Or, in its full name: Wring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective greatness through Slowification, Simplification and Amplification. By Gene Kim and Steven J. Spear.
It's a bit of a mouthful, but this matches perfectly the ambition of the book's authors: To devise a theory of everything. Or, at least, of business operational success - any business. Naturally, in order to do that, they are abstracting quite a bit, but despite everything they manage to create something that sounds convincing and powerful. It's a great book, but it suffers from a major drawback for me - it's a managers oriented book, which fits their theory (short version - it's all about management) but is not as actionable for me as I would like it to be. I can still use the insights from it to reason with my managers, and to set some goals I will want to advocate for, but it puts one heck of a nail in the coffin of "driving a change bottom-up" idea.
So, to the theory of everything.
The authors define 3 layers of "stuff" that happens in just about any business:
Layer one: "Technical Object". Or, in other words, the doing. This is what the skilled people are doing - be it coding, chiseling a piece of rock or selling timeshares to elderly people.
Layer two: The tools. Those are the tools used to do the things in layer one, the hammers and jigsaws, the build systems and expensive electronic microscope.
Layer three: The social circuitry. This is how your organization is structured, how data flows, how dependencies are managed and how decisions are being made.
The radical claim the authors make is that while there are a lot of differences between organizations in their layers 1&2 needs, in layer 3 it's pretty much all the same. Therefore, it stands to reason that in this layer, good practices can be transferred between industries, which we can see happening in some places (the one I remember is the Toyota manufacturing approach being an inspiration to devops movement in software development). The book's main message is that in order to increase productivity & quality while decreasing costs and making employees happy and motivated, you "only" need to do three things. They name them "slowification, simplification & amplification". Do those, and you're on the right path. Note - there's a distinction between "simple" and "easy". Each of these words is packing a whole lot of work within it.
The first term is a word they made up to carry the meaning they were looking for of "slowing down to make things better" (they say that in German there is "Verbesserung", which my limited knowledge just says means "improve", but I might miss some context). The idea is that since when under pressure we revert to our habits and instincts instead of thinking (in Daniel Kahnman's terms that would be "system 1(fast) thinking"), we need to slow down to engage our brains (system 2, or "slow" thinking). This can happen at many levels - some phases, such as planning\design are slow by nature, and might only need some small nudges to be more conscious, we can use a testing environment that is low-risk and we can control to a greater degree, and we can find ways to slow even the performance environment (that's the name they use for "production", as it's more broadly applicable). Let's take for example a basketball game - before a game, the coach might go over some tactics with the team, draw some sketches on the board, so that players won't have to communicate the plan while they are running after the ball. This way they have time to suggest adjustments and deliberate alternatives. Then, when in practice, they might stop everything to perfect the way they pass the ball around, and during the game, a player can take a couple of seconds dribbling to re-orient and plan the next move. Slowing down is not always possible - a player jumping for the rebound ball can't pause to think, so in this instance they will have to rely on the instincts they've built during practice.
Simplification, thankfully, retains its dictionary meaning. in order to succeed, we want to solve easier problems. They mention three techniques to achieve this: Modularization is the way we partition a large problem to smaller yet coherent problems. Incrementalization is their way of saying "baby steps", where we establish some solid known basis (through standards, automation, documentation and so on), and invest efforts in learning the next new thing and linearization is creating a sequence where actions are depending at one another.
Most of the book is alternating between explaining the three concepts (or is it principles?) and analyzing success and failure examples according to them. They show, for instance, how the Wright brothers were able to get an airplane flying in a fraction of the cost of the (failing) competition because instead of trying to build one complete plane after another, they did a lot of experiments on various parts such as testing only the wing design elevation power, without attaching it to an actual plane, or using a kite in order to test the ability to steer by curving the wings. Those examples make a pretty good case for the main theory, but the one thing that was probably the reason for the book being that convincing was the opening "vignette" which is available in google books for free (link, I hope), they do a much better job of describing it than I could, but the main idea is describing how poor management and social circuitry are making a mess of something relatively simple such as managing moving furniture out of hotel rooms and painting them.
In between all of those, there are a few insights that are worth mentioning, such as the realization that the social circuitry should match the way the technical layers are organized (which, if we think about it, is a take on Conway's law that reverses the causal direction. It's not that "since our org structure is X, all of our systems will be X compatible", but rather "since we want to produce X, we need to structure our org in a manner that will support it"), or a motivational explanation of why the framework presented in the book works (in short: simpler, more isolated problems enables more minds to engage with the problems at hand). The most depressing insight they share, which I have already mentioned, is that those things don't come bottom-up, to really have an impact, one must have executive power. I'm guessing that as an individual, I can use some of these ideas to structure the work around me to some limited extent, but the truth is - simplifying most of the problems I deal with will require change in multiple other teams, so I can nudge, convince, and haggle - but I can't really control what's going over there, so my effect will be limited.
So, all in all - great book, especially if you're somewhere in the C-suite. I wonder if it should be taught in management courses.
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