The ‘Spaghetti notes’ phenomenon

July 31, 2022 giantknave Brain Farts Case Management, failure demand, Feedback, Functionalisation, Single-loop vs. Double-loop learning, specialisation, Waste

Most people I know like pasta. I don’t. I find it bland and boring (sorry Italy).

I find spaghetti particularly annoying. No matter how much I eat, the portion in my dish never seems to reduce. It gets all tangled on my fork, it dangles everywhere, and it makes a big mess.

Which is a nice segue to this post:

The more ‘functional’ (i.e. specialised/ compartmentalised) a service has been designed then…

…the more likely that a client must speak with lots of different people (‘a new person every time’)

and the more likely that the client’s needs are then broken up into ‘transactions’ and passed on (a.k.a ‘referred’) to lots of other people to work on…

…the more people ‘touch’ (i.e. work on) a client record…

…the more file notes are left on the client record…

…the harder it is for someone working on a client record to work out what is going on…

…the more likely that, during a client interaction, the person attempting to help can’t possibly read ‘all the notes’ and so only reads what is obvious to them in the time (that they feel¹) they have available to them…

…the more likely that something important is missed from within the notes…

…the more likely that inappropriate/ incomplete actions are taken and, worse, serious errors are made…

…the more likely that a client needs more work done² on their record (to deal with the resultant failure demands, to ‘undo’ the actions taken, and the knock-on effects)…

…the more likely that a ‘leaving good notes’ policy is rolled out (including ‘best practice note templates’ and ‘quality control’ by inspection of note taking)…

…the more time taken by everyone working on a client record to make detailed notes (and to ‘police’ this)…

…the more involved each note becomes…

…the even harder it is to work out what is going on (because there’s yet more notes and each one has become painful to read – even containing internal hieroglyphics to supposedly make an ‘easier to consume’ short-hand)…

…until we arrive at the ‘spaghetti notes phenomenon’ where it’s virtually impossible to know, let alone understand, what’s gone on when viewing a client record, and it would take days of effort from a dedicated and experienced worker to review all the notes and patch them together into a coherent whole…

…and if they do this, they will stand back and think “oh my @%&!, what a pile of waste it took to achieve a shite client experience.”

The final ‘nail in the coffin’: Someone helping a client can often look at the spaghetti before them in the client record and (rationally) arrive at the conclusion that it would be much easier to ignore all the notes and talk to the client as if they are starting all over again.

Reflection:

Focusing on making good notes is an example of single-loop learning (‘making a wrong thing righter’).

The real problem isn’t with the notes, it’s with the design of the system that means that so many people are working on the same client record, because it’s this that creates the spaghetti.

Clarification: I’m absolutely NOT against good notes – if I’d worked on a client file a month ago, I’d like to read my own note that effectively and efficiently reminds me where I left off. I’d also like any colleague to be able to read it and gain a similar understanding.

What I AM against is a system design that causes a ‘note making’ reinforcing feedback loop³.

Footnotes

1. A person helping a client could take a great deal of time to work through the notes – to make sure that they gain the necessary understanding – but does their working environment cause them to think that this time isn’t available to them?

Do they feel like they’ve got to get through x number of tasks today and so time is of the essence?

2. And, of course, this ‘more work’ needs yet more notes adding to the client record.

In my experience, a ‘here’s what we did to undo an error’ file note is a convoluted thing to read (let alone write), and almost impossible to follow because ‘you had to be there’ to actually get it…which means that such file notes are often glossed over because it’s easier to do so…which leads us back around into the same torturous circle.

3. For those readers that may not understand what this means, a reinforcing loop is one in which the result of an action produces yet more of the same action, thus producing growth (or decline depending on which direction the action in question is leading).

“Erm, I don’t know yet!”

May 16, 2018 giantknave Brain Farts customer, customer service, Feedback, Net Promoter Score

This short post is about receiving text messages from service organisations: Some are (or could be) useful, whilst many others are (ahem) ‘bullshit masquerading as customer care’.

I recently had to arrange an MRI scan. I’m getting old(er)…and so are my joints.

The initial mix up.

A medical consultant referred me for an MRI scan. She told me to expect an appointment within the next 4 – 6 weeks. Cool, that doesn’t sound too long.

I started to question things when I hadn’t heard anything after 10 weeks. I rang to chase it:

“Oh, sorry to hear that you haven’t heard from [the MRI service]. We sent the request through to them the very day that you saw your consultant. They must have ‘lost it’. I’ll send through a second request marked’ urgent’. Let me know again if you don’t hear from them.”

Making a booking

Thankfully, a member of the MRI service’s booking team rang me about a week later.

She asked me some clarifying questions, explained what would happen, gave me a few appointment slot options and I agreed to a day and time for next week. Excellent – an easy and friendly conversation. That was a good customer experience (though, please don’t ask me to give an NPS score!)

However, do you know that feeling when you put the phone down and think¹:

“hmmm, I’ve hastily scribbled ‘Thursday at 9 a.m.’ down on my doodle pad next to me….I think that’s the slot that we agreed on….I hope I’ve got that right….I hope that’s what she put into her system.”

