From Insight to Strategy to Innovation – while standing at the Toyworld Checkout

Posted on February 23, 2012 by

Listen up lean and agile thinkers. This is a simple illustration of the kind of things that make innovation and strategy easy – a gift from someone on a toy shop counter that probably earns less than $20 an hour. Are you this smart? This brave?

With a 10 year old in my household, it’s little wonder I am a fan of Lego. From my own childhood memories, to their inspiring recovery from a near death business experience (after their long-standing patent for bricks expired) just by listening to customers and innovating the product accordingly, it is all good.

One of their recent products puzzled and infuriated me though. It is a single Lego minifigure in an opaque cellophane packet – ideal for for party bags for kid’s birthdays; the child at the checkout who MUST spend their pocket money on something (and they are cheap, $4 to $5 each); or perhaps the serious collector to get some custom mini figure accessories and body parts.

Yet, you can’t see which one of the 16 in the series you are going to end up with.

I will thus confess to having spent far too much time at many a big store’s Lego counter with Mr 10, eyes shut, feeling the packets to detect the slightest variation in the components to figure out if the character is Jane Torvill (uncool!) or Toxic Space Engineer (cool!).

Children’s (and collecter of greater years, ahem) ingenuity and social network savvy soon solved it – for Series 1 and 2 they quickly figured out the bar codes were different and published the key. So Lego moved the goalposts, using a single bar code and a system of dots on the packaging to differentiate figures in Series 3. The kids cracked it again.

Series 4 onwards you have no chance of detecting the difference from the packaging. The secondary market on eBay for these figures erupted, and the popularity of the series continued to grow. Business is booming. Yet I’m still grumpy about it. Why?

Why did Lego want the figure to be a surprise? Was that part of their strategy for the product? Perhaps I will never know, and Mr 10 and I quickly became disenfranchised by the whole thing.

So imagine my surprise, when dropping into Toyworld Palmerston North in NZ last week to find the Lego minifigure packets on the checkout counter, with each figure individually labeled with a hand-written number against the official Lego key. “You can’t do that”; “that’s naughty”; “that’s against the rules” were all thoughts that leapt into my rule-obeying lizard brain. Flabbergasted, I managed to regain enough English language ask why they’d done it.

And for the readers who are struggling with why the hell I am writing about toyshops, this is called INSIGHT and is the most valuable commodity you can possess when developing something new. It is Dan Pink’s ‘purpose’ and Simon Sinek’s ‘why’ in the words of a 20 year old shop clerk:

“I just saw the looks on the faces of the kids – so disappointed that they got a cheerleader when they wanted a deep sea diver, and the conflict they had, knowing they had to be grateful, but had chosen a useless gift”.

Now, agilists, here comes the STRATEGY bit – how will you do something about that problem your customer savvy product owner has found a really sharp insight about:

“Did you get an official cheat sheet from Lego on how to do it?” I asked.

“No, no – there isn’t one. We just had time while on the checkout and watching the door, so we checked each one individually, just like the kids would do.”

INNOVATION simply comes from making this a habit now, knowing things like there are only 2 robots in the latest boxes of 100 or so mini-figures, and thinking about which of their customers might really value that robot.

“The hair on number 3 in that set there is cool for making Call of Duty characters” trots out Mr 10 to the girl behind the counter. “Really? My brother is so into Call of Duty – he’ll love that one”. Minifigure #3, the uncool, pyjama-clad kid with the teddy bear just went from ‘can’t shift’ to ‘can’t keep in stock’.

That is called GROWTH.

If you’re smart, you’ll be down to Toyworld in Palmy and hire that lady on the counter for your agile innovation team. She gets it 100%.

Posted in Communication, Customers, Disruption, People, Strategy | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments

The upside of coronal mass ejection

Posted on February 20, 2012 by

I’m just back from a week working with our friends in Horsham at HC Pro on their Agile and Lean process – I just love the ‘Why’ for their business – Capturing, sharing and preserving visual memories.  Every time I visit I’m reinvigorated about beautiful photography.  In related news, the Sun has finally woken up a bit from it’s long solar minimum and we are starting to see some big sun spots and really big flares.  Big flares means a strong Aurora Borealis.  A strong Aurora Borealis means beautiful photos, so I have to share.

More here

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Challenger 1986: NASA’s most explosive retrospective.

Posted on February 16, 2012 by

Space Shuttle Challenger in one of the most famous (and chilling) space photos of all time.

As I read this week’s Telegraph obituary of a great American rocket scientist, I was moved to thinking about how we deal with the whistleblowers and truth-tellers in an agile world.

How can we strike a balance between encouraging transparency and realism, while managing the impact on the morale of tight-knit teams from Negative Nigels and Whining Winifreds?

I’ll be the first to say that the command and control culture of committed waterfallers (like NASA) is a fast track to secrets being kept, and problems being swept under the carpet. When “failure is not an option” on a project racing toward a fixed launch date, with scope being secretly trimmed off Gantt charts to ensure compliance with public commitments and budgets, and all-nighters pulled by tech heroes, we are just hiding failure.

Is agile any different? If it is effective, yes. But agile zombies, with their card carrying undead marching into retrospectives and standups ritually chanting out their obligations so they can get back to their desks as quickly as possible, is probably just as bad as waterfall.

This tragic tale of an ignored voice is a stern reminder of the consequences of avoiding talking about engineering issues.

When I arrived at Lonely Planet in 2007, and proceeded to shut down a failed waterfall-delivered website program, the HR team had already initiated a training program called Effective Conversations. It seemed uncomfortably basic and quaint in intent – teaching people to get good information across quickly and confidently when in meetings, in casual conversations, one on ones, or in the lunch queue.

