I was reading an article about Indeed's recent round of layoffs (8% or 1,000 people, on top of a 15% layoff last year), and I stumbled on this quote from Chris Hyams, Indeed's CEO:Despite our efforts so far, our organization is still too complex; we still have significant duplication of effort and too many organizational layers that slow down decision-making. We have been working to simplify every aspect of our business, but without meaningful change, we can't get where we need to go.
Which illustrates that even when it’s a linear, ordered system like a factory process, you can still get unintended overcorrections that explode out of control. In the complexity and massively variable timelines of company politics … way worse whiplash, though the human system will also mitigate/absorb the effects so they’re largely hidden … until they hit breaking point.
Stuff like SenseMaker seems tailor made to do Genba at scale (they have a product version called Genba!). I’d be happy to explore that with anyone whose company would be interested.
I'm curious what "walking the floor" looks like for executives at modern software companies, particularly remote ones. Asking as an exec at a remote software company :) who tries very much to stay in touch with what my colleagues on the front lines are working on but sometimes hear a version of "there's too much context that you don't have, this won't be meaningful" or "it'll change the nature of the conversation for you to be present" - both of which are almost certainly true but make it hard for me to access what's really going on in the day to day.
I think this is a huge question for the times. It is a cultural question as well. If we believe that managers are there to make these unnecessary, then getting this deep will be seen as a threat.
I think a start is more open-ended conversations. Dropping in for a chat. Maybe less formal. Not scripted, and perhaps not as structured as a normal gemba walk. It might take the form of people walking through their work, or similar.
I like this idea - starting more lightweight, asking questions or seeing a demo of work in progress. It feels less like an invasion or surveillance and much more natural - more driven by curiosity and interest. Thanks for the tip!
Duplication is valid and normal in most organisations and organisms -- slime molds for example! Or us humans, who have duplicated circulatory systems (blood and lymph). Replicated systems allow for flexibility and adaptation that you don't get when you have a single point of failure. I worry about the opposite problem: that we may clear out useful duplication in a misguided drive for efficiency.
For the past 4 years I have been working on strategic planning and ecosystem design. One of the biggest challenges we see in many organizations that have grown to more than 50-100 people is they lose sight of the ecosystem that they are working within. There are two main challenges that I see, executive leaders have a confidence basis that overlooks the details of the organizations or functions they are running. The second problem is that the lower level managers don't understand the whole strategic picture so they have a hard time challenging decisions coming from above. The frequency of this phenomenon varies depending on the organization and its culture, but it's certainly not uncommon in large corporations where decision-making processes are complex and hierarchical. We promote that organizations really need to understand their ecosystem so that all stakeholders regardless of level know who delivers value to them and who they deliver value to in response. Creating a culture of collaboration and accountability will help ensure that organizations are optimized for effective execution.
This overlaps with the "business models for good times need complementary models for hard times (like both selling shoes and repairing them).
So instead of decoherence for internal reasons, seek ways to discover if underlying assumptions about the outside world are changing (or that your ways of responding to those assumptions no longer work). Is your sector or the economy contracting instead of booming? Is your supply of goods changing? Is the employer/worker compact being rewritten? etc.
Reminds me of the Beer Game to illustrate the Bullwhip Effect: https://systemdynamics.org/beer-game-article/#
Which illustrates that even when it’s a linear, ordered system like a factory process, you can still get unintended overcorrections that explode out of control. In the complexity and massively variable timelines of company politics … way worse whiplash, though the human system will also mitigate/absorb the effects so they’re largely hidden … until they hit breaking point.
Stuff like SenseMaker seems tailor made to do Genba at scale (they have a product version called Genba!). I’d be happy to explore that with anyone whose company would be interested.
I'm curious what "walking the floor" looks like for executives at modern software companies, particularly remote ones. Asking as an exec at a remote software company :) who tries very much to stay in touch with what my colleagues on the front lines are working on but sometimes hear a version of "there's too much context that you don't have, this won't be meaningful" or "it'll change the nature of the conversation for you to be present" - both of which are almost certainly true but make it hard for me to access what's really going on in the day to day.
I think this is a huge question for the times. It is a cultural question as well. If we believe that managers are there to make these unnecessary, then getting this deep will be seen as a threat.
I think a start is more open-ended conversations. Dropping in for a chat. Maybe less formal. Not scripted, and perhaps not as structured as a normal gemba walk. It might take the form of people walking through their work, or similar.
Echoes MBWA (management by walking around) from the early HP days. No idea how this scales globally, let alone virtually. https://www.hewlettpackardhistory.com/item/management-by-walking-around/
I like this idea - starting more lightweight, asking questions or seeing a demo of work in progress. It feels less like an invasion or surveillance and much more natural - more driven by curiosity and interest. Thanks for the tip!
> Imagine a scenario where team members were instructed to "log" incoherence when it happened.
1st thought: What an awesome kind of event log that would be
2nd thought: What a great way to vent/journal that would be
3rd thought: If done in natural language, what an excellent application for AI this could be
Duplication is valid and normal in most organisations and organisms -- slime molds for example! Or us humans, who have duplicated circulatory systems (blood and lymph). Replicated systems allow for flexibility and adaptation that you don't get when you have a single point of failure. I worry about the opposite problem: that we may clear out useful duplication in a misguided drive for efficiency.
Now I'll write a post about the opposite side of the pendulum swing ... lol.
please do, I would enjoy that!!
For the past 4 years I have been working on strategic planning and ecosystem design. One of the biggest challenges we see in many organizations that have grown to more than 50-100 people is they lose sight of the ecosystem that they are working within. There are two main challenges that I see, executive leaders have a confidence basis that overlooks the details of the organizations or functions they are running. The second problem is that the lower level managers don't understand the whole strategic picture so they have a hard time challenging decisions coming from above. The frequency of this phenomenon varies depending on the organization and its culture, but it's certainly not uncommon in large corporations where decision-making processes are complex and hierarchical. We promote that organizations really need to understand their ecosystem so that all stakeholders regardless of level know who delivers value to them and who they deliver value to in response. Creating a culture of collaboration and accountability will help ensure that organizations are optimized for effective execution.
This overlaps with the "business models for good times need complementary models for hard times (like both selling shoes and repairing them).
So instead of decoherence for internal reasons, seek ways to discover if underlying assumptions about the outside world are changing (or that your ways of responding to those assumptions no longer work). Is your sector or the economy contracting instead of booming? Is your supply of goods changing? Is the employer/worker compact being rewritten? etc.