They are designed to eliminate the friction and waste from your own interactions and throughout your organization that have resulted from unproductive, unexamined conversational patterns.

Dwight’s piece echoes Bob Emiliani’s award winning paper, Lean Behaviors. Bob distinguishes between “lean behaviors” (those consistent with and supportive of lean principles) and “fat behaviors” (those that undermine lean and create waste). Bob writes that

the ability to communicate ambiguously and without ever making a commitment results in the avoidance of conflict. Refinement of this skill reduces people’s ability to say what they mean, sometimes even in the simplest of conversations, and forces other people to “read between the lines.” If such behavior becomes the norm, then the unintended consequence is an organization that cannot effectively discuss important issues. Business problems linger unresolved, often for years, and it becomes increasingly difficult to confront the issues. Ignoring problems leads to repetitive errors that consume resources whose focus is usually on short- term solutions to appease management.

Conversations are reduced to simple comments, obligatory discussions, or debilitating debates…. Information becomes closely guarded, the transfer of knowledge is biased towards agreement or good news, and learning is stunted so that an organization is not able to accurately assess its competitive position.

Okay, so this all sounds very academic and far removed from what you deal with on a daily basis. But think about the pointless meetings, poorly-timed interruptions, meandering conversations, and unclear directives that plague your days. Think about how they undermine your ability to do your work well by robbing you of focus, clarity, and time to solve problems. That’s significant.

Dwight’s paper contains a short diagnostic that might be helpful. If you’re serious about changing the way your office functions, it’s a good place to start.

Tags: ,
Posted in TIMEBACK BLOG | 3 Comments

Closed Lists, Kanbans, and the Key to Prioritization.

Posted March 3rd, 2010

I was recently revisiting Mark Forster’s concept of the “closed list.” (Mark is the author of Do It Tomorrow, and a leading productivity consultant and thinker based in the UK who’s well-worth reading.) The closed list is essentially a to-do list that’s limited by the amount of work time you have available during the day.

Mark’s argument is that making a daily to-do list containing 14 hours of work is pointless, not to mention frustrating and self-defeating. If you’re only working 10 hours a day, you’ll never finish all the items on your list no matter how efficient and motivated you are. So why bother putting all those items on your list for the day? You’ll have to move it to another day.

Instead he advocates a to-do list that can be completed within your workday — and that includes accounting for the unexpected problems that inevitably derail your schedule. It’s a reality-based to-do list.

The closed list reminds me of the brilliant simplicity of the kanban in a lean production line. For those who don’t know, a kanban is a signaling device (usually a simple card) that controls the amount of work-in-process inventory. When a person on a production line finishes his operation (grinding a piece of metal, say, or checking the credit scores on a mortgage application), he sends a kanban to the previous station. This signals that he’s ready for the next piece of metal or the next mortgage application, and the upstream person then sends the next item down the line. For the purpose of this blog post, what’s important is that the kanban controls the amount of work-in-process inventory: there can never be more inventory than there are kanban cards, so you never run into Lucy’s famous problem of too many chocolates coming too fast down the assembly line.

Mark’s closed list — which is really the father of my principle of “living in the calendar” — has the same benefit of the kanban in controlling the amount of work-in-process inventory. It prevents you from taking on more than you can handle in any one day, and thereby forces you to prioritize. You can’t do more than 8, or 10, or 14 hours worth of work — you have to decide what’s most important, and ruthlessly weed out the rest (a la Jim Collins’ stop doing list). It also creates a basis for a conversation with your boss when yet another “critical project” with an impossible deadline is added to your load.

The closed list doesn’t reduce the amount of work you have to do. The truth is, that work is pretty much infinite. But it does force you to assess your work more closely, and helps you prioritize and keep you focused on what’s really important to you.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in TIMEBACK BLOG | Leave a Comment

Create a fast track for your work.

Posted March 1st, 2010

I spent a few days at the SHS/ASQ alphabet soup conference in Atlanta this week, learning about how hospitals are implementing lean to improve their quality and lower their costs. I was struck by the fact that all the focus is on hospital processes — admission, discharge, nurse shift change, etc. — but no one is thinking about how to use lean to improve the way people do their office work. The nurse supervisors and managers I spoke to, for example, were complaining about the difficulty of getting their administrative tasks done in any sort of efficient way. Like workers in any other kind of organization, they buried by email, paperwork, and meetings.

There’s no easy solution to these burdens, but there are lessons from the way hospitals manage patients that can be applied to the way that individuals manage their work. Consider the “fast track” that many hospitals have implemented in their emergency departments.