…and so what I really really really wanted was an immediate text (i.e. within minutes of ending the call) confirming the day, time and address for my scan. So simple, so easily done and so valuable.

They did send me a text. Here’s what it said:

“Hi Steve. If you need to move your appointment with [name of MRI service], please call [tel. number], thanks.”

Aaaargh! That’s about as much use as a chocolate fire guard. It gives me no information of value. They have quite brilliantly engineered a near certain failure demand call from me – they’ve even given me the number to call!

So, I ring the number that they have so helpfully provided, and they confirm that, yes, I did have it right and, no, it wasn’t a problem me ringing to check – they get it all the time (operation face palm).

So that’s all well and good.

Two further texts

Time goes by and then, 24 hours before my appointment I get two (separate) text messages from the MRI service.

Here’s the first:

“Confirming your appointment with [name of MRI service] at [address] on [date], please arrive at [time]. Please phone [tel. number] if you have any queries.”

Brilliant. This is the exact text message that I wanted when I first booked. Now, don’t get me wrong – I like getting the above text the day before as a reminder…but AS WELL AS, not INSTEAD OF an initial confirmation text.

Now, I know that this blog post is totally about ‘first world problems’ and I’m really grateful for the access to the medical services that I have. I mainly wrote this post because of the second text² and to illustrate a point about it.

Here’s what the second text said:

“How was your recent experience with our booking team? Go to [URL].”

…and I thought “Erm, I don’t know yet…I haven’t had my scan!”

And why does this matter you might ask?

Well, I might turn up for my scan and:

they aren’t ready for me (perhaps there’s a huge queue); or
they might not have my information ‘in their system’ yet (e.g. because it hasn’t been passed on by another silo); or
they might have ‘double booked’; or
they might not have any record of my booking; or
they might not have informed me of something I needed to bring/wear/not wear or do/ not to do; or
…and on and on.

The text feedback request sent before I receive the service shows quite clearly that the organisation is trying to score a vertical silo (i.e. the booking team, and quite likely a specific person within) rather than caring about (let alone understanding) whether the horizontal service worked for the customer.

I care about ‘from my need through to its satisfaction’. I don’t care about the ‘booking team’ (sorry booking team, no offence meant).

The booking team can talk to me as friendly and efficiently as they want (which, no doubt, I would find agreeable) …but this makes up about 5% of the value of the interaction. I will only find out about the quality of my booking interaction when I come to have my scan.

Turning to the general point

I don’t mean to pick on the MRI service. It’s just the last example in a long line of service organisations sending out ‘surveys’ asking how well they did from a single interaction with me.

Whether it’s the bank, telecommunications, utility or insurance company…or even the local council.

The point is the same for ALL of them. I don’t really care about a contact, I care about whether you satisfied my need. These are totally different points of view.

In summary:

If you really want to improve your organisation, change your viewpoint from ‘inside out’ to ‘outside in’.

Addendum

Of course I had to go to the URL given to me in that last text to confirm my suspicions as to what I would find…and oh yes, regular blog readers have guessed it – they want me to give them a score from 1 through to 10 about whether I’d recommend them to my friends and family.

Ho hum.

Footnotes:

1. You might not be like this. However, I’m the sort of person where people (including my wife) deliberately ask me down the pub whether I locked the front door…just to see the doubt creeping across my face.

2. The rest is just the comedy side baggage that also occurred.

Double Trouble

August 3, 2017 giantknave Brain Farts Chris Argyris, Donald Schon, Feedback, Kurt Lewin, learning, Organisational learning, Peter Scholtes, Single-loop vs. Double-loop learning

There’s a lovely idea which I’ve known about for some time but which I haven’t yet written about.

The reason for my sluggishness is that the idea sounds so simple…but (as is often the case) there’s a lot more to it. It’s going to ‘mess with my head’ trying to explain – but here goes:

[‘Heads up’: This is one of my long posts]

Learning through feedback

We learn when we (properly) test out a theory, and (appropriately) reflect on what the application of the theory is telling us i.e. we need to test our beliefs against data.

“Theory by itself teaches nothing. Application by itself teaches nothing. Learning is the result of dynamic interplay between the two.” (Scholtes)

Great. So far, so good.

Single-loop learning vs. Double-loop learning

Chris Argyris (1923 – 2013) clarified that there are two levels to this learning, which he explained through the phrases ‘single-loop’ and double-loop’¹.

Here are his definitions to start with:

Single-loop learning: learning that changes strategies of action (i.e. the how) …in ways that leave the values of a theory of action unchanged (i.e. the why)

Double-loop learning: learning that results in a change in the values of theory-in-use (i.e. the why), as well as in its strategies and assumptions (i.e. the how).

That’s a bit of a mouthful – and (with no disrespect meant) not much easier to comprehend when you read his book!²

If you look up ‘double loop learning’ on the wonders of Google Images, you will find dozens of (very similar) diagrams³, showing a visualisation of what Argyris was getting at.

