From: http://changingminds.org/blog/0902blog/090225blog.htm

Much work these days is packaged up as projects, with plans, resources and time-bound deliverables. Managing projects is a skill as the various risks and issues can easily trip you up. In particular the sheer complexity can cause much extra work and conceal important issues.

Here, then, are four ways of making things simpler by separating out things that need your attention in different ways.

1. Separate rapidly changing things from slowly changing things. This makes changes (and communication about them) easier. For example a strategic plan, which changes little is separated from a rapidly-changing tactical plan.

2. Separate things that require attention now from points of information. This allows a sharper focus on action. For example items that require decisions may be covered first in a meeting, then information discussions continued in the remaining time.

3. Separate planned action from unexpected action. This allows both to be clearly managed and for plans to be revised as needed. For example issues are managed separately from standard project plans, thus allowing both onto the stage.

4. Separate internal project communications from external communications. Internal communications can be detailed, technical, textual and full of jargon. External communications should be focused, brief, visual and use Plain English.

You can also use the principle of separation to create clarity in documents and presentations by:

* Using colour, bold fonts, and other visual contrasts.
* Using lines and physical separation.
* Visual/physical separation into sections, pages, documents.

Photo by Peter Hayes (click for original)

Gerald Weinberg is the grandmaster of consulting and project management. From the hundreds of hints and tips on offer in his excellent secrets of consulting series, Adrian Segar explores his favorite 19 :

You’ll never accomplish anything if you care who gets the credit. (The Credit Rule.) Check your ego at the door.

In spite of what your client may tell you, there’s always a problem. (The First Law of Consulting.) Yes, most people have a hard time admitting they have a problem.

No matter how it looks at first, it’s always a people problem. (The Second Law of Consulting.) I learned this after about five years of being engaged as a technical consultant and repeatedly having CEOs confiding to me their non-technical woes…

If they didn’t hire you, don’t solve their problem. (The Fourth Law of Consulting.) A common occupational disease of consultants: we rush to help people who haven’t asked for help.

If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. (The First Law of Engineering.) Must. Not. Unscrew the tiny screws just to check what’s inside.

Clients always know how to solve their problems, and always tell you the solution in the first five minutes. (The Five-Minute Rule.) Unbelievably, this is true—the hard part is listening well enough to notice.

If you can’t accept failure, you’ll never succeed as a consultant. (The Hard Law.) Everyone makes mistakes, and that can be a good thing.

Helping myself is even harder than helping others. (The Hardest Law.) The hardest things to notice are things about myself.

The wider you spread it, the thinner it gets. (The Law of Raspberry Jam.) Or, as Jerry rephrases it: Influence or affluence; take your choice.

When the clients don’t show their appreciation, pretend that they’re stunned by your performance—but never forget that it’s your fantasy, not theirs. (The Lone Ranger Fantasy.) “Who was that masked man, anyway?”

The most important act in consulting is setting the right fee. (Marvin’s Fifth Great Secret.) Setting the right fee takes a huge burden off your shoulders.

“We can do it—and this is how much it will cost.” (The Orange Juice Test.) Jerry uses an example straight from the meetings world for this one—event professionals will recognize the situation, and appreciate the insight.

Cucumbers get more pickled than brine gets cucumbered. (Prescott’s Pickle Principle.) Sadly, the longer you work with a client, the less effective you get.

It may look like a crisis, but it’s only the ending of an illusion. (Rhonda’s First Revelation.) A positive way to think about unpleasant change.

When you create an illusion, to prevent or soften change, the change becomes more likely—and harder to take.(Rhonda’s Third Revelation.) Notice and challenge your illusions before they turn into crises.

If you can’t think of three things that might go wrong with your plans, then there’s something wrong with your thinking. (The Rule of Three.) The perfect antidote to complacency about your plans.

The best marketing tool is a satisfied client. (The Sixth Law of Marketing.) Word of mouth is the best channel for new work; being able to satisfy my clients led me to a successful, twenty-two year IT consulting career without using advertising or agents.

Give away your best ideas. (The Seventh Law of Marketing.) When you teach your clients to handle future similar problems themselves, they’ll appreciate your generosity and are more likely to give you further work or good word of mouth to others.

