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In our discussions of systems thinking, there is a critical fact that we haven’t touched on yet — In order to be able to work with systems, you need to be able to recognize them. Systems Thinking is oriented to the long term view. Generally we get caught up in the hubbub of the day to day. It’s easy for us to miss the operation of the system. It is like the parable of the boiled frog. By the time they discover the increasing heat in the pot, it’s too late for them to escape.

Feedback and time delays are what structure a system and provide its enduring status quo. These operate over long periods of time. If we’re unaware of how a system operates, if we don’t learn to see the system, then we end up being prisoners of the system; buffeted around by the forces of the system.

If we learn to see the system, we can take advantage of the forces of the system. We can learn to recognize the leverage points in the system. This is valuable if you want to do something to affect change within the system.

In learning to see systems there is a huge aid that comes from recurring fundamental systems. There are certain systems that recur in all kinds of industries and disciplines. These generic structures have come to be known as System Archetypes. Peter Senge, one of the thought leaders we commonly reference, says that only when we learn to think in terms of System Archetypes can we really operate in a way that makes systems thinking an effective agency for management.

Between now and the end of the year we’re going to talk about System Archetypes, how to recognize them, and how they give you insight into the systems within which you operate on a day-to-day basis.

Contact us to learn more about how Systems Thinking and the application of our Product Development Operating System can help your organization become more efficient, productive, innovative, and competitive. Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking

Today I’d like to follow up on the last couple of posts. We’ve been talking about systems thinking and knowledge management. If you can think back to the very beginning of this video series we talked about a framework, developed at EAC, for looking at product development as a system. We call it the Product Development Operating System. The foundation of this system is the Information Flow management system. The idea is to present information where it’s needed, in a timely way, inside of your operation.

As Thomas Davenport pointed out, pure technology is not enough. Your knowledge management system needs to include other elements like Obeya rooms or even face-to-face communication.

Information, when presented and encountered by a human mind, has the opportunity to be converted into new knowledge. This happens inside another subsystem of the Product Development Operating System, the Continuous Improvement subsystem. The learning that occurs in the Continuous Improvement subsystem is applied in the Workflow subsystem where learning about product or technology is applied as innovation inside of product development.

The design of a system of flow, the presentation of information and its conversion to knowledge through your knowledge worker environment is a key factor in increasing productivity. When you look at your product development operation, can you see it as a system? Do you understand how the various elements interoperate? Are you getting the results that you want or do you find yourself fighting fires?

Contact us if you cannot see your system as a system and understand where your points of leverage are. We can help. We have a service product called the Product Development System Assessment. It not only baselines your current state, but it also presents a series of recommended improvements to move your system towards a more systematic operation and a healthier state. Our assessment service is designed to get you back on the road to higher productivity in your product development environment.

In our last post we talked about three authors whose work give good insight into systems thinking. I want to thank everyone that commented on that post. I’m glad you appreciated it. If any of you don’t know how to reach us and want to provide feedback, you can reach us at info@eacpds.com, or you can message me on my Twitter account @systhinking, or you can simply leave a message below.

The positive feedback from the three books we recommended led us to do another recommendation. These books are on subjects of knowledge work, knowledge management, and knowledge workers themselves.

The first of three authors I would like to recommend is Peter Drucker — probably the most prolific business writer of the 21^st century. Just before his death Druker published his final book titled Management Challenges for the 21^st Century. He called the primary challenge of the 21^st century is increasing the productivity of knowledge workers. He has a chapter inside that book devoted specifically to that topic. Very easy and good reading; easily absorbed.

Druckers work is followed up by the work of Dan Pink who wrote the book Drive. Drive talks about motivation of the knowledge worker. He reinforces the believe of Deming and Drucker that the traditional carrot and stick motivators are not only ineffective for knowledge works, but they’re actually counter productive and cause a reduction in productivity.

