Sometimes the best way to do something well, is to know what to avoid.  In Ex-Windows Boss Steve Sinofsky: Here's Why I Use An iPhone, Nicholas Carlson shares some tips from Steve Sinofsky on analyzing the competition:

1. Don't use the product in a lightweight manner
2. Don't think like yourself
3. Don't bet competitors act similarly (or even rationally)
4. Don't assume the world is static

Sinofsky elaborates, and says to use the product deep, and use it over time.  Use the product like it was intended by the designers.  Wrap yourself around the culture, constraints, resources, and more of a competitor.  And, don't take a static view of the world -- the competitor can always update their product based on feedback, or weaknesses you call out.

My colleague Karin sent me the following Ted Talk about the colalife movement.  It took me  a week to get to it.  I'm glad I did.  You will be too.

Karin wrote:

I found these at the weekend and I felt I should share with someone; and who knows there may be a story in there somewhere. The TEDtalk is the guy promoting  his grand idea to distribute oral rehydration kits to remote African villages using Coca-Cola distribution, the Kit Yamoto video is mainly the designers of the packaging talking about how the design evolved. There’s a bit of talk of how it was iterative and how the designers listened and how it was simple but not easy.

 

 

On my most recent plane trip, I got a chance to read Taiichi Ohnos Workplace Management: Special 100th Birthday Edition. It’s a book, translated and written down from a series of narratives and distilled into a small set of digestible chapters full of short stories. It has a pretty great representation of many of his ideas, and is a great read about the philosophy and attitude behind Toyota, and ultimately the movement classified as lean thinking/manufacturing, etc.

I found the book sometimes jarring, perhaps it’s just the conversational style and the translation that means it’s a bit halting. The constant references to manufacturing terminology also makes it slow to digest, but I find it fascinating to see how many of these ideas easily translate into the world of software as well. The book touches upon a little bit of thing when he goes on to analyse the difficulties of the “white collar workers” and how it’s much harder for them to “go to the gemba” to see the results.

Much of the advice is still appropriate today. Many take aways reinforce many of the ideas espoused by many of the lean movements such as tool makers should not be separated from the tool users, or they end up creating tools that are not useful. The idea that improvement cannot be mandated centrally, away from the “gemba” but must be done by the people “on the gemba”.

The book also starts off with his attitudes towards people being human, the the problems that we have with our own mental models or misconceptions that lead us to be wrong. Chapters like “The wise men mend their ways” and “If you are wrong, admit it” are good examples of how to cope with these human traits.

The book is a short read, and is full of nice little soundbites. Probably my favourite out of the book is:

“There are so many things in this world that we cannot know until we try something. Very often after we try we find that the results are completely the opposite of what we expected, and this is because having misconceptions is part of what it means to be human”, in the Chapter: “If you are wrong, admit it”

I’ve been using Sublime a bit recently and one thing I wanted to do was put neo4j cypher queries into files with arbitrary extensions and have them recognised as cypher files every time I open them.

I’m using the cypher Sublime plugin to get the syntax highlighting but since I’ve got my cypher in a .haml file it only remembers that it should have cypher highlighting as long as the file is open.

As soon as I close and then re-open the file it goes back to being highlighted as HAML.

I initially thought that the way around this would be to write a plugin which kept track of files that you’d manually assigned a syntax to but then I came across the ApplySyntax plugin which seems even better.

ApplySyntax allows you to assign syntaxes to files based on regular expression matching on the file name or on the first line of the file.

At the moment, the easiest way to detect that a file is a cypher query is that the first line will begin with ‘START’ so I wrote the following in my user settings file:

~/Library/Application Support/Sublime Text 2/Packages/User/ApplySyntax.sublime-settings

{
	"reraise_exceptions": false,
	"new_file_syntax": false,
	"syntaxes": [
		{			
			"name": "Cypher",
			"rules": [
				{"first_line": "^START"}
			]
		}	
	]
}

ApplySyntax is a pretty neat plugin, worth having a look if you have this problem to solve!

I’m a fan of anticipating the future, and creating the future.  Even speculation helps dream up what’s possible, and be ready for anything, when it happens.  And if you balance that with key trends, you can really stay on top of things.