There’s one pathway for the serious problems — gunshot wounds, cerebral hemorrhages — that need immediate attention. And there’s a fast track for people who have non-life-threatening issues that can be easily resolved, such as stitching up a bad cut or splinting a sprained finger. These are high volume, fast turnover cases. If you’ve ever gone to an emergency department that doesn’t have a fast track for a non-life threatening problem, you’ll end up sitting around for hours studying People magazine’s “Sexiest Man of 2007″ double issue while the medics take care of the guy who’s having a coronary.

What would happen if you created a fast-track for your work? As part of 5S, sould you set up a paper and electronic filing system that separates the high volume, fast turnover work from the serious, more complex issues that take time to process? That would make it easier and faster to access the information you need, and avoid those Howard Carter-like archaeological expeditions looking for stuff.

Going one step further, could you create blocks of time in which you only dealt with high volume, fast turnover work, and other blocks that were reserved for the big stuff? If you did that, you might increase the likelihood that you’d deal with everything more quickly, more smoothly, and with less stress.

Tags: ,
Posted in TIMEBACK BLOG | Leave a Comment

Can you start a lean contagion?

Posted February 15th, 2010

Efforts to drive a lean transformation across an organization are difficult. Improvements in one area of the business often don’t spread to other areas. Deep-seated resistance to change slows progress to a crawl or stops it entirely. Backsliding erases hard-won gains.

But what if you could get lean to spread like a contagion? What if acceptance of lean, or even an outright embrace of lean (not the tools, but the mindset), could become like a virtuous epidemic?

Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler, in their book Connected, posit that all kinds of behaviors and characteristics that we consider independently defined actually spread like a contagion. Take obesity, for example. After analyzing the Framingham Heart Study, they found that obese people tend to hang with other obese people, and thin people hang with thin people. (Birds of a feather, and all that business.)

More intriguingly, they found that there’s a causal relationship: obesity spreads by contagion. So if your friend’s friend’s friend — whom you’ve never met, and lives a thousand miles away — gains weight, you’re likely to gain weight, too. And if your friend’s friend’s friend loses weight, you’re likely to lose weight, too.

How does it work? Scott Stossel explains in the NYTimes that

Partly, it’s a kind of peer pressure, or norming, effect, in which certain behaviors, or the social acceptance of certain behaviors, get transmitted across a network of acquaintances. In one example the authors give, Heather stops exercising and gains weight, which influences her friend Maria’s thinking about what normal weight is, so that when Maria’s other friend Amy (who has never met Heather) also stops her exercise regime, Maria is less likely to urge Amy to resume it. So Heather’s weight gain influences Amy’s, even though the two women never meet.

And it’s not just obesity that can be contagious:

Christakis and Fowler explore network contagion in everything from back pain (higher incidence spread from West Germany to East Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall) to suicide (well known to spread throughout communities on occasion) to sex practices (such as the growing prevalence of oral sex among teenagers) to politics (where the denser your network of connections, the more ideologically intense and intractable your beliefs are likely to be).

So this got me thinking: is it possible to spread lean throughout an organization like a contagion? Is it possible to have it take on a life of its own? After all, when you’re looking at a value stream horizontally across an organization, you’ve got a great opportunity to have lean spread widely and quickly. In some respects, you even need lean to spread this way, because you’re cutting across so many functional silos.

When I think about my work — applying lean to individual behaviors — I realize that this idea presents a huge opportunity. One person running a lean meeting, for example, has a chance to, um, infect up to a dozen other people in a company. A simple change in email processing policy (say, only four times a day) can touch hundreds of others. In fact, at Intel, Nathan Zeldes created blocks of time during each day that engineers could work without interruptions, and when word of the experiment spread, other regions demanded to be included in the program.

There’s more research to be done in this area, though: some companies mandate email-free Fridays, but usually can’t sustain it. And even Intel hasn’t been entirely successful in maintaining the new behaviors. It’s possible that those initiatives didn’t start at a “hub” — one of the “influenceable” nodes that are likely to spread a behavior most quickly. Or perhaps you need a critical mass to prevent recidivism.

What do you think? Could you take advantage of this idea of behavioral contagion to spread lean more quickly through your company?

Tags: , ,
Posted in TIMEBACK BLOG | Leave a Comment

Four tools for making work visible.