The third author I’d like to recommend is Thomas Davenport. He’s really taken the baton from Peter Drucker in the elaboration of the motivation and management of knowledge workers. Davenport has two very good books. One is Thinking for a Living and the other is Working Knowledge. These two books very carefully layout what constitutes a knowledge worker and what constitutes knowledge work. He talks about the distinctions between data, information, and knowledge. He starts making the management of knowledge as a system very clear. In his books he also emphasizes the inclusion of humans in a knowledge management system. Knowledge management has been a stumbling block for most companies in the 21^st century. It’s because we address it with technology solutions alone. Davenport points out that pure technology is not enough — that knowledge exists within the minds of human beings and to move to a pure technology solution – and exclude human beings – is to move away from a real knowledge management system.

In conclusion, the environment for knowledge workers and the knowledge management system are both systems that require very careful systems design.

Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking

We’ve been discussing systems and systems thinking, and a number of you have requested recommendations of some books. So first of all for those of you who may be new to this video series, systems are a collection of elements that interoperate in a cause and effect relationship. The dynamic of a system ends up producing similar results and continuous outcome especially in steady state. It’s called the aim of the system. If you want to think about systems, you think about them as the building blocks, feedback, and time delays.

If you’re interested in doing a deeper dive into systems, I’m going to recommend three authors for you. The first one was really my first encounter with systems thinking. That’s the work of W. Edwards Deming’s book, Deming: Sample Design in Business Research. At a conference in Japan in 1950, Deming took the flow diagram for production that was laid out like most flow diagrams of the time, a process ending with products going into the marketplace, and he drew a feedback loop from the marketplace back into the company. That feedback loop allowed learning, continuous improvement, and the increased quality of products. It was the first systems drawing produced from a process drawing that I am personally aware of. Deming is the starting point for our systems thinking.

Deming has written a number of books, but rather than one of Deming’s books I’d recommend one by Mary Walton. It’s called the Deming Management Method. It gives you a view both of Deming the human being as well as Deming’s principles of management in his view of systems.

Deming did his work in the 50’s and there was a group that was formed in the 60’s at MIT that started to discipline the field of systems dynamic that was lead by Jay Forrester. He and his students and collaborators were the primary drivers of the evolution of our modern view of systems. I found that one of his students moved out of his MIT group and became a professor at Dartmouth. Her name is Donella Meadows. She wrote a really terrific book called Thinking in Systems. It’s a really good way of getting to understand the dynamics of systems especially of complex systems.

The third author I would recommend is Peter Senge, probably the most famous of the systems writers. In his book The Fifth Discipline, he talks about the five disciplines of a learning organization, with systems thinking being the most important, if you will, the glue, of a learning organization. If you either read Senge or have read Senge, be sure not to overlook The Fifth Discipline: Fieldbook. It accompanies Senge’s work and it gives you practical exercises to help move towards a learning organization. It’s a nice compliment to the theory of the textbook, “The Fifth Discipline” itself.

If you read these three books, your understanding of systems will increase immensely and you will be able to understand and see systems that work.

Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking

We’ve been talking about time boxing in the context of an Agile system. But there’s one critical system element that we haven’t touched on so far, and that’s visual management.

Inside of a time box system there are three groups that rely on feedback from visual management. There are the other stakeholders and downstream customers of product development: the executive team, the business team, sales and marketing, and even manufacturing. These groups need updates on the status and prognosis of projects. It gives them a look ahead for their own planning. Inside the time box there is the development team which uses visual feedback to track work completed and work yet to be done. They also use it to test or see how they’re progressing against expectations and delivery. The third group is the leadership team within the time box itself. They are responsible for the big picture. Things like capacity planning for upcoming time boxes, the amount of work in progress, the amount of work that is ready for development, etc. There are a number of things these groups use visual management to keep track of.

The exact details of any particular application of a time box, what is given to management, and how it’s designed are elements of detailed design and we won’t go into them here. But I’d like to share with you a story about the power of visual management and visual displays.

