(I’m doing a new 3hr workshop on prioritization if anyone is interested) Someone asked me recently for an example of where I had shifted my perspective. I blurted out Continuous Improvement without really thinking. This post explores that shift—or more like crisis.
I think this is an incredibly important piece, John. I share your observations and your frustration. There’s no question in my mind that at least a part of it is the tight intertwining of high finance and technology. That alliance has driven spectacular growth for some but at the expense of quality and sustainability for everyone else.
Toyota was forged under drastically different conditions than these. As was the Agile movement originally, developed at a time when tech was not considered as much of a critical part of the economy. Now Wall Street has a stranglehold on technology development and it shows.
But like you I have hope. I’ve seen many pockets doing work with compassion and integrity. We must seek out one another and raise the visibility of these examples wherever we can.
Everything comes in cycles of hype and bust. It’s been almost 25 years and everybody has almost forgotten the pains of death march driven delivery. That specter hasn’t gone away and as soon as an Org lets up without respecting the people doing the work, it comes roaring back.
We’ve been in a long boom cycle with Agile among other things and it’s only natural that there is a contraction.
As long as there is a death March there will be a counter against it that values ppl and doing things like CI. We just have to keep improving how the latter bits are great for business and longevity but it’s always a battle against short termism and ignoring of its externalities.
I don’t think these practices can survive in any fast growing company, and we love fast growing companies. It’s just too antithetical to our culture. If you want to grow fast then you have to accept reversion to the mean. There are lot of highly capable individuals who want (need?) dominion and control out there. The only way to retain those ideals would be to hire slowly and reinforce the culture rigorously. Maybe hire fresh, innocent folks and train them before they’re too infected and jaded.
Your last paragraph, what gives you hope, is spot on. It’s what I see too. Adversity is driving real leadership to emerge; it’s just quieter in nature.
I like David Marquet's framing of it as "Discontinuous Improvement" (because you need periods of doing inbetween the reflecting to avoid the trap of constantly second guessing yourselves, as well as avoiding the trap of feature factory)
Like with a maps gps app with an inaccurate compass where you have to commit to walk a certain distance to be able to tell for sure if you're moving in the right direction. It doesn't help to keep second guessing and walking in circles.
I have hope, too. While everyone in my generation (Gen Y) seems to hate Gen Z people because they find it more important to live a fulfilling life than to grind along on a status-driven career path, I observe them challenging the dreadful status quo every day. And they are already becoming leaders, bringing in a different attitude. Also, I am seeing more and more companies opting in for steward ownership (https://www.impactterms.org/steward-ownership). In Germany, this is what is going to solve a fatal succession problem in thousands of midsize family businesses in the engineering sector.
I am talking about CI a lot. In the company I worked for last year (global manufacturing company, around 10,000 employees) I discovered that CI was run as a ‘community’ - meaning there really was no central oversight and every local CI manager did their own thing. The various sites developed into entirely different directions. I got a friend in to talk to Strategy about what community is (and isn’t) but it didn’t really help.
John, as always, a great and controversial write-up. I totally share your frustration and would even go further. Organisations give up on continuous improvement before they even have seen it. Standardising practices (retrospectives etc.) to the point that they become "harmless" (effectless) and/or hated by the ones forced to practice them in the name of continuous improvement or agility.
You point out clearly that leadership has to do with it, and I can only agree. I've seen it more than once. It is never that obvious because real change, improvement, or the lack thereof is slow... hardly noticeable. It's observable in the long run only. I would go even further and say that kaizen requires a philosophy ingrained in the organisation's DNA that doesn't even accept leaders who don't internalise kaizen. Reprogramming an organisation's DNA is even slower than kaizen. I haven't experienced it myself yet and wonder if I ever will. As long as a single leader can undermine and destroy the organisation's aspirations, I find it difficult to see how Kaizen can take hold.
I feel like this is off the point. It's 100% a failure of leadership. People can blame the tools all they want, but if you're not creating a culture that supports these principles they go nowhere.
