Risky business

I followed a spirited discussion on the user group forum hosted by our ERP vendor. Users were clamoring for development to embrace iPhone integration; which led to a general call for the vendor to broaden its scope beyond Windows client applications. ERP company representatives explained (ever so patiently) why they aren't going there, and why the users should see this reluctance as a good thing. With every posting by the software compay, you could see the frustration level rise amongst the users.  Since I've sat in both chairs, I know the frustration from each perspective. User: Why can't you offer more flexibility for my business needs? Vendor: Have you any idea how much this would cost? It has no quantifiable commercial value - how do I pay for this??

Ultimately, if the market eventually demands the new thing, the vendor will develop it -- but it will be a reactive strategy. In the 80s and early 90s, ERP companies could get away with that. The market accepted long lead times for development, and highly valued stability and risk avoidance. The market's in another place now, and users have much different expectations. They look to their technology vendors to bring the future to them. Sometimes (and only sometimes) the new new thing delivers perceivable value and it takes off like a rocket. But, the failure rate is high. 

Someone has to bear the risk, and maybe it's time for ERP vendors to think differently about the value their clients expect from them. Rethinking the relationship may lead to rethinking the contracts that underpin it, which fund development. Sometimes it' s possible to be safe and sorry. 

Reflections on learning

A teacher at my daughter's new high school shared a pearl this week: when kids are trying to learn something, he said, "Don't steal their struggle." As a parent who too frequently acts the kleptomaniac when her kid hesitates with an answer, this struck me to the core. My urge to help is so unhelpful, and this comment really brought it home to me.

So this was top of mind today in my dialogues today with staff. Ever ready to weigh in (... well, I do keep a blog...), my acting on that impulse is probably none too helpful when someone is working to understand something. Another person really can't help you understand. Wrapping your mind around new data requires something like a dialectical struggle. It's not comfortable and sometimes it feels almost physically painful - the hope is that you learn something because of the conflict between what you thought you knew and the new information.

I think this is the crucial difference between memorization and learning. We commit lots of new information to memory every day, and it's not confronting in the least -- where you left your car keys; how to do a new task; the name of the person who sits next to you at an event. This is no different in kind than memorizing the periodic table, or the Prologue to The Canterbury Tales. Memorization doesn't require that you change how you think about anything - it's just a mechanism to stuff more data into the matrix of your brain.

Too much workplace training is just memorization. Too much of what we 'learn' in our daily lives amounts to no more than this: we just add data to the existing constructs. As an undergraduate years ago, I naively was amazed at the drop-out rate in my freshman philosophy course. For some students, challenging the way they thought (about anything) was just too much -- enticing to me, others found it repulsive. Based on what I see, there's probably a fairly large subset of our population that refuses to challenge their preconceptions -- they'll take on new data, but anything that doesn't fit existing constructs is just lost on them. However we all have our limits: there's a point where my ability to conceptualize something like string theory just causes a system freeze.

Thankfully, it's not all that challenging. Many of the questions I hear daily go beyond memorization, but fall short of string theory. Why do we have so much inventory on hold? How can we enhance the customer's experience? How am I supposed to work with {name of least favorite coworker}? Although the person asking the question may think he's asking for information that can be acted upon, these are all learning questions. They are questions that should cause internal conflict and a change in thinking. The least helpful thing is to steal the struggle - respond with a pat answer. There's so much to be learned in challenging what you think that answer should be, and the discomfort eventually is replaced by the joy of having learned something new.

You can take it with you

This time of rapid technological development is most satisfying when you see your own visions made real by innovators around the world. For some time I've imagined a future in which we carry a single device that is a personal extension of ourselves -- a mobile daemon that is a virtual self. We would use this device to entertain ourselves, read, learn, engage with others, transact commerce. It would function as our multiple devices do today: mp3 player, laptop, PDA, mobile phone -- but it would fulfill all of those needs, while being absolutely portable to the extent we need it to (that is, small enough to slip into a jeans pocket when necessary, but large enough for reading screens of text easily). 

A very clever company called Modu has made this a reality using modular design (the very small modu phone slips into jackets - called modu mates -- to enable the physical interface required for various tasks). This is a glimpse into the future. Based on their representation of their product (they've not yet entered the US market), it appears that the company has designed an extraordinary solution.  Design is a key term here - the modu and its mates are very design-conscious, striving for the ultra-cool stratosphere that is Apple's domain. How the software enables a well-integrated user experience is also critical -- and even more, how well server-based applications enable a completely mobile experience. 

In the meantime, I'm still imagining where this can go - and enjoying the speed of development.

Lean in any language

I'm struck by something I read in Lean Retail (Simon G Fauser, 2007).Describing the difference between Lean Management and Kaizen (Japanese continuous improvement), the author explains that the differences reflect differences in social organisation in the Western and Japanese cultures. The West values individual contribution; in Japan the inidividual is sublimated to the group.

In the early 1990's, I attended a week-long Kaizen event at a manufacturing plant in East Texas. The event was hosted by a US consulting firm, and they had invited former Toyota Production managers to lead Kaizen teams. It was a fascinating experience, not least because I was able to witness the explosive culture clash between the East Texas plant managers and the Japanese consultants. (By Thursday, the plant manager was bravely attempting to defuse the situation and prevent a mass walk-out by line managers and supervisors.) On the sidelines, it appeared to me that the plant's real issue was the wholesale dismantling and replacement of their processes by outsiders. They experienced huge changes (and equally impressive gains, by the way) with no appreciation by these outsiders that what was ripped out represented the cumulative contribution of those managers and supervisors over long periods of time. The fact that some of the outsiders were from a different culture became the touchpoint. No doubt the consulting style of the Japanese was quite different from that of the US consultants -- who were much less direct, and more considerate communicators. But xenophobia played no small part in the scapegoating; it was convenient for externalizing the frustration and hurt feelings that arose out of the project. As we left the site at the end of the week, the plant staff were threatening darkly that they intended to undo all of the Kaizen work, which would have resulted in significant financial loss to the company.