Here’s my version⁴ of such a diagram:

You can think about this diagram as it relates either to an individual (e.g. yourself) or at an organisational level (how you all work together).

Start at the box on the left. Whether we like it or not, we (at a given point in time) think in a certain way. This thinking comes about from our current beliefs and assumptions about the world (and, for some, what might lie beyond).

Our thinking guides our actions (what we do), and these actions heavily influence⁵ our performance (what we get).

And so to the ‘error’ bit:

“Organisations [are] continually engaged in transactions with their environments [and, as such] regularly carry out inquiry that takes the form of detection and correction of error.” (Argyris & Schon)

We are continually observing, and inquiring into, our current outcomes – asking ourselves whether we are ‘on track’, or everything is ‘as we would expect’ or perhaps whether we could do better. Such inquiry might range from:

subconscious and unstructured (e.g. just part of daily work); right through to
deliberate and formal (such as a major review producing a big fat report).

Argyris labels this constant inquiry as the ‘detection of error’. The error is that we aren’t where we would want to be, and the correction is to do something about this.

Okay, so we’ve detected an error and we want to make a corrective change. The easiest thing to do is to revisit our actions (and the strategies that they are derived from), and assess and develop new action strategies whilst keeping our underlying thinking (our beliefs and assumptions) steadfastly constant. This is ‘single-loop’ learning i.e. new actions, borne from the same thinking.

I reflect that the phrase ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’ fits nicely here:

If the reason for the ‘error’ is within your thinking, then your single-loop learning, and the resultant change, won’t work. Worse, you will re-observe that error as it ‘comes round again’, and probably quicker this time…and so you make another ‘action’ change….and that error keeps on coming around. You have merely been making changes within the system, rather than changing the system.

A previous post called ‘making a wrong thing righter’ demonstrates this loop through the example of short term incentive schemes, and their constant revision “to make them even better”.

So, the final piece of the diagram…that green line. Many ‘errors’ will only be corrected through inquiry into, and modification of, our thinking…and, if this meaningfully occurs, then this would result in ‘double-loop’ learning – you would have changed the system itself.

Right, so that’s me finished explaining the difference between single-loop and double-loop learning…which I hope is clear and makes sense.

You may now be thinking “great, let’s do double-loop learning from now on!”

…because this is how most (if not all) those Google Image diagrams make it look. I mean, now you know about it, why wouldn’t you?

But you can’t!

The bit that’s missing…

Unfortunately, there’s a wall. Worse still, this wall is (currently) invisible. Here’s the diagram again, but altered accordingly:

Right, I’d better try and explain that wall. Argyris & Schon wrote that:

“People learn collectively to maintain patterns of thoughts and action that inhibit productive learning.”

What are they on about?

Imagine that, through some form of inquiry, an error (as explained above) has been detected and a team of relevant people commence a conversation to talk about it:

The hierarchically senior person begins with a ‘take charge’ attitude (assuming responsibility, being persuasive, appealing to larger pre-existing goals);
- it is typical within organisations that, once goals have been decided, changing them is seen as a sign of weakness.

He/she request a ‘constructive dialogue’, thereby stifling the expression of negative (yet real) feelings by themselves, and by everyone else involved…and yet acts as if this is not happening;
- each person in the group is therefore being asked to “suppress their feelings – to experience them privately, censor them from the group, and act as if they are not doing so.”

He/she takes a rational approach and asks the group to develop a ‘credible plan’ (which becomes the objective) to respond to the error…and so has skipped the necessary organisational self-reflection for double-loop learning to occur.
- Coming up with a plan is ‘jumping into solution mode’ before you’ve properly studied the current condition and asked ‘why’.

So how does this affect the group dynamics?

“The participants experience an interest in solving the business problem, but their ways of crafting their conversation, combined with their self-censorship, [will lead] to a dialogue that [is] defensive and self-reinforcing.” (Argyris & Schon)

Given that this approach will hide so much, we can expect lots of private conversations (pre-meetings to prepare for meetings, post-meetings about what was/wasn’t said in meetings, meetings about what meetings aren’t happening…). Does this describe what you sometimes see in your organisation? I think that it is often labelled as ‘politics’…. which would be evidence of that wall.

Taken together, Argyris and Schon label the above as primary inhibitory loops.

Argyris sets out a (non-exhaustive) list of conditions that trigger and, in turn, reinforce, such defensive and dysfunctional behaviour. Here’s the list of conditions, together with how they should be combated:

Condition	Corrective response
Vagueness	Specify
Ambiguity	Clarify
Un-test-ability	Make testable
Scattered Information	Concert (arrange, co-ordinate)
Information withheld	Reveal
Un-discuss-ability	Make discussable
Uncertainty	Inquire
Inconsistency/ Incompatibility	Resolve

”[such] conditions…trigger defensive reactions…these reactions, in turn, reduce the likelihood that individuals will engage in the kind of organisational inquiry that leads to productive learning outcomes.” (Argyris & Schon)

i.e. If you’ve got defensive behaviour, look for these conditions… and work on correcting them. Otherwise you will remain stuck.

