Author: James Osborn

The Goal

There’s loads of value in going back and revisiting the classics, not just to remind ourselves why they are a classic, but also to see which of those lessons we are missing out on and could be making more use of in our day-to-day lives.

The Goal is one of those classics that anyone in a large organisation should take the time to read. It’s a story based around a struggling factory, a company under stress and a leader who can’t find the way forwards. It’s also a lot more than that. It’s a primer in system thinking, the theory of constraints and some of the basics of queuing theory.

Before you go too far, it is also worth highlighting that it’s a bit of a product of its time, some of the scenario is very “mid century American corporate”, whilst the trappings may feel dated, the core principles are solid.

It strips everything back to the core question. What is the end goal of a company? To make money by providing maximum value. What other measures matter? None.

You go through a journey of learning, identifying where the bottlenecks are, removing them in turn and finding more capacity than you ever thought you had, with no fresh investment.

Forcing things through, chasing with “urgency” might just fight your immediate fire, but it won’t transform your delivery, or get you out of a hole. Only taking the time to step back, to look at everything going on, find the thing that is constrained and fixing it. Only having that discipline will make a difference.

We learn that making assumptions is misleading. We need to get out on the shop floor to really see what’s going on. We all learn that small fluctuations lead to large delays in the end, especially as the number of steps increases.

Wherever you can remove a dependency, you speed everything up. Each time you remove wasted effort from your bottleneck, you speed everything up. Where you find a way to put more resources to serve your constraint, you speed everything up.

When you look at the system overall, you see the cost/benefit equation differently. The costs of an hour in the bottleneck is a cost of an hour of overall production.

Improving things that aren’t the bottleneck is just waste. Piling up more half finished things in a queue for a constrained machine is a cost, not creating more value.

Improving the bottleneck is worth doing even inefficiently. You don’t consider the cost of the step, you must measure against the cost of value forgone overall.

This way of thinking isn’t easy to come by, it’s a lot easier to manage a dependency, to optimise on the micro and to celebrate getting your bit done. Switching to this model of systems thinking requires discipline, and it requires lots of belief. These findings are counter-intuitive, and contrary to the easy answer or standard thinking.

You need to convert the production line concepts to your own context, which you can do in any creative endeavour.

Give people this book, get them to read it and then you can start your experiments in optimising the system and delivering the most possible value!

Tags Book Review, Coaching, constraints, effectiveness, efficiency, goals, Leadership, The Goal

Coaching Leadership

2024 Top Posts

I’ve been a bit behind on blog posts in 2024, but my Wednesday Coaching series on LinkedIn has been busier for sure!

The top 5 coaching posts were:

Always super cool to see what resonated with people, the questions that mattered and made a difference.

Which of these is most useful to you?

Tags 2024, Coaching, Leadership

Book Review Coaching Harvard Business Review Leadership

Power to the Middle

Power to the Middle is a McKinsey book that tries to “bust the stereotypes of the middle manager”. It’s a fair departure from some of the familiar consultancy cost cutting practices, and a lot closer to the ideas presented in Slack, around building resilient organisations in the ever faster changing world of work.

It’s research backed, with a wide range of stories around the central message. Middle Managers really are the glue in your organisation. They are the ones that connect up the people on the ground with the Executive direction, and the ones that bring strategy to life.

Each chapter of the book addresses a specific topic, and leaves you with 2-3 key points to help make sure that you are making best use of the vital Middle Manager role. From moving them into the coaching and development role they need to occupy, to crafting the role as an attractive destination, to allowing Middle Managers to take on strategy and craft it to fit their own specific needs and circumstances.

Command and control approaches through brittle structures are not going to give you the flexibility and innovation needed to survive in the modern world, and unlocking the power of these connectors is key to a successful future.

The key takeaways ensure that you are able to give some actions to your managers, while also making sure you are taking the right actions to support them, it’s a nice balance to show that everyone has to put the effort in to realise the value.

