The problem with priorities.

Ron Ashkenas posted a thoughtful piece on the problem with priorities a few months ago. He tells a story of the head of a large hospital who asked his direct reports to make an index card for each of the projects they were working on.  One hundred fifty cards (!) later, it became apparent why so few of the projects were moving towards completion -- with so many projects drawing on the same resources of time and attention, nothing could get finished. Moreover, these senior managers were reluctant to formally drop any of the projects because they felt that all of them were important. But as the old saying goes, if everything is a priority, then nothing is. Something is either the priority or it's not.

This reminded me of something that Merlin Mann once wrote:

Making something a BIG RED TOP TOP BIG HIGHEST #1 PRIORITY changes nothing but text styling. If it were really important, it’d already be done. Period. Think about it.

Example. When my daughter falls down and screams, I don’t ask her to wait while I grab a list to determine which of seven notional levels of “priority” I should assign to her need for instantaneous care and affection. Everything stops, and she gets taken care of. Conversely – and this is really the important part – everything else in the universe can wait.

I've written before about the necessity of understanding your "production capacity." If you had infinite time and infinite resources (energy, money, focus), you wouldn't really need to worry about your production capacity. You'd just keep working and get everything done. You'd rescue your daughter and analyze last month's sales figures. No problem.

Unfortunately, you don't have infinite time and resources. (Or if you did, you wouldn't be working right now. You'd be on a yacht docked at your own private Caribbean island.) So you have to make choices. You have to choose your priority for the hour or day or week or year.

My wife has gradually been learning this lesson. Recently, she's been a bit better at saying no, and has been spending a bit more time on her "great work." Patient care comes first as always -- there's no letup in the number of procedures she's doing each day -- but she's shelved almost all of her academic work and a significant amount of her administrative work. Equally important, she's less stressed about the stuff that she's not doing.

Remember: either your project is the priority or it's not. Period.

Delegating with a Kanban

A partner in the tax practice of a law firm asked me, "How can I keep better track of the work the associates are doing? And how can I stay on top of the work I've delegated to them?" Tracking work that others are doing is a common problem, particularly in a high-priced law firm, where the clients want answers to their questions at the most inopportune times -- like the middle of dinner, or just after you've settled into watching Toy Story 1 & 2 with your kids. To be fair, if you're charging them $800 per hour, you should be ready to answer those questions. However, hounding your team to get you that information -- especially when they're watching Toy Story with their kids -- is a sure way to get your firm de-listed from the "100 Best Places To Work."

So what can you do?

Inspired by Lee Fried at Group Health Cooperative, and by Jim Benson over at Personal Kanban, I realized that the kanban is an ideal answer. (For those readers who don't know what a kanban is, for the purposes of this post, just think of it as a white board or bulletin board that's visible in the work area.)

Put each person's name down the left side of the kanban and create a row for each of them. Put the task they're assigned in the next column, and the expected completion date next to that. If you want to be fancy, you can even include some symbol that indicates about how far along they are in completing the work. Have another column that holds a simple red/green signal that indicates they're on track or they've fallen behind. And that's it.

What you've created is a simple visual management tool that allows you to quickly see how each person is doing. Here's an example of what it might look like:

In this screenshot, I've adopted Jim's approach (and terminology) by breaking work into three buckets: "To Do," "Doing," and "Done." This added information helps provide context for where you are in a larger project.

There's nothing earth-shaking about this approach, but I think it falls into the sweet spot between something that's too small for full-blown project management software, and something that's to big for a one-person task list. Having it prominently posted ensures that the work doesn't disappear into a computer file. And the red/green status bar enables someone to signal for help without having to schedule a formal meeting.

One very easy way to work faster.

It's a little disappointing, really. I really thought I was being so smart and creative. I read Pete Abilla's recent post about Little's Law, software development, and queue management, and I thought -- "Hey! I bet you could apply this concept to argue against multitasking and overloading one's calendar! Little's Law proves that if you do that, it will actually take longer to get your work done!"

And then I realized that Pete had beaten me to this flash of insight by, oh, about three years. There it is, in semi-permanent electrons, back in April of 2007:

A common result for multi-taskers is that simultaneous projects or items are spawned.  Multi-threaded is sometimes the analogy here.  But, unlike machines, people have a difficult time completing multi-threaded processes.  The end result is that projects and efforts are not complete, time runs shorter and shorter, and demands continue to pile up.  Think of everything I’ve just described as Work-in-Process (WIP).  So, using Little’s Law above, as WIP grows, then Throughput decreases. Translation: As we multi-task, we start several projects, complete only a few, WIP grows, Cycle Time eventually lengthens, and we are less productive.