Unfortunately, primary loops lead to secondary inhibitory loops. That is, that they lead to second-order consequences, and these become self-reinforcing.

Managers begin to (privately) judge their staff poorly, whilst the staff, ahem, ‘return the compliment’, with “both views becoming embedded in the organisational norms that govern relationships between line and staff”;

Sensitive issues of inter-group conflict become undiscussable. “Each group sees the other as unmovable, and both see the problem as un-correctable.”
- A classic example of this is the constant conflict in many organisations between ‘IT’ and ‘The business’.

The organisation creates defensive routines “intended to protect individuals from experiencing embarrassment or threat” …with the unintended side effect that this then prevents the identification of “the causes of the embarrassment or threat in order to correct the relevant problems.”

From this we get organisational messages that:

are inconsistent (in themselves and/or with other messages);
act as if there is no inconsistency; and
make the inconsistency undiscussable.

“The message is made undiscussable by the very naturalness with which it is delivered and by the absence of any invitation or disposition to inquire about it.”

Do you receive regular messages from, say, those ‘above you’ in the hierarchy? Perhaps a weekly or monthly Senior Manager communication?

How often are you amazed (in an incredulous way) about what they have written or said?
Do you feel welcome to point this inconsistency out? Probably not.

We end up with people giving others advice to reinforce the status quo: ‘Be careful what you say’, ‘You’ll get yourself into trouble’, ‘I wouldn’t say that if I were you’, ‘Remember what happened last time’…etc.

In short, there are powerful forces* at work in most organisations that are preventing (or at least seriously impeding) productive learning from taking place, despite the ability and intrinsic desire of those within the organisation to do so.

(* Note: Budgets – as in fixed performance contracts – are a classic ‘single-loop reinforcing’ management instrument. Conversely, Rolling forecasts can be a ‘double-loop’ enabler.)

So what to do instead?

Right, here’s my third (and last) diagram:

It looks very similar to the last diagram, but this time there’s a ladder! But where do we get one of those from?

“For double-loop learning to occur and persist at any level in the organisation, the self-fuelling processes must be interrupted. In order to interrupt these processes, individual theories-in-use [how we think] must be altered.” (Argyris & Schon)

Oooh, exciting stuff! They go on to write:

“An organisation with a [defensive] learning system is highly unlikely to learn to alter its governing variables, norms and assumptions [i.e. thinking] because this would require organisational inquiry into double-loop issues, and [defensive] systems militate against this…we will have to create a new learning system as a rare event.”

There’s two places to go from here:

What would a productive learning system look like? and
How might we jolt the system to see the wall, and then attempt to climb the ladder?

If I can begin to tease these two out, then BINGO, this blog post is ready for print. Right, nearly there…

A Productive learning system

Argyris and Schon identify three values necessary for a productive learning system:

Valid information;
Free and informed choice; and
Internal commitment to the choice, including constant monitoring of its implementation.

Sounds lovely…but such a learning system requires the fundamental altering of conventional social virtues that have been taught to us since early in our lives. The following table ‘compares and contrasts’ the conventional with the productive:

Social Virtue:	Instead of…	Work towards…
Help and Support	Giving approval and praise to others, and protecting their feelings	Increasing others capacity to confront their own ideas, and to face what they might find.
Respect for others	Deferring to others, and avoiding confronting their actions and reasoning.	Attributing to others the capacity for self-reflection and self-examination.
Strength	Advocating your position in order to ‘win’, and holding firm in the face of advocacy.	Advocating your position, whilst encouraging inquiry of it and self-reflection.
Honesty	Not telling lies, or (the opposite) telling others all you think and feel.	Encouraging yourself and others, to reveal what they know yet fear to say. Minimising distortion and cover-up.
Integrity	Sticking to your principles, values and beliefs	Advocating them in a way that invites enquiry into them. Encouraging others to do likewise.

There’s a HUGE difference between the two.

The consequences will be an enhancement of the conditions necessary for double-loop learning – with current thinking being surfaced, publicly confronted, tested and restructured – and therefore increasing long-term effectiveness.

You’d likely liberate⁶ a bunch of great people, and create a purpose-seeking organisation.

Intervention

The first task is for you to see yourself – you have to become aware of the wall…and Argyris & Schon are suggesting that you may (likely) require an intervention (a shake) to do this. Your current defensive learning system is getting in the way.

Let’s be clear on what would make a successful intervention possible, and what would not.

An interventionist would locate themselves in your system and help you (properly) see yourselves…and coach you through contemplating what you see and the new questions that you are now asking…and facilitate you through experimenting with your new thinking and making this the ‘new normal’. This is ‘action learning’.

This ‘new normal’ isn’t version 2 of your current system. It would be a different type of system – one that thinks differently.

Conversely, you will not change the nature of your system if you attempt to ‘get someone in to do it to you’.

Why not?

