The Japanese have an interesting expression, Tama Mushi.  A tama mushi is an iridescent beetle and this simple expression means that things look differently depending upon the angle from which you view them.  In divisive organizations, rather than working to get a 360 degree understanding of a problem, individuals defend the position of their group, failing to consider, and even to hear the legitimacy of the position of other stakeholders.   Issues dissolve into internal win-lose competitions and energy goes into winning for one’s group rather than into understanding the actual problem.

An organization’s ability to manage in the face of this kind of political environment is critically hampered.  Many companies go backwards, and in the interest of maintaining some level of peace they devolve into faux-consensus organizations.  Faux-consensus organizations are characterized by an over commitment to get everyone on board with a plan before moving forward.  They often arrive at a situation known as the veto of one, where any member – a representative of a functional group with a ‘point of view’ – can stop a project in its tracks.  Critical issues go unresolved as the stakeholders invest time wooing the veto holder onboard.

Even as organizations mature, the prospect of internal politics gumming up fluid and flexible execution hovers nearby.  This can be seen even in companies mature enough to use the 8D process to manage crisis situations.  At its simplest, 8D is divided into parts, the containment and the follow up corrective action.  Those two parts reflect what Covey divides into the urgent – the crisis management of the containment phase, and the important – the corrective action which has root cause discovery followed by the execution of a resolving plan. In the containment action, a team deals with a critical customer-effecting flaw and rallies all hands to keep the problem in house and from negatively effecting customers further.  The clear goal and the crisis mentality focus the team on accomplishing this first step.

The second part of the process, the corrective action is vulnerable to political divisiveness.  This phase starts with root cause discovery, and most commonly deploys the team that was formed to perform containment.  Though the worst of the crisis has passed, the situation is usually still charged with stress.  Having lost the focusing power of the crisis and with perhaps a growing sense of defensiveness to the stress generating messages coming into the team from outside, a splintering of the team into factions is a not unlikely outcome.  Team based root-cause discovery gets subverted into fault finding and an unhealthy situation leads to a significantly sub-optimal solution.

Demonstrated by the proverbial horse designed by a committee, investigation and planning are activities best served as individual responsibilities.  So in the case of the 8D process, we recommend an hourglass shape to the process. Deviating from common practice where the 8D team is formed early and kept intact until the conclusion of the process, we see it as more effective and less vulnerable to a flare up of politics if the containment team turns over root cause discovery and planning to a single responsible individual.  And when the root cause is determined and a corrective plan is to be executed, an execution team is formed. 

In general, teams operate best when project needs can be subdivided into individual responsibilities, or when a crisis situation helps to glue the team together.  But to fully mature, an organization needs to develop the situation in which teams work well together, even outside of crisis mode. In fact they need teams to collaborate early to avoid as much as possible the creation of crises.

While siloes divide the horizontal landscape of a company, hierarchy separates the organization into layers.  This vertical segmentation of the company creates communication barriers between the strategic, managerial and individual contributor ranks of the company. 

As organizations solve the communication problem between layers, they often discover the added benefit of the weakening of the silo culture. For this to happen, it is critically important that the communication apparatus have something vital to transmit.  And that vital transmission would be a clear articulation of what the company is trying to accomplish, the goals of the organization. 

The number of organizations that operate without defining goals is astonishing.  And many organizations that have done the strategically difficult work of forming shared goals, fail to communicate them to and throughout the organization.  A shared understanding of goals can inform all the decisions being made and all the work being undertaken in the company, at all levels.  It enables teams to cooperate, without the necessity of a crisis gluing them together.  When everyone in the company is trying to put a man on the same moon, silos crumble and internal politics are reduced from disabling to merely annoying.

If your own organization is crippled by politically charged infighting and narrow view points, look to the creation of shared goals as a lever to lift the company out of the muck.  Getting to credible, agreed upon, vitally important goals is the first order of business for companies who seek to uproot the unhealthy politics that rob them of energy and profit.