A month later, I knew it was gold – I had yet to find a person who did not say “I knew that would happen”. People had just not managed to get the complexity and interdependence of the hairball of product and architecture problems across to Steering Committees and executives. And after a few public scoldings for being naysayers, they learned to shut up and soldier on.

Edward Tufte tackled this same issue of communicating complexity for NASA after the second major shuttle program disaster – Columbia in 2003. This $7 report from his website is one of the best training guides for agilists to invest in around effective written communication.

The constraints put upon Boeing and NASA engineers to explain the complexity of the situation where chunks of insulation had broken off the booster rockets and damaged the heat protective tiles on the leading edge of the wing, using Powerpoint slides with bullets points and a constrained number of words per line, was too great. The wrong decision was made to not space walk and inspect the damage.

I wonder if that was a ‘didn’t work’ or just a ‘puzzles us’ in a retro sense? Either way it signaled the beginning of the end for the second great chapter of the USA’s space exploration efforts. If you are facing an ever increasing complexity in your product and IT architecture, our advice is to put as much investment into improving everyone’s communication skills as you are any engineering effort.

Buy your copy of Edward Tufte’s handbook from his website here.

Posted in Agile, People, Technology, Space, Communication | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

Eric Ries – ‘pivoting’ immortalised in a New Yorker cartoon

Posted on February 11, 2012 by

James and I recently had the pleasure of hearing Eric Ries speak on innovation and product development, through an excellent event called Thoughtworks Live here in Melbourne.

Eric Ries has written a great book called The Lean Startup, which was an important book on our list of 33 texts you should read to get your Luna MBA. His presentation last week did a great job of pointing out how the book is as applicable to innovation within big companies and organisations, as it is the garage-based ‘startups’ – the more popular sense of the term.

One of the most enjoyable moments was Eric’s reflection that he never set out to add a word to the global lexicon of buzzwords around startups, and how the term ‘pivot’ had become painfully over-used over the last 2 years. It is still a key concept in the book, but to some extent obsession with it has distracted from the many other great ideas. Pivoting is all about the moment you have learned your startup idea really sucks, and (in James’ words) ‘you need to take your investor’s cash and try something completely different, quickly and without them panicking and taking all their money back’.

When there’s a New Yorker cartoon based on your new buzzword, you know you’ve made it.

Posted in Agile, Disruption, Strategy | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Roundabouts and Traffic Lights

Posted on February 8, 2012 by

A Quiz:

  • What’s safer ? An intersection with traffic lights or a roundabout ?
  • What’s faster ? Traffic lights or a roundabout ?
  • What’s better for the environment ? A roundabout or traffic lights ?

The answer in each case is the roundabout, they reduce overall accidents and drastically reduce the number of serious accidents (very few t-bone crashes). Traffic flows much faster with a roundabout as well and this in turn leads to a better environmental outcome with less start stop traffic producing less emissions.

I was reminded of this recently listening to Bjarte Bogsnes talk about his work making the financial planning of organisations more agile (Nigel promises to write about this shortly) – he used the metaphor of traffic lights and roundabouts when thinking about the budget process. The traffic lights are rigid rules, the decision about when to drive (or spend) is being made by someone else who is removed from the intersection and placed in a computer program sequence. At a roundabout the drivers who are at the intersection have to make their own informed decision about when to stop and when to go themselves in consort with other drivers.

Traffic lights are a rigid system, programmed based on traffic patterns at some fixed point in time perhaps 5 years ago, they don’t adapt. At a quiet time with one car on the road you may still end up arbitrary stopped because that’s what the traffic light, or the system says to do. With a roundabout, the system adapts; Little traffic and everyone can just flow through the intersection without even slowing down much. Lots of traffic and the system adapts, people slow and take their turn to move through.

Traditional organisations and projects are very much like the traffic lights, planned with the best of intentions to be safe and consistent, but the process is rigid and doesn’t adapt to the daily changes in traffic flow, market intelligence, sales or perhaps software development progress. Agile organisations and projects are like the roundabout, individuals and teams taking responsibility for themselves with the process providing a framework for dynamic, localised decision making based on the best currently available information. While traffic lights take responsibility away from individuals, roundabouts require individuals to step up and take responsibility for themselves and the other drivers negotiating their way forward.

Interestingly despite the indisputable benefits of roundabouts, they make many drivers feel anxious. The fear may not be not be rational, but it is real. We find the same thing as we introduce Agile concepts to organisations. Leaders are scared of giving up control and individuals are scared of taking responsibility for their own decisions, regardless of the benefits.

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NASA’s Gemini Mission Photos

Posted on February 6, 2012 by

After a spate of distracting Agile, Lean and generally serious posts let me drag us back into space with beautiful photographs from some of the first iterative missions NASA launched in to space.

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This is why Apple wins …

Posted on February 3, 2012 by

Via APPL Orchard:

“[Apple is] going to continue to make the best products in the world that delight our customers and make our employees incredibly proud of what they do.”

- Tim Cook in his first email to Apple employees as Apple’s new CEO sent August 25, 2011

“The path [Sony] must take is clear: to drive the growth of our core electronics businesses – primarily digital imaging, smart mobile and game; to turn around the television business; and to accelerate the innovation that enables us to create new business domains.”

- Kazuo Hirai in response to being appointed Sony’s new President and CEO on February 1, 2012

Apple: {best, world, delight, proud} vs. Sony: {growth, businesses, accelerate, domains}

—

Following on from Nigel’s last post… Apple is a Lean and Agile Customer driven company focused on the bottom of the McKinsey list.  Focused first on customers, innovation, greatness and employee pride and satisfaction.  No where in that statement is Cook talking about growth, profit or any of the other bullshit most companies (and leaders) think they should focus on … Those things are outcomes, which Apple has in spades, but they come because Job’s built a culture focused on the right Why.

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