Posted February 11th, 2010

In general, I’m not a big fan of fancy time management hardware or software. As the saying goes, automating a broken process gets you a faster (and more expensive) broken process. Far better to use a simple system to fix the process and then automate as necessary. (Kevin Meyer is the chief apostle of this approach, with his pizza and whiteboard replacement for an ERP system.) Even buying special pre-packaged and printed day planners fits into this category, since you get locked into someone else’s proprietary and inflexible system.

Having said that, there are some interesting websites that can give you greater visibility in how you’re spending your time. They won’t actually help you, you know, do anything important, but by making your actions visible, they can help spur behavioral change.

The Wall Street Journal covered four of the services (Slife, RescueTime Pro, ManicTime, and Klok) last week. Each one has strengths and weaknesses, but will no doubt be improved over time. I won’t bother reviewing them as you can read the WSJ article for free here.

I’m good with a watch, a piece of paper, and some discipline. However, if new tools will help you get started down this road, by all means read the article and check them out. The important issue, I think, is not so much what tool you use, but rather that you’re committed to making the invisible — i.e., where and how you spend your time and attention — visible. Once you’ve done that, you can start to analyze the current state and implement countermeasures to improve it. As the WSJ authors wrote,

All in all, the services really helped us get a handle on how we spend our work time. And having a written account of where our minutes went pushed us to modify our work habits—and get more done.

These tools aren’t panaceas. But it might get you started in living the lean principles that you’re trying to drive through the organization.

Tags: ,
Posted in TIMEBACK BLOG | Leave a Comment

Why not become CEO of your problems?

Posted February 8th, 2010

I had a chance a few weeks ago to take a class on A3 thinking with John Shook. He mentioned that one of the greatest benefits of an A3 is that it forces people to take ownership of a problem, rather than having it fall into a no-man’s-land between functional silos. And we’ve all run into those, right? You know how it goes: “That’s marketing’s responsibility.” “No, it isn’t. Its definitely part of the sales function.” “Yes, but sales gets that information from IT.” And on and on it goes, with no hope of ever getting resolved.

So I was struck by last week’s NYTimes interview with Mark Pincus, founder and chief executive of Zynga. Pincus tells the interviewer that one of his key methods of leadership is to make everyone into a CEO in the company:

Mark Pincus: I’d turn people into C.E.O.’s. One thing I did at my second company was to put white sticky sheets on the wall, and I put everyone’s name on one of the sheets, and I said, “By the end of the week, everybody needs to write what you’re C.E.O. of, and it needs to be something really meaningful.” And that way, everyone knows who’s C.E.O. of what and they know whom to ask instead of me. And it was really effective. People liked it. And there was nowhere to hide.

NYTimes: So who were some of your new C.E.O.’s?

MP: We had this really motivated, smart receptionist. She was young. We kept outgrowing our phone systems, and she kept coming back and saying, “Mark, we’ve got to buy a whole new phone system.” And I said: “I don’t want to hear about it. Just buy it. Go figure it out.” She spent a week or two meeting every vendor and figuring it out. She was so motivated by that. I think that was a big lesson for me because what I realized was that if you give people really big jobs to the point that they’re scared, they have way more fun and they improve their game much faster. She ended up running our whole office.

Now, you can argue with Pincus’s approach. It probably doesn’t conform with all the tenets of “respect for people.” And telling an employee, “I don’t want to hear about it. Go figure it out.” probably isn’t the best way of training staff in how to think (which is one of the key functions of the A3). But making a person the CEO of a problem is, I think, very much in keeping with Shook’s idea of granting ownership via A3, because it ensures that something will get done.

Have you ever whined about ineffective, time-wasting, soul-sucking meetings? Do you bemoan the plague of useless, irritating, and time-consuming “reply all” emails? Are you frustrated at the lack of an intelligent electronic file storage system? Do nearly constant interruptions by colleagues keep you from getting any of your important work done?

In Pincus’s terms, are you willing to become the CEO of any of these problems? Or using lean methods, are you willing to take ownership of these problems with an A3 so that you can devise some countermeasures and make the office a better place to work?

Tags: , ,
Posted in TIMEBACK BLOG | Leave a Comment

Getting off the fire truck.

Posted February 1st, 2010

The Lean Enterprise Institute has released a new DVD, “Womack on Lean Management.” I haven’t watched it yet, but the description alone really got my attention:

“When you go in and spend a day with managers and observe what they are doing – even up close to the top – they are busy talking to the customer about things gone wrong, they are busy talking to the supplier about things gone wrong, they are busy talking to operations or design about things gone wrong. Complete instability.

“As a result, the main work of many managers at many levels in companies using ‘modern management’ systems is constant firefighting.”