(By the way, although this is the money quote, the whole post is worth reading. He's far more eloquent on Little's Law than I ever could be. Plus, I can't figure out how to insert the Greek letter Lambda in a blog post.)

I think that Pete's point makes a good case for using a tool like a kanban or your calendar to manage the amount of work you take on. If you don't match your production capacity (which is to say, the limits on your time and attention) with the amount of work you take on, you've got a recipe for stress and slower work.

Jim Benson, over at Personal Kanban (where "It's hip to limit your WIP."), tells this story beautifully in his "Personal Kanban 101" Slideshare presentation. The picture above (from that presentation) makes Pete Abilla's point about Little's Law visual.

Jim's point is that the motorcyclist is the last, little, five minute task that you agreed to do. . . but of course, in a completely clogged day, it can't get done quickly at all. And a kanban (his solution), or rigorous use of the calendar (my solution, so far) is a way to ensure that you don't get yourself into this situation -- where five minute tasks can't get done, where the cycle time for your work lengthens, where frustration and unfulfilled promises mount.

Okay, so my idea about Little's Law and multitasking wasn't original. I stand on the shoulders of giants, and all that. But if it brings a bit more attention to Pete Abilla's orginal post, so much the better.

Lean and the power of communication.

I attended the LEI's Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit last week in Orlando and was impressed by all the attendees' dedication to improvement. The problems with our healthcare system -- and the healthcare insurance system -- are legion, but seeing the accomplishments of this group gives me some measure of hope that things might actually get better. Amidst all the value stream maps and photos of 5S initiatives, one thing that really hit me was how communication lies at the heart of so much of lean. From kanbans to value stream maps, from daily huddles to managerial standard work from 5S to A3s, I kept seeing how clear, concise, and consistent communication eliminates waste, creates value, and focuses activity and attention on what's important. When you think about it, a kanban is a form of communication that tells someone that something needs to be done at a certain time. Value stream maps are a kind of visual communication that helps reduce misunderstandings. Daily huddles are clearly about communication of problems (and solutions), while manager standard work is a way to routinize and clarify communication up, down, and across an organization. 5S is a way to help communicate abnormalities in a process or place. A3s are an elegant and concise method of communicating just about anything. And you can't go to any lean plant or office without seeing visual management boards that essentially are just forms of communication.

So this got me thinking about the waste of time, effort, and energy that goes into what passes for communication in most organizations. You know -- confusing emails with no clear purpose. Voice mails that don't answer questions, but instead just ask you to "call me back" (and race through the telephone number at the end). Soul-sucking meetings that serve no point except the aggrandizement of the organizer's ego. Proposals and reports that deforest half of Brazil without telling a coherent story. That's a colossal amount of waste.

By no means am I diminishing the importance of the lean tools that are so often discussed. But it does make you wonder: what would happen if we spent even just a little time on improving the quality of the communication within and between organizational silos?

Does the internet make you smarter or dumber? Yes.

Friday's Wall Street Journal ran an interesting feature: side-by-side articles on whether the internet makes you smarter or dumber. Clay Shirky advocated smarter, while Nicholas Carr (who's in the news for the release of his latest book) argued for dumber. My answer to the question? Yes, it does. Both authors make compelling arguments for their point, and I think that both arguments are valid. What's not in question, from my perspective, is that the way we use the internet -- as an always on, constant companion for communication, entertainment, and information -- can be terribly destructive to our ability to get on with our jobs. And our lives.

I'm not a Luddite by any means. I don't propose that we go back to the pre-internet world, or even the 56K dial-up modem. The internet is much too valuable an invention for that. (And having just laboriously completed some rudimentary carpentry work without power tools, I'm all in favor of technology.) But it's important to recognize that there must be a time and place to use the off button. To be unplugged. To be fully present, without distractions. The fact is, as I've (and many others have) written about ad nauseum, we're incapable of multitasking:

When we're constantly distracted and interrupted, as we tend to be online, our brains are unable to forge the strong and expansive neural connections that give depth and distinctiveness to our thinking. We become mere signal-processing units, quickly shepherding disjointed bits of information into and then out of short-term memory.