It’s overall an easy read, well broken down into contained chapters with those key messages to enable you to summarise quickly. It’s also great to see this kind of thinking coming from a major consultancy, transforming the manager role and unlocking all the potential held within it is much more refreshing than seeing it as waste that can be cut.

As the world changes ever faster, we must be effective, and recognise that that costs more than a perfectly efficient machine created for an unchanging purpose. We can’t optimise for now, we have to optimise for the change we know is coming, and we’ll do that with flexible, empower managers able to shape their teams to deliver on the overall strategy of the organisation.

Tags Book Review, Coaching, Harvard Business Review, Leadership, Management, McKinsey

Coaching Leadership

70/20/10 Learning

Man picking up a weight — Photo by Victor Freitas on Unsplash

The 70/20/10 model is a rough rule of thumb for the balance of types of learning. Whilst there’s not a lot of evidence to support it (especially the specific numbers), it’s certainly something that feels right to a lot of people.

In essence, it states that 10% of learning comes from formal training, 20% our relationships with others, and 70% from learning in practical contexts.

Anyone who’s ever learnt anything will feel this breakdown. Reading the instructions gets you going. Watching the Youtube video helps, but you only get proficient by doing the activity a number of times. Different activities will certainly have difference balances! It’s easier to master putting together flat pack furniture than complex woodworking, you need a lot more practical effort for the second.

Even if it’s not super well founded in evidence, it does have some useful points to take away.

The first is that this all needs to be deliberate effort. Just go through the motions doesn’t count. Doing a job for a long time won’t imply mastery, you need to be pushing yourself to learn.

The second is that all of the three types of learning are necessary. Sure, you might “just figure it out”, but without that formal foundation you’ll likely be going for a long time, and making some really basic mistakes you could have easily avoided.

This second point is a really key one. Sometimes people who’ve just heard the breakdown will say the 10% bit isn’t important, it’s the smallest part. Smart people know it’s foundational, and won’t try to skip it. Don’t get fobbed off with the “learn by doing” approach, you need that initial learning and then peer support before diving into the doing to be truly effective.

Again, this model isn’t super well supported with evidence, but it’s easy to remember so it’s got a lot of traction. Take what’s valuable from it, and make sure you blend all the types of learning to accelerate your growth.

Tags Coaching, Leadership, Learning, training

Book Review Coaching Leadership

Surrounded By Idiots

There are fools everywhere, and sometimes you can feel like they are just there, getting in your way, not understanding you, and frankly being dense just for the sake of it.

Surrounded By Idiots is an immensely readable book that takes this opening premise, and gives you the “four colours” of people to help you understand they aren’t idiots, they are just different.

As with any profiling tool, you need to take what you find to be valuable from the book. Don’t just box yourself into one of the colours and use that as a new crutch to justify why things don’t go well for you!

The book has loads of examples to help you understand the Red, Yellow, Green and Blue profiles. From the dominant, pushy Now now now types familiar to every Sales org, to the precise and methodical Blues of your data analytics department, Thomas Erikson guides you through an explanation of the profiles, how they work and what matters to them.

He helps you understand how to connect better across the divide. How do you appeal to someone who shows mostly Green characteristics? How do you meet in the middle, or at least somewhere away from your centre?

He works through the hard stuff, giving feedback, feeling angry and what saps our energy. Knowing all this helps you pull a disparate group together, leaning on strengths and rounding out weaknesses.

The key takeaway is that we are not all the same, and so to get on we have to work together to build our community. By putting in the effort to understand people we can build better and stronger relationships, and have a more fulfilling life with less stress.

A very noble goal, and again, a very engagingly written book. I’m sure you will enjoy it, and you’ll definitely learn something from it!

Tags Book Review, Coaching, Leadership, Personality, Tests, understanding

Coaching Leadership

Processes

Good process is a great way to scale your impact. Bad processes stifle creativity and stop progress dead.

So when you think it’s time to add a new process, be really honest with yourself why you want to add it, and ask yourself a few key questions.

