data
The Egg and I
Ever wonder about the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg? It’s hard to escape the current media about eggs, salmonella outbreaks again! I confess that part of me is a chicken, more than a bit concerned about the eggs. Although the broadcasted data says my eggs are likely to be safe, the current outbreak is disturbing. Egg farmers everywhere are sharing the chilling thoughts of what fear can do to our buying behaviors. A bad egg amongst the good can spoil the lot. It’s not just about eggs, is it? So, what would we be willing to pay for the good eggs? I know all about the value of data in decision making, the power of an objective lens, the better understanding of what risk really means, how it improves performance, and that is all good. That is, in fact, good as long as we have evidence that the data is good, timely, and reflective of what we really need to know for good decisions. So, how do I make up my mind about the eggs, particularly when my grandkids want some “cheesy eggs”? Cooking them thoroughly is supposed to kill the microbial varmints, but the old, “just in case” whispers in. I’m making decisions with second hand information with a cost versus perceived risk imbalance. Does that happen with other decisions we make at home, work, or play? (The golf course counts here)
It’s complicated since good eggs look the same to me as bad ones. What I need to know is inside the shell, and I don’t have the tools or knowledge to check. Here’s the challenge. I only know that eggs are bad by the damage they’ve done to someone and if somehow the word gets out and if the media decides to share it and if I happened to catch the news. Those are lots of ifs. Someone has to crack the shell and eat the egg. I don’t have testing data on the carton, and food safety failures are nothing to ignore. The wonders of science and high tech supply chain systems make eggs plentiful and really cheap. I suppose that applies to lots of other stuff that’s really cheap. So if we were in the egg business, we would want our customers to enjoy our eggs safely, always safely, and come back and buy some more. A history of great safe eggs is important and I would want to make sure only good ones hit the skillet.
But, this is not really an egg problem; it’s a quality management problem. The golden rule of “thou shall not use your customer as your inspector,” has been broken. That’s a rule that is foundational to ethical business practices. When we make a sale, accept an order or sign a contract, we are in fact making a promise that our customer will get what they expect, based on either a standard, a contract, or what we advertise or put on our “boxes.” Accepting a specification is the same as making a promise, and those that don’t intend to keep it but still sell the “stuff” are “fibbers” as my grandkids might say, or something much uglier in our adult language. It’s a real problem in industries where all the suppliers make the same promises and claims.
So, how do we make promises to our customers? How do we keep them? Do we rely on customer failure data to know, or do we know that the likelihood of failure is unlikely? How unlikely? Do we need someone with a badge and a club looking over our shoulder or is our respect our customers, employees, and investors a big enough motivator? There is really no difference between eggs, or cars, or cough syrup, or toys, or the innumerable products and services we provide. A promise is a promise and when we break one and harm is done, it’s on our name and reputation.
• Do we know what we’ve promised, or more importantly, what our customers believe we’ve promised?
• Do we lead and manage from the big print or the fine print?
• When was the last time we checked our processes? Are they about always keeping the promises? To whom?
• When did we last evaluate how effective and efficient our controls are? How likely are we to keep the promise?
• How and when do we decide what is “good enough” for our customers?
• What evidence could we produce on demand that would support our promises and earn the trust of our customers?
“Quality is not an act, it is a habit.” Aristotle
Oh, Now I See!
“I was seldom able to see an opportunity until it had ceased to be one.” Mark Twain.
“Oh, now I see!” It’s a phrase we use so often to convey that we understand, or get it. We use sight as a metaphor for understanding all the time. The word lens is used to mean a channel through which something can be seen or understood. “Mary sees the world through rose colored lenses,” (an optimist, or naive). We are creatures of pattern recognition and our conjuring process requires imagery to put things in place, or to make sense of what we experience or think. We will typically apply what we know (our storehouse of imagery) to what we see and work hard to make sense of things.
Lenses matter and the choice of lenses have interesting effects on what follows. We believe that lenses allow us to see better, and that is true, but for a very limited and specific range of stuff. The lens is helpful in that it blocks out an infinite number of things we could see or consider so that we get clarity and detail on what the lens puts into focus for us. I’ve looked through telescopes and microscopes, sunglasses and readers, wide angle lenses and telephoto ,,,, all bringing into focus different stuff and making me oblivious to everything else around me. If driving fast, I do no longer see what was in front of me seconds before. Nor should I, be looking anywhere but where it’s critical when driving. Texting while driving is illegal in some states, thank goodness.