After all, what’s The Art of the Long View teach us?  While we can’t predict the future, we can better prepare for it by playing out the “what if” scenarios and possibilities.

With that in mind, I did a search on Microsoft secret stuff, and found some interesting things.  After all, Microsoft spends more on R&D than Google and Apple combined.

Here are some of the more interesting articles I found:

• Meet Microsoft, the world’s best kept R&D secret
• XBox Surface: Microsoft's 7-inch gaming tablet
• Microsoft's 'Secret' Projects That Will Completely Rock Your World
• Windows XP Retiring In Time For Microsoft Glasses
• Xbox leak reveals Kinect2, augmented reality glasses

Here are my key take aways …

• Holodeck - transform your family space into a something like Star Trek’s famous holodeck.
• Kinect Glasses (Fortaleza) - wearable peripherals and augmented reality.
• Xbox Surface – a 7-inch Xbox tablet.

Kinect Stuff

• Kinect Fusion - create interactive 3D models.
• KinectTrack - a new six degree-of-freedom (6-DoF) tracker which allows real-time and low-cost pose estimation using only commodity hardware.
• SuperKid - Use Kinect to make movies: watch yourself against a virtual background, and interact with virtual props.

Touch and Touch Screens

• LightSpace - create interactive displays on everyday objects.
• OmniTouch - displays graphical images onto virtually any surface and transform the projection into an interactive, multi-touch-enabled input.
• Sidesight - expand a mobile device's multi-touch capabilities beyond the size of its screen.
• SkinPut - beam interactive displays onto your hand and arm
• Thinsight - a hardware and software product that allows ordinary LCD screens to become fully functional multi-point touchscreens.

More …

• Digits - translate a user’s hand movements directly into a virtual space.
• Foveated Rendering - accelerate graphics computation by a factor of 5-6 on a desktop HD display, by exploiting the fallout of acuity in the visual periphery.

What neat stuff do you see Microsoft working on?

  Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development.   I've been hearing two disparate views of estimation, and it does feel "camp" oriented.  The Scrum camp doesn't question estimation but is looking for better ways.  It takes much more time than it feels it should.  The reason for this feeling is that it takes much more time that it should.  Planning poker is...

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Does Scrum Training give a good ROI?

Well, of course, that depends. Mainly, how whether the Team (the full Team) takes an aggressive attitude toward improvement.

But let’s look at the following calculation.

We start with the a Team that, fully loaded, costs about $1 million per year.

Their current Business Value delivered after 1 year’s work….taking the NPV (net present value) of all future cash flows, is currently $3 million.  Now, maybe you can follow most of the rest below.

Financial Benefits Estimate Cost of Team $1,000,000 Business Value Delivered by Team $3,000,000 Note: This is NPV from work delivered in one year Improvement Factor 2 Note: Reasonable improvement factor in 12 months. Note: Jeff Sutherland is looking for a factor of 5x-10x. Note: This is usually measured as an improvement in velocity. BV Run rate after improvement $6,000,000 per year’s work Gross BV Improvement $3,000,000 per year’s work Note: Per year! Note: Thus, this is a LOW (conservative) estimate Investment required to obtain improvement $750,000 Note: This includes many things, mainly accumulated cost of impediment removals Note: This is a HIGH (conservative) estimate Note: At some point, a lower investment could correlate with a lower improvement factor. Net Net BV Improvement $2,250,000 Return on Investment 300%

Let’s talk about the investment of $750,000

So, this includes the cost of training.
This includes the cost of travel to the training.
This includes the time lost while training.
This includes the cost of removing impediments for the Team (this is by far the biggest cost).
Removing impediments may require servers, software, training on automated testing, etc, etc, etc.

To be honest, we think $750,000 is a gross over-estimate of the cost of getting a 100% improvement in velocity.  It will cost MUCH less. Maybe $100,000 or $200,000 or $300,000 — depending on your situation.  If the cost is ‘only’ $300,000, then the ROI after one year becomes 900%.  Or 9x.  That is huge.

Where would I invest first?