If we look at takt time on a production line as a two beat cycle – in one cycle the line advances, in the other the value adding tasks are executed – the heartbeat and our circulatory flow do serve as clarifying models for the Lean elements of Cadence and Flow.

Heartbeats have been in the news recently with the minor dustup over the suspicions of privilege in Dick Cheney’s successful heart transplant.  Below that opinionated noise there is a far more interesting story, and one that has caused my Lean head to spin – continuously – and to muse.  This other story begs the question of what would happen to the relationship of Cadence to Flow, and to our heartbeat analogy if there were no driving beat but rather continuous flow.

Prior to his heart transplant, Dick Cheney had an LVAD (left ventricle assist device) implanted to help support his failing heart and to keep him alive until a candidate heart could be found.  There are over 10,000 heart disease patients who now have one of these LVADs embedded.

The development and adoption of artificial hearts have been constrained by the rapid wear and tear on the implanted mechanical pumps, as well as by the difficulties of supplying power to the devices. The hundred days of life extension given to Barney Clark by the Jarvik 7 heart in the 1970’s set a course for medical engineering research, but the goal of a natural life with an artificial heart has remained unfulfilled.  Because of the practical limitations of artificial hearts, they have been used exclusively as devices to prolong life while patients waited for an available heart for transplant.

In the 1980’s, a doctor-engineer was inspired by an experience he recalled.  A decade earlier on a volunteer mission to Africa, he had observed how water was pulled from wells by an Archimedes Screw, essentially an auger in a pipe.  His inspiration and subsequent research led to the development of heart devices that moved blood not by pumping, but by means of compact turbines.  Early fears that the rotating blades of the turbine would do damage to blood cells were allayed and this technology became the basis for LVADs.

LVADs are not intended as artificial hearts, but rather as ‘crutches’ for diseased hearts.  Because of their compact technology they provided mobility and freedom from hospitalization for patients awaiting transplant. Astonishingly, LVADs also demonstrated the ability to help reverse heart disease apparently in the same way a crutch relieves the burden on a leg and lets it heal.  But even greater astonishment awaited as the LVAD patient population grew and flourished.

In 2003, a patient from Central America came to the United States and was fitted with an LVAD. Communicating through a language barrier, he misunderstood the instructions for him to return frequently.  Upon release from the hospital, he disappeared. A year later, he returned for a checkup and explained that he had not returned sooner because he felt so great.  During his physical, astonishingly, he had no pulse.  His heart had given out entirely and he was being kept alive solely by the circulation provided by his implanted turbine.

Since that experience, an artificial heart based upon dual turbines has been developed and has been implanted successfully into a small number of patients as a treatment of last resort.  For now, those patients thrive and there is optimism that research has embarked on a path to a practical, long lasting artificial heart. 

The circulation that results from these turbine-based artificial hearts gives continuous flow (Perfect Flow?) but no pulse, no cadence.  The critical value-add process of gas exchange in the lungs can be accomplished as the blood flows continuously. So does Perfect Cadence result from the absence of the no-value-added-but-necessary half of our two part cycle? Is it achieved when we are able to provide all necessary value contributions under the condition of continuous flow?  I think in theory it is, but as I try to visualize this in practice the only image I can summon is Lucille Ball laboring and stuffing her face at the candy factory. 

Cadence is often a conscious feature.  We consciously create cadence to regulate workflow.  This enabling control feature also carries a cost, and the cost is that it keeps us from Perfect Flow.  If Perfect Cadence is that which enables Perfect Flow, then the approach to Perfect Cadence is the cadence that results as the duration of the no-value-added-but-necessary part of the cycle approaches a limit of zero.  This may not exist in the organic model that we choose to apply to our knowledge work, but it likely has conceptual value in areas like production where, like in the world of medical devices, both organic and mechanical models apply concurrently.

