The traditional way to show the hierarchy of a traditional organization is with the CEO at the top and the workgroups/teams at the bottom. The Toyota way (as far as I know) is to reverse it, with the CEO at the bottom. I don’t think either shows the diagram as I’d really like, although the reversed model feels much better to me.

The reason is, the CEO role is a dual role of support and showing direction. In the support role, the role is certainly “at the bottom”, providing support for everyone else in their jobs. In the showing direction role, it is at the tip of the organization.

I have often wondered how I could show that duality effectively, both at the same time. Tonight, as I was going to sleep, an image came to me. I had to get up and do it (and then blog it) so that I don’t forget it.

TL;DR: Work smarter, not harder.

I have noticed that all systems have some natural capability for productivity, value delivery and quality. As the people in the system gain experience in the system, their performance will start reaching that systemic speed. Just like with a ship, this happens quite easily, but when the “hull speed”* is reached, the amount of effort / power to go faster dramatically increases, up to the point that a certain speed seems unsurmountable regardless of power expended. In systems, we can perceive this e.g. in overtime, which does not yield real benefit since the extra effort translates to more mistakes and other negative factors that detract from real progress.

I continually observe that also in the ball point game, where people psyche themselves to try harder, but they still get the same result.

In this blog post, I’ll share a bit of a conversation I was having with a participant of my CSM course, who had his team ask provoking questions. I’ll share the questions and my responses. Remember that this is a conversation piece, so I can’t guarantee it’s more than opinions :).

Snippety snip, start the email here (the original email in quotes, my response in blue):

I had a great retrospective with the team that was having buy-in issues last week and they expressed some fundamental questions that they had not been given answers to.

A colleague asked me very recently, regarding Nokia being in the headlines with Elop’s recent internal memo, what has, in my opinion, Nokia done right and wrong over these years. After all, they achieved a massively dominant position in mobile phones and are now losing it all.

I think they did a lot of things right in the late 1990’s and very early 2000’s.

They were the first ones to focus on customer experience. Even if the processes weren’t very refined compared to best practices today, Nokia phones were considered to be the easiest to use for almost a decade (until iPhone hit the market).