Jerry Weinberg is a legend in Project Management and Consulting circles. Here are his 10 Laws of Trust:

1. Nobody but you cares about the reason you let another person down.
2. Trust takes years to win, moments to lose.
3. People don’t tell you when they stop trusting you.
4. The trick of earning trust is to avoid all tricks.
5. People are never liars—in their own eyes.
6. Always trust your client—and cut the cards.
7. Never be dishonest, even if the client requests it.
8. Never promise anything.
9. Always keep your promise.
10. Get it in writing, but depend on trust.

Conferences That Work | Jerry Weinberg’s ten laws of trust

I am currently crunching through Steve Litt’s brilliant series of books on Troubleshooting. I am hugely into general problem solving frameworks and his Universal Troubleshooting Process (UTP) is one of my favourites.

Today, whilst clearing my backlog on Instapaper I came across this Wired.com piece on legendary design firm IDEO. They use a simply process called “Design Thinking” that they claim is at the heart of their stunning successes:

Practically speaking, the approach isn’t complicated. In stages, it goes like this: firstly, immersion, whereby the designers research the problem by plunging themselves into it – talking to the people they’re trying to help, working with them, interviewing experts. Secondly, synthesis – whereby they gather together their findings and look for patterns. Third, ideation – brainstorming solutions to the real problems identified by stage two. Then comes prototyping, making mock-ups of solutions to try out against the problem. After that comes the product. Only at the end, at the prototyping stage, are judgements made; until then, all ideas are given equal weight.

This methodology is radical in that it differs from traditional approaches to business strategy in two key ways. Whereas in many companies the concept for a new product may have already been based on, say, an idea from the marketing department with a designer later brought in to make it look pretty, design thinking places the designer at the heart of the innovation process. Secondly, the methodology gives a firm framework within which a wider team can work. It takes the cliché of the lone creative mind being struck with genius, and replaces it with a process that a whole team can follow. Creativity, therefore, isn’t a thing that magically appears, but a process you work through.

From: Reinventing British manners the Post-It way – Wired.co.uk

I can see similarities to Ken Watanabe’s simplified problem solving methodology as presented in his best-selling children’s “Problem Solving 101“

1. Understand the current situation current (Immersion)
2. Identify root cause (Sythesis)
3. Develop an effective action plan (Ideation)
4. Execute until solved, making modifications as necessary (Prototyping)

From: http://www.problemsolvingtoolbox.com/

You can also see similarities between IDEO’s framework and Dan Roam’s framework for proble  solving through visual thinking as outlined in “The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures“. In the book Roam explores a four stage process for solving any problem with visual thinking:

1. Look (Immerse/ Understand)
2. See (sythesis / Identify patters / root cause)
3. Imagine (Ideation / Plan)
4. Show (Prototype / Execute)

How do these map to the Universal Troubleshooting Process (UTP)?

The UTP shares the core troubleshooting steps with the other three (3, 4,6,7 and 8), but it has some seemingly anachronous and superfluous steps (1,2,5,9 and 10). I say “seemingly” because experience has taught me that the Universal Troubleshooting Process steps are all necessary and in the right order.

It is aimed more at professional, routine troubleshooters and as such addresses the important psychological factors and habits that contribute to long-term effectiveness.

I cannot do this process justice in a few lines, but here is summary:

1. Prepare - This is about having the right attitude and mindset for troubleshooting as well as the required tools, skills and information. For professional troubleshooters (like Technical Support agents) attitude is one of the most important elements in their professional quality and success.
2. Make damage control plan – This is iatrogenic prevention i.e. do not make things worse. If forces you to think of consequences before trying pot luck fixes.
3. Get a complete and accurate symptom description - Here the UTP shares a step with the first principle of the other three (i.e. Look / Immerse/ Understand). In the UTP thi9s is usually achieved by creating a simple block diagram off the problem system so as to understand elements and relationships.
4. Reproduce the symptom - This is part of fully understanding and verifying the current situation. You verify the symptoms and measure them.
5. Do the appropriate corrective maintenance - This step is again targeted at professional troubleshooters. So many problems are caused by bad maintenance and fixed by routine maintenance, that often it is worth running the standard best practice maintenance procedures over the system and seeing of that fixes the issue.
6. Narrow it down to the root cause - This is the core step. Often it is a process in itself as you look from problem patterns, isolate elements of the system and systematically disqualify them as candidates for root cause. Eventually you generate a most likely root cause hypothesis and proceed to step 7.
7. Repair or replace the defective component - Here you generate a plan to test the hypothesis by fixing, replacing or implementing a work-around for the root cause.
8. Test - You now apply your fix and test to ensure the problem is indeed solved. 
9. Take pride in your solution – This is another psychologically important steps to help prevent burn-out and boost morale.
10. Prevent future occurrence of this problem – This is simple operational best practice. You learn from your problems, document your solutions and new knowledge, you modify systems and procedures to ensure the problem does not reoccur, or you can respond quickly and effectively.