And yet I see legions of businesspeople and healthcare workers trying to process complex information (spreadsheets, budgets, medical records, etc.) while allowing themselves to be interrupted by the phone or email, or just as damagingly, by self-inflicted interruptions (Hey, I wonder what the score of the Mets game is...). This can't be a good thing. I'm not the only one who thinks so, either: one of the most popular features of the word processing program Scrivener is "full screen mode," which blacks out everything on your computer screen except the document you're working on. And WriteRoom is a word processing program which has as its only selling point, "distraction-free writing."

(I'm not dissing these products, by the way. But I do wonder why we need a product to mimic the appearance of being disconnected when we could just, you know, actually disconnect ourselves. Is it so hard to turn off Outlook and Firefox?)

A few years ago I made a vow that when my wife comes home from work, I close my computer. For the most part, I've lived up to that promise -- and that's something I'm really, really proud of. I don't write that to sound holier-than-thou. (You know, "Look how great I am! I can turn off my email!") I write it because I know how tough it is to unplug the ethernet cable. I also know that as a result, I talk to my wife a lot more than I used to -- and that's a really good thing.

All this is to say that the question isn't whether the internet makes you dumber or smarter. It's whether you can unplug and provide yourself with the time and quiet to focus on whatever it is that's really important.

The downside of automation

Nathan Zeldes, former Intel engineer and author of the seminal paper on Infomania, argues that IT tools can reduce productivity. He doesn't suggest that computers and information technology, writ large, is a bad thing (he's an Intel guy, after all), but rather that any specific IT tool might not be good for the organization. He describes a typical situation:

I’ve seen many an MD cursing under their breath while struggling to enter my examination data and conclusions into a new computerized system. Instead of scribbling a few illegible lines on paper and chucking it into a manila file, to be processed later by an assistant, they had to use an unfamiliar and possibly ill-designed piece of technology, and it took them much longer. And because of this they had less time to apply their real value added, their precious ability to cure the sick.

Zeldes isn't advocating a return to the 50s, complete with pink collars, steno pads, and 3-martini lunches. (Although, who knows - he might be a fan of Mad Men.) He realizes that the benefits of IT are enormous. But I think he raises an interesting issue: the downside of IT systems and automation.

Zeldes says that usually technology

gets deployed with little attention to the wider implications. Thus, if a tool enables the manager or engineer to do the admin’s work, the temptation to remove the admin and become “lean” and “efficient” is great. But the fact is, an admin is paid much less than a highly skilled engineer or manager (or surgeon); and the latter only has so many hours in a day, which may be better used for doing higher level tasks. This is not to say that we can’t streamline some of the work by having it done by the manager; the question is which part, and to what extent. As is often the case, it’s pretty much about identifying the correct balance.

Toyota is famous for being very slow to introduce new, expensive, technology: they never want to automate a broken process. That slowness to add technology also enables the company to understand how it will affect the value stream, and whether that's wise.

When I see companies leaping at technological solutions for time and attention management, I have a feeling that they're in for a big disappointment. Buying a piece of software isn't a cure for poor work flow any more than buying a bigger pair of pants is a cure for your weight problem. Understanding the root cause(s), developing multiple countermeasures, and going through several PDCA cycles is a more reliable route to success.

The Productivity Myth.

Tony Schwartz asks this question over at the HBR Conversation blog:

But is it [the productivity gains in the economy since the market meltdown] good news? Is more, bigger, faster for longer necessarily better?

Tony argues that the fear of layoffs is driving workers to sleep less, work more, take fewer vacations, and have less downtime during the day. He says that this amped up work pace "ultimately generates value that is narrow, shallow and short-term." Personally, I think he takes his argument a bridge too far when he blames the more, bigger, faster ethic for Toyota's problems and the sub-prime mortgage crisis (more sales, more profits, damn the torpedoes).

And yet, there's an element of truth in his argument. Mark Graban penned a wonderful piece today on the perils of 100% utilization, whether for a system, machines, or people. As he says,

The goal of 100% utilization leads to dysfunction and waiting time. Yes, we don’t want the doctor to be idle anymore than ZipCar wants its vehicles to be idle, but you need some “slack capacity” in any system for things to flow.

