Happy Monday! I'm Cory Foy and welcome to this week's
Mapping Monday, where we're in the middle of exploring
Simon Wardley's Doctrine. So far, we've
looked at two categories of doctrine, covering principles
and patterns of communication and development, including
things like focusing on high situational awareness, using
appropriate methods, and challenging assumptions.
And I've linked to those videos in the blog post for this video
so, be sure to check them out!
For our third category, we want to look at how we
operate as an organization. That means
looking at seven doctrine principles:
Managing Inertia, Optimizing Flow,
Thinking Small to know the details,
Focusing on Effectiveness over Efficiency,
Doing Better with Less, Setting Exceptional Standards,
and Managing Failure. Let's dive in!
Our first doctrine principle is
managing inertia. Imagine you're a business
owner. You've developed a successful business
one that has grown and has
hundreds or thousands of people in a specific
place. You've been in business for a while,
and seen all kinds of people
try to get into the same space, all thinking they have
a unique approach. But, you know
that they're all underestimating what it takes to
really be successful in this line of business.
And so, when yet another startup enters the space
you don't think anything of it. Suddenly,
two years later it seems like you can't go
2 hours without hearing about more business
lost to this startup. What happened?
We got comfortable. Wardley lists
three climatic patterns which explain:
Success breeds inertia,
inertia increases the more successful a past model is,
and, inertia can kill an organization.
In short, success makes us
comfortable, and we lose the methods
of evaluation that got us where we are.
We don't want to panic about every new entry,
but we should have a method for evaluating
what they bring, and understanding
what threat they represent. Maybe
allowing us to acquire or
block them if they really are a threat.
Inertia is a fascinating topic, and
Wardley identifies 16 types of inertia
as shown here, and linked to in the
article with this video.
Interestingly, when a business finds themselves
like our friends above, there's typically people
in the organization it's not a surprise for.
In fact, they may have been
trying to raise the alarm about what they saw
but found themselves tied up in organizational
politics, red tape or bottlenecks, so the
information couldn't get where it needed to go.
These flows of information are critical, and we want
to optimize them. Our second principle
- optimize flow - tends to bring up ideas
of Kanban and the flow of Software development.
But, there are many flows of capital
in an organization, including information,
risk, development, financial
and many others. We want to ruthlessly
find the bottlenecks which prevent us
from driving towards the key value
for our users and clear them out.
I recently did a video on Value Stream Mapping
which showed a reduction of ten months
in a development process we got by visualizing
the key processes, and then clearing
them out. And I'll link to that video below so you can
take a look at it when you get a chance.
Optimizing flow goes hand-in-hand with our
next principle about thinking in the small
to know the details of what's going on.
As we grow and become successful.
we tend to trust our downstream processes
without fully understanding them.
This can lead to waste and delays. It doesn't mean
that as a leader you have to micromanage!
Instead, think about a line of sight
when you have a question, there should be a clear line
of sight from the lowest levels to the high level strategy
that is inspectable. And,
you should inspect it every now and then!
Not only do you learn things, but you can inspire
confidence and pride from your teams as they
show you what great things they're doing.
However, if you're going to inspect,
your focus should be on effectiveness
over efficiency. In other words,
don't optimize ineffective processes!
As an example from Fire Rescue, when
we have a large fire we need some sort of external
water source. Hopefully this means there's a fire hydrant
nearby. In training as a Captain I might
see that my firefighters have an inefficient way of
pulling the supply hose off the truck to drag it
to the hydrant. And, I might work with them
that let's them pull that off the truck 40% faster.
But then my chief comes along
and he looks at it and says, "You know what?
instead of working on pulling that off faster
why don't you simply stop at the hydrant on the way in
wrap the hose around it without turning it on
and then drive to the fire letting the fire truck pull it off?"
cutting a 7 minute process to 45 seconds
with a higher level of effectiveness.
Back to business, one of the counterintuitive
things I show my clients is that
if you want to go faster, work on less things at once
and reduce the delays between the steps.
We don't have to actual improve the steps themselves
to see significant improvement. We want to
do better with less. And that means a culture of
Kaizen. Not just continuous improvement, but
a ruthless focus on it.
We need measurement, transparency, openness,
as well as trust and safety.
And the continuous is critical here
we can't just do a single "blame session"
and think we'll get the same benefits as a
cadenced reflection. We should be open to
experimentation and failure.
And that brings us to the last two principles
setting exceptional standards and managing failure.
You are what you prioritized, and you set the
tone for your employees. This means setting the
bar at the very best that can be achieved.
Not Burnout! Not Overachieving!
But sustainable, innovative, amazing people.
And along the way, we're going to be trying new things
entering uncharted waters. We're going to be
making bets on unproven gameplays.
Our maps will be wrong! So be prepared
to have a culture where failure is planned
and designed for. Distribute risks to
reduce impact. Try things like "pre-spectives"
where we talk about what could go wrong
before we do something.
So, those are Wardley's doctrine principles of Operations
So, those are Wardley's doctrine principles of Operations.
Managing Inertia, Optimizing Flow
Thinking Small to know the Details, Focusing on
Effectiveness over Efficiency, Doing Better with Less,
Setting Exceptional Standards and
Managing Failure. Take a look at your organization
this week. What things do you not know the details of?
What things are inefficient?
What things are at risk? And,
what can we do about it? Maybe - start with a map?
I'd be delighted to hop on a 30 minute video call
to help you get started. And if you have any other questions
or just want to let me know how it's going, reach out on
Twitter at @cory_foy, or via email at
hello@coryfoy.com. Until next week, let's get moving!