This universal troubleshooting procedure has been a vital tool for my team and I in beating some extremely tough problems, sometimes involving desperate customers begging us to fix badly broken massively complex undocumented systems and us successfully finding and fixing the root cause problems in 24 hours where the system designers could not succeed for months.

I also heartily recommend the Dan Roam and Ken Watanabe books referred to above. They are both brilliant and accessible.

Master consultant and all round business genius Gerald Wienberg has sorted the best of Jerry Weinberg’s (no relation) “50 things to improve business”:

2. back up everything

4. Rule: do nothing, revised with 3 caveats: a) don’t do it if there’s someone that can do it better; b) don’t do it if there’s someone that can do it adequately; c) if it makes me really happy, do it anyway; d) if someone can do it 85% as well as I do, let them do it; e) anything not worth doing is not worth doing right; f) if in doubt charge for sales trips

6. make them pay something, with their time, their money — if they don’t pay for it they don’t value it

8. if it’s not on paper, don’t do it

9. listen to what other people are telling you

10. don’t communicate to somebody, but communicate with somebody

11. always have an exit strategy

12. make them feel like your client has a part in the final outcome; make sure they have their fingerprints on it

13. listen for what they’re not saying

14. listen to the “music”, body language, intonation

15. always be ready to sell your product

16. if you find yourself reluctant to sell your product, there’s something wrong with it

17. any successful services company has some fixed priced product to sell

18. given them entry points that they can buy

19. recurring revenue model, e.g. via contract maintenance plans, or follow-through

20. have a follow-through clause in contract so you can know how you’re doing

21. charge more money if they don’t want you to come back after some time, e.g. 3 months

22. if you just build it they probably won’t come

23. manage expectations, book: Managing Expectations, by Naomi Karten

24. Time spent in reconnaissance is time well spent

25. You can observe a whole lot just by watching (Yogi Berra)

26. Go hard or go home; fully commit all resources needed, or kill it mercilessly

27. Commit enough to learn what you have to learn to find out whether it’s worth pursuing or killing

28. People who work in an Agile/iterative way often fail to do the discovery

29. Ideas by themselves aren’t as valuable as you think they are; don’t guard them too closely

30. Nothing is as dangerous as an idea, esp. if it’s the only idea you have

31. Never rest on your past successes; there is always something more you could be doing; if you’re not learning, you’re dead

32. Sharing competitive advantages brings 10-fold rewards; give it away, it comes back

33. Being able to say ‘no’

34. Research clients as if you were hiring them

35. Recognize that every client is unique.

36. You don’t have to remember everything to succeed.

37. It’s ok to let a client go if it’s not the right fit; you should organize your business such that it’s ok to let a client go, i.e. don’t be over-dependent on any single client

38. The best way to build a business is to stay in business; stay around, build a reputation and credibility

39. Actively solicit feedback from clients; actively extract the feedback, e.g. watch the audience

40. Don’t be alone in your work; have someone to talk to

41. Honor the people who are your sounding board and bring feedback, e.g. life partners, friends, …

42. Anything that’s annoying or repetitive should be automated or stopped

43. Track your budget & cost every month

44. Don’t make mistakes over your budget or your cost.

45. Don’t spend your money on office decoration, esp. if your clients don’t come to your office

46. Always try someone out before you hire them

47. Don’t fall for the big lies: “we’re just about to get funding” “our data is clean” “your check is in the mail” “we’re going to sign it next month, just keep working” “don’t worry about the contract” …

48. Preventing any one of these mistakes will pay for this conference

49. Double your reading speed

50. Choose not to read a lot; don’t read stuff that’s not worth reading

51. Stay off Facebook & Twitter

52. Sometimes you can save money by spending money; and sometimes the reverse. Learn to tell the difference

via 50 more ways to improve your business.