In the world of Lean, the timing of the complex dance of syncopated work is managed through cadence.

The most visible and familiar example of cadence in Lean systems is the concept of takt time that controls the production line. The work of each station along a production line or in a work cell is executed within the same time-duration bounding-box. The concept of cadence enables load leveling, the act of shifting work from one production work station to a neighbor so that the time of execution at all work stations can be balanced to fit into the shortest, most efficient takt time. The most efficient takt time produces the most efficient total cycle time, and serves the high level goals of Lean production systems.

One of the five fundamental principles of Lean is Flow, the uninterrupted movement of value across boundaries. Cadence is the heartbeat that determines the flux of value within the system. The analogy of a heartbeat is doubly appropriate.

Like a heartbeat, the cadence of production has a systolic stage that forces flow, as work in progress moves from one station to then next. And the cadence has a diastolic stage of low flow pressure, during the execution of the tasks at each station.

The second valuable aspect of the analogy of the heartbeat is its organic nature. With increasing focus on knowledge work and management efforts to humanize the workplace in the pursuit of greater productivity, mechanical models have been increasingly displaced by organic, systemic models. And so the heart organ replaces the ticking clock or the metronome as the timing event.

In Lean Product Development also, cadence serves to both coordinate and drive the timing of events. But unlike in the manufacture and assembly of product, the cycle times of product development are much longer and the model of the beat-per-second human heart is useful, but less insightful. An example of the use of cadence in Lean Product Development is the use of Integrating Events in Set Based Concurrent Design. These events are used to put innovation ‘on a clock’ but in a way that is not counterproductive to the creative work.

The period of this development cadence extends over several weeks. For what kind of creature does this describe their heartbeat? Obviously, none, and so some other organic cadence function likely serves as a better model. The menstrual cycle leaps to mind – appropriate by period of cadence, by its somewhat variable regularity, and by its key role in the creative (innovation?) process. Of interest to me is the time variance between the two strokes of the integration event cycle, if fact of any cadenced cycle. It gets me thinking.

In a heartbeat, the two halves of the ‘lub-dub’ cycle are approximately equal in duration. In a factory setting, the division of takt time between the task of adding value and the task of movement to the next station are ideally not approximately equal in time, but rather the value-add time is maximized and the non-value-add-but-necessary time is minimized.

Allow me to detour for a quick, justification side bar here. A common caution to Lean practitioners is to avoid blindly applying the tools of Lean, but rather to use them with an understanding of the underlying principles that guide their application, the ‘why’ of the tools. Like the standards that we have developed to make our work more efficient and more effective, the principles of Lean themselves must be analyzed and sometimes challenged in the cause of continuous improvement. And so I embark on a perhaps Quixotic dive into thinking about flow and cadence.

My thinking calls into focus another fundamental principle of Lean, the pursuit of Perfection. Principle based Lean practitioners recognize Perfection, the idealized future state, as being more of a compass heading than a destination. And so the question is begged, what is Perfect Flow? Is it the reduction to zero of non-value-add but perhaps-necessary time? And if that is so, does that mean no movement (so no flow) or that value-add can be done during movement? We’ll rip this apart in our next blog. And we invite you to send your thoughts on this and all future blogs in to us to help guide our thinking and our learning.

And so as we speak of the next blog and of the value of cadence, we are announcing that we will now put a cadence to our postings, to make it easier and more predictable for those who wish to follow. We will put up some new thoughts on the first and third Tuesdays of the month, with the occasional ‘organic’ variation to our regularity. And on occasion we may throw up an intermediary blog as we get something off our mind and into words. And, again, we are interested in your feedback, so please share your thoughts with us.

We understand that a significant portion of the basis of this in-fighting ties to the unconscious, habitual application of the management principles of Frederick Taylor.  Current leaders of product development appear to collectively understand there is a need for change, but lack the tools to overcome deeply entrenched, counterproductive management habits. 

