CAP-Do: Connecting Demand to the Lean Supply Chain

CAP-Do: What makes CAP-Do so attractive is that it assumes we do not have the answers.  It allows us to create a systematic way to address the problems (pain) or opportunities (gain) from the use of our products and services. CAP-Do is an emergent process. You may know the outcomes that you desire but that is relatively unimportant in today’s world or The Challenger Model. It is the outcomes that your customer requires and how you adapt to his/her processes to produce their needed results. This takes a willingness to discover as you go versus leading the way. The essence of Pausing or as Peter Senge calls it “Presencing” is the act of acknowledging that there is more than right a answer. We refrained from trying to find answers or problem-solve in the Check and Adjust stage. We can now gather and understand the actions, roles and uses of our product/services. This is the stage where the connection between supply and demand occurs. Most organizations try to choose between what we know (Check) and what we learned (Adjust). The key though is acceptance and understanding or as I have explained earlier; empathy. This empathetic connection is important; not only to our customer, but as an external team we must also empathize with our internal organization. It is this preparation, done with a pause, before we move into the planning stage that is imperative. As we cycle or iterate between the supply and the demand world we will discover complementary answers. The obstacles will get smaller and smaller. The organization that instills the CAP-Do process will put a tremendous amount of faith in the Sales and Marketing teams. These teams must work and overcome the tension between supply and demand. CAP-Do is a Lean process that supports the tenants of Service Dominant Logic and Jobs to be Done. It requires a fundamental understanding of the idea that there is not one single answer in this world for any problem. The answers lie with the people that are addressing the problem at the moment and have a particular job-to-get-done. It is in understanding their needs and their outcomes with greater wisdom. More fundamentally, you create a way to get your own job done in any situation.

If you would to purchase CAP- Do, it is available for download as a PDF.

Chapter Outlines:

Check Chapter 1 - Structural Conflicts Chapter 2 - Enterprise Thinking Chapter 3 - A Learning Process, not a Teaching Process Adjust (Act) Chapter 4 - A Perspective of Strength Based Principles Chapter 5 - Lean and the OODA Loop Pause Chapter 6 – Pause Plan Chapter 7 - Lean Sales Methods Chapter 8 - Retool your Sales and Marketing with Lean Do Chapter 9 - Experiment through Prototypes Chapter 10 - Lean Thoughts Chapter 11 - Doing CAP-Do Chapter 12 - CAP-Do Process – Working with SDCA, PDCA, EDCA

CAP-Do is included in the Marketing with Lean Book Series at no additional cost.

Empathy is the Fundamental Principle of Understanding.

From my blog post, Do you only Listen through your Ears?:

Empathy is a major differentiator between the traditional process methodologies of Six Sigma, and I say this tongue–in-cheek, Lean. Many times when you review Design for Six Sigma, Lean Startup, Lean Product Development, and Lean Design (the list goes on), seldom when you search (like never) the index of the book will you find the words Empathy. I think that is a major difference in Design Thinking, Service Design and as I like to call it, EDCA.

That word empathy is a hard thing to practice. Some people may say you are born with or raised with it. I think you can acquire it, but it takes a different set of listening skills than most of us  develop.

In a recent article in the New York Times, The Morality of Meditation, I have taken the liberty of pulling several quotes:

MEDITATION is fast becoming a fashionable tool for improving your mind. With mounting scientific evidence that the practice can enhance creativity, memory and scores on standardized intelligence tests, interest in its practical benefits is growing.

This is all well and good, but if you stop to think about it, there’s a bit of a disconnect between the (perfectly commendable) pursuit of these benefits and the purpose for which meditation was originally intended.

The heightened control of the mind that meditation offers was supposed to help its practitioners see the world in a new and more compassionate way, allowing them to break free from the categorizations (us/them, self/other) that commonly divide people from one another.

Meditation increased the compassionate response threefold.

They confirmed that even relatively brief training in meditative techniques can alter neural functioning in brain areas associated with empathic understanding of others’ distress — areas whose responsiveness is also modulated by a person’s degree of felt associations with others.

If we want to connect with our customer, if we want to develop an intuitive read of his organizations needs, do we not need first to have compassion and empathy. It is the act of empathy that we develop through using the Sales Neuro Charger and/or meditation that allow us to utilize them in the sales process. Empathy is the fundamental principle of understanding. How can we develop objective views without it?

How do you Handle an Impossible Project?

Michael Dobson (@sidewisethinker), author of Project: Impossible – How the Great Leaders of History Identified, Solved and Accomplished the Seemingly Impossible – and How You Can Too! said in the podcast:

Well, to be honest one of the things, if it hasn't happened in your career yet, I'm saying this to the audience. I'm sure you've been there. If you haven't been given a project that is sort of absurdly impossible on the face of it, well, you haven't been around for a very long time. Impossible projects in any field in any discipline, well, this is just one of those little situations in life that sooner or later we are all confronted with for better or worse. Win, lose or draw, we all have to face it.

Listen to the rest of the conversation on impossible projects.

