How to fail well

The biggest waste is not failing, it's not doing. There is a famous tale of a patrol lost in the fog in the mountain that found its way home following a map, only to discover it was the wrong map. In uncertainty, the wisest thing to do is get on your feet and walk - carefully. The cost of not doing so is often much greater.

I'm a great believer in failing - thankfully, since it happens to me often enough. In the same vein, I believe that one learns from one's mistakes, not from one's dumb-stupid-baka errors. Making mistakes is the only way to deal with uncertainty (as the alternative is do nothing). Errors occur when you ignore something fairly certain, but that you haven't seen (or wanted to look at).

Failing well is essential to moving forward in an increasing uncertain and unpredictable work environment. In the past ten years, everything from technology, to footprint, to jobs is changing. Planning is all very well when we can forecast with some degree of confidence, but to keep planning when we know the plan is wrong is a little bit weird, not to say dangerous. So how to fail well?

1. Don't do anything stupid: there is enough uncertainty going around not to try and do something radical and different in a known area. A few years ago I found myself on a beach in Brazil, in what was the middle of the winter for me in Europe. I thought, what the hell, and I went for a swim, got carried away by the undertow and saved by the baywatch. Embarrassing - I really had a moment thinking "this is it, goodbye." Now, that was really stupid. They were SIGNS telling to watch out. Ignoring gravity, demographics, or expertise is not innovative, it's just plain dumb.
2. Start with what is at hand and fail quickly: don't think it through, just do something with what you've got! Thinking about it usually complicated matters with all sorts of unlikely scenarios. The point of doing rather than thinking is to explore. We now have many opportunities to do things virtually, so it's pretty low cost to get something done - respecting rule number one: don't do anything dumb that would bankrupt you or take unreasonable risks.
3. Rope in others right away: don't fail alone if you can help it. By collaborating intensely with two or three people, chances of success increase dramatically. The questions is often to find the right people and to get them to participate to whatever nonsensical idea you're about, but several heads are definitely better than one.
4. Change your mind often: the point of doing is learning, not succeeding. Failing is useful only if you do learn, which means changing your mind and abandoning your original plans to follow where the experiments and your team mates lead. We're not wired to find changing our minds easy, so we need to learn to appreciate every time it happens.
5. When it works, do it again: I have a great friend who is a movie producer and explains Hollywood thus: no one ever knows the recipe to what works, so as long as people pay to see a movie, keep doing sequels, which is the way you build a franchise… until audiences get bored for it. The flip side to an open mind is to be disciplined about repeating what works without chasing something else and building it further with the tools at hand.

Over the years I've notice that many things I have failed at (I mean, really failed, as in not getting the job, not getting the funding, etc.) have closed some doors but more importantly opened others which did succeed. The question then, in a turbulent , uncertain world, is how to work at opening doors that you can't see are there. The only way I know is to try it and fail... until it succeeds.

A Challenge to Lean Restaurants: Serve Me Less Food

I'm not picking on restaurants. The entire food supply chain wastes a third or more of the food from farm to table, not to mention the wastes in energy, fuel and labor within operations. But that scope is too broad. Let's keep it simple. Restaurants, a challenge: serve me less food. I don't like wasting food. It's immoral. It's wasteful. I don't need a whole basket of bread, American-sized portions or all-I-can-eat anything. The science is in. We can calculate the number of calories I need per day to be healthy. A food service customer experience that does not keep this in mind appears increasingly outdated. If it's too difficult to adjust portion sizes based on the customer Restaurants almost never ask if we would like a small portion, and sometimes specify "no changes please" on the menu, suggestion either pre-made batches or a lack of customer focus, both non-lean, non-agile behaviors. Restaurants, you can also ask whether my party is dining on business, and whether we would like to plan ahead on packing up 25% of our meal in advance to donate, since we will not be able to finish it nor take it to our hotel and eat it another day. Some restaurants do this already. Why not all?