I've never expressed this idea as concisely as Mark, but I talk about this all the time when I consult to companies. I see people who are stressed and overworked, and they come to me for ideas on how to get more done during the day. To be sure, there's often a high level of waste and inefficiency in the way they work, and we have no problem coming up with ways to reduce that waste. But if all they're going to do is fill up their new "production capacity" (usually with more stupid email, pointless meetings, or non-value added work), then their efforts are ultimately self-defeating. By pushing themselves up to 100% utilization, they're guaranteeing that the system will break: they'll get sick, they'll make mistakes, they won't be a good bosses or husbands or dog owners.

Bottom line: you need some slack time to relax, recharge, and you know, actually think and reflect for a bit. Your performance will improve (as will your health).

Schwartz say that

Getting more tasks accomplished — say, writing and responding to scores of emails in between other activities — may technically represent higher productivity, but it doesn't necessarily mean adding greater value.

I couldn't agree more.

Why companies don't experiment.

A recent HBR article by Dan Ariely, "Why Companies Don't Experiment," posits that listening to experts creates a false sense of security.

When we pay consultants, we get an answer from them and not a list of experiments to conduct. We tend to value answers over questions because answers allow us to take action, while questions mean that we need to keep thinking. Never mind that asking good questions and gathering evidence usually guides us to better answers.

He goes on to say that

Companies pay amazing amounts of money to get answers from consultants with overdeveloped confidence in their own intuition. Managers rely on focus groups—a dozen people riffing on something they know little about—to set strategies. And yet, companies won’t experiment to find evidence of the right way forward.

I think that in a larger sense, the experts might take the form of internal Lean Six Sigma Black Belts, the senior engineer, the department chair, even your mother ("always make the chicken soup *this* way, with the parsnip added last"). Even if you don't have direct authority from your position in some organizational food chain, you might have authority that stems from your expert status. And that's something to be wary of.

As a consultant, this issue -- leading with no authority, combined with the danger of prescription -- is on my mind. My clients consider me an "expert" (which makes me squirm) on time management. The truth is, I've worked at dozens of companies and with hundreds of people, so I see patterns that are often repeated -- but that doesn't mean that I can prescribe an off-the-shelf solution for an organization struggling with getting the right things done. Each organization is unique -- and for that matter, each individual is unique. Not only are the root causes of their problems likely to be different, but the solutions and countermeasures will differ. The only way to find what will work is to really understand what's behind the problems and then experiment with changes.

And yet, most managers I see are reluctant to try different ways of working. I think that's partially due to inertia -- after all, they've done pretty well so far by working the way they have. But that reluctance is also driven, in part, by fear. What if people don't like working in this new way? What if the CEO doesn't like the fact that emails aren't being answered within 45 seconds?

Ariely says that Scott Cook, the founder of Intuit, is

trying to create a culture of experimentation in which failing is perfectly fine. Whatever happens, he tells his staff, you’re doing right because you’ve created evidence, which is better than anyone’s intuition. He says the organization is buzzing with experiments.

Experiments require evidence and data. So if your gut tells you that you're not working as efficiently as you could and you want to change in the way you work, benchmark the current state, run experiments, and measure the change. You don't need experts to tell you what will work for you.

Call for Community A3 Participants Redux

Much to my surprise, the response to Joe Ely's and my call for participants in our community A3 project has been, um, underwhelming. After some reflection with Joe and others, I've come up with the following possible explanations:

1. Companies are so magnificently efficient that there's no wasted managerial time, and therefore no need for a community A3. No problem, no A3.
2. Companies may have a problem, but have no desire to be involved with Dan and Joe because, after all -- who the hell are they?
3. Companies may have a problem with all their really smart people stuck in unproductive meetings, but it's just not really a priority compared to all the other stuff they're doing, lean and otherwise.
4. Companies may have a problem with all their really smart people stuck in unproductive meetings, but they're reluctant to share those inefficiencies with the public -- even the lean community.

I've ruled out #1 because having flushed more hours than we care to count down the toilet of flabby, pointless meetings, both Joe and I know better.

#2 is a good possibility. Aside from our devastating good looks and wonderful blogging voices, neither Joe nor I have double-top-secret Lean Six Sigma Infrared belts. (Actually, Joe might, but since it's double-top-secret, he hasn't told me about it.) But we're pretty good as coaches nonetheless, if only because, as outsiders, we can ask questions.