This really hit home for me. I don’t deal with the seriously tough problems that so many lean consultants grapple with, like getting complicated manufacturing or service value streams straightened out. Or, as Jim would say, creating stability in core processes. My work is (in some ways) much simpler: just getting people to spend time on what’s actually important to their customers and their company.

But when I see the amount of time squandered on activities that create no value at all, I wonder whether we should first try to create stability in single person processes — i.e., the stuff that forms the core of value-added managerial work.

I mean, what if directors, managers, and supervisors created stability in the way that they managed their own work? What if they had regular trips to the gemba and regular, repeatable, consistent mentoring? What if they stopped bowing to the holy god of the inbox? What if they stopped kneeling before the almighty 60 minute meeting? What if they applied visual management techniques to their own use of time to help ensure that they actually spent time on the really important stuff?

What if they got off the fire truck for awhile and tried to solve the problems in their own work processes?

Posted in TIMEBACK BLOG | 5 Comments

Creating flow in your work (Part 2)

Posted January 25th, 2010

I've been thinking a lot recently about how to improve flow when you're dealing with complex, low-volume, high-mix knowledge work. The process for creating flow is pretty well documented for repetitive, task-oriented work. (That's not to say that it's easy. But it is well-defined.) However, what do you do when you're the creative director at an ad agency? Or a trial lawyer? Or in charge of marketing communications for a specialty chemical manufacturer? How can you bring flow to work that is inherently so unpredictable and highly variable?

In a previous post, I suggested that you should look for the elements of your work that are predictable and repetitive. Now, I want to suggest that you transforming complex, creative work into simple, “transactional” tasks that can be done easily. Checklists are a perfect example of this concept. They ensure that individual steps within a complicated process are both remembered completely and done correctly.

NASA astronauts and ground operations use checklists for all space missions. The Columbia Journalism Review advocates that journalists use checklists to reduce errors in reporting. Since the crash in 1935 of a prototype B-17 bomber, pilots use checklists when taking off and landing planes – the process is just too complicated, and the downside risk is too great, to rely upon mere memory. Checklists are increasingly finding their way into medicine as well, dramatically reducing infection and mortality rates where they’re being used. Dr. Peter Pronovost has been leading the way in this area, as Atul Gawande reported in The New Yorker:

The checklists provided two main benefits, Pronovost observed. First, they helped with memory recall, especially with mundane matters that are easily overlooked in patients undergoing more drastic events. (When you’re worrying about what treatment to give a woman who won’t stop seizing, it’s hard to remember to make sure that the head of her bed is in the right position.) A second effect was to make explicit the minimum, expected steps in complex processes.

Your work may have less riding on it than the lives of patients or passengers, but there’s no doubt that there’s complexity in your work that, if eliminated, would improve flow and reduce waste. Chip and Dan Heath wrote in Fast Company about the benefits of checklists in business:

Even when there is no ironclad right way, checklists can help people avoid blind spots in complex environments. Has your business ever made a big mistake because it failed to consider all the right information? Cisco Systems, renowned for its savvy in buying and absorbing complementary companies, uses a checklist to analyze potential acquisitions. Will the company's key engineers be willing to relocate? Will it be able to sell additional services to its customer base? What's the plan for migrating customer support? As a smart business-development person, you'd probably remember to investigate 80% of these critical issues. But it would be inadvisable to remember the other 20% after the close of a $100 million acquisition. (Whoops, the hotshot engineers won't leave the snow in Boulder.) Checklists are insurance against overconfidence.

Checklists reduce ambiguity and uncertainty, thereby allowing faster action with less deliberation. They provide the same benefit that habits do in setting free, as William James put it, the “higher powers of mind” for creative thought.

Checklists improve flow in one other significant way: they dampen the tendency to multi-task in favor of serial-tasking. In a rapidly changing, always-connected work environment, serial-tasking may sound heretical. At the very least, it probably sounds slow and inefficient. And yet, serial-tasking leads to a smoother flow of work (and value). What we often forget is that the most complex activities are composed of individual actions – done one at a time. A good analogy might be the performance of an elegant prima ballerina in Swan Lake: her dance is composed of a series of individual movements – turns, steps, and jumps – done in sequence, one at a time. But when they’re linked together, they create a seamless, flowing whole. The same is true for your work. Because even if you’re not creating an artistic masterpiece, you can nevertheless strive for the same smooth, uninterrupted, flow of work.

How can you use checklists in your work? How can you turn the creative into the "transactional"? Let me know in the comments section.

Posted in TIMEBACK BLOG | Leave a Comment

Older Entries