In our enterprises, we make choices about lenses all the time. We don’t call them lenses, even though they affect what we see and subsequently interpret. If our lenses are the wrong ones, then we’ll just have to deal with interpreting what we see and worry about what we don’t see. If our lenses cover too much to absorb at once, because we’re driving the business so fast, then we’ll just to trust our luck that we did not miss an important turn-off or on-ramp. If our business roadways are all smooth and devoid of danger or speed traps, then it doesn’t matter so much. If the scenery doesn’t change or we’re not trying to take our enterprise anywhere new, then all is good.
Among our most important lenses are what we measure, how well we measure, how often we measure, and what we do with what we measure. They are important if we do actually do something of value with what we measure in time to make a difference. It does us little good to find out that we missed a turn-off two weeks or a month ago, unless we’re pretty good at u-turns and restarts, except when opportunities don’t wait around for us to u-turn. Also, who decides what to measure, or who interprets what we measure, or who decides what to do with what we measure, or who reports what we measure, or doesn’t report what we measure is likely to matter a whole bunch too.
When we go for our annual physical, all the same measurement stuff applies, and we surely hope the doctor and the lab get it right. I lost a cousin to cancer this weekend because a doctor and a lab got the measurements wrong years ago when they could have done something in time to save Bob’s life.
So, when was the last time you checked the lenses you use at work, home, or play?
“There are three classes of people; those who see, those who see when they are shown, and those who do not see.” Leonardo da Vinci.
Who’s Not on Board?
Not that long ago, a major mobile phone carrier had an effective advertising campaign with a catchy slogan. Yet, I found their slogan troubling. It was troubling in that their banner, “We have fewer lost calls” left with me an impression that “we’re not as bad as the other guys” was written with the intent to establish a positive differentiator of quality and reliability. My reaction then was that the goal was to be the best of the bad, or cream of the crap. Upon reflection, I realized that the problem was with me, and in fact, the carrier’s message was the right one. This carrier was actually speaking the language of quality, not of spin (as I confess was my reaction). Quality is measured by the likelihood of failure against a specification. In their case, our case, it was a message that what mattered to the customer was continuity of service and there is a probability that that service will be interrupted, and the best do it fewer times. The carrier must have studied Dr. Noriaki Kano and realized that in some cases, the best can mean fewer defects, and failures against a basic requirement can only bring dissatisfaction. For the basic requirement of service availability, a service unavailability measure is the right metric and satisfaction is not achievable, that is, zero defects can bring only zero dissatisfaction.
This last week, we witnessed what appeared as truly bizarre behavior from Apple. The new flagship, the iPhone 4, has a troublesome performance problem with the reception. The very beautiful phone integrated the antenna into a smooth metal casing, creating a problem when the phone was held in a particular, albeit very normal, way. Some would argue that the decision process for the product launch suffered from an unhealthy bias wherein form trumped substance and engineering warnings. It’s saddening, coming from an exciting and innovative producer of form and substance. What was befuddling was the chairman’s response to the defects. It began with hubris with what appeared a dismissive tone that trivialized the problem …. Customers don’t know how to hold our phone properly, what’s all the fuss about; it’s the bad media at play. As the evidence mounted of the reception calamity and the web took over, sharing the data, the next stage of responsiveness focused on an attack on the competition, asserting that other smart phones shared the same problem. From here it sounds like it’s about “my” product and brand, not the customer pain. That strategy was a big boo-boo. Motorola, HTC, and RIM did not remain silent, each stating that their designs did obey the laws of physics and sound engineering, after all, customers wanted continuity of service.
Today’s connected world is a dangerous place to forget that respect for the customer and respect for the competition are essential for sustainability of brand value and economic goodwill, just ask Toyota. I’ve always loved Apple’s creativity in form and substance. I also believed that Toyota put the customer first. Funny how often bigger does not beget better. It’s called entropy, another engineering insight often forgotten.
On reflection, I wonder how much of the problem had to do with poor engineering and how much with a culture of “enforced optimism” or some variant of the “emperor’s new clothes?” The evidence to date on the catastrophic BP oil rig explosion and the subsequent environmental opening of Pandora’s Box seem to support the dangers of “enforced optimism” leadership behaviors.
How often does the “enforced optimism” show up in planning (pick any type), budget sessions, objectives, progress reviews and reports, investor sessions, group decision making, scheduling and commitment setting, …., other stuff?
Thoughts?