1. Train the whole Team.
2. Get an Agile Coach (I won’t debate here how much time the coach should be dedicated to the Team. But a coach for one Team.)
3. Improve the Product Owner
4. Improve the continuous builds
5. Improve automated testing
6. Improve integration and regression testing, so that they are much more robust

Almost always, these are the top areas.

Each Team also has its own specific things, things unique to that Team.

Some Teams are fundamentally dysfunctional.  Some Teams need people skills.  Or facilitation on decision-making. Or training in specific skill sets.  Lots of other possibilities.

The key thing is that you see that we think starting Scrum is the key to releasing all these benefits. And that it will not be Scrum alone that releases the benefits.  Getting all the benefits will require hard work and further investment.  But it starts with Scrum.

And Scrum, if played professionally, has a huge ROI.  Huge.

Note: Here is a link to a spreadsheet, so that you can do your own calculations.  Use different assumptions, and see what you get as an ROI.

How do you create career opportunities?   You reinvent yourself.

While you can always hope for things to land in your lap, there are specific patterns I see successful people do.  Among those that continuously create the best career opportunities, here are the key success patterns:

1. They invest in themselves.  They’re always learning, and taking some sort of training, beyond their day job.
2. They reinvent themselves.  As a result of investing in themselves, they grow new capabilities.   With their new capabilities, they expand the opportunities they can easily plug themselves into.  For example, a few of my friends started to focus on data science in anticipation of big data, as one of the key trends for 2013 and beyond.  As part of re-inventing themselves, they re-brand themselves to better showcase what they’re bringing to the table.
3. They build connections before they need them.  It’s always been a game of who you know and what you know, but now more than ever, your network can be the difference that makes the difference when it comes to finding out about relevant opportunities.
4. They know who’s job they want.   They have a role-model or two that already does the job they want.  The role-model exemplifies how they want to show up, how they want to spend their time, and through that role-model they learn the types of challenges they want to take on, and they get better perspective on what the life-style is actually like.  This not only helps them get clarity on the type of job they want, but it helps when they tell other people the kind of job they want, and can point to specific examples.
5. They know the market.   They pay attention to where the action is.   They don’t just follow their passion.  They follow the money, too, to know where the growth is, and where there’s value to be captured.  As the saying goes, every market has niches, but not every niche has a market.
6. They have a mentor, and a “board of directors.”   They use a circle of trusted advisors that can help clue them into where to grow their strengths, and how to find better opportunities, based on what they’re capable of.   It might be their “wolf pack”, but more often than not, it’s a seasoned mentor or two that has great introspection, and can see what they can’t, and they can help them to see things from a balcony view.  Most importantly, the sharp mentors, the wise and able ones, help them to know their Achilles heal, and get past glass ceilings, and avoid career limiting moves.
7. They have a sponsor.  Like a game of Chutes and Ladders, skilled sponsors help them find the short-cuts, avoid the dead ends, and avoid sliding backwards.

If you’re wondering where the best career opportunities are, sometimes it’s the job you’ve already got, sometimes you have to go find them, and sometimes, you have to make them.

In this post I want to talk about company culture. Every company has a culture. Some are outstanding, perhaps some are close to criminal, but I guess most are just mediocre.

How do you know where in this spectrum between star and rubbish your company’s culture is located?

I think a good way of telling is whether you were given the opportunity and the freedom to improve the way you work. Are you working on new projects that lead to a significant improvement of the processes you use and as a result significantly improved benefits for your customers?

Let’s look at a randomly made up example. A team is working on a product that is a combination of hardware, firmware, software and services. The product has not been introduced to the market yet. However you know that you need to finish the project by the end of the month. “Finish” does not mean that you have all features complete that you thought you must have. Instead it means a cross-functional effort between product management, hardware engineers, software developers, marketing, sales and probably a whole raft of others.

In that collaboration the team will understand that it may not be able to ship every single feature, but it will also understand the priority of each feature as each feature has a different business value to the company and to the customer. Let’s assume that in this given example a demo in the first week of the next month is highly likely to lead to receiving a significant order.