#3 is quite likely. After all, it's hard to measure the cost of waste of really smart people checking their Blackberries in a conference room for two hours instead of being out on the floor solving problems. It's a real opportunity cost, but it doesn't show up on the income statement. If this is the case, do me one favor: before you mark this RSS feed as read and move on to your next job, just try calculating how much time you've spent in the last week in meetings, and how much of it was waste.

Now, if #4 is the issue -- you're afraid of making either yourself or your organization look bad -- let me put your mind at ease: the purpose of this A3 is to share ideas for improvement with the lean community, not to embarrass anyone. We're more than happy to keep all participants anonymous. There's no need to put your name on your A3 -- we'll share the content (root causes, countermeasures, implementation results, etc. -- but not your identity.

So, with all that said, we still have room for a few more people or organizations to join us. Welcome; we'd love to have you.

Looking for volunteers for our community A3 project

Joe Ely of Learning About Lean and I are organizing a community A3 project to figure out how to eliminate (or at least reduce) the soul-sucking waste of time masquerading as corporate meetings. No less an eminence than Peter Drucker believed that a company is "malorganized" if it causes you to spend more than 25% of your time in meetings. (See my post on this topic here.) Based on our own experience and conversations with others, we're guessing by that definition most companies are in trouble.  So we're going to take up arms against this sea of administrative troubles and by opposing, end them.

We’d like you to join our effort.  We're hoping that the collective wisdom of the lean community can give us more time to do important things (like, say, work) and spend less time in conference rooms sleeping through a 93 slide PowerPoint deck.

Here are the details:

Purpose:

• To reduce the plague of meetings so that we can, you know, actually do some work

People:

• Participation is limited to the first eight companies (or groups) to respond
• All members of the lean community are welcome to review the A3s at any time, or comment on the open access Google Doc

Process:

• Dan Markovitz & Joe Ely will provide the problem statement for the A3 (this creates a uniform starting point for all groups)
• Each company works simultaneously on its own A3
• All A3s posted and readable (but not editable) on Google Docs to anyone who is interested during and after the course of the project
• Comments/updates/funny cat pictures can be submitted on a separate Google Doc so that everyone can read them

Timeframe (75 days):

• Target launch date: Monday, May 3
• Target completion date: Monday, July 12
• Two weeks to fill out the left side of the A3 (background; current conditions; goal; analysis)
• Eight weeks for Do-Check-Act (proposal; implementation plan; follow up)
• Report out/reflection by July 19

If you’re interested in joining us, please send an email to Dan Markovitz (dan ATSIGN timebackmanagment.com) with your name, organization, and contact information.  We’ll send you the link to the Google Docs area with the A3 template and problem statement.

Questions?  Comments?  Contact Dan or Joe (joeely618 ATSIGN gmail.com).

We hope you can join us.

"I'm not stressed out."

Mark Graban tells the following story about his visit to VIBCO:

The two women who were working at the front desk (answering phone calls and customer requests, among other duties) were describing the impact of Lean on their work – how they standardized many of their activities and applied a Kaizen mindset to making their work easier. There were lots of little Lean improvements in place, stuff they had worked on themselves. They mentioned how they were able to get much more done during their day.

A visiting healthcare executive asked one of the women if she was working harder as a result of those changes. She responded,

It doesn’t feel like I’m working harder. I’m not stressed out. I’m getting more done and there’s a sense of accomplishment.

There's an important point here, and it's easy to miss. Generally speaking, the front desk job is incredibly demanding: there's no time for planning and there's no predictability to the schedule -- when you're working the phones and tending to the front door, you have no idea what's coming through the door or when. In a lot of respects, it's a lot like working in the emergency department at a hospital: you never know what kind of patient will come through the door next.

What's noteworthy is that even in a position where the worker has to be immediately responsive to the unpredictable incoming work (after all, they can't just not answer the phones, or lock the front door), they were able to standardize some element of their activities and make those activities easier. And the establishment of standardization resulted in less stress and more work completed. (Not to mention that nice feeling of accomplishment.)

If you're reading this blog, there's an excellent chance that you're not a receptionist, and therefore that your job allows for a more measured response time. For the most part, you don't have to answer the phone on the first ring, or respond to an email within a minute of its arrival (even if you feel you do). Think about the effect that standardizing -- and improving -- some of your work could have on your ability to accomplish your work.