It’s Your Call
A blown call costs a pitcher a perfect game. This week, it really happened and everybody felt terrible, apologies ensued and the guilty umpire felt genuine remorse and accepted full responsibility for the failed measurement. A poor measurement did not change the perfection of the real performance, a better gage, instant replay validated that, but rather the record of what happened. Those that missed this story and are evaluating the statistics of pitching performance will only have the historic data to evaluate, data that is a false witness of events. Imagine the effects of all the poor measurements in one year of major sports events. Do they change important outcomes? Do they steer rewards or punishments? How about all the stuff that goes on with gamblers in or out of Las Vegas?
Bad measurement in sports evokes big emotions, outrage, indignation and a score of aftereffects that include bragging rights. Does bad measurement in our enterprises conjure similar reactions? What are the chances that we are making decisions as a result of poor measurement, the wrong lens, an obstacle in the way, poor technology, get the picture? If so, the issue is ubiquitous. In over two decades of helping organizations with performance gaps, poor measurements have always been at play, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
The issue is not a simple one. For example:
• Do we use the data that we have and try to conjure meaning from it? Or do we start with what we want to know and then measure accordingly?
• Are we sure that the movement in the data is representative of what is actually happening within the process?
• Do different individuals or functions measure differently? Would they come up with the same value when measuring the same process?
• Does the data just not make any sense?
• How about our “calls” on what we evaluate? Do two managers reach the same conclusion about someone’s performance? If not, who is right? What are the consequences to the individual?
• Do we introduce our own bias into the measurement and evaluation?
• Do we have folks who are easier graders and those that are more demanding? Do they evoke similar or different performance?
• How much of our decision process rely on a subjective call (an opinion) versus an objective measurement (an actual number)? Do we know how often our calls are wrong?
• Do compliance requirements change how we measure performance?
• What happens when lab results are wrong? What if wrong results bring really bad news or they mask the bad news and bring good news?
• Are we ever surprised by events that would have been very visible had we measured differently?
• Does a part of the organization hide or hoard data?
• Do our customers measure our deliverables and call about problems that we should have prevented them from experiencing? What did our data say?
• Do we have our vision checked from time to time? Why is that?
• Do we ever catch how some advertisers deceive with clever use of statistics? How about in our enterprises?
• Is it safer for ourselves to call someone “safe” rather than “out” when we’re not sure, just in case? Consequences are often more severe in one direction versus the other.
• Have we ever spent a lot of money and resources on a decision made with poor data?
So, how’s our data today?
Where is That Report?
To a small to large extent, most reports that are produced and delivered are late, early, inaccurate, or incomplete, with too much or too little at the time when needed to make decisions. Ouch, that sounds like a nasty indictment. But it’s true nonetheless, because we may be trapped in the paradigms that produce batched outputs in a continuous world. That means that there is typically a schedule or a request that triggers the production of the report and the world and its impacts on us are changing all the time, so some of the stuff in the report have changed by the time we get it.
Let’s leave the compliance reporting aside as that is a very different discussion.
Now, why all the rants? The real value of reports and spending a fortune on information is to enable better choices and decisions. We can influence the future and make a better place for our enterprises and ourselves by what we chose, decide, and execute. For decisions that are influenced by transparency to what is and isn’t, we want the accessibility and usefulness to be convenient, correct, as fresh as available, all the quality stuff, and unencumbered by anything else. The bundling and batch production of a “report” affects all the above. Plus, many reports are produced with an eye to production efficiency rather than decision effectiveness. That means that we get more information than we specifically want or need, because the reports are created for a broader audience. Maybe we only need one of the twenty published pages, but sorting that out hurts production and delivery efficiency. Maybe the process requirements were set as a result of a project executed by the function that produces, rather than the one than decides. Don’t blame them, their budget and metrics prompted it.
We’ve learned to create and use these bundled documents over many years. We know how to organize the information and make it as useful as possible, maybe. As long as we “report” utilizing the constraints of documents, we will have to display in two dimensions, pay the price of hand-offs, stale information, delays and costs of compiling …. And the killing of lots of trees. When dealing with risks and decisions that have complexity and velocity, electrons do a better job than hands and people. Try asking, “what if this, and what about looking at it this way or that?” …. Then wait for the next report.
Many have already figured it and are way beyond the simplicity of this argument. Today there are really great technologies that can answer in real time and across as many windows as are relevant. But often the richness and capability still makes it into the batched reporting, robbed of real time and stripped of the multi-dimensionality requirements of better decisions.
Now, don’t take this as an endorsement or even an encouragement for enterprise systems of big IT spend. This is a suggestion to challenge the old habit of producing in batch, potentially governing the timeliness and quality of choices and decisions.