If you want a spot of hope, I'm a Manager of Continuous Improvement and for the last 5 years I've managed a small CI team at the fast growth tech company I work for. There have definitely been times when I felt helpless to push improvement as I wasn't given the resources I needed to solve identified problems, but largely my team has made an impact and made the jobs of the people in our department easier. So much as that we keep getting shuffled higher in the org chart so that we can support more and more teams.
So the answer to the question "Who is talking about Continuous Improvement" is, at the very least, me.
Thanks for the Joy of Agility reference - do you have similar for Kaizen?
I think continuous improvement needs worker-scientists, where every process iteration is an experiment. We can either hire for curiosity or teach it - the latter my current focus.
How do we help people sense tensions/frictions in their daily work, then structure some 'safe-to-try' learning/experimentation cycles?
There is often Continuous Improvement - but the focus is on improving personal career / job security and short-term shareholder returns.
The systems we operate it don't provide the right incentives for people to act in the interest of the 14 principles listed in the lean-thinking house.
Continuous Improvement isn't sexy, but transformation is. Make a lot of noise with silver bullet frameworks and claim sustainable and impactful wins with short-term cost cutting.
Do whatever is necessary to improve the quarterly numbers.
Be busy, force people to be busy, focus on output not outcomes.
Pay expensive consultants to justify what you are doing or to propose solutions without understand the problem.
I am not so optimistic. I think many of the underlying issues boil down to challenges of our economic system which influence behavior that define the culture.
The first line of the Toyota Improvement Kata is "In service of a vision or a direction..." and as you point out, that vision today is much more often "cost reduction" or "IT rationalisation" than "great tech".
I know you don't do this John, but far too many tech orgs that do try to improve are doing so in service of abstract "best practises" not the real needs of the business, which may be involve very uncomfortable compromises for us techies.
I think this is an incredibly important piece, John. I share your observations and your frustration. There’s no question in my mind that at least a part of it is the tight intertwining of high finance and technology. That alliance has driven spectacular growth for some but at the expense of quality and sustainability for everyone else.
Toyota was forged under drastically different conditions than these. As was the Agile movement originally, developed at a time when tech was not considered as much of a critical part of the economy. Now Wall Street has a stranglehold on technology development and it shows.
But like you I have hope. I’ve seen many pockets doing work with compassion and integrity. We must seek out one another and raise the visibility of these examples wherever we can.
Everything comes in cycles of hype and bust. It’s been almost 25 years and everybody has almost forgotten the pains of death march driven delivery. That specter hasn’t gone away and as soon as an Org lets up without respecting the people doing the work, it comes roaring back.
We’ve been in a long boom cycle with Agile among other things and it’s only natural that there is a contraction.
As long as there is a death March there will be a counter against it that values ppl and doing things like CI. We just have to keep improving how the latter bits are great for business and longevity but it’s always a battle against short termism and ignoring of its externalities.
I don’t think these practices can survive in any fast growing company, and we love fast growing companies. It’s just too antithetical to our culture. If you want to grow fast then you have to accept reversion to the mean. There are lot of highly capable individuals who want (need?) dominion and control out there. The only way to retain those ideals would be to hire slowly and reinforce the culture rigorously. Maybe hire fresh, innocent folks and train them before they’re too infected and jaded.
Your last paragraph, what gives you hope, is spot on. It’s what I see too. Adversity is driving real leadership to emerge; it’s just quieter in nature.
I like David Marquet's framing of it as "Discontinuous Improvement" (because you need periods of doing inbetween the reflecting to avoid the trap of constantly second guessing yourselves, as well as avoiding the trap of feature factory)
Like with a maps gps app with an inaccurate compass where you have to commit to walk a certain distance to be able to tell for sure if you're moving in the right direction. It doesn't help to keep second guessing and walking in circles.