Also see the original 50 ways to improve your business .

These are some selections and notes from a brilliant essay by Dr Chester W Richards about OODA loops and the general application of military know how to business. From “What you really do with OODA loops” :

The key to the military notion of time lies in how practitioners of the art of war view strategy. Great commanders down through the years have used time-based strategy to cloud their opponents’ understanding and destroy their morale so that the battle, if it must be fought at all, is relatively quick and painless. In the language of conflict, we say that they move their opponents where they want them to be. Leaders in business and industry can do the same thing and with similar results. This paper explores this notion, first by looking at what today’s most avant-garde business theorists claim for the concept of time, and then comparing that to what the most successful generals and strategists aim to achieve. Finally, we will the translate the military goals and objectives back into the commercial world and look for examples where it actually worked.

…Building one new business after another, faster than the competition, is the only way to stay ahead.

…a real strategist doesn’t like words like “respond” and is dubious about “anticipate.” These are passive sorts of things…

Now it is true that fast reactions have their place – if your opponent catches you by surprise, for example. Competence in this tactic, such things as staying cool, using the other side’s momentum against them, and so on, form an essential part of any competitor’s tool kit. Problems arise when, as in the above paradigm, reaction becomes the goal of strategy. First, under such an arrangement, if we don’t see anything, we don’t do anything. So much for initiative.

If your mindset is to observe carefully and then respond, you will always incur a lag, and the focus of your efforts will be on finding ways to shrink it. But suppose there was a way to compete that didn’t generate a lag in the first place.

…Sun Tzu also took aim at Maginot Line strategies: “Preparedness everywhere means lack everywhere.”

…”It is generally advisable to be the one to initiate the attack and thereby put the opponent in the defensive position.” (63) Also: “In the path to victory in Heiho (his school) taking the initiative at all costs is the most important thing.”

…What if opponents act first? Let’s not be arrogant – your opponents are thinking human beings and can also employ the basic strategic tools of surprise, deception, and ambiguity. Then, advised Musashi, you have to stifle their plans immediately. The focus, however, is never on defending, but on regaining and using the initiative so that you can lead your opponents where you want them to be.

…Sun Tzu had proclaimed that the ability to think and act rapidly is the essence of war…Sun Tzu and his commentators also talked about sowing confusion by not giving opponents time to plan…In particular, one could manipulate time and rhythm to unhinge an opponent’s mental and moral composure: You use “an advantageous rhythm to arrest the powerful determination of the adversary’s motivation.”

This was, he insisted, an essential step before engaging in physical combat. It is a stunningly powerful observation, for demotivated opponents are defeated opponents, no matter what weapons remain in their hands. Warriors using Musashi’s techniques could create gaps, which the Japanese call “suki,” in their opponent’s attention, during which one could attack a fully armed samurai with a fencepost (as Musashi once did) and win. (Nihon 31)

In modern times, a corollary notion has been synthesized by the American strategist, the late Air Force Col. John R. Boyd. Like Musashi, Boyd got his initial ideas from one-on-one combat, in his case, jets over Korea. After pondering this experience, and studying the results of engagements from Sun Tzu to the present, Boyd derived the OODA loop, for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act. It has been described for business by Bower and Hout, Stalk and Hout, and Peters. Note 6 The ability to execute rapid OODA loops is called “agility,” and it now generally recognized that the more agile organization will build-up increasingly decisive advantages over its opponents.

It is worth repeating that this is not a theoretical construct, but a proven strategy for winning in armed conflict. It provides a framework much more powerful than merely reacting to opponents, but one might reasonably ask whether it applies to anybody but a soldier? More to the point, businesses don’t directly combat each other. Instead, they compete for the attention, and money, of customers. Can businesses employ OODA loops and the other tools of time-based competition to achieve anything like the effects of Sun Tzu, Musashi, and Boyd, and if so, how is this going to help them survive and grow?

