“The supposition is prevalent the world over that there would be no problems in production or service if only our production workers would do their jobs in the way that they were taught. Pleasant dreams. The workers are handicapped by the system, and the system belongs to the management.”
— W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis (1982)
This is essentially what the third layer - social circuitry is all about in Wiring the Winning Organization. It is the domain of the management to enable layer one (the person doing the hands-on or technical work) and layer two (tools and instrumentation) to succeed, to remove beaurocracy, to remove the need for heroics, to remove blame, to remove fear, to remove the need for switching out and switching in and much more.
The quote was obviously simpler to throw out in the past, before democratization of decision-making through agile and a flat organizational structure. Deming does not infere blaming management here (that is a wrong interpretation of the quote), but even if some do, it is far more complicated today. Regardless if your organization is far from teal or far from begin self-organized, we are all responsible for the design of the system. Sure, some more than other’s, but still - if you are in an “agile” organization, you contribute to the design of the system. Maybe the most handicapping issue today is that managers think self-organization means letting people figure it out by themselves, which is very far from being an enabler. End rant.
This is not a review of Gene Kim’s and Dr Steven J Spear’s Wiring the Winning Organization: Liberating Our Collective Greatness through Slowification, Simplification, and Amplification, but a reflection and recommendation to read it soon, not later - or listen to the audiobook!
Gene Kim - the author of The Phoenix Project, The Unicorn Project, DevOps Handbook, and much more - pairs up with the guy who decoded the Toyota Production System among other things, Dr Steven Spear, senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management (and author of The High Velocity Edge) clarifies decades of management philosophies into a set of simplified concepts, principles or systems if you will in a book that is a must-read for any aspiring leader, current manager, leader, or anyone who wants to understand how to make an organization work better. As Deming’s quote above, it puts emphasis on the fact that management is what enables work in “layer one and layer two” to flow, perform well and succeed.
I see the book as a continuity or an increment of novelity on ideas from Edwards Deming, Peter Senge, John Boyd, and not the least Eliyahu Goldratt. There are references to many more, but those are who I know best that converge with my own reading.
The authors divide organizational work into three layers. The following quote is from Gene Kim’s and Steven Spear’s article The Three Layers of Work…
Layer 1 Layer 1 contains the technical objects being worked on. These are the technical, scientific, and engineered objects that people are trying to study, create, or manipulate. These may be molecules in drug development, code in software development, physical parts in manufacturing, or patient injuries or illnesses in medical care. For people in Layer 1, their expertise is around these technical objects (i.e., their structure and behavior), and their work is expressed through designing, analyzing, fabricating, fixing, repairing, transforming, creating, and so forth.
Layer 2 Layer 2 contains the tools and instrumentation. These are the scientific, technical, or engineered tools and instrumentation through which people work on Layer 1 objects. These may be the devices that synthesize medicinal compounds in drug development, the development tools and operational platforms in software development, technologies that transform materials in manufacturing, or the technologies to diagnose and treat patients’ illnesses and injuries. Layer 2 capabilities include the operation, maintenance, and improvement of these tools and instruments. These first two layers are the “technical” part of a sociotechnical system.
Layer 3 Layer 3 contains the social circuitry. This is the overlay of processes, procedures, norms, and routines, the means by which individual efforts are expressed and integrated through collaboration toward a common purpose. This is the “socio” part of a sociotechnical system.
Over-arching these are The Three Mechanisms to Wire a Winning Organization as described in the article The Three Mechanisms to Move from the Danger Zone to the Winning Zone. The three mechanisms are…
- slowification of the environment in which the problem-solving occurs to make problem-solving easier;
- simplification of products, processes, and systems through the use of modularization, incrementalization, and linearization to make the problems themselves easier; and
- amplification to make it more obvious that problems are occurring so they can be seen and solved.
— pdf companion to the audiobook
By reading these two articles referenced above, you get a general idea about concepts illustrated in the book.
Slowification is the idea of slowing down to speed up, stopping to sharpen the saw as Gene Kim has said in multiple interviews. According to the authors, there is no good word for this is English and apparently they wanted one word to describe this.
STOP or PDSA
Personally, this resonates much more with STOP as in Stop, Think, Orient, Plan from my days training and teaching wilderness survival. Deming’s Plan-Do-Study-Act, PDSA acronym is not far off either.
The student usually haste without temperance, while the sage slows things down, speude bradeos, makes haste slowly. In order to stop and sharpen the axe you need courage and temperance in order to go against the grain of bad management principles of keeping hands busy. You also need wisdom so that you know when to stop sharpening the axe or the ability to tell if the axe is already sharp as oversharpening and sharpening an already sharp blade is dumb and wasteful… Unless you want to produce a better edge profile that keeps sharp longer (a convex grind for example). Of course, all of this can get you fired in a beaurocratic or slightly pathological organization, but fear not, amor fati, love your destiny…
“Everyone approaches courageously a danger which he has prepared himself to meet long before, and withstands even hardships if he has previously practised how to meet them. But, contrariwise, the unprepared are panicstricken even at the most trifling things. We must see to it that nothing shall come upon us unforeseen. And since things are all the more serious when they are unfamiliar, continual reflection will give you the power, no matter what the evil may be, not to play the unschooled boy.”
— Seneca, Letters From A Stoic, Letter 107 (On Obedience To The Universal Will)
ISRPFEA
Shameless plug: Beside the STOP acronym, throughout the book I was thinking about my own planning tool ISaRPFEA for agile development or just about any project.
ISRPFEA consists of seven steps: Initial tasking, Situational awareness calibration, Recognitional planning model, Pre-mortem, Five paragraph order, Execution, and After-acction review. In essence, it is modelled around routines and planning in a modern military unit adapted for general use with some additional sprinkles (heavily influenced by the research of Gary Klein). The origins of these ideas are from the prussian leadership philosophy Auftragstaktik which John Boyd talked alot about. Boyd’s ideas were conceptualized in Chet Richards book Certain to Win: The Strategy of John Boyd, Applied to Business.
The winning mechanisms broken down into these three concepts perfectly identify the various areas in ISRPFEA. The tasks are simplified because they are first planned as telling a sequential story (RPM, premortem, etc), then simulated and rehearsed before performance. Problems are amplified in the situational awareness calibration, pre-mortems, conceptualizing the COA in RPM and in the many After-Action Reviews held (typical after each task and then aggregated into the larger for the whole increment).
Conclusion
It is really simple, read it, period. This is a management book for all aspiring and current managers the rest of us directly, indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly rely on to set us up for success. It is a great introduction to the management philosophies the book is based off of (Toyota Production System, W Edwards Deming’s System of Profound Knowledge and the 14 principles, safety culture, resilience engineering, DevOps and more) and is specifically an excellent companion to The DevOps Handbook and The Phoenix Project.
“True leadership stems from the ability to inspire others with a vision, empower them with a purpose, and guide them with integrity.”
— Seneca (according to ChatGPT 3.5)