Johanne Greenwood

When Agile Gets Ugly

Thu, 11 May 2017 12:23:30 -0700

I favor project management and process improvement using lean and agile methods. Visual management – simple ways for everyone to see “what should be happening” and “what is actually happening” so that anyone can contribute where most required. Agile methods like Scrum are crossing over into mainstream practice, but along the way businesses are having a hard time letting go of their existing waterfall practices and roles. The waterfall-agile hybrids can be ugly.

The imperative for certainty

Business leaders are under constant pressure to drive out uncertainty. You're obliged to predict what's going to happen: forecast sales, forecast for production, forecast earnings, generate confidence inside and out. There is a kind of Emperor's New Clothes haze over the whole exercise, where people are expected to give dependable answers even when the matter is demonstrably unpredictable.

Leaders in lean thinking identified this as one of the big problems in American car manufacturing. It took a long time to build a car, so to have stock on hand dealers were obliged to try to forecast what customers would want - models, colors, optional features and so on. Inevitably they would be wrong, and end up saddled with cars on the lot that didn't exactly meet the needs of any buyer. Customers were obliged to wait a long time for a car to be built to their specification or to buy a car that was available right away, but wasn't really what they wanted. Dealers would end up selling off stock at a discount, and bargain-conscious consumers learned the patterns and would wait for the next sale period. There's speculation that this cycle of overproduction and deep discounting (and others like it) are an underlying cause of slumps and peaks in the economy.

Lean and agile: gunfight or knife fight?

Lean helped this in a number...Read More

What We Can Learn from Google's Most Productive Teams

Tue, 25 Apr 2017 10:01:07 -0700

In 2012 Google started a study to understand why some of their teams were so much more productive than others. They have a lot of teams, and a lot of curious people who love data. Where better to figure out the perfect team - the combined magic of individual characteristics, group norms, structures, processes and rewards?

At first, it seemed there were no patterns. The alchemy of a great team appeared impossible to define and recreate. Introverts, extroverts, detail thinkers, big-picture dreamers, open disagreements, avoided conflicts, strong directive leaders, facilitative harmonizers, to-the-point discussions, and meandering debates all featured in both high and low performing teams.

Eventually, the pattern beneath the absence of patterns emerged. The single most important factor for a highly productive team is psychological safety - a shared belief that the team is safe for interpersonal risk taking.

Teams with high psychological safety are groups where every member speaks as much as they need to and the members are skilled in reading how others feel.

There is a tendency for "equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking". This doesn't mean that team members rigidly take turns - at some times certain people will be more voluble than others, and they make speak over one another or drift off topic. However over a period of time, everyone has spoken roughly the same amount. Nobody is suppressing themselves or shutting down another.
At the same time the teams exhibit high "average social sensitivity". They were able to read tone of voice, expression and other non-verbal cues to obtain an understanding of how others felt. The members were able to be authentic - they didn't have to put on a mask when they came to...Read More

Can Your Team Tell You When the Bus Starts Tipping Over?

Sun, 23 Apr 2017 11:59:58 -0700

The movie Speed features a city bus wired with a bomb that will explode if the speedometer falls below 50 miles an hour. Events have led to Annie driving the bus while Jack tries to figure out how to rescue the passengers. As the bus heads to a corner, Annie warns "I can't make it. The bus is going to tip over!"

At first Jack tells her it will be fine. She repeats her fear, and he suddenly sees the reality: "You're right. We're going to tip over!"

In this moment the remarkable thing about Jack is that he manages to hear what Annie has to say and to see what she means. This is a constant challenge for managers and leaders. When your project or your enterprise is a speeding bus, with customers, employees and investors all on board and desperate to keep the momentum, it's extremely difficult to hear anything above the noise of the wheels. You can't take action on issues that haven't penetrated your own consciousness.

You may be thinking "Hah, that would never happen to me."

"... I would be like Jack. My team would shout loudly if there was a disaster brewing and I would hear them." Unfortunately this is a non-trivial problem and there are plenty of examples that illustrate the difficulty, including Air Florida Flight 90, which crashed with 78 fatalities when the co-pilot could not make the pilot recognize that they were not safe to take off.

I had a speeding-bus moment when I was reviewing a planned event with a newly promoted manager. The event had been planned for some time and would require Kate* to travel for a period of three months or so to pull things together. As we discussed I detected that Kate was ambivalent about the plans, but I didn't sense why. This was a great opportunity for Kate to demonstrate her leadership in her new role. The demands of getting it done had been no secret. This was no...Read More

5 Tactics to Spark Faster Product Adoption

Fri, 24 Mar 2017 10:26:08 -0700

It’s over ten years since John Gourville described “the 9x effect” but innovators continue to run into this brick wall when they launch their new ideas.

The 9x effect combines two factors with deadly results:

Targets value losses three times higher than gains

Many innovations replace an existing product or solution. Unfortunately, current users are attached to their existing solutions – in fact they are endowed with them, and strongly favor maintaining that endowment. We are wired to be biased towards the status quo and more afraid of loss than attracted to gains.

Imagine that I bet you $100 on a coin toss. That’s a pretty simple bet – 50% chance to win. Now imagine that heads you win $100 and tails you lose $100. Most people won’t take that bet. Most won’t bet unless they stand to win $200 to $300 to offset the risk of losing $100.

When we examine loss aversion in an innovation setting, your product will need to be perceived as around 3x better (or more) for it to induce people to give up what they already have. You might be able to objectively show that your product is 50% better or 120%, but your targets will irrationally overvalue the benefits they currently have relative to the ones they don’t.

Innovators over-value their own solutions by a factor of three

The second part of the 9x effect deals with the psychology of innovators. To the innovator, their invention has become status quo. It’s part of the innovator’s endowment, so the idea of being without it triggers the same type of irrational 3x over-valuation.

These two factors combine into the 9x effect:...Read More

5 Bedrock Practices that Businesses Still Get Wrong

Tue, 14 Mar 2017 11:45:44 -0700

Looking back over the last few years, if I had to distill my experiences into five bedrock practices that have the most potential to secure success these would be the ones I would choose. All of them are supported by substantial bodies of expertise, so much that some are approaching cliche status, yet they are still the cause of failures or poor results.

Here's the list: I'll discuss each one at more length in a series of following posts.

1) Lean and agile:

2) Customer listening:

We have to be intensely curious about our customer and love their needs more than our own ideas. Technologists still have a tendency to focus on features rather than user objective and associated benefits. Storyboards and 3D business cases can uncover needs in a way that excites, disturbs and reassures customers and creates demand. Net Promoter System measures if we’re getting it right at scale. Unfortunately we still sometimes confuse our measurement of performance with the customers' perception and end up convincing ourselves that they should be satisfied rather than setting our goal for what they care about. Other issues include survey fatigue among customers and employees who are tired of the survey being used as a stick to beat them.

3) Focus:

Nearly everyone has absorbed the messages of The Startup Owner's Manual and The Lean Startup. One thing delivered is better than six at 95% complete; one solution...Read More