Firstly, is it actually going to help? Does it solve the problem you are trying to stop, or does it makes things worse? Get some people to throw some rocks at the proposal. Imagine what happens if you follow the process to the letter, as people’s judgement will fade over time, you can’t rely on that.

Assuming it passes these tests, and is likely to lead to better outcomes and good behaviours, ask yourself if it’s worth the cost? If the impact is big, then it might be worth a new process. If it’s small, why are you bothering? Don’t add overhead you don’t need.

Then ask if it’s really worth the cost. If you add an approval step to every release, then you’ll release more slowly. If three people must sign off a slide, then triple whatever the original cost to create was. If it’s your process, then you’ll need to own these costs. Nothing comes for free, it’s never just pure upside.

Finally, ask yourself how you’ll get rid of the process, or update it when the time comes. It’s easier to add than subtract, especially when you create jobs to enforce a process. What’s your way out? How will you know when a process is embedded into culture? How do you know if you are going through the motions for no real benefit?

Good process accelerates change. Bad process stifles it. Do the work to make it good, don’t just launch and forget.

Tags change, Coaching, Leadership, process

Coaching Leadership

When to do it!

Scrabble tiles spelling out "Do the work" — Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash

I was out in the garden the other day, cutting back a particularly unruly shrub. Whilst I was there, I saw a few weeds popping up in the flower bed, so I dug those out. Then a minute to clear up a couple of old flower pots. I checked on something on the patio, and swept up a few loose stones.

One big job got me outside, but by having a bit of slack in my plans I was able to pick-up a few other small things that jumped out at me. None of them were big enough to go to the effort of getting setup to enjoy a cold February afternoon, nor were they worth recording and coming back to later.

I’m a big fan of the idea that if it just takes a minute, it’s better to do it in that minute. It’s a great way to build up some momentum, and it really ties into the ideal of leaving something better than you found it.

If you don’t do those small things in the moment, then you are choosing to not do them at all (maybe not an issue if they sit into a non-urgent/non-important bucket). Or you are choosing to schedule them. Record it, track it and monitor progress. If it was just a small job, you’ve put more overhead into doing the admin than just doing the task. Nightmare!

See a typo when you are reading a doc – Fix it right away.
Email just needs a simple response – Get on it
See a bug you know how to fix – Tell the team and drop in the PR
And ever on…

Of course, you can take this too far. It’s easy to do the easy things, and miss the hard ones. Don’t just respond to emails if your big task for the day is finishing off an important presentation!

I balance in one of two ways. My preference is to do these small things in and around the important task. Once I’ve sent out that critical email which needs careful drafting, I’ll sweep up a few others at the same time.

The other is to box up a bit of time, and go and do as many of these smaller things as you can in that block. It’s a good way to get back on top of your messages by just slotting in 30 minutes to see how far you can go.

Don’t let the admin win! If it’s quicker to do it than track it, then you should go for it there and then!

Tags Coaching, Important, Leadership, Prioritisation

Book Review Coaching Leadership

Team Topologies

Team Topologies is a great book by Matthew Skelton and Manuel Pais. It gives you methods to organise your technology teams for fast flow, and a simple way to categorise those teams.

It’s a short and punchy book broken into three key sections. We start with Org Charts, Conway’s Law and teams as the unit of development. The second section takes you into the meat of the book, covering team anti-patterns, the four fundamental topologies and how you might choose sensible boundaries. The last section is focused on interactions between the teams, and methods of iterating towards the structure.

The big ideas are really around long lived teams as the unit of software delivery, that there are only really a few types of team, and that we can choose to target high flow and iterate towards it over time.

Flow doesn’t mean efficiency, so a lot of the identified anti-patterns are where an organisation has attempted to be efficient (handing over work, creating queues and specialist groups), targeting least overall effort, rather than soonest delivery of value.

The book highlights a number of times that you must have good engineering practices as a pre-requisite. If you are not able to release software easily and with confidence, or to do so in an automated manner, then you will need to fix that before gaining value from this structure.