Analyze your responsibilities. Break out the recurring, predictable work (ordering supplies, processing email, dictating cases) from the creative, unpredictable work (writing ad copy, choosing a color palette for the product line, choosing a medication protocol). Standardize and kaizen the predictable stuff. Get more work done. With less stress.

If a receptionist can do it, you can too.

Meetings: the plaque of an organization.

Ed Whitacre Jr., the CEO of GM, is struggling to get the company moving faster. The ossified bureaucracy at GM renders rapid decision-making nearly impossible, and nowhere is that more evident than in the plague of meetings that prevent people from actually making decisions. How bad is it? The Wall Street Journal reported that in the past,

even minor decisions had to be mulled over by committee after committee. Once several years ago, the company tried to stamp out bureaucracy—and ended up appointing a committee to oversee how many committee meetings should be held.

Whitacre is trying hard to push authority and decision-making responsibility deeper into the organization, rather than requiring everything to be approved by the CEO. The Journal describes a recent meeting designed to get his approval for a new generation of cars and trucks:

Before the executives could present the pictures, charts and financial projections they had prepared, Whitacre stopped them to ask why they were having the meeting in the first place.

"Y'all have checked all this out pretty thoroughly," Mr. Whitacre said in his Texas drawl, according to a participant. "I imagine you're not going to approve something that's bad or unprofitable, so why don't you make the final decisions?"

Mr. Whitacre then let the team's plans stand—and suggested that the group end its regular Friday sessions.

I don't know if Whitacre has spent much time reading Peter Drucker, but Drucker was bluntly eloquent about the dangers of meetings. As a recent article in Human Resources IQ explains, Drucker went so far as to say that meetings are by definition a concession to deficient organization, because you can either work or meet -- you can't do both at the same time. And although meetings are a necessary evil, they should be rare:

But above all, meetings have to be the exception rather than the rule. An organization which everybody meets all the time is an organization in which no one gets anything done.

Too many meetings always bespeak poor structure of jobs and the wrong organizational components. . . if people in an organization find themselves in meetings a quarter of their time or more -- there is time-wasting malorganization.

Too many meetings signify that work that should be in one job or in one component is spread over several jobs or several components. They signify that responsibility is diffused and information is not addressed to the people that need it.

How does your organization compare to Drucker's 25% benchmark? My guess is that you're way over that. Most executives I see are spending over 40% of their time in meetings (and most of those are poorly run, poorly focused, and don't result in clear direction for the participants).

Meetings are like plaque, clogging the arteries of the business -- and of the value stream. Companies become immobile from these unproductive, pointless time sucks. Compare GM's sclerotic meeting culture with the stripped down, focused, problem solving meetings at Lantech, where decisions are made at the point of the problem, and at lowest possible level. (Read more about how those meetings are folded into standard work here.) No committees, no fluffy agendas, no long-winded Powerpoint presentations: all the information and all the necessary people are at the location of the problem ready to make a decision. Quickly.

Get rid of the meetings. Go to the gemba. Start flossing.

Leading without authority at Porsche.

John Shook often talks about "leading as if you have no authority." This kind of leadership is not only fundamental to a lean system and to A3 problem-solving, it's an equally valuable skill in any company. When you're working in a matrix organization or in a team, the odds are good you won't have the authority you might want to accomplish your charter. I thought of this principle when I read this statement by Michael Mauer, Porsche's head of design:

... at the end of the day, I do not tell them [the designers] to move a line exactly 50 mils lower or higher or more to the left or more to the right, because if the boundaries are too narrow you really kill all the creativity. I try to motivate people to think for themselves about the solution and how they could achieve the goal... Even if I have a solution in my mind, it is just one possible solution. There might be ten other possible solutions that are maybe much better, but by giving a direction that is too detailed or showing a solution, a way to the solution that is too detailed, I kill all the creativity. One of my major goals is to give the team freedom in order to have a maximum of creativity.

(Excerpt via Diego Rodriguez at Metacool. Full text of interview here.)

This feels to me very much like leading as if you have no authority. And more: it feels like the approach necessary for good problem solving. There's a recognition that there are always multiple solutions to a problem, and what you think is "the answer" might not be the best one, despite your knowledge and experience.

Leading as if you have no authority doesn't just mean not bullying people like Mr. Spacely. It also means avoiding the temptation to dominate -- however inadvertently, however well-meaning -- with your knowledge and experience.

Master the art of saying yes slowly.