“Kurt Lewin pointed out many years ago that people are more likely to accept and act on research findings if they helped to design the research, and participate in the gathering and analysis of data.

The method he evolved was that of involving his subjects as active, inquiring participants in the conduct of social experiments about themselves.” (Argyris & Schon)

In short: It can’t be done to you.

That ladder? That would be a skilled interventionist, helping you see and change yourselves through ‘action learning’.

To Close

Next time someone shows you that lovely (as in ‘simple’) double-loop learning diagram, I hope you can tell them about the wall…and the ladder.

Footnotes

1. Chris Argyris is known as one of the co-founders of ‘Organisation Development’ (OD) – the study of successful organizational change and performance. Argyris notes that he borrowed the distinction between single-loop and double-loop from the work of W. Ross Ashby. For blog readers, we met Ashby in an earlier post on requisite variety.

2. Book: ‘Organisational Learning II: Theory, Method, and Practise’ (1996) by Chris Argyris and Donald A. Schon).

3. Diagrams: Many of the diagrams stay true to what Argyris wrote about. Some attempt to build upon it. Others (in my view) bastardise it completely!

4. Language: I should note that Argyris used different language to my diagram. Here’s a table that compares:

My diagram:	Argyris and Schon:
Thinking (Our beliefs and assumptions)	Values, norms and assumptions
Action	Action Strategies
Performance	Performance, effectiveness
Defensive learning system	Model O – I
Productive learning system	Model O – II

5. Influence: I haven’t used the bolder ‘cause’ word because there’s a lot going on that is outside the system (e.g. the external environment).

6. Liberate: You don’t need to bring in ‘new’ people, most of what you need are already with you – they just need liberating from the system that they work within.

7. Kurt Lewin: often referred to as ‘the founder of social psychology’. Much of my writings in this blog are based around Lewin’s equation that B= ƒ(P, E) or, in plain English, that behaviour is a function of the person in their environment.

Polishing a Turd

May 19, 2017 giantknave Brain Farts Daniel Kahneman, Eric Ries, Experiment, Feedback, George Box, Lean Startup, Planning, W Edwards Deming

When I was growing up, I remember my dad (a Physicist) telling me that it was pointless, and in fact meaningless, to be accurate with an estimate: if you’ve worked out a calculation using a number of assumptions, there’s no point in writing the answer to 3 decimal places! He would say that my ‘accurate’ answer would be wrong because it is misleading. The reader needs to know about the possible range of answers – i.e. about the uncertainty – so that they don’t run off thinking that it is exact.

And so, with that introduction (and flashback to my school days) this post is about the regular comedy surrounding business cases, and detailed up-front planning…and what to do instead.

A seriously important concept to start with:

The Planning fallacy

Human beings who desire something to be ‘a success’ (e.g. many an Executive/ Senior Manager) tend to:

“make decisions based on delusional optimism rather than on a rational weighting of gains, losses, and probabilities. They overestimate benefits and underestimate costs. They spin scenarios of success while overlooking the potential for mistakes and miscalculations. As a result, they pursue initiatives that are unlikely to come in on budget or on time or deliver the expected returns – or even to be completed.” (Daniel Kahneman)

This isn’t calling such individuals ‘bad people’, or even to suggest that their actions are in some way deliberate – it is simply to call out a well-known human irrationality: the planning fallacy.

We all ‘suffer from’, and would be wise to understand and guard against, it.

I’ve worked (or is that wasted time) on many a ‘detailed business case’ over the years. There is an all-too-common pattern….

“Can you just tweak that figure till it looks good…”

Let’s say that someone in senior management (we’ll call her Theresa) wants to carry out a major organisational change that (the salesman said) will change the world as we know it!

Theresa needs permission (e.g. from the board) to make a rather large investment decision. The board want certainty as to what will happen if they sign the cheque – there’s the first problem¹.

Theresa looks around for someone who can write a great story, including convincing calculations…and finds YOU.

Yep, you are now the lucky ‘spreadsheet jockey’ on this proposed (ahem) ‘transformation programme’.

You gather all sorts of data, but mainly around the following:

a ‘base case’ (i.e. where we are now, and what might happen if we took the ‘do nothing’ option);
a list of ‘improvements’ that will (supposedly) occur if the board says ‘Yes’;
assumptions relating to the potential costs and benefits (including their size and how/when the cash will flow); and
some ‘financial extras’ used to wrap up the above (interest rates, currency rates, taxes, the cost of capital…and so on)

You create an initial broad-brush model and then, after gaining feedback from ‘key’ people, you work through a number of drafts – adding in new features and much detail that they insist as being essential.

And voila! We have a beautifully crafted financial model that has a box at the end with ‘the answer’ in it².

You show the model to Theresa.

Wow, she’s impressed with the work you’ve put in (over many weeks) and how sophisticated the model is…but she doesn’t like this initial answer. She’s disappointed – it’s not what she was looking for.