Do we need a report, or do we need a decision? I suggest you answer the decision one first.
Thoughts?
Throwing the Flag
Those who follow sports know that the quality of officiating is receiving much needed and overdue attention. In fact, there is one officiating team in NCAA Football that is currently sitting on the bench for terrible calls in very important games. In fact, the poor officiating may have determined the winners and losers. Sports are a great place to talk about poor measurement because we’ve all seen it. With the advent of better technology and high definition instant replays some of the boo-boos are much more evident. Competent people in the business of evaluating performance of any type are very aware of the impacts of measurement and very skeptical of any decisions people make …. Measurement issues surround us …. I used the word competent intentionally because those that don’t pay serious attention to the quality of measurement and render opinions, advice, or recommendations on data or information are dangerous people to have on board.
Let’s stay with college football for a little longer. Bad calls lead to new conditions that redefine all of the subsequent plays. Some calls don’t end up having terrible consequences, but others do. (Apply these points to everything else … work, play, health, safety, purchases, promotions, politics, war ….) Let’s take the bad call that changed the outcome of the game.
- Rankings changed among the competing teams
- Who played at bowls changed along with the commensurate compensation and attention? Also, all of the people who went to bowls changed, … , the travel, vacations, and lots of other secondary and tertiary order effects.
- Coaches got fired, hired or moved. Lots of the press chimed in labeling winners and losers. Life changing events took place ….
- Different kids got recruited by different coaches….. And on and on and on….. the dominoes keep falling …
- This was due to just one bad call (measurement) that changed the game, just one game.
Apply that to any professional sport, the gambling industry, and the lives of the happy and despondent whose lives revolve around the sport … it continues. There is good and bad from all of this …but it is different. So the better team doesn’t always win, and it wasn’t from poor performance….
Now, how about business performance? Have we considered just how much is impacted by poor measurement? How many big and small decisions alike were made on the shoulders of a bad call? Was the bad call on the shoulders of bad information or data? How about performance appraisals, promotions, demotions and the like? Any capital spending decisions made on poor data? Did we ever spend bundles fixing something that wasn’t broken beacuse our data was crap?
Sports are changing and some for the better as our measurements improve.
How about what we do?
“One Thing …”
It’s really great to be surprised, particularly when it’s a good one. For close to two decades I’ve been ranting about three rules, the only three rules we need to execute, improve, or accomplish close to everything. There are many attributes that contribute to success, brains for example, but those are not what this is about. The three rules are focus, discipline, and follow-through. They are applicable to better golf, getting a prom date, getting through school, and an endless list of goals to meet or ends to achieve. I have found that trying to get “there” and stay “there” without following all three is unlikely, geniuses included. What most of us call luck in the successes of others may have the hand of randomness, but more likely you’ll find the rules behind the “luck.” I’m pretty sure that by now some have figured out that “luck is when preparation meets opportunity.”
My surprise came at a conference this past week, one dedicated to performance improvement. These conferences almost always have gems and nuggets of insight and success stories, and this last one had a real humdinger. My first inkling that this was going to be good came when the presenter turned out to be the President and CEO of the organization. You typically don’t see folks from the C-suite presenting a story about performance improvement to a room full of professionals, consultants, gurus and geeks. With his story, Robert Weiner of PAS Technologies need never fear. I will leave the details out, but available to those with enough initiative to hunt him down and request a copy of the presentation. Those in the aerospace industry should jump on this, like now! It has ample examples of the three rules and lots of brains to boot. The three rules were evident and brilliantly executed. I can’t say that often, sadly.
There are two gems that stand out and can serve as benchmarks for those seeking to transform. Transform can apply from self to enterprises and everything in between. The first application has to do with understanding that fitness, typically governed by the laws of physics, is a precursor to exceptional business performance, typically governed by the laws of economics. Obese enterprises will not win races and sustain leads. Business fitness makes winning possible. The second part has to do with how to measure success and when to change focus, discipline, and follow-through. Robert Weiner got it right. As a consequence, his team was able to snatch success from the jaws of failure. If you want folks to get aligned, then they need transparency into what matters. If you want them to improve, they need the means to build capability that is measurable and scalable. If you really want this to work, focus on the essential. Then make sure all the consequences match. It’s hard to “walk the talk” when the signals “stumble the mumble.”