In the book “Thinking in Systems” by Donella Meadows, she tells the story of an energy conservation exercise in the Netherlands. After WWII a number of housing developments were built. They were focused on efficiency and economy so returning servicemen would be able to find affordable independent housing. In the US we have Levittown, NY as an example. Donella’s story references an example in a suburb of Amsterdam. These houses were built very inexpensively. They were exact copies of each other. It was a very boring development where everything looks exactly the same, but it provided affordable homes for the veterans of WWII.

A number of years later the government of the Netherlands ran an austerity program. They asked citizens to reduce their energy usage. They tracked results and were hoping for about a 10% decrease in energy usage, but they got a wide range of results. In this one particular housing development there were two distinct classes. There was one group that was conserving on par with the rest of the nation, but there was a second group that was conserving at an extraordinary rate, much more than the rest of the development and nation. At first it was dismissed as more diligent citizens doing a better job. One persistent researcher dug in and tried to understand what was happening. The researcher found that in these exact copy houses there was one important difference. In two thirds of the houses the electric meter was in the basement and in the other third the meter was in the hallway just inside the front door. There was a very strong correlation to those that had the first floor meter and those with extraordinary conservation. Everyday when they came home they saw the electric meter spinning at the fast rate and were reminded of the conservation effort. That feedback, that persistent of information, caused them to be more diligent and conserve more energy. It was the persistent feedback of their purpose and commitment to the program that the electric meters provided. It lead to a more positive outcome. If you take that same visual feedback into product development you can get the same results if you, in fact, design and deploy visual management.

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In the last post we talked about how the tennis doubles team, the leaders of the time box system, create productivity. In this video we’re going to talk about how the development team is naturally predisposed to be increasingly productive.

With the management burden handled by the leadership team, the members of the execution team are freed up to focus on the work itself. A key part of their work is “dialogue.” It’s a process called grooming and the term as well as the activity is borrowed from a software development system called Scrum.

During regularly scheduled periodic “dialogues“ all members of the execution team focus on four attributes of the execution of the requests. One is the work itself. They refine the work, breaking it into smaller and smaller chunks. Eventually the work is a size that can be executed within a single time box. They also focus on an estimation of the effort required. This allows the team do a collective estimation of the work required and is used to match the available capacity of the time box to the work.

Also during this dialogue they talk about quality disciplines and what quality disciplines need to be brought to whatever work they’ll be executing. E.g. whether any work will need a design review or a drawing review, etc. There is general discussion about what quality disciplines to bring to the work.

Finally they discuss possibilities for cross training or mentoring. They discuss whether any work would provide the opportunity to allow a member of the team to be mentored or cross trained during the execution of the work.

In this “dialogue”, the grooming exercise, first you have the goal of the project itself; a shared vision held by the team, but the dialogue provides a shared vision of the execution path to complete the work. The dialogue also leads to an analysis of what work should be done, how much discipline should be brought to it, etc. During this dialogue everyone’s worldview and perception of the work is brought to the surface.

In Peter Senge’s contention everybody’s “mental model” is brought to the surface. The team aligns on how to execute the work as they go through the analysis and dialogue. The alignment of the team to the work is, again in Senge’s context, team learning. The ability to take work not assign it to the person that would normally do that work, but instead turn them into a spontaneous mentor and have someone else execute the work, is a chance for the team members to increase their personal mastery in a particular discipline.

So we have Shared Vision, Mental Models, Team Learning, and Personal Mastery — four of the five disciplines of Senge’s “learning organization.” The only missing discipline of a learning organization is Systems Thinking. Of course Systems Thinking is the dynamic of the operation which all of this series is meant to focus on. So, you have the fifth and final discipline of the learning organization also involved in the organization of time box learning.

The learning organization of this product development team is critical because learning is sighted by the other Peter, Peter Drucker, as one of the 6-Keys for creating high productivity amongst knowledge workers. And it is the focus of EAC to use Systems Thinking and the learning organization context to reform the operation of the American approach to product development.

Follow Bill at http://www.twitter.com/systhinking