A Parable:
In the early 1900s a large factory making engine parts suddenly started to make parts out of specification. The factory manager brought in several people to figure out what was wrong. No matter how often they changed or reconfigured the machines they just couldn’t get it right, and no part from that line could be sold. Finally they tracked down the engineer who had originally designed the factory line and hired him to fix it. He walked up and down the line while all the machines were running, until he stopped in front of one machine. From his pocket he pulled a piece of chalk and put a large X on the machine. The factory workers pulled that machine out of the line and replaced it, and suddenly everything was working perfectly. The factory manager was thrilled until he received the engineer’s bill, which was $10,000. He was furious because the guy was only there for 15 minutes and he asked for an itemized invoice. A few weeks later he received an invoice in the mail:
If you would like to get notified for new posts subscribe below:
Recent Posts
-
Math, Metrics, and Science Oh My!
Who doesn’t like Math, Metrics, and Science? According to Pew Research, only 11% of Americans say that they liked math in school. Based on most public discourse, this isn’t hard to confirm. I want to look at a couple of commonly used statistics terms and how metrics get misused. This misuse can cause us to…
-
Efficient Meetings: Only immortals don’t care if they take forever
How much time is wasted in meetings? According to Forbes, there are 55 million meetings daily, and at least half don’t accomplish much. Harvard Business Review surveyed 200 senior managers; only 17% said their meetings are generally productive uses of group and individual time. A recent survey shows 93% of workers complain about their recent…
-
Are AI Answers A Money Pit?
Summary: Cynefin: A Sensing Model What kind of problems does AI solve well? To answer this question I first want to bring back up the Cynefin model. This is a sensing framework in which situations can be analyzed, and we can respond accordingly. For a short recap of my article, Complexity is Key, here is…
-
Checklists: Organize your Personal and Professional life
Summary: The Importance of Checklists This topic may be boring. Unfortunately, even important things can be boring, and checklists are important but seem boring. Why do surgeons have checklists? They are smart, right? Why do they need to have a checklist? According to studies, checklists in surgeries and by medical staff can reduce deaths by…
-
High Volume Waste – The Unsung Promise of AI
A Word on Waste Whether it was when I was getting my MBA learning lean manufacturing or lean software development, I learned that we needed to focus on reducing waste to be successful. There were eight main kinds of waste to reduce in a process (manufacturing or software development). To remember them all, there is…
-
Visualize Everything – Manage none of it
Summary: Visualize the Work: The Good: In the Agile community, there is an adage, “Visualize Work.” This means visualizing where work is within the development process to help improve workflow. This works; teams share understanding, they can remove ambiguity in the workflow, and they can see (literally) ways to optimize it. There are many ways…
-
Lean Godzilla
Summary Godzilla Destroys the Oscars Even if you didn’t see the most recent Godzilla offering from Toho Japan, Godzilla Minus One, you might have noticed that it won the Oscar for Best Visual Effects (VFX). This is quite an achievement since the movie cost $15 Million, and its competitors spent substantially more. Guardians of the…
-
Understanding the Psychology of Influence: Empowerment Over Manipulation
Overview Since college, I have found immense value in Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion. I revisit it regularly, as Cialdini consistently updates it with fresh stories, analogies, and psychological insights. This is a must-read for business, marketing, and product design professionals, as it comprehensively explains the various strategies used to influence our…
-
Skin in the Game: Avoid playing with house money
Summary: When people make decisions that impact others, what can drive them to make the best decision for the group/organization? Many decision processes can help us focus on what matters, minimize bias, and make an educated decision with as much input from experts as possible. One method I like has been outlined in an article…
-
Drawing a BEAD on value
People often confuse many things for value. Here are just some of them: excitement, urgency, trends, hype, complexity, interest, short-term cost savings, ease, loudness, and quantity. Let’s try and categorize these. Fooled by who was saying it Many of these things are confused for value because of who says it. A well-known acronym in product…
-
Failing Forward: Preventing a Culture of Falling Back
Summary: One of the common refrains I hear is making sure people are held accountable. This is usually said as a way to prevent failure in the future. It presumes two things that are frequently incorrect: Failure is only sometimes a problem A failure, at its core, is an undesirable outcome. We tried to accomplish…
-
Feature to Noise Ratio
Summary Consider how quickly something falls out of our heads before we write it down. Studies for how much we can keep in our working memory go back to 1871 when William Stanley Jevons published an article indicating we can, at most, keep 3 to 4 pieces of information at a time. Many tests have…
-
From Dinosaurs to Datacenters: How Jurassic Park’s IT Mistakes Still Apply Today
If you’re a fan of Jurassic Park, you may remember the iconic line, “spared no expense.” However, when it came to IT, John Hammond made some serious mistakes that still apply to tech today. This article will explore how Hammond’s choices impacted the park and how they can be applied to modern-day IT and software…
-
Installing Business Software: it is like bringing a potentially dangerous animal into the jungle where you live.