The coolest surprise came when he described the transformation that was executed with only one metric for fitness, then, and only after fitness was achieved, he shifted to only one metric for winning. Yep, one metric for each phase and that’s for the entire enterprise. It worked and will work. But this is not for the faint of heart or feeble in resolve. Many will moan that their metric is not there or that certain metrics belong for correctness and balance. Get the presentation from Mr. Weiner, read and weep. It is good stuff. When we pick the right one, the secondary stuff finds its place and aligns to contribute, rather than distract. Fitness requires all the systems to work in sync with clarity of purpose and outcome. It is hard and is likely to hurt, and that is good.
As Curly, the crusty cowboy in City Slickers said, “Do you know what the secret of life is? … One thing. Just one thing. You stick to that and the rest don’t mean …” we know the word …..
In the Dark?
There’s a pretty interesting debate going on between some really bright folks about whether information, or history, can be destroyed. It’s not among real historians, archaeologists, biographers, or anyone else most of us would imagine. It’s among very renowned physicists, luminaries including Stephen Hawking. Dr. Hawking was among the very early to write for the enlightenment of us outside the genius gene pool with “A Brief History of Time.” He is also credited with the conceptualizing and predicting of black holes.
Black holes are entities in the cosmos whose density is so large that they pull in, “suck up” everything around them including light. Nothing gets out, like some in-boxes we all know about. Black holes and their effects on information are what the big debates are about and where reputations are at stake. We know that the regular types of information and histories are destroyed all the time. Information or history is destroyed by cataclysms, wars, book burnings, oral accounts, my faulty memory, and a very long list of other means, including our scary hard disk crashes. It’s sad, but creates lots of opportunities for sleuths of all disciplines.
Here’s the fascinating part. The real physicists out there will rankle at my oversimplification, but I’m just not that smart. A big part of we actually “know” about what’s out there in the cosmos comes from bigger and better telescopes and other measurement technology. The stars, planets, galaxies and other cool stuff are visible because light has travelled big amounts of space-time. For now, let’s just say that it has covered very large distances across space in very long periods of time, light years in fact. We know by now that what we see all happened in the past, including everything near to us since light had to bounce off of or emanate from what we “see.” Light moves very fast, so we believe it’s happening in the “now” and that’s comforting to many.
Here we go. If nothing can escape the black hole’s pull, including light, then the information about a star or galaxy is lost on the way to us if it comes near a black hole. As far as our instruments can tell, the star never happened, the information is lost. This argument has been going for a long while and even Dr. Hawking has moved from his position on the subject. His new position involves perspectives that include more dimensions than we can understand and multiple universes, some without black holes. This stuff is not for everybody.
So it is all about light. We’ve known about it for a long time. We use terms like enlighten, bright, luminary, obscure, in the dark, and other descriptions that have to do with information, knowledge, and other types of history. If we don’t put light on something, or if does not give off light that reaches us, information is lost. It is as if it never happened. Worse, if our management and information systems take data in and it never gets out, information is lost. We have black holes of our own making.
Maybe it’s time to take the debate from the realm of physicists, astronomers, and cosmologists and bring it into the realm of operating an enterprise. Information is being lost, history of what happened no longer exists, and we will make some decisions in the dark. These black holes can be found everywhere. In fact, the post 9-11 investigation revealed that critical information was lost because of interagency black holes and individual biases.
Dr. Hawking has concluded that if we are in one of the parallel universes that does not have black holes, information is not lost. So you can’t have it both ways in any given universe.
But there is hope for our businesses. We can change what and how we execute and create a black-hole-free workplace. It’s good for our health.
Cool Beans!
Today I experienced something some really cool healthcare! It left me contemplating that maybe we really do have the capacity to sort out the hurdles we face with the healthcare issue. Today I needed to make an unplanned visit to my physician. With a fully booked schedule (this doctor is good…), one of his team understood that variability and timing creates opportunities, parked me in the waiting area and got me in within 20 minutes. That was great by itself, but the cool part followed.
One aspect of getting my medical guidance from this physician is his impressive use of data and technology. Whenever we meet, the discussion around the vitals is on point, virtual and current. I like that. Data is good. From what I gather, the preponderance of his data travels purely on the back of electrons, who I have found are less prone to hick-ups than those transferred with fingers. I like that. Electrons are good.
I often rant that electrons are far better at some tasks than people like me are. They make less mistakes, don’t complain, don’t have eyesight problems, are fast, don’t forget (I do…) and lots of other great attributes. We’re codependent with electrons, so we can make a good team now and in the foreseeable future. Today I saw electrons kick some serious butt. I needed a prescription for what ailed me.