Warfighters, as we have seen, use mind-and-morale destroying techniques to create and exploit opportunities for collapsing the enemy. In business, things are fundamentally different. War has opponents; business does have its analog of opponents – competitors – but they are of secondary importance next to a new god-like entity, the customer.

…What about the mind-destroying effects described by Sun Tzu, Musashi and Boyd? There is little in the business press on this question, probably because writers have been focusing on the remarkable, if passive, attributes noted in Section II. But anecdotes and circumstantial evidence abound to support what military strategists and practitioners have found. Anybody who has ever been on a losing team, or worked for a failing organization, knows Boyd is right. Here is a classic description from one of the founders of the modern quality movement, Joseph Juran:

Lacking victories over their competitors, and unable to defend themselves from their bosses, they lash out at each other, making unity of purpose even harder to achieve. (74)

Or this, from the former chairman of General Electric, Jack Welch:

This internal focus has wasted our time, wasted our energy, frustrated us, made us so mad some nights over some bureaucratic jackass boss that we’d punch a hole in the wall. (Sherman 46)

An organization falling victim to the Boyd Treatment will enter a tightening spiral of internal conflict. As it falls further behind in the marketplace, and its successful moves (as determined, of course, by the customer) become rarer and rarer, all the wonderful chaos and bickering beloved of military strategists follows. Interviews with members of such organizations will reveal witch hunts, strict adherence to directives and procedures (with a total lack of risk-taking), and so on. Inevitably, people split into camps and start apportioning blame, and the company turns ever more deeply inward (Welch’s “internal focus”, Boyd calls it “folding your adversary in on himself”). Usually, Stalk and Hout observe, traditional managers never understand what hit them. When attacked by a time-based competitor, cost-based managers rarely figure out why, despite what their spreadsheets are telling them, they are suddenly losing market share and why more robust cost-cutting isn’t restoring profitability.(264)

The key point is that for business, these effects are icing on the cake. They do not, in and of themselves, produce products that customers will buy. The primary active effect of time-based strategy in business is the symbiotic shaping of the marketplace that agile companies participate in.

“The company that can identify what technologies are needed, introduce them quickly, and commercialize them will succeed.” – Hiroshi Okuda, President, Toyota Motor Corporation (Business Week, June 15, 1998)

…Ask any CEO, “Is your business philosophy reactive?” It’s like asking if his marketing plan is to wait by the phone. Even the French of 1940, that wonderful source of what-to-avoid examples, liked to brag about how their élan would sweep away the Teutonic invaders. Of course, as they were soon to learn, talking a good fight was not the same thing as actually doing it. And so it is with the world of business. Policies are one thing, but companies that have the power to shape the market are structurally, as well as philosophically, different.

…Structure is so intimately bound up with strategy that it is difficult to imagine how one could make any lasting change in an organization’s behavior without first making equally profound changes in its systems.

…

meeting the needs of the customer should provide focus and direction to all activities of the company. Note 8 It is in this key area where we find perhaps the most visible differences between companies that claim to be proactive, and those that actually are. Reactive companies want to detect market opportunities. They engage in traditional market research, things like questionnaires, focus groups, and the like. Basic to their attitude is the idea that the customer is “out there” and we are “in here.” To bridge this gap, they will put a lot of effort into going out to Customer Land and “finding out what they want.”

One problem with this approach, of course, is that the customer often doesn’t know…the big question now is “What next?”  I don’t know – offer me something.

…whereas we all claim to put the customer first, the very structure of most companies limits how intimately involved with the customer they can become. One obvious example is a Marketing Department that jealously controls customer contact. Or a policy of basing sales and project people in a home office rather than with their customers. Or an accounting system that sees customer service as a cost, that is, an attractive candidate for cutbacks when times get tough.

…Most of today’s management systems and practices preclude the intensity of customer involvement that companies will need in order to survive.

…companies with rapid decision cycles are often good innovators. Partly this is because most innovations are actually incremental improvements on an original idea, what Hamel and Prahalad call “expeditionary marketing.” (“Imagination” 86-92) The more rapidly that a company can sense how the customer reacted to its last offering and make changes accordingly, the better job of innovation it will do.