Learning to say no matters. A lot. I've been thinking recently about what Michael Bungay Stanier describes as "Bad Work," "Good Work," and "Great Work," particularly as it relates to my wife. (Michael is the founder of Box Of Crayons and is the author of Do More Great Work.)

In Stanier's view, "Bad Work" is the brain-numbing, soul-sucking crap that drives you to drink -- stupid meetings, inane emails, pointless office face time, etc. "Good Work" is the work you do most of your time, the product or service that your organization provides to the world. Stanier says

There’s nothing wrong with Good Work—except for two things.

First of all, it’s endless. Trying to get your Good Work done can feel like Sisyphus rolling his rock up the mountain, a never-ending task. And second, Good Work is comfortable. The routine and busy-ness of it all is seductive. You know in your heart of hearts that you’re no longer stretching yourself or challenging how things are done. Your job has turned into just getting through your workload—week in, week out.

By contrast, "Great Work" is the stuff that makes a real difference to the organization and to the world. Great Work

is what you were hoping for when you signed up for this job. It’s meaningful and it’s challenging. It’s about making a difference. It matters to you and it lights you up. It matters at an organizational level too. Great Work is at the heart of blue ocean strategy, of innovation and strategic differentiation, of evolution and change. Great Work sets up an organization for longer-term success.

Now, my wife is a doctor at a major NYC cancer hospital. It's a teaching hospital, which means that while her days are primarily clinical, filled with procedures and patients, she also has a significant research and teaching burden.  I think that kind of work is both "good" and "great." I mean, helping to cure people of cancer is pretty damn meaningful and makes a real difference. But at the same time, it's routine (for her, not the patients); it's often not that challenging; and it's definitely Sisyphean.

Recently, she's been heavily involved with a major process improvement project. Even though it's administrative work, I think it qualifies as Great Work because when it's done, the hospital will be able to treat more people, more quickly, with less of a hassle for the patients. And if you're sitting there with a giant liver tumor, getting to see her more quickly with less of a hassle is pretty Great.

But here's the problem: the clinical, academic, and research burdens are overwhelming her. She has very little time to work on the process improvement project, because she has so much else going on. And she feels as though she can't say no to any of those other responsibilities. Partly that's self-imposed pressure. Partly that's due to preposterously high expectations set by the hospital. So she's got a ton of work that's not getting done, and she feels terrible about it.

Of course, even though she's accepted all the work, she's not getting to a lot of it. Her time is finite. So even though she says yes, she might as well have said no.

And if she had explicitly said no to some of the work -- by doing fewer procedures, teaching fewer residents, not reviewing any papers -- she'd be able to do more of the process improvement project. Frankly, she's not doing those other things in a very timely fashion anyway. And had she done so, she might be less stressed and feel better about herself.

I've written before about the importance of understanding one's own production capacity. It seems to me that if you understand your capacity, it will help you learn to say no (or as Stanier says, at least it will help you "master the art of saying yes slowly").

After all, your capacity is fixed. Saying yes or no will not affect the amount of work you can do. But saying no will make you feel better. And it just might help you do more Great Work.

Drucker on time

Jon Miller, over at Gemba Panta Rei, reminded me last week of how eloquently and succinctly Peter Drucker stated so many of the ideas that I often struggle to articulate. Here's Drucker on time:

Everything requires time. It is the only truly universal condition. All work takes place in time and uses our time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource.

When the concept is stated this clearly, the connection to lean is unmistakable. Time is a resource, and lean is nothing if not creating more customer value with fewer resources.

When I was at LEI's Lean Transformation Summit a few weeks ago, I attended Drew Locher's workshop on bringing lean thinking to offices. One of the things he said that really hit home for me was that time management is absolutely a key part of lean in the office. Of course. If you want to remove the waste in a process, then you really ought to figure out ways to take out any waste of "this unique, irreplaceable, and necessary resource."

If you think about time this way, you might be a little more reluctant to attend meetings with no clear objective, or allow people to walk in and steal your attention with the dreaded "quick question" (that's anything but), or succumb to the tyranny of the urgent email.

It's irreplaceable. Invest it wisely.

Email is where knowledge goes to die

"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.

Why do we spend so much time putting out fires?

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?

The cost of communication waste.

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.

Closed Lists, Kanbans, and the Key to Prioritization.

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.

Create a fast track for your work.

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.