Our last great chance to shuck off this flawed and self-limiting management style occurred during World War II.  Training-Within-Industry (TWI) was the successful Army-led effort to create an efficient work force out of the men and women entering the factories, replacing former factory workers who were now on the front lines.  While Henry Ford a half century earlier had lamented that every set of hands came attached to a whole, questioning person, TWI embraced the whole being and taught workers not only the key point of what they were building but went so far as to explain WHY they were key points.   TWI’s “Every person must be seen as an individual” was a clear precursor to Lean’s “Respect and trust your workers”.

The improvements brought to management during the war were lost as the returning tide of ex-soldiers reclaimed their spots along the assembly lines and in the offices of the factories.  Management reverted to pre-war ways. 

At the same time, MacArthur was bringing TWI to war ravaged Japan.  TWI, by then reformed as a private company, helped reestablish an industrial base in Japan. And the more effective management practice that had been ‘piloted’ in American factories during the war became the basis of Japanese practice.  This exportation of competitive advantage flew under the radar in optimistic and prosperous post-war America.

Early in my career, I worked as a research engineer in Japan at electronics giant, Sharp Corporation.  As a part of my basic training, I was led through a problem solving approach (now associated with Lean) that combined the benefits of the Deming Cycle (PDCA) and the A3 communication tool.  When I returned to the states and throughout my career (which has centered on product development) I was regularly challenged by the chaotic environment in which we execute Product Development, especially in comparison to my experience in Japan.

When Lean Product Development emerged as a new management framework in the early 21^st century, I saw that it reflected what I had observed first hand in Japan.  As I was drawn deeper into an understanding and appreciation of the system, I came full circle back to A3s.  Through the A3 insights in the writings of Durward Sobek and John Shook, and in private conversations with Sobek, I realized the power of PDCA and A3s.  I also realized that my basic training had provided me with an advantage that had been displaced on my return to the States – a personal microcosm of the abandonment of our advantage when the World War II veterans returned home.

Peter Drucker was a results-based champion of Frederick Taylor and of Taylor’s contribution to economic growth in the 20^th century.  But in the 1980’s, with the emergence and expansion of the knowledge work force, Drucker realized that the limitations and problems inherent in Taylor’s management methods were inappropriate and ineffective in the information age and the knowledge economy.  To achieve necessary high productivity from this new class of worker, something better than blunt force management was needed.

So let’s think of product development, executed by knowledge workers, as a competitive event.  Like an athletic contest in which we encounter an advantaged opponent, we need a game changer.  The obvious game changer is a field leveler.  It is the wide spread embrace and adoption of that American creation, PDCA, the scientific method applied to knowledge work, and its application through its companion tool, the A3. 

A parting thought is that to just pick up these tools and apply them at a tool based level will blunt their effectiveness.  They must be applied at a principle based level with a full understanding of their motivational and developmental value in the context of a larger system.  But more about that in a later blog.

Broadly categorizing, our organizations are divisible into two dominant cultural types, control cultures and achievement cultures.  And each of these aligns best with organizations of a particular strategic focus; control cultures suit cost driven operational efficiency organizations and achievement cultures align with knowledge generating, product leadership organizations.

Achievement cultures also go by another named, Competence cultures, so dubbed by William Schneider in his book The Re-engineering Alternative.  The Latin verb competere is the root of the word competence, as well as the root of the word compete.  In achievement based cultures, our success in the marketplace is based upon an internal competition through which we develop the core competencies which represent the core of our go-to-market strength.  The internal competition which is at the heart of this is the competition of ideas, the battle of potential solutions to problems from which our standard knowledge is developed and evolves.

A lurking danger in engineering environments is the expectation that the really smart guys (apologies to women engineers; in this narrative you are considered one of the guys) will serve as a source of instant answers.   I once had a CEO who chastised an engineering manager because his organization was buying books, with the implication that they were not ‘fully formed’ and therefore of inferior value.  In engineering organizations, the end result of these expectations and their rewards is a competition (competere) called the Smartest Guy in the Room, which works against the competition of ideas that drives market success.