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MICHAEL SINGER DOBSON is a marketing executive, project management consultant and nationally-known speaker. He has been a staff member of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, award-winning game designer, and career counselor in his varied career. My favorite book of Michael’s, out of twenty or so he wrote, is Creative Project Management. You can find Michael on Twitter @sidewisethinker or his main website sidewiseinsights.com

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Voices Matter: Are you helping the situation?

Everyone is talking about conversations but are we really having them? Are 90% of conversations incorporated in 140 characters or thinking of the latest sound bite to get our message across? In Russ Unger’s new book Designing the Conversation: Techniques for Successful Facilitation (Voices That Matter) he discusses the ability to communicate and the practice of setting up the conversation to make it productive. Stephen Anderson sums up the book:

A book on facilitation? I wouldn't have thought this was needed, but after reading Designing the Conversation, I'm reminded of all the valuable skills we learn—with some difficulty, mind you—on our own. Fortunately, all that stuff is covered here, from preparing for a session to handling the difficult personalities. And it's all delivered in a way that's short, to the point, and packed with plenty of pop culture references, making this a fun, lively read! You'll grin at uncomfortably familiar situations and nod in agreement as bits of invaluable advice are served in style through every chapter.

I enjoyed the book as much Stephen did and almost as much as Russ’s first book, A Project Guide to UX Design: For user experience designers in the field or in the making (2nd Edition) (Voices That Matter).

 

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Russ Unger is a user experience consultant and is on the Advisory Board for the Department of Web Design and Development at Harrington College of Design. His workshops have been attended by a variety of companies, from lean startups to large corporations. Since 1993 he has helped many companies incorporate user experience strategies and tactics into their designs. You can find Russ at http://userglue.com.

Uncovering Compelling Insights

Steve Portigal. author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights, is the founder of  Portigal Consulting. He has interviewed hundreds of people, including families eating breakfast, hotel maintenance staff, architects, rock musicians, home-automation enthusiasts, credit-default swap traders, and radiologists. His work has informed the development of mobile devices, medical information systems, music gear, wine packaging, financial services, corporate intranets, videoconferencing systems, and iPod accessories.

Steve speaks regularly at corporate events and conferences such as CHI, IxDA, Lift, SXSW, UIE, UPA, UX Australia, UX Hong Kong, UX Lisbon, and WebVisions. His articles about culture, design, innovation, and interviewing users have been published in interactions, Core77, Ambidextrous, and Johnny Holland. He blogs at www.portigal.com/blog and tweets at @steveportigal.

Steve was gracious enough to secure a discount code for the book, IUBUSINESS901 for 20% off,  if purchased through Rosenfeld Media, Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights

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A Story of Sustaining Lean

Robert B. Camp holds a bachelor of science degree in engineering from the United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, and a master of business administration from Franklin Pierce University, Rindge, New Hampshire. Robert spent almost 20 years of his career working for Mobil and Lockheed Martin. Throughout his career, he has performed roles that have drawn heavily on his increasing body of Lean knowledge and experience. He is a board member of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence and the author of Go and See: A Journey about Getting to Lean, and most recently Sustainable Lean: The Story of a Cultural Transformation.

In the podcast, Robert discusses a particular area that I thought brought out a very clear message. When you are talking culture and transformation, you cannot hire someone else to come in and do your work. An excerpt from the podcast:

Robert Camp: The problem is, they're unsustainable, unless, leadership with the organization agrees that they're going to change. I make a point of referencing that in my book, early in the book, the protagonist, Jim, who is a plant manager is talking to a consultant that he's heard at a gathering, and he approaches him afterwards. Jim approaches the consultant afterwards and says: "I hired these external consultants to come in and we did great. They did better than they even promised me they would do. Then, I was pressured by corporate to cut off the contract, and in the two years since, things seemed to have drifted back to where they had been". Frank, the external consultant, says to him: "What you did wrong was you entrusted the transformation to somebody else. Unless, you are willing to lead it, it's not going to be sustainable". I think, therein lies half of the answer that A is got to be led by the leaders of the organization. The second piece to that is by leading they literally get out front which means they need to understand Lean as well as anybody else and they actually have to drive the transformation. They can't hire somebody to come in and do that for them.

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How well do you interview?

Steve Portigal (@steveportigal) author of Interviewing Users: How to Uncover Compelling Insights is next weeks podcast guest. Steve is fascinated by the stuff of a culture – its products, companies, consumers, media, and advertising. As he says, all these artifacts and the relationships between them are the rules that define a culture -- the stuff makes the culture, but it is the culture that makes the stuff. Read that twice and if you still need further explanation, Steve can be found at Portigal Consulting.

An excerpt from our podcast.

Joe: When I think of capturing the information in the interview, I think of two things, either I come in with my sixty-minute camera crew, or I go out in the car after the interview and write it down in a notepad what I just learned. Both have pros and cons, but is there a certain way, I should be capturing information or something you can help the listeners with?

Steve: I think you have two interesting things. One is a recording; let's call it a magnetic media. The other is interviewer's notes; their interpretations, their recall whether you take your notes afterwards or you take notes during. It is important to realize that as a note taker or someone who’s doing post interview recalling, you can't capture it all.

