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Today we are going to start talking about system archetypes and we’re going to deal with the easiest to understand — Escalation.

In escalation there are two players. Player one does something that is seen as a threat by player two and player two responds in kind by making a power move. Player one then perceives that power move as a threat, so they respond again in kind and do something that is perceived as a threat by player two. So it goes in a continuing pattern of “seen as threat…response > seen as threat…response” and the situation grows out of control. The situation escalates. It’s done through a series of power moves.

In an escalation system, both parties are operating from their mental models: a sense of righteousness. They believe they can’t give in. An example of escalation was seen in the 1980’s during the arms buildup between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union would increase their nuclear arsenal and the U.S. would respond in kind and increase theirs. The U.S.’s increase was then seen as a threat to the Soviet Union who would then spend more money and increase theirs. Likewise we would respond in kind. On and on it went consuming critical national resources. Both countries locked into this system, unable to back down. Both were prisoners of the system. Eventually it led to bankruptcy of the Soviet Union and hyperinflation in the United States.

This kind of escalating system exists inside of our organizations. It exists between functional groups when one functional group takes an important position, but that position is seen as a threat to another group in the organization and they start escalating back and forth.

A trigger for an escalation can be simple. An example could be if your marketing group says they’ve learned something new about the market and need to introduce a new spec in the middle of a product development process. The engineering group might say, “We can’t! That change in spec will drive us back to square one. We can’t accommodate it and still be on time to market.” With these two righteous positions the interface between the two groups becomes a battle line. They go back and forth escalating, threatening and counter threatening each other.

If you find yourself in a system of escalation, how do you get out of it? If you’ve recognized the system, that’s terrific, but how do you find your way out of it. In the archetype of escalation the way out is through dialogue. Between countries, on the international scale, the term dialogue is referred to as diplomacy. Inside of your organization dialogue is referred to as inquiry – learning and asking questions to understand the underpinnings of your partner’s position. Peter Senge calls this advocacy (within your position) with inquiry (looking to understand the position of your partner). If you’re wondering how to avoid escalating situations by asking meaningful questions to get to the heart of a matter, I recommend you read a terrific book by Michael J. Marquardt called Leading with Questions. If you learn to lead with questions you will always be able to find yourself out of organizational situations that are escalating out of control.

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.

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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.

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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.

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In recent posts we talked about teams. We noted how the time box product development system produces two teams, both of which are authentic and appropriate for the execution of product development work. Ultimately what we’re interested in is productivity. So let’s look at this in the context of productivity. The two teams within the time box system are the Leadership Team and the Development/Execution Team. In today’s video we’ll be talking about the leadership team.

As noted in a previous video this team operates like a tennis doubles team. They each have their own assignment but they share work and responsibility; they cover for each other. One member of the team is focused on workflow; on making sure the work flows through the time box efficiently. The other focuses on ensuring the work being executed in the time box is the work of highest value and highest priority. If you create great value with great efficiency you have high productivity.

The efficiency of the time box system managed by this pair is also enhanced by two other elements. One is the filtering of requests into the time box. They make sure it is crystal clear what is being requested of the team. They make sure there is no efficiency lost by team members having to figure out or research what is being requested when it arrives at their desk. The other is the loading of the time box itself in which this team loads an amount of work that is accurately matched to the capacity of that team during that time box period. This eliminates the inefficiencies that are inherent in the overburdened standard matrix approach to the execution of product development.

So we have great efficiency coupled with a focus on the work of highest value. This pair of great value and efficiency is definitely high productivity. The tennis pair’s leadership team in the time box system leads to high productivity. So, that’s one team. In the next post we’ll look at the other team that contributes to high productivity within the time box system.

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