In the Smartest Guy in the Room game, the winner is not always the engineer with the best idea, but is often the engineer with a good idea, who is also the best debater.  Ultimately, in the competition of ideas, a decision must be made.  Someone needs to parse through all the potential solutions and choose.  It helps immensely if the person making the decision is smart; it helps more if they are wise.

An Achievement Culture needs to be a learning culture.  Our standards are the best of what we know.  Our competition of ideas generates knowledge, enables learning and leads to the establishment of new standards.  Learning requires an openness to new ideas; the Smartest Guy in the Room game is based on the strength with which you can defend your own ideas, a position that closes off learning.  A wise friend and engineering manager shared with me that he recognized when someone’s intellectual position was failing.  It was at the point when logic gave way to emotionalism.

We are knowledge workers.  We learned what we know.  And as Drucker suggests, the environment that promotes continuous learning is a key to motivating knowledge workers.  When we lack the wisdom to recognize the value of our contribution to the competition of ideas, and instead focus on winning the debate, we close off learning and devalue our contribution.  It goes back to the aphorism that a man or woman can accomplish great things if they don’t care who gets credit for it.

If you find yourself playing the Smartest Guy in the Room game, try shifting over to the Best Learner in the Room game.  It will prove a beneficial move for your, your team, and your organization.

Sharing the motives behind this blog through self introduction seems the right place to start.  By self introduction, I don’t mean telling you about myself – you can find all that up on LinkedIn – but rather about EAC and our shared view of product development.  EAC was founded and operates on a fundamental belief that the way we (you) execute product development is fundamentally flawed.  We further believe that this deteriorates America’s competitive position and unnecessarily, unacceptably demotivates the expert knowledge workers who operate within the functions critical to product success. 

As an achievement focused organization, EAC seeks first to understand the drivers and root causes of the positive and negative behaviors typical of product development environments. We then engage in the competition of ideas to produce an array of countermeasures to bring to common product development problems.   One output of this internal collaboration is the Product Development Operating System (PDOS), a framework for the conduct of successful product development published on the EAC website.

An element of the PDOS gets to the heart of justifying this blog.  In the PDOS, we use a maturity model to articulate an important aspect of improvement efforts within product development.  Limited by flawed management habits many companies become trapped at what we call Level 2 operation, “Silo’ed”.  During the maturation of a product development system, the gap from Level 2 to Level 3, “Systematic”, is the most difficult to bridge.  It is EAC’s mission to help product development organizations, to borrow a phrase, cross this chasm.

Siloes are interesting.  In companies they are at first a sign of progress. The generalism of entrepreneurships reforms into specialized functional areas, enabling further growth and maturation.  But they eventually become a barrier to further organizational progress.  That’s not surprising; Peter Senge tells us in the first law of systems thinking that “today’s problems come from yesterday’s solutions”.  For these maturing companies, getting beyond the silo mentality is one important key to progress.

Earlier in my career I spent several years working in Japan at a global manufacturing company.   Japan during the course of its history had periodically shut itself off from the rest of the world.  The Japanese talked about their resulting global naivety – knowing and caring about only what happened within their limited domain – as ‘ii no kaeru’, a ‘frog in a well’.  A well is just an upside down silo.  For functional groups, understanding their own bigger picture – the landscape in which the well or silo exists – is the first step in the work of connecting the silos and fostering systematic operation. 

EAC conducts Voice-of-Customer interviews, performs Product Devleopment System Assessments, and provides consulting services.  During these events, when we visit prospects and customers, it is startling to see how hungry each company’s product development thought leaders are for stimulating and informative ideas and discussions about what can be done to improve product development operation.  And that is how we justify this blog.  To all of you who from time to time feel like a frog, this blog is aimed at letting you know what’s going on outside of your well.