I have hope, too. While everyone in my generation (Gen Y) seems to hate Gen Z people because they find it more important to live a fulfilling life than to grind along on a status-driven career path, I observe them challenging the dreadful status quo every day. And they are already becoming leaders, bringing in a different attitude. Also, I am seeing more and more companies opting in for steward ownership (https://www.impactterms.org/steward-ownership). In Germany, this is what is going to solve a fatal succession problem in thousands of midsize family businesses in the engineering sector.
The truth is that few or rare companies actually practice continuous improvement, those that do are certainly safer, more solid and truly efficient.
If you want the processes at your company to improve constantly, you might consider feedback loops. Here's how they work: https://kanbantool.com/blog/harnessing-kanban-feedback-loops
I am talking about CI a lot. In the company I worked for last year (global manufacturing company, around 10,000 employees) I discovered that CI was run as a ‘community’ - meaning there really was no central oversight and every local CI manager did their own thing. The various sites developed into entirely different directions. I got a friend in to talk to Strategy about what community is (and isn’t) but it didn’t really help.
Then I myself was kicked from my job.
Sigh.
John, as always, a great and controversial write-up. I totally share your frustration and would even go further. Organisations give up on continuous improvement before they even have seen it. Standardising practices (retrospectives etc.) to the point that they become "harmless" (effectless) and/or hated by the ones forced to practice them in the name of continuous improvement or agility.
You point out clearly that leadership has to do with it, and I can only agree. I've seen it more than once. It is never that obvious because real change, improvement, or the lack thereof is slow... hardly noticeable. It's observable in the long run only. I would go even further and say that kaizen requires a philosophy ingrained in the organisation's DNA that doesn't even accept leaders who don't internalise kaizen. Reprogramming an organisation's DNA is even slower than kaizen. I haven't experienced it myself yet and wonder if I ever will. As long as a single leader can undermine and destroy the organisation's aspirations, I find it difficult to see how Kaizen can take hold.
Mission impossible?
I feel like this is off the point. It's 100% a failure of leadership. People can blame the tools all they want, but if you're not creating a culture that supports these principles they go nowhere.
If you want a spot of hope, I'm a Manager of Continuous Improvement and for the last 5 years I've managed a small CI team at the fast growth tech company I work for. There have definitely been times when I felt helpless to push improvement as I wasn't given the resources I needed to solve identified problems, but largely my team has made an impact and made the jobs of the people in our department easier. So much as that we keep getting shuffled higher in the org chart so that we can support more and more teams.
So the answer to the question "Who is talking about Continuous Improvement" is, at the very least, me.
Thanks for the Joy of Agility reference - do you have similar for Kaizen?
I think continuous improvement needs worker-scientists, where every process iteration is an experiment. We can either hire for curiosity or teach it - the latter my current focus.
How do we help people sense tensions/frictions in their daily work, then structure some 'safe-to-try' learning/experimentation cycles?
There is often Continuous Improvement - but the focus is on improving personal career / job security and short-term shareholder returns.
The systems we operate it don't provide the right incentives for people to act in the interest of the 14 principles listed in the lean-thinking house.
Continuous Improvement isn't sexy, but transformation is. Make a lot of noise with silver bullet frameworks and claim sustainable and impactful wins with short-term cost cutting.
Do whatever is necessary to improve the quarterly numbers.
Be busy, force people to be busy, focus on output not outcomes.
Pay expensive consultants to justify what you are doing or to propose solutions without understand the problem.
I am not so optimistic. I think many of the underlying issues boil down to challenges of our economic system which influence behavior that define the culture.
Continuous Improvement *toward what*??
The first line of the Toyota Improvement Kata is "In service of a vision or a direction..." and as you point out, that vision today is much more often "cost reduction" or "IT rationalisation" than "great tech".
I know you don't do this John, but far too many tech orgs that do try to improve are doing so in service of abstract "best practises" not the real needs of the business, which may be involve very uncomfortable compromises for us techies.