With the wrong culture the team would do it’s 8 to 5 job and then go home. No creativity would be invested and you may even see the occasional finger-pointing. Progress would be slow.

With a different culture the team would band together working towards that objective. A sense of excitement would be visible within the team. The team would collaborate, think beyond the boundaries of their “official” role (e.g. developer) and they would be very creative to find even simpler and faster solutions that would allow to stitch together a product that would be good enough for the purpose. They would throw in as many extra hours without the need to be asked or be instructed. The team would do whatever it takes to achieve the objective. They would know that they can make decisions and they would get the tools and the support to get the job done.

The leadership in both of these cases is quite different. It is very likely that the former breathes of micromanagement and bureaucracy. Maybe getting new hardware and software is close to impossible and always requires a lengthy process for ordering and procurement.

The leadership in the latter is most likely more hands-off. It’s management by exception or management by objective. If the team needs a new tool, hardware or software, the decision can be made within hours if not minutes rather than weeks or months. The leadership would embody trust towards the individuals in the team, willing to take the risk that things can go wrong when you push the envelope.

How do you know that you are in the right culture? First of all you need to decide for yourself what company culture you want to work in. Then ask yourself a few very simple questions that I believe are indicative of what the actual culture is in your company. Questions include:

• Am I working on a project that challenges me, the team and the approach we take>
• Is the project leading to improvements of the product, the processes you use, learning for yourself?
• How do you interact with customers? Do you have direct interaction or do you have ‘men in the middle’?
• How long does it take to get new tools like hardware or software? Is the duration measured in hours and days rather weeks or months? Do you see new tools arriving in your team on a regular basis, e.g. at least once per month?
• What is the attrition rate in your team? Are people replaced immediately? How easy is it to replace people?

I’m sure there are plenty of other indications that help. The important thing is that you do not judge your leadership by what they say but by what they do. Once you know what culture you are looking for and what culture your present company has, it’s easy to come to the right conclusion. Perhaps you like it. Perhaps the time has come to move on.

What if there was a significant change in culture? My recommendation in that case would be: Don’t make any quick decisions. I that case hang in there for a few more weeks or months. Sometimes things don’t turn out as bad as they might appear initially. You can still make a different decision once the new culture becomes clearer to you.

Here is a link with yet another set of aspects regarding a company’s culture. It’s a post by Grant Cardone.

Continuing with the 100 Things You Must Know to Be Effective In Software Development.   Relatively early in my consulting career, I realized that it’s not simply the low hanging fruit you go after, you have to attend how one thing sets up another.  As people learn, some lessons set up others.  I call this the “pick up sticks model for building curriculum.”  Some practices also change the...

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The purpose of this post is to explain why building culture adapters around at team or group is a good idea. It is important for me to revisit this topic from my book and conference presentations since I have learned something new and wanted to share it. All but the last section is an excerpt from my book.

It is by now well known that Agile is a mindset and culture system and that it is incompatible with most organizational cultures.

Let’s talk about one way of moving forward with Agile – building adapters. This is an effective approach when the span of control and influence of the leadership does not cover the whole of the organization.

Start with A Successful Agile Team

A very powerful way to think about introducing a foreign culture such as Agile to an organization is through a cellular model. Consider a successful transformation of one team or group to Agile. This may have been a special pilot project with all the people keen to do Agile.

Imagine that the team is very excited about the new way of working. The team exists in the context of some other culture.

The team is not that excited about all of the organizational barriers and limits on productivity and success. So, what typically happens is they start to push back on the needs and requirements of other groups that are not adding value to the team and to the customers.

Attack of the Organizational Antibodies

The result sounds like a B-movie: “Attack of the Organizational Antibodies!” In the human body, we have antibodies (Killer T-Cells) that are designed to eliminate foreign elements to keep us healthy. In a similar way, organizations will react to the introduction of a foreign culture system such as Agile. These are the elements that work hard to preserve the status quo.