However, I couldn't see that the process methodology, or how we went about performing Kaizen, or the decisions made, were influenced by culture. In fact, that's what I liked about the process: it was data-driven and completely logical. An experiment conducted in Tokyo looks the same if it's replicated in Tucson. I found this refreshing, since most business management practices are completely culture-dependant. The challenge in any business process is how to make it work with multiple people (it's not a process if everyone does his own thing). It has to be quantifiable; it has to be replicable regardless the individuals who perform it. That's the crux: you must create a mechanistic process that is manifested only within a social, human context. Values and social norms inform only one aspect of Lean or Kaizen: gaining buy-in necessary for a successful implementation.

For engineers and anlysts, that's always the rub. I like my chances of getting a machine to run a new sequence smoothly better than getting a team to do the same.

Chicken Feed

I’ve been thinking about motivation recently. An article this week in the NY Times (Mixed Results on Paying City Students to Pass Tests, 8/19/08) reports that efforts to pay students to score well on Advanced Placement tests resulted in more test takers, but few passing the test. An article in DC Velocity (The Secret to Going “Lean”, Pat Kelley and Ron Hounsell) argues the position of motivating the workforce by paying them for increased performance. (Rather alarmingly, the article suggests the best way is to reward individual performance – which makes me wonder what kind of process improvement that is supposed to encourage?) But overall, their argument is of a piece with the perceived wisdom that money motivates. Businesses believe this absolutely, evidenced by their executive pay structures.

But does money really motivate? Certainly pay that is perceived to be unfair de-motivates, but the inverse isn’t necessarily true. The Brafmans in their book Sway lay out a compelling argument that indeed money doesn’t motivate people to do what you want them to do, and can produce quite the opposite (and seemingly irrational) response. The NYC high school results prove their point: the promise of a cash reward motivated more students to try (that is, take the test), but was ineffective to motivate the behaviors that are necessary to succeeding on the test. So in the workplace: if we want to inspire teams to achieve breakthrough performance, perhaps we need to think outside the perceived wisdom.

In fact, I witnessed this just yesterday in a meeting with the DC staff. Speaking to the point of personal and professional growth, I mentioned off-hand my expectation that work was more than a paycheck – my hope is that everyone has an opportunity to grow professionally, benefit personally, and make a tangible contribution. I was unprepared for the enthusiastic response from the group to the ‘more than a paycheck’ comment; it resonated with them more than I could have expected. Now, I have no doubt that everyone in the room wants more money from his job, and I too want to see them make more money as a result of growing the business and professional growth. But motivation is more complex than feeding the chicken more pellets, although strangely we like to think of ourselves that way.

Same as it ever was

Interesting story today in Technology Review, "How (Not) to Fix a Flaw." MIT students found security flaws in the Boston subway payment system, and they did what appears to be the honorable thing: rather than exploit it, they documented their discovery and attempted to bring it to the attention of others. The transit authority would prefer to keep it quiet while they try to fix the problem, so they moved to censor the students. So, desire for control confronts the threat of disclosure.

Wasn't it ever so? Every couple days I see a message on my machine that it's looking for 'updates' it thinks are essential. If I ask for more information about why I should install the updates it found, I get a fuzzy explanation that amounts to: Don't worry your little brain about this; we know what's best. How different it would be if instead, the message said "We've found a bug we created in the software you're running. An unassigned variable causes the application to freeze, requiring you to close and restart the application. This patch contains the fix for it." I'd love the honesty, and I'd also, strangely, give the software company more credibility just because they risked owning up to their mistakes. Even if they didn't have a fix, but knew about the problem (as with the subway payment system), wouldn't it make sense to get more minds working on the problem by letting others in on it?

We've gotta assume there are no secrets when a bug exists. Just because you don't acknowledge it, you think no one will notice? People who earn a living exploiting this vanity can only be grateful.

Uncommon sense

A business unit manager and I were talking last week about a process change his team had put in place. The team is convinced their change has improved productivity. Unfortunately, no metric supports that -- in fact, the data say that the process change is much less productive than the previous standard. So where's the disconnect?

The team leader is convinced that his 'common sense' approach will yield improvements. I'm reading the book Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior and it's given me some insight into the dynamic at play. Regardless of education or profession, people are more influenced by behavior and perceived value than they are by quantifiable, objective data when making decisions. This is so obvious and, simultaneously, stunning.

I think about the HR assessment tools that profile how a person makes a decision: fact-based, feelings-based, balanced mix? It's dawning on me that we're probably kidding ourselves, when safety experts, scientists and medical doctors (fact-based jobs if ever there were) have a clear track record of throwing facts to the wind in life-or-death decisions. This is obviously so hard-wired in the human brain that it feels quixotic to tilt against it.

Yet, acknowledging the sway of 'common sense' is necessary to understand what is required to instill the uncommon sense of fact-based decisions. Uncommon sense is artificial, and not natural, but we can still value it over the chaotic natural order of things. Rare things are often more valuable, after all.