People matter more than process

I've just had the privilege of writing a paper with two people I respect tremendously in my field… and to see it rejected by an academic journal. The editor's argument is the following: "I would like to point out that your paper went through a standard blind review process, where names and reputations are not part of the evaluation criteria. The three independent reviewers all converge to similar conclusions." The failure is all mine since I did most of the writing and the reviewers felt negatively about the style of the paper.

It's not the rejection that bugs me, as an author I've had my share of that, and, in this case I had never heard of this journal in the first place. It's the assumption that the "blind" editorial process is a guarantee of quality. In a confused, not stabilized field, WHO says WHAT matters enormously.  In this case, one of my co-authors created the field, the other, as a senior manager at Ford, has more knowledge of the topic than any one else. I've learned more in writing this paper than I had in years. WHO they are counts!

It reminded me of a development project where the project manager had perfectly followed the workflow, the gate reviews, the checklists to come up with a piss-poor product that flopped terribly on the market. Luckily the division manager gave the revamp to a gifted engineer most managers disliked for his messy ways, but who understood the product inside out, and he focused on one idea: simplification. The resulting product became a total hit, market share practically doubled.

When Bill Gates has a banal idea, which he often tweets about, it's well worth listening, because his idea might not be innovative, but his judgement is bulletproof and who he is give the thought credential. After all, everything the man touches works out. Action trumps thinking every day. Doing creates evidence. Evidence is better than intuition when it comes to learning.

Frederick Taylor has had the last laugh. back in 1911, he stated: "In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first." This might work for bureaucracy and Law courts, but when it comes to learning, clearly who the speaker is matters tremendously, regardless of the process. Who we choose to follow as Best In The World determine a large part of who we become. Sure, even the wise can drew up, and indeed do. But in a world saturated with information, choosing WHO we listen to REALLY matters!

Are we wasting lessons learned?

Can you help us think through our next steps in our Lean transformation? A large government department whom we have helped for several years within projects and training programs.  The leading guy within their Lean department explains how they are shifting from delivering capacity to a project to delivering a product to a project. This will help focus on the process and build in quality expectations. I was, at that moment, still wondering why I was in the meeting as I am only involved in coordination and planning for one of the training programs.

The next day  I find myself sitting in on a meeting with a company evaluating their Lean journey and possible next steps. This because I assisted a colleague with a broken leg during the last two days of a Kaizen week. After we talked about the results of the Kaizen week she asked a question: how do you keep focus on the process while we shift to a matrix organization? Ok, so this company is just about to walk the same steps that the previously mentioned government department already walked. No guarantee that they will end up with the same result if they copy this. I couldn't help myself sharing what the governmental department was doing.  Very insightful she said. But the governmental department will experiment on this approach, and pivot maybe. Maybe it is already been done by someone else, what did they learn?

So who is writing this stuff down? Or do we need to walk this path to learn it ourselves, with all of the delays, resistance and political wrestling matches within our companies. I am sure our gurus have seen it all so my question is….are we wasting lessons learned?

How leaders create resistance to change

When they try to reform without first having gained trust.

We've all seen the tremendous waste of resistance to change, when a leader wants to change things for the better, but every one else holds back, soldiers on or even sabotages. We see it at company level, we can see it now at country level. Some times, resistance is so strong it can derail (or at least bog down) the entire reform, and some consultants have specialized in this one single issue: overcoming resistance to change.

When the leader is strong, and resistance is everywhere, leaders tend to retreat to a bunker mentality and force the changes through, not matter what, at increasing costs to all around. They can't understand why people simply won't see that their "solution" is better, necessary and urgent. We need to reform education now! We need to reorganize the company now!

Leaders themselves create the resistance whenever they push changes through without having made the effort to gain people's trust first. This is one of the tough lessons I learned from my mentors, Dan Jones and Jacques Chaize a decade ago. Having worked a lot in the auto industry, I believed that you had to expect resistance in any case, and drive changes through no matter what. It might work in the end, but at what cost?