Summary: The analogy: One of the common misconceptions is that installing software is much like installing an appliance in your home. The ease with which we install software on our phones gives the illusion that it is as easy as adding a washing machine or refrigerator. Install and uninstall is easy and as plug-and-play as…
-
When are SMART goals Dumb?
Summary One of the most common goal-setting techniques taught is to make sure your goals are SMART, which is an acronym standing for: S – Specific M – Measurable A – Achievable R – Relevant T – Time-based This acronym can be useful setting goals for the near-term, known destination, work-product-based goals. If you have…
-
Assumption Mapping – Preventing Hope-Based Product Delivery
Summary: Parable: Wizzy owned a successful farm supply store. He had a large extensive rebate program that had helped made Wizzy’s Farm Store successful. Each farmer got a discount from the store if they put a sign in their field near the road saying they grew crops using Wizzy products. This was a boon for…
-
9th Kind of Waste – Ego
Summary: Parable A garage door opener company has a problem. Recently their key supplier has stopped making the electronics board they have been using for years on their garage door openers. The supplier has replaced the board with one that comes with Wi-Fi but it is more expensive. The leadership sees this as an opportunity.…
-
Visualizing & Mitigating Risk
Summary Chance is hard to feel: Many people get nervous about flying. In recent years there have been 0 deaths for all US domestic flights. If you expand the scope to international aviation and go back several years the risk is about 1 in 2.067 million. The risk of a fatal crash in a motor…
-
Interview your Manager like a Customer
Summary Personal Parable Many years ago I got a job of being the product owner for an internal software delivery team. At the time there was a decent knowing-doing gap in my capabilities. I had learned a great deal about the role through reading and training, but I had never done it before. While my…
-
How We Can Trust Generative AI
Summary: Parable: Steve logs into his work laptop. He sees an e-mail in his inbox asking for his help: To: steve@company.com From: CFO@company.com Subject: URG: Help needed with pricing! Hey Steve, I know you are an expert with spreadsheets. I wanted you to review the attached one and let me know ASAP if our new…
-
The Hidden Costs of Delay
Summary: A parable: In 2010 the Affordable Care Act (ACA), sometimes referred to as Obamacare passed congress. States were responsible for determining how their citizens would be able to sign up for a subsidized healthcare plan. Oregon chose to make its own website, Cover Oregon. To build the website they hired Oracle as a consultant. …
-
Market Fit Debt
Summary: There’s an iceberg up ahead In a recent article, I highlighted the need to increase adaptability to match market changes. Our systems have liabilities that don’t show up on a balance sheet that prevent our company from moving forward. One example was Southwest Airlines’ 2022 scheduling system issues, which cost the company billions of…
-
Business Hertz
Summary A parable: In the 1980s video tapes (beta/VHS) became the first way to watch a movie in your home. Initially, tapes were expensive to buy, a newly released movie could sell for $100 and the VHS player itself would cost $400. As a result, most people could own a player but not own many…
-
Complexity is Key – Software is not a Toaster
Summary: The Cynefin Framework The Cynefin Framework was created by Dave Snowden (no relation to the other more famous Snowden), a researcher in knowledge management. Cynefin, pronounced kuh-nev-in, it is a way to deal with problems and apply the right decision making for that kind of problem. There are 5 domains in the model. To…
-
Users, Not Great Ideas Dictate Success
Summary: A Parable: In the early 2010s Jeff Bezos had a brilliant idea. His idea: Amazon needed to be in the smartphone business, and it needed to be a cheap smartphone that used 3D technology. By all accounts Bezos got deeply invested in his brilliant idea and moved forward with designing a phone he thought…
Chalk X 