My experiences with getting a prescription enjoy the benefit and difficulties of many years and some ailments. Getting the prescription generated and filled can be slow, require several hand-offs, prone to errors throughout, and have carried significant transactional costs and liability insurance burdens of the risks and importance they have. Lots of hands and lots of eyes aren’t free. Lots of compliance requirements and the fear of suffering consequences are also very costly. They also have a number of queues in the process of being filled. When we add to that the transactional costs created by insurance coverage, the non-valued costs added to my little pill are scary to contemplate. After all, we’re not electrons, so we have to check stuff to make sure. I don’t like that. Non-value adding costs are bad.
Today I watched Doc, key in my prescription into his electronic tablet, ask for and then input the local pharmacy information, hit the magic key and confirmed receipt at the destination. These friendly electrons did that is a few seconds. I left his office and by the time I drove up to the window at my pharmacy, the little pills were ready. Those living in Cyber-land may say, “So what? That’s easy…” My reply is, “This is cool beans!” I like that. Cool beans are good.
I see promise in this little experience. I see the endless possibilities to tackle this yoke and fear of health care around our collective necks. Solutions are possible. The promise of process improvement still has lots of legs! These hard times may yet precipitate the best of times. Actually, we’re reading this because of our friendly electrons!
I don’t want to minimize or oversimplify what is ahead. The challenges are huge. The players are difficult. The stakes are high. The tactics are ugly. The rhetoric is offensive. The suffering is real. But the opportunity is great. There is opportunity in every storm. I hope and pray we can get past all the storm coverage and move on to finding and harvesting these opportunities.
“When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion, kind unassuming persuasion, should ever be adopted. It is an old and true maxim that ‘a drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall.’ So with men, if you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend. Therein is a drop of honey that catches his heart, which, say what he will, is the great highroad to his reason, and which, once gained, you will find but little trouble in convincing him of the justice of your cause, if indeed that cause is really a good one.” Abraham Lincoln
Fast Times with Heisenberg, Gretzky, and Carroll
Ever hear of Werner Heisenberg? Unless you are one of those people (confessed addict here) that is curious about lots of stuff, in this case quantum mechanics, you may not really care. Quantum mechanics has to do with the behaviors of the really small, what some physicists look at. What is really interesting about Heisenberg is a principle about measurement he developed, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle. He says that the more you want to know about a particular attribute like position (where it is), the less precision you will have about another attribute like velocity (how fast it’s going in a particular direction). I’ve believed for a long time that it is true about bigger things than the subatomic. It is true about what we measure and evaluate in our business performance. Stay with me, this may help.
One example is akin to the example above. The overwhelming majority of business data that I’ve been exposed to focuses on where performance has been, say position. That is important since we need to know what our demonstrated capability to perform is. The more we know about position, the less we can say about how fast it is moving in a particular direction, velocity. Our performance has a velocity, and depending on what aspect of velocity, a very specific direction. The velocity going forward is not usually the trend; it can sometimes require a little more calculus than algebra.
In fact, performance has multiple directions; the most obvious are cost, time, and quality. We can say with complete certainty that they move at different velocities (it’s a safe bet). The really important point is that we seldom, if ever, look at the velocities for decision making. Agile people and entities do. They also keep that part a secret (it’s called competitive advantage). If you follow sports, you may have heard the quote by the hockey great, Wayne Gretzky, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it is.” Since Wayne has to manage his own velocity he needs to manage it to where he needs to be, at the puck. Applies to our businesses, doesn’t it? Performance decisions only affect the future, where stuff is going, not the past (unless you’re a good book cook).
I’ve spent the better part of the last two years on this topic and it has fundamentally changed my lenses to evaluate performance, capability, metrics, dashboards, product development, voice of the customer, innovation, competition, negotiation, human resources, … ad infinitum. Looking at the world through that different lens and feeding it through a different dashboard also changes our insight into where the ugly risks are and where to invest resources and time on improvement strategies. Additionally, the velocity lens redefines the applicability of gaming theory and network analysis in business decision making. These are really cool beans.
No reminder needed that the world of leading and managing enterprises is fraught with ever faster changes.
- Do we know how fast?
- When we execute the changes we’re deciding to make today, will we end up where the puck is going?
- Do our project controls and toll gates enable or constrain our ability to respond to an ever moving puck? Do scope creep, change orders, restarts, and rework sound more like the rule than the exception?
“The faster I go, the behinder I get”. “You have to run as fast as you can just to stay where you are. If you want to get anywhere, you’ll have to run much faster.” “Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place.” Lewis Carroll
So, where are we going?