…Companies take the initiative in the marketplace by offering a stream of new products and services. Where do new products and services come from? The only answer possible, discounting elves and gamma rays, is through the initiative of the people who work for and with the organization. A market creator uses the almost symbiotic relationship all of its people have with its customers to generate ideas for new features or capabilities or whatever. Stalk and Hout were dead on, when in the middle of describing how agile companies become entwined with their customers, they observed that “Sometimes it’s difficult to know who’s leading whom.”…Incidentally, this is the same principle underlying maneuver warfare, where an army puts out tens or hundreds of small “feelers,” then uses its fast OODA loop speed to identify and reinforce those that begin to penetrate.

…”lean production,” which is based on these same principles (and can therefore be considered as an implementation of the principles of maneuver warfare), has displaced mass production, which relies on synchronization and control, in every marketplace where the two compete.

Toyota, whose system is generally considered the foundation of lean production, expects initiative at all levels and in all processes…”The paperwork is minimal,” reads the official Toyota description of the system, “the efficiency is maximal.  And the employees themselves are completely in charge.”

…Far too many companies demonstrate the fatal flaw noted by Sybase co-founder Robert Epstein: An established company’s true major goal is to defend what it did last year….These are business versions of the Maginot Line.

The Maginot Line mentality is deadly and yet it is so appealing that it may not be recognized until it has sapped the company’s competitive strengths.

But while it is certainly true that at any given point in time a company has to do the best with what it has, this is the definition of “tactics,” not strategy.  Basing a company’s future on any particular resource is a business version of a stance, and so a false and fatal strategy.

Perhaps the most obvious objection to a core competencies strategy is that the market might not happen to be buying what you’re good at.

…It is worth keeping in mind that Wal-Mart is a market shaper and creator, not merely a market responder, and thus agility – rather than the specific products of it – is its “core competence.”

a belief that you have any type of unique capability is the siren song of complacency. In fact, a belief that you have some kind of difficult-to-emulate ability to know the customer is simply arrogance, which is even a faster-acting poison than mere complacency, and this tends to be true of all high-level business (as opposed to technical or physical) functions. You must assume that your competitors are just as good at the business basics as you are, and you would be better served to assume they are already ahead.

Former Intel CEO Andy Grove was right: Only the paranoid do survive. It is so tempting to believe that “we have these facilities” or “we have these great capabilities”, and therefore we are safe.  You are never safe, and the first hint of a belief that you are safe marks the start of your decline. Only a management that can constantly challenge comforting beliefs, even if they are unstated, will lead its company to survive and grow year after year.  Remember when Enron used to proclaim itself “The World’s Best Company”?

…

According to the ancient warriors of the Sun Tzu school, the real situation is even worse than complacency-invites-decline.  That, at least, is well within our own tradition.  Musashi proclaimed that any manifestation of the stance mentality, even if assumed with vigilance and paranoia, will always generate a defensive spirit and so will open vulnerabilities. One might do better to emulate the Zen warriors who knew that the only resource that will ensure victory is resourcefulness itself. (Cleary, Japanese Art of War, 77)

So the bottom line is yes, you can prosper by restructuring your operations to become a fast reactor to market trends. You may have to prune things some, which it’s probably time for anyway, but you won’t need to do great violence to your underlying systems and culture. And everything will probably work out OK, unless, of course, you meet up with a competitor who is determined to shape the market and who is structurally able to do so. Then 2,500 years of experience say that you are going to have a problem. And word is getting out. “Boldness,” writes Fortune‘s Rahul Jacob, “may very well be the preeminent competitive advantage in this slow growth decade.” (74) After all, whom would you bet on, a fast sheep or a fast tiger?

YouTube – A Guy In a Cube

Vital Smarts, the people who brought out the fantastic “Crucial Conversations” a few years ago, have a great ad for their consulting business.

Do not be carried along by cowardly conventions and self-interested arse covering. The best operations teams consist of highly motivated free thinkers who are not afraid to admit to mistakes so they can be fixed systemically before they add up to anything serious.

