What Do You Think?
When I ask “what do you think?” I’m really looking for thoughts, reactions, different ways to use concepts, and how you feel about what I write. Something as simple as a word being used in a different way can spark my thinking and drive my writing. For example, one commentor, who admitted he was intimidated about writing back to me, told me about his view of organizations as boxes. This immediately created images of people inside boxes, people breaking out of boxes, boxes with cardboard bridges between them, boxes being broken down, and thinking outside the box. Up until then I thought of thinking outside the box as more of an individual, outside the company, thinking and innovation process. His analogy caused me to see “outside the box” as an internal process where one department gets outside it’s box and works with another box to drive innovation.
Your thoughts truly drive my thinking. To all who have commented, thank you! And to those who haven’t, let’s get out of our box and think together!
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Always happy to share comments, as you write great thought provoking posts.
Something I have kicking around for a while and wanted to get your input: Is Lean / Agile only possible for those who have suffered through the travails of Waterfall and Big Up Front Planning? My premise is you have to been through those boot camps in order to refine thought processes to the essential. New team members will not have the context or background to truly realize the gains.
Context and background definitely helps in lean. My post on Agile Transformation Strategy at http://projectmanagement411.com/agile-transformation-strategy-is-a-lot-like-lean/ (Dec 11) addresses this to some degree. Lean, as it applies to manufacturing facilities, has developed quite a bit and requires education, simulations, and direct application to problems (called kaizen events) during the “getting up to speed” period. The post addresses a realization on the part of an agile software development company that they may have to do the same types of things to overcome the “non-intuitive” factor by using these types of “proof” steps. The very real problem in migrating to lean is that pockets of people get very excited about the results of small improvement examples (small kaizens if you will) and want to immediately do more- the problem is that the rest of the business culture doesn’t understand yet and the risk of disbanding the entire lean effort is very high. So, to answer your “suffer through travails” question: I don’t necessarily see prerequisite suffering as necessary; what is necessary is that a massive culture change led by top management has to occur (paradigm shift) and it can be facilitated by training laced with hands on tradition-breaking examples.