Build Culture Adapters

The movie doesn’t have to have a bad ending. One common pattern is to build adapters or translators around the foreign culture so that it fits within the overall culture. These are depicted in the diagram below as shapes surrounding and protecting the team. In this situation, the adapter allows the team to blend in with the overall organizational culture and avoid triggering the antibodies.  It looks like this:

In practical terms, the adapter could take the form of a Microsoft Project Plan that has no value to the customers or team but is required by the organization. Another might be team use of a peer-based review for merit increases that still gets submitted by the manager since the system requires input only from her.

This sounds like a lot of effort! Is it worth it? The value is equal to the benefits derived from Agile less the cost of adapter maintenance. Assuming there is good value in the team’s new state of functioning, then sadly some of that productivity will be lost maintaining the adapters. But this is a much better situation to be in compared to getting attacked by organizational antibodies. The adapters are part of the cost of doing business. Like taxes.

Lean differentiates between different types of waste in organizations. Type I Muda (waste) are non value added tasks that are required at the current time. Type II Muda are non value added tasks that can be removed immediately. Maintaining the adapters is type I since the environment requires them.

The model above points a way to success with Agile transformation – it is possible to transform one team or group provided that care and attention is provided to satisfying the requirements of the larger organization. It is a feasible strategy to consider this a first step before a wider organizational change initiative.

THIS WILL EVENTUALLY FAIL!

The adapter strategy is not sustainable in the long term. Why? Eventually, the manager of this group is going to leave and a new manager will be selected. The new manager will typically be chosen to reflect the host organizational culture and will become a powerful attractor for the host culture. An then Agile gets dissolved or neutered. And the people who love working in this new way to deliver great products quit the organization and go work somewhere else.

At a number of conference presentations, I presented the arguement that no responsible manager should undertake using this pattern since it is ultimately doomed to failure. And this is my mistake. I was wrong. Sorry.

But that’s Good! (My New Insight)

I was at a client earlier this year and this topic came up. As I have been working very hard on supplicating and having compassion for the organizations I coach, I noticed something interesting. This particular organization was focussed on short term results and not long term results. (Yeah, I know this is a losing strategy but it’s their culture not mine). So, in the context of their organizational culture is was not only acceptable but highly desirable to do something that will work in the short run but fail in the longer term. So, if you are a manager in an organization that is fixed on short-term results, then the adapters are a truly great strategy to use with a clear conscience. Happy trails.

 

 

Related posts:

1. Tactics, Strategy, & Culture – A Model for Thinking about Organizational Change The following diagram is a powerful mental frame to help...
2. Agile Failure and Culture – Agile 2012 Workshop Results What follows are the workshop results from Agile 2012 Session...
3. Connecting the Dots on Agile, Org Culture, Personal Growth & Temenos A friend of mine asked me what is going on...

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After a lot of discussion, we decided to just post the latest version of the SAFe foundations briefing for everyone’s use. In addition, yesterday we recorded a webinar, sponsored by our partners, where I delivered the new briefing to about 600 people. Both the slide deck and the webinar are posted here: scaledagileframework.com/foundations. Please note that the slide deck has certain restrictions on use, which are included in the presentation itself.

David Rice

May is looking to be quite an exciting month at ThoughtWorks Studios. I'm writing to give a quick preview of Go’s new value stream mapping, a SaaS version of Mingle, and Snap, our new CI/CD in the cloud offering for users of Github and Heroku.

Let's start by taking a look at a screenshot from a new Go feature on one of our dog food servers.

Thumbnail: 

read more

The Scrum Guide does not mention it, by I strongly advocate a public impediment list.

The simple idea is: visual management, and single piece flow off the ‘top’ of the list.

What’s the problem?  There are several, and let’s discuss two today.

1. Some impediments are personal and should not be put on the list.

To be this is easy. An example that is fun to talk about is that Sarah and Sunil are having an affair.  And some or all of the team knows about it, and it is ‘disrupting’ the team in some way.

The issue: listing this specific personal impediment on a public forum will not help. Fair enough.

And the easy solution is that those ‘personal’ impediments should not listed, at least in the wrong way, on the public impediment list.

2. ‘We don’t want to see the bad news.’

This is actually a very common and a very hard problem.

Often members of your organization — while they may never say it this way — will not want to see the problems in the organization.