[Update1: This was my submission to Executive Rockstar's Best Career Advice competition ]

[Update2: This book look promising "Know What You Don't Know: How Great Companies Fix Problems Before They Happen" By: Michael A. Roberto]

[Update3: Why Systems Fail and Problems Sprout Anew]

The best career advice that I ever received was from Steve O’Donnell, currently SVP IT Infrastructure & Operations at First Data International, celebrity blogger and former Global Head of Data Centre & Customer Experience Management at BT (where we worked together):

One day he said:

“Jonathan, I will never fire you for an honest mistake but if you lie to me, ever, you will be out the door in a minute. There is no mistake that you can make that I cannot figure out how to fix IF you tell me about it immediately. Be honest with me and you are safe, lie to me and you are gone.”

This is a golden rule in effective technical operations. It creates a culture of honesty and safety – not being afraid of reporting errors or lapses – that leads to true Kaizan:  genuine self-correction and organisational self-improvement because you are able to deal with errors systematically (i.e. by tweaking systems) and without the damage of the blame game and deferred responsibility.

His advice is particularly important in environments where errors are rare but extremely serious when they do occur – like executive boardrooms or aircraft maintenance hangers or hospitals.  The behaviour or practice of telling the truth about minor errors is central to the precursor-based error detection system (i.e. spotting the warning signs early)  which is in turn at the center of truly effective operations management (and every other system).

Kevin Kelly explains the issue in a  brilliant post about “Looking for Ugly“:

How do you prevent major errors in a system built to successfully keep major errors to a minimum?  You look for the ugly.

The safety of aircraft is so essential it is regulated in hopes that regulation can decrease errors. Error prevention enforced by legal penalties presents a problem, though: severe penalties discourages disclosure of problems early enough to be remedied.  To counter that human tendency, the US FAA has generally allowed airlines to admit errors they find without punishing them. These smaller infractions are the “ugly.” By themselves they aren’t significant, but they can compound with other small “uglies.” Often times they are so minimal — perhaps a worn valve, or discolored pipe — that one can hardly call them errors. They are just precursors to something breaking down the road.  Other times they are things that break without causing harm.

The general agreement in the industry is that a policy of unpunished infractions encourages quicker repairs and reduces the chances of major failures. Of course not punishing companies for safety violations rubs some people the wrong way. A recent Times article reports on the Congressional investigation into whether this policy of unpunished disclosure should continue, which issued the quote above. The Times says:

“We live in an era right now where we’re blessed with extremely safe systems,” said one panel member, William McCabe, a veteran of business aviation companies. “You can’t use forensics,” he said, because there are not enough accidents to analyze.

“You’re looking for ugly,” Mr. McCabe said. “You ask your people to look for ugly.” A successful safety system, he said, “acknowledges, recognizes and rewards people for coming forward and saying, ‘That might be one of your precursors.’ “

Looking for ugly is a great way to describe a precursor-based error detection system. You are not really searching for failure as much as signs failure will begin. These are less like errors and more like deviations. Offcenter in an unhealthy way.  For some very large systems — like airplanes, human health, ecosystems — detection of deviations is more art than science, more a matter of beauty or the lack of it.

Come to think of it, looking for ugly is how we assess our own health. I suspect looking for ugly is how we will be assessing complex systems like robots, AIs and virtual realities.

So, in short:  Create a professional environment that enables and encourages your team to detect, report and deal with the “ugly”.

[Update: I mailed Steve my submission and I was delighted to see he blogged about it on his Hot Aisle blog]

The faculty at Executive Rockstar have a great video introduction to Issue Decomposition, one of the most useful tools in the consultant’s toolkit.

Issue Decomposition is essentially a modified and structured Socratic interrogation (iterative interrogative loop)  that has its modern origins in Cold War strategic thinking and its resultant field of Game Theory.

It was developed to help with high stakes multilateral negotiations, like Nuclear Arms Reduction, by clarifying the core issues and elements of any problem or situation.

It has evolved into one of the best but least known about decision support systems.

It is both very simple and powerful tool that can liberate those bedevilled by a lack of clarity or confusion.

Check out Phil’s introduction over at the Executive Rockstar Secrets Blog:

Executive Rockstar Issue Decomposition Crystal Clear Thinking | Secrets Of Executive Rockstars

Really enjoying the new blog – Lateral Action – from the guys behind CopyBlogger .

Here are some starter posts to give you an idea of the themes and style:

Tyler Durden’s 8 Rules of Innovation | Lateral Action

Foolish Productivity: The Hobgoblin of Creative Minds

Beyond Getting Things Done: Lateral Action