You go through all of the assumptions together. Theresa has some suggestions:

“I reckon the ‘base case’ comparison will be worse than that…let’s tweak it a bit”
“Our turnover should go up by more than that…let’s tweak it a bit”
“Nah, there won’t be such a negative productivity hit during implementation – the ‘learning curve’ will be much steeper!…let’s tweak it a bit”
“We’ll save more money than that…and avoid paying that…let’s tweak it a bit”
“Those savings should kick in much earlier than that…let’s tweak it a bit”
“We’ll be able to delay those costs a bit more than that…let’s tweak it a bit”

…and, one of my favourites:

“Mmm, the ‘time value of money’³ makes those upfront costs large compared to the benefits coming later…why don’t we extend the model out for another 5 years?”

And, because you designed a nice flexible model, all of the above ‘suggestions’ are relatively easily tweaked to flow through to the magic ‘answer’ cell…

“now THAT looks more healthy! The board is going to LOVE this. Gosh, this is going to be such a success”.

Some reflections

Some (and perhaps all) of the tweaks might have logic to them…but for every assumption being made (supposedly) tighter:

one, or many, of the basic assumptions might be spectacularly wrong;
plenty of the assumptions are being (conveniently⁴) ignored for tweaking…and could equally be ‘tightened’ in the other direction (i.e. making the business case look far worse); and
there are many assumptions that are completely missing…because you simply don’t know about them….yet…or don’t want to know about them.

With any and every tweak made, nothing has actually changed: Nothing has been learned about what can and will actually occur. You have been ‘polishing a turd’…but, sadly, that’s not how those around you see it. Your model presents a highly convincing and desirable story.

Going back, your first high-level draft model was probably more useful! It left many ‘as-yet-unknowns’, it contained ranges of outcomes, it provided food-for-thought rather than delusional certainty.

We should reflect that “adding more upfront planning…tends to make the eventual outcome worse, not better” (Lean Enterprise). The more detailed you get then the more reliant you become on those assumptions.

The repercussions

Theresa gains approval from the board for her grand plan and now cascades the (ahem) ‘realisation of benefits’ down to her direct reports…who protest that the desired outcomes are optimistic at best, and sheer madness at worst (though they hold their tongues on this last bit).

Some of the assumptions have already proven to be incorrect – as should be expected – but it’s too late: the board approved it.

The plan is baked into cascaded KPIs…and everyone retreats into their silos, to force their part through regardless of the harm being caused.

But here’s the thing:

“Whether the project ‘succeeds’ according to [the original plan] is irrelevant and insignificant when compared to whether we actually created value for customers and for our organisations.” (Lean Enterprise)

The wider point…and what to do instead

It’s not just financial models within business cases – it is ‘detailed up-front’ planning in general: the idea that we should create a highly detailed plan before making a decision (usually by hierarchical committee) as to whether to proceed on a major investment.

The Lean Start-up movement, led by Eric Ries, makes a great case for a totally different way of thinking:

assumptions aren’t true! (it seems daft to be writing that…but the existence of the planning fallacy requires me to do so);
we should test big assumptions as quickly as possible;
such testing can be done through small scale experimentation (which doesn’t require huge investment) and subsequent (open-minded) reflection;
we will learn important things…which we did not (and probably could not) predict through detailed up-front planning. This is a seriously good thing – we can save much time, money and pain, and create real customer value;
we may (and often will) find a huge flaw in our original thinking…which will enable us to ‘pivot’⁵ to some new hypothesis, and re-orientate us towards our customer purpose.

The big idea to get across is what has been termed ‘validated learning’.

Learning comes from actually trying things out on, and gaining direct feedback from, the end customers (or patients, citizens, employees etc.), rather than relying on our opinions about them.

Validated is about demonstrating what the customer (or patient, citizen, employee etc.) actually does (or doesn’t do), not what they say they would do when asked (i.e. from external market research or internal survey). It is to observe and measure real behaviours, rather than analyse responses to hypothetical questions.

…and to do the above rapidly by experimenting with ‘minimum viable products’ (MVPs).

Delay (whilst writing a beautiful document, getting it approved, and then building a seemingly golden ‘solution’) prevents the necessary feedback from getting through.

Caveat: Many an organisation has read ‘The Lean Startup’ book (or employed a consultant who has) and is using the above logic merely at the start of their legacy ‘investment decision’ process…but, through grafting new labels (such as Lean) onto old methods and retaining central hierarchical approval committees, their process remains ostensibly the same.

You don’t do validated learning merely at the start of an investment process – you re-imagine what ‘making investments’ means!

“It’s moving leaders from playing Caesar with their thumbs up and down on every idea to – instead – putting in the culture and the systems so that teams can move and innovate at the speed of the experimentation system.”

“The focus of each team is iterating with customers as rapidly as possible, running experiments, and then using validated learning to make real-time investment decisions about what to work on.” (Eric Ries)

Notice that it is the team that is making the investment decisions as they go along. They are not deferring to some higher body for ‘permission’. This is made possible when:

the purpose of the team is clear and meaningful (i.e. based around a service or value stream);
they have meaningful capability measures to work with (i.e. truly knowing how they are doing against their purpose); and
all extrinsic motivators have been removed…so that they can focus, collaborate and gain a real sense of worth in their collective work.