Now, when I work with any new facility, I start with a kaizen ergonomics first. Managers are taught to do frequent, short, workshops with their teams to support team members in fixing obvious ergonomics issues. They help where they can, not by managerial advice, but by getting support from other parts of the organizations. Before anything else, they build mutual trust.

Where managers succeed, all the other changes brought by pull systems, improving flow and red bins and so on happen seamlessly, and sometimes even enthusiastically by engaged team members. The lesson is that improvement can only happen within a relationship, and you have to build the relationship before driving reforms, so that every one has a chance of seeing their interest and contribution, as well as a chance of changing things where they don't understand what the reform is supposed to achieve.

Why are developed societies rich - and wasteful?

I was in Brazil lately, and noticed that apartment blocks were built out of cinderblocks. I visit a couple of construction sites per month in France, and buildings have concrete walls poured into metal workforms. As I thought it through, I figured that labour cost in western Europe is high, so it makes sense to seek higher productivity through investing in equipment - the work forms are large and expensive, but require far less labor per unit. On the other hand, using them cost-effectively requires a methods department, and then some scheduling software and so on. On the plus side the thermal and sound insulation of a poured concrete wall is better than one built of cinderblocks.

Any one who has visited a German factory will know what I mean - a high value, high cost, high productivity equilibrium of high quality goods made on expensive machines sustained by large engineering departments but little direct labor. When Germans build a leveling board, they construct it out of shiny aluminum rather than plywood. As productivity is wealth, this high cost equilibrium creates overall largely white-collar wealthy societies.

The flip side is that the division of labor between various department encourages each department to do the best they can in their light, and in the end create vastly over-engineered solutions and strikingly wasteful systems. For instance, ISO certification requires staff to write procedures which will then be audited, and the cost of all of this is added onto the product. It's waste.

Cost control doesn't work because there is no real way back to cheap labor. If cost cutting is too severe, some activities fail altogether and the system no longer produces quality goods, which is the beginning of a death downward spiral - something we're unfortunately familiar with in French industry. Is waste therefore unavoidably part of any highly developed society?

Not necessarily. Each specialist, indeed each person, can be taught to see for themselves the waste they generate on the overall system and learn to work in wiser ways to reduce this waste, and in kinder ways to better cooperate with others across functional barriers to reduce the overall waste. The trick here is to learn to identify specific types of waste, such as badly mixing concrete and having to rework the concrete walls out of the form by direct labor, and progressively taking the wasteful element out of the high-value equilibrium. To reduce waste, we first need to see waste, and understand how our own behavior causes it to happen.

The new power lines

A waste-free society is definitely "the" new frontier.  It is not a traditional frontier anymore: the new terra incognita are not far away in space or time but within each of us: we are the frontier!

Individual accomplishment in a society, moving from an economy of scale to an economy of scarce, is involving a radical shift of our old routines, the way we act, and the way we think.

Finding growth for everyone in a waste-free world will require us to be cooperative and smart, Kinder and Wiser.

Kinder. Suppressing the frontiers of time and space has left open the last frontier: human interactions. New wealth will come from our ability to combine our skills to find and implement new and better ways. Cooperation is a keystone. And it starts with respect: including all the players and their aspirations unto the game: it is not about being nice, it is about recognising the fact that we are all part of the world’s destiny and we depend on each other's intelligence to create waste-less growth. A french philosopher* used to say: "believing in someone's intelligence will help it grow, but denying it will destroy it".  If it was nice in the past to be powerful and kind, being kinder may be a new source of power.

Wiser. The challenge is to create new products and services with a frugal use of non-renewable resources and also a leveraged use of ever-renewable resources like people intelligence and learning capacities. Developing these smart resources will increase our ability to address and share the right questions; our capacity to draw re-use and recycle the necessary resources and deliver  smart and waste-free products and solutions. Being wiser is already a new resource to feed the  new power lines! 

*Jean Guéhenno