Sometimes this will manifest as a denial of some of the impediments. And, to be fair, there should be a healthy discussion about whether all things mentioned are really impediments. But certainly we see people ‘defending’ things that are really impediments.

A related factor, though, is the wish to feel good about ourselves. And the impediment list makes us, often, see that we are….more imperfect than we sometimes want to admit.  This is hard on the organizational ego.

So, building in some humor, and showing the value of always striving to be better… these are very important things to discuss.

 

Scrum is, in a way, simple.

But we think that, for many reasons, doing Scrum well requires continuous study.

For one thing, we need to do the practices in harmony with the values and principles behind lean-agile-scrum.  And we are always forgetting the values and principles.

But there is more to it than that.

You may have taken our CSM course. If you have done Scrum for a while, you should seriously consider taking the intermediate CSPO (Product Owner) course + Workshop. If you are a PO, the reason should be obvious; you need to take your skills to the next level.  This will greatly benefit the Team.

If you are a SM, you need to understand the PO role much better, so you can coach your PO to become better.

The course is also good for manager’s, business stakeholders, and business analysts.

Our next Intermediate CSPO Course + Workshop is in Charlotte on May 21-23. I hope you can join us. See here!

But my main point here is not this specific course. My main point is the need for continuous education, so that you, your team and your customers realize the full value of scrum.  This course in May or the CSPO course more generally is only examples of that continuous learning.

Today thru Sunday, for that limited time, we have a special promotion on this course.
Intermediate CSPO + Workshop in Charlotte, May 21-23.
10% off to members of the local Agile or PMI groups. (Or those who join today.)

Details are here or here.

Today thru Tuesday, for that limited time, we have a special promotion on this course.
CSM + Workshop in Toronto, May 29-31.
10% off to members of the local Agile or PMI groups. (Or those who join today.)

Details are here or here.

Partnership & Possibilities: A Podcast on Leadership in Organizations
EPISODE 2: AN INQUIRY INTO QUESTIONS

“Leadership really comes from the nature of the questions you ask rather than the statements that you make.”

Running time 32:54

What questions have been particularly powerful for you? What questions have you asked or have been asked that have made a difference in your life or which have stimulated learning in others (and in yourself)?

Leave a comment on this blog or email us at leadershippodcast@gmail.com

Summary
Intro – What role do questions play in leadership? What does the process of asking questions look like?
3:32 – Using questions to help discern patterns as described in the Human Systems Dynamics model
9:00 – Leaders do not have to know all the answers – asking questions is not a sign of weakness, rather it opens the door to innovation, engagement and new learning opportunities for all agents in an organization
13:49 – Asking questions without judgment enables the asker to be open to receiving new information without preconception
18:34 – Having a holistic understanding of the approach you use to asking questions is essential
22:53 – Using a set of guidelines in asking questions can also lead to a greater depth of understanding and learning
30:19 – Change begins to occur from the moment the question is asked

Resources
HSD Institute Wiki
The 2R Manager: When to Relate, When to Require, and How to Do Both Effectively by Peter E. Friedes
Change Your Questions, Change Your Life: 10 Powerful Tools for Life and Work by Marilee Adams PhD
Insights You Can Use by Esther Derby
The Nature of Order by Christopher Alexander
Fearless Change by Linda Rising

What resources have you found useful as a way to think about improving your ability to ask good questions? Email us at leadershippodcast@gmail.com and we will share them with our audience.

Photo Credit: milos milosevic via Compfight cc

I am still making progress, although it’s more difficult to see my progress today. Why? Because I did not get as much to done.

One of my readers asked a question about the Urgent queue  and the relative ranking of my ever-growing left hand column. How did I determine what to do, and what was the rank of each?

The Urgent queue always trumps everything on the left hand side of the list. I was so frantic on Monday, I didn’t order anything when I put the list together. It almost didn’t matter what I worked on, as long as I made enough progress to get enough things to done. As you can see, I did pick and choose. When I rewrite my list for next week, I will reconsider what I need to do in order. I need to complete the workshops and talks first. Then do the writing. My list next week should be shorter, so I should feel less frantic and be able to finish it.