Nothing new here

You might read the above and shout out:

“but this is just the scientific method”; or
“it’s yet another re-writing of the ‘Plan – Do – Study – Act’⁶ way of working”

…and you’d be right.

Eric Ries’ thinking came about directly from his studying of Deming, Toyota etc. and then applying the learning to his world of entrepreneurship – to become effective when investing time and money.

His book, ‘The Lean Startup’, and the ‘validated learning’ concept are an excellent addition to the existing body of work on experimentation towards purpose.

Footnotes

1. We should never present a seemingly certain picture to a board (or merely hide the caveats in footnotes)…and we should coach them to be suspicious if they see one.

2. For the financially aware: this will likely be a net present value (NPV) figure using a cost of capital (WACC) provided by the finance department, or some financial governance body.

3. The ‘time value of money’ reflects the fact that $1 now is worth more to you than $1 in a year’s time.

4. Conveniently doesn’t mean intentionally or maliciously – it can just be that lovely planning fallacy at work.

5. Pivot: This word has become trendy in many a management conversation but I think that its original (i.e.intended) meaning is excellent (as used by Eric Ries, and his mentor Steve Blank).

Eric Ries defines a pivot as “a structured course correction designed to test a new fundamental hypothesis….”

6. PDSA: Popularised by Deming, who learned it from his mentor, Walter Shewhart. A method of iterative experimentation towards your purpose, where the path is discovered as you go, rather than attempted to be planned at the start. Note that, whilst the first step is ‘Plan’, this DOESN’T mean detailed up-front planning of an answer – it simply means properly planning the next experiment (e.g. what you are going to do, how you are going to conduct it, and how you are going to meaningfully measure it).

“Sir, Sir, Sir…have you marked it yet?!”

June 9, 2016 giantknave Brain Farts Capability, Feedback, Gemba, John Seddon, Measures, Ralph Tyler, System

So my son had some school exams and this post was triggered from a conversation I had with him just afterwards:

I expect all of you can cast your minds back to school and if you’ve got teenagers then, like me, you will also be sharing their experiences.

Picture the following scenario:

You’ve studied for, let’s say, a maths exam¹;

You’ve spent 2 long hours sat on an uncomfortable school chair, whilst being watched by the beady eyes of the maths teacher (who was actually asleep), and have just emerged from the exam hall;

You and your mates fall straight into discussing the trauma that you’ve just been through:

“What did you put for question 4?”

“Oh [beep], I hadn’t realised it was about that! I wrote about [something else that was completely irrelevant to the question]”

“Could you work out the pattern in that sequence of numbers?…’Fibonacci’ who?”

“What do you mean there were more questions over the page?!!!”

…and so on.

What you will notice is that they are all ‘switched on’ in the moment, whether they ‘enjoyed’ the exam or not. They really want to know what the answers were and how they did against them!

The after’math’ 🙂

So, next day, they have double-maths…whoopee!

The Students all plead together: “Sir, Sir, Sir…have you marked our exam yet?”

Teacher: “Whoa, hold your horses, I’ve barely sat down! I’ll do it as soon as I can.”

…and the students engage in yet more chatter about the exam but their memory of the exam is beginning to fade.

At the end of the week, they have maths again:

The majority of Students: “Sir, Sir, Sir…have you marked our exam yet?”

Teacher: “No, not yet, I’ll do it over the weekend.”

…much less chatter now. They have forgotten most of it.

So, now it’s the following week and maths:

A few keen Students: “Sir, have you marked our exam yet?”

Teacher: “Sorry, no, I’ve been writing reports so I haven’t got around to it yet. I’ll definitely do it by the end of this week.”

…the mood has changed. The content of the exam has been forgotten and so, instead, they fall back to merely wanting to know a score.

End of week 2 maths lesson:

One diligent Student: “Sir, have you marked our exam yet?”

Teacher: “Yes I have! I’ll read out the marks” and the marks are duly read out to the class, which brings out the whole spectrum of emotions (from feelings of elation to tears of despair, with a healthy dose of indifference in between).

That diligent Student again: “…but Sir, can I have my marked exam paper back?”

Teacher: “Erm, yes…I haven’t got them with me now…I’ll bring them in next week.”

What do we think about this?

We all know that by far the best thing to do for effective learning to take place is to mark this exam, get the marked papers back to the students and then go through the paper to explain and then discuss it question-by-question…and to do all of this As Soon As Possible.

(… and I know that this is what all good teachers will try to do)

We can see that:

There is a human desire for immediate and meaningful feedback, which quickly dissipates over time;

An overall score (the result), whilst potentially providing some useful indicative data, cannot help with learning – you can feel emotions from receiving a score but you can’t improve. Instead, you need to know about the method (or, in this exam scenario, each question);

“We don’t learn from our mistakes, we learn from thinking about our mistakes” (Ralph Tyler, Educator)

There is little point in just the teacher knowing the current capability of each of their students. Each student should be very clear on this for themselves.