It’s also clear through the book that attempting to suddenly move all teams into the model on day 1 is unlikely to work, that iterative and adaptive approach is most likely to be successful, especially via the analysis of cognitive load on teams, and splitting responsibilities where they are overloaded.

I think it’s easy to get excited by the simplicity provided in the book, with four team types and three interaction modes, there’s a lovely easy classification system, and engineers love to put things into buckets or give them a label.

In a mature existing org it’s unlikely that you’ll get a perfect one to one mapping ever, but the taxonomy does give you a chance to start using the same language when describing teams, and an ideal to aim towards.

The case studies and tips scattered through the book bring this to life. Iterations on orgs take years not days, as they need to bed in and become part of the culture. The first thing you try is going to be wrong, so the examples where people have iterated over time are particularly enlightening.

I think that a lot of the core ideas will be familiar to org minded thinkers, but they are pulled together in a compelling way. There’s a lot of value in the approaches outlined, but they require discipline to understand fully, to recognise the foundations that must be in place to be successful and the willingness to iterate as the org continually moves forwards.

Simplicity is hard, don’t fall into the trap of thinking it’ll all be easy once your leadership team has read the book and you’ve rebadged all your teams in team topologies terms.

Be willing to put in the work, and you’ll be rewarded with a shared set of terminology, and a repeatable process for building out teams that deliver the maximum possible value in the shortest time.

Tags Book Review, Coaching, Conway's Law, Leadership, Organisational Change, teams

Coaching Leadership

Hammers Everywhere

A hammer on a wooden table — Photo by iMattSmart on Unsplash

We’re still doing work on our house (and will be for a while)! One really interesting thing that I’ve seen is that when we are getting quotes for work, a lot of tradespeople are very sure what a problem might be, before they’ve really looked into the issue.

We can get three quotes, and have three different root cause analyses of what’s going on.

This is happening because of their expertise in a particular area of a trade. If they are used to using nails, every solution is a hammer! If a job feels familiar, then it’s easy to assume it is exactly what it appears on first glance.

Sometimes it’s a preferred job or way of working, and sometimes it’s just the big expensive “fix it all”, rather than the intervention we actually need.

The best people we’ve worked with take their expertise, and then go with an open mind to find the right solution. They might have that initial idea, but they test it against the actual situation. They look at the problem from various angles, get up close, go up a ladder and really understand what’s going on.

By testing a hypothesis quickly and cheaply, we get to the real issue faster. That means the right work is done, things that can wait are put down the list, and we’re spending the right money at the right time.

We’ve fixed “damp” by repairing the drainpipes and cutting back shrubs, and replaced a single valve in our heating to bring it fully back to life on a cold winter’s day.

People that work this way don’t make the most money in a single transaction, but as they ‘ve built trust, we go back to them multiple times, and recommend them to our friends!

So, don’t get blinded by your expertise. Use it to shape your thinking and come to solutions quickly, but make sure they are informed by what’s going on in reality. Don’t just always reach for the hammer!

Tags Coaching, expertise, Leadership

Book Review Coaching Leadership

2023 – Top 5

Winner Every Time text on top of teddy bears — Photo by Robert Linder on Unsplash

It’s time for the annual top 5, and it’s tools and books taking top spot once again:

Two new entries from this year’s posts, all about Tech Debt (and good news for followers of this story, I’ve got my new windows coming in the Spring), and All Good, how only positive feedback can be limiting!

A big positive is the continued overall growth of the site, doubling the number of visitors since last year. I’m super happy that people are finding value in this content, and that they keep coming back for more.

Here’s the top 3 from my LinkedIn Wednesday Coaching series:

If these resonate with you, then why not have a go at answering them for yourself? And if you’d like to see more, then join me over there and get involved.

I’ll be sharing some more book reviews in the New Year, and if there’s anything specific you’d like me to cover, just drop me a line at james@jamesosborn.co.uk or connect on LinkedIn, I’d love to hear from you.

Tags Book Review, Coaching, Leadership, Top 5