It goes through an enormous filter already, whether you're in real time or recalling, there's a huge amount of distortion. It's essential that you do have without getting to post-modern, the 100% accurate recording. A recording, the definitive doctrine of what happened, an audio recording or a video recording because what happens is you do have that distortion, you do remember something as being more dramatic. You remember that you heard something because you are thinking about something else.

There are all those things that come up and there's a big gulp between what was actually said. I challenge anyone to go back and watch an interview and compare your notes. You'll see sometimes critical, sometimes not, it depends on what the issues are. You'll see some big, big, big differences. You need to know for sure what they said. How many they said, if it's a list of things. What the sort of unstated pieces were? You would have to go back and tease that apart because it is not, you're not just interested on what's on the face on what's the word that comes out of their mouth are, you need to kind of dig into it a little bit more. That's why you need that definitive record and it doesn't have to be a sixty-minutes camera crew, it can be, when flip cameras were a thing, people were really kind of into those for their easiness portable HD quality hard disk cameras keep coming down in price and in size and I think, the quality of that, that or kind of an easy audio recorder, those things are so small as long as you have plenty of batteries, you can kind of set them and forget them and that would be what I would tend to do and recommend. You are not producing an Oscar nominated documentary on this. You're just going to capture a reasonable fidelity and then tools are available to that very, very well.

The thing I was going to come back to was that note taking process that you just described, whether you are doing during or doing it after, people find that really valuable as a way to kind of sort through. I can't see you right now, but I can imagine you scribbling things about what I am saying or someone listening to the two of us talk, might be kind of jotting notes. It a way that people process information and that filter, although, it distorting, it' also really important because that's the way that you start making sense and thinking about what the implications are. So, sitting down after an interview and saying to yourself or your colleagues what are the five most important things, what surprised you, you can facilitate that debrief or you can set yourself up to take notes during as a way to help you start processing all that information. But you still want to do some processing with that definitive record.

Kranz Dictum: The Miracle behind Apollo 13

Have you ever been part of an impossible project? Next week’s Business901 podcast is Michael Dobson author of Project: Impossible - How the Great Leaders of History Identified, Solved and Accomplished the Seemingly Impossible - and How You Can Too!. The book was a fun read for me and so was the podcast. Michael does an excellent job of weaving project management lessons in and out the stories. Michael, knows a thing or two about project management, he has written over twenty-five books.

An excerpt from the podcast:

Joe: When we think of a crisis like that, how much project planning goes into a crisis, such as Tylenol. Were they just winging it in that instance?

Michael: Well, the part of the background of the Tylenol situation was that a lot of the executives of Johnson and Johnson had just gone through training or some workshop about corporate ethics. Their vision and mission statements and all these good management practices and they really only had one question to ask themselves. Did we mean all this stuff that we were saying? Once they said "Yes, we did mean it," then they had a basis to go on. You'll see this as a theme in a couple of stories. In Apollo 13, you know the famous CO2 exchanger that we all remember from the Apollo 13 movie, the fact is that there had been a tremendous amount of training in crisis response, there was an emergency kit. They couldn't very well have done it without duct tape. Somebody had to think about putting together an emergency kit that included things like duct tape that was available generically. With Patton in the Battle of the Bulge, he didn't do it in 48 hours. He anticipated it and had his planners hard at work. With Caesar at the Battle of Alicia, it was the long term training of the Roman soldier that allowed him to take on the absurd task of building this amazing set of fortifications in a very short period of time with very little in the way of supplies. If you don't start early, if you don't have the foundation, if you don't have the vision, if you don't have the training, if you don't have the emergency kit, well, your ability to handle a crisis when it shows up is extremely hampered. Normally, crisis management by definition is reactive rather than proactive, but a lot of training, a lot of the prep work, a lot of the mind-set comes well in advance and in most cases by the time the project officially starts, it's too late. If you haven't started early, if you haven't built a foundation early, well, there's not much you're going to be able to do to recover.

Joe: In the movie Apollo 13, I think of where the person said something to the effect, "gentlemen" . . . .

Michael: Failure is not an option.

Joe: Failure is not an option. Yes, exactly.

Michael: Gene Kranz who never said it. He never said it. What he did do is he was the guy who developed the NASA response following the Apollo 1 capsule fire that killed Grissom, White and Chaffee. There is a long story about the origins of that. Some of it is in the book, and it was after that he developed and announced what he referred to as the Kranz Dictum that was a preparation and mind-set tool for NASA. He insisted and focused on it from the immediate aftermath of Apollo 1. So, by the time Apollo 13 came around, he had achieved what he did call, perfection in the art of crisis management. Simply no way to make space travel or, any kind of, going up explosive powered rocket, there's no way to make that inherently safe. If you're not ready with crisis management, you have no business going.

Gene Kranz did well with something he never said, His book is titled: Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control From Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond

MICHAEL SINGER DOBSON, marketing executive, project management consultant and nationally-known speaker, has been a staff member