As for the ones I have added to the bottom of the list, trumping the older ones in importance? No, not really. They are there because I realized I needed to do them also this week. My todos are getting away from me. Putting them on the list means I don’t lose them. I can relax because they are there. Now, I have to focus and do them.

If you are wondering, will I continue this series next week? No. I will not. One week of this is plenty. I wanted to show you a number of things:

• Everyone has trouble every so often, with too much to do
• The best way to organize your work is to see it, not matter what you decide to do next
• I like personal kanban, where I finish one chunk of work and go on to the next
• If you keep your chunks of work small, you can finish one and continue on to the next one. If your chunks of work are too large, you can’t finish anything and you are tempted to multitask. (Don’t do that!)

If you want to see all the posts in this series, here they are:

• Personal Kanban and Iterations, Day 1
• Personal Kanban and Iterations, Day 2
• Personal Kanban and Iterations, Day 3
• Personal Kanban and Iterations, Day 4

To see a “real” personal kanban board, the way I suggest you do it in Manage Your Job Search, go to Personal Kanban for Your Job Hunt.

Read my Book Review of Personal Kanban for more information on how to do it right. And, Gil Broza will be interviewing me for his Individuals and Interactions virtual training May 15, 2013. My topic? “Focus Keeps You Going.” Surprised? I don’t think so!

When you start using Kanban you need to change your viewpoint. Look at the world - in particular look at your work - through the prism of flow. It's amazing what you'll see.

Recently I've been looking for the shortest possible introduction for those starting Kanban. +David Anderson's foundational principles are a good candidate. Taking (I hope tolerable) liberties with the presentation of these, I summarise the principles as follows (please see "There are 3 ... Principles of Kanban" for what the "dot-dot-dots" stand for) :

1. Start with what you do now ...
2. Agree to pursue ... evolutionary change
3. Encourage acts of leadership at all levels ...

It's a great starting point.
But I'm dissatisfied with this, because applying the principles alone is not enough to ensure people are doing Kanban. Everyone is where they are, and many want to change in an evolutionary way, while encouraging acts of leadership. Most of them however are not doing Kanban!
See the flow! One way to visualise work in progressSimple you say - just adopt the principles and start doing the Kanban core practices (see "There are 6 core practices of Kanban"). But this is also unsatisfactory. The practices are not all followed by those who are doing Kanban. Not everyone uses a visual board (or other visualisation) yet. Not everyone has WIP limits yet. Not everyone has explicit policies yet. Unlike Scrum which says that if you are not doing all of Scrum you are not doing Scrum, Kanban describes itself as a way to improve from whatever you are doing now. As +David Anderson makes clear, even such "proto-kanban" implementations bring benefit, and these partial or shallow implementations of Kanban do fall under the banner of Kanban.
So how can we express the missing element to the foundational principles? I think the answer is to explain the starting viewpoint. Before applying the foundational principles of Kanban, and before you've started doing its core practices, change your viewpoint...
The Starting Viewpoint: Look at your work as Flow.
Notice this viewpoint statement isn't asking you to do anything yet, except look. Just look in a different way and you'll be amazed what you see. Seeing work as flow - items moving from an initial concept through one or more other stages to "done" may not seem that profound. Yet it opens up a completely different way to analyse and manage work. Furthermore as a starting point it means you can look back on work recently done and collect data relating to the flow, even before any aspect of the process has been changed. You can ask:

1. How long did this item take from concept to delivery?
2. How many items were completed in the period?
3. How many items are currently being worked on?
4. etc...

The answers to such questions are likely to highlight the issues the business cares about or is dissatisfied with. From there finding the insight to make improvements is a natural process. As I found recently with a team I am working with, there's usually data about the flow of work available from the recent or even distant past. Looking at that data again through the viewpoint of flow will show you what you can improve and importantly, whether you have improved once you have made changes.
I'm grateful to +Rodrigo Yoshima whose abstract for Lean Kanban North America 2013 on Management and Change used the phrase "Lean Flow Paradigm". It was the trigger for this post. His slide-share for the presentation is available here, and it's well worth a look for examples of how seeing work as flow helps teams and management to improve things.