So, to organisations:

The above might seem blindingly obvious and a world away from work but every day we all carry out actions and interactions within value-streams for the good of our customers…and the usual buzz phrase uttered at regular intervals is ‘we want to continuously improve!‘…but do we provide ourselves with what we need to do so?

Think of the richly varied units of customer demand that we* strive to satisfy as analogous to the maths exam:

(how) do we all know how we (really) did?
(how) do we find this out quickly?
(how) do we know what specifically went well and what didn’t?
…and thus, (how) can we learn where to experiment and how this went?!

(* where ‘we’ refers to the complete team along the horizontal value stream)

There’s not much point in senior managers receiving a report at the end of the month that provides them with activity measures against targets and some misleading up/down arrows or traffic light colouring. Very little learning is going to occur from this…and, worse, perhaps quite a bit of damage!

…and when I say learning, I hope you understand that I am referring to meaningful changes being made that improve the effectiveness of the value stream at the gemba.

The value-creating people ‘at the gemba’:

The people who need the (relevant) measures are the people who manage and perform the work with, and for, the customer.

If the people who do the work don’t know how they are truly doing from the customer’s point of view then they are no different from the students who don’t have their marked exam papers back.

There should be no surprise if the workers are merely clocking in, turning the wheel, collecting their pay and going home again. It’s what people end up doing when they are kept in the dark….though they likely didn’t start out like this!

Senior Management may respond with “but we regularly hold meetings/ send out communications to share our financial results with them, and how they are doing against budget!”

This gives people the wrong message! If you lead with, and constantly point at, the financials, you are telling people that the purpose of the system is profit, and NOT your stated ‘customer centric’ purpose;

You can’t manage by financial results. This is an outcome – ‘read only’. You have to look at the causes of the results – the operational measures;

…and as for budgets!!!

To repeat a hugely important John Seddon quote:

“Use operational measures to manage, and financial measures to keep the score”

I am championing what may be termed as ‘visual management’: being able to easily see and understand what is happening, in customer terms, where the work is done.

A whopping big caution

However, ‘visual management’ should have a whopping big warning message plastered all over its box, that people would have to read before undoing the clasps and pushing back the lid…because visual management works for whatever you put up on the wall!

If you put up a visual display of how many calls are waiting or how long your current call has taken or a league table of how many sales each member of your team has made or….etc. etc. etc. people WILL see it and WILL react….and you won’t like the dysfunctional behaviours that they feel compelled to engage in!

So, rather than posting activity measures and people’s performance comparisons, what do the value creating people need to know? Well, put simply, they need to know how their system is operating over time, towards its purpose.

Here’s what John Seddon says about the operational measures that should be “integrated with the work: In other words they must be in the hands of the people who do the work. This is a prerequisite for the development of knowledge and, hence, improvement.

Demand: what are the types and frequencies of demands that customers place on the system? What is the predictability of failure demands and value demands?

Flow: what is the capability of the system to handle demands in one-stop transactions? Where a customer demand needs to go through a flow, what is the capability of that flow, measured in customer terms?

…in both cases we need to know the extent of variation – by revealing variation we invite questioning of its causes. By acting on² the causes, we improve performance.”

A final thought: This blog has often said “don’t copy manufacturing because Service is different!“ But gemba walks through a well run ‘Lean thinking’ factory floor may very well assist your understanding of what is meant by good visual management. No, I’m not saying ‘copy what you see’…I’m suggesting that you might understand how a well run value stream has a physical place alongside the gemba where its participants gather and collaborate against a background of what they are currently achieving (their current condition) and what experiments they are working on to improve towards some future target condition.

To close – A shameless segue:

So I’ve been writing this blog for nearly 2 years…and I know many people read it…but I don’t get much feedback³.

If you have read, and accept the thinking within this post, you will understand that this limited feedback ensures that I am somewhat ‘in the dark’ as to how useful my writings are for you.

I do know that people see/ open my posts…but I don’t know too much more:

you might read the title or first few lines of a post, yawn, and go and do something else;
you might get half way through and not understand what on earth I am rambling on about;
you might read to the end and violently disagree with some or all of what I’ve written;

but…and here’s the punch line, how would I know? 🙂

Notes:

It’s clearly a totally separate, and MUCH bigger question as to whether taking exams is good for learning – I’m aware that many educators think otherwise. The genesis of this post merely comes from my son’s exam reality. Just for clarity: I’m not a fan of the ‘top-down standards and constant testing’ movement.
Seddon writes ‘acting on’, NOT ‘removing’ the causes of variation. The aim is not to standardise demand in a service offering…because you will fail: the customer comes in ‘customer shaped’. The aim is to understand each customer’s nominal value and absorb it within your system as best you can…and continue to experiment with, and improve how you can do this.
A big thanks to those of you that do provide me with feedback!….and I’m most definitely not criticising those that don’t comment – I’m just saying that I have a very limited view on how I am performing against my purpose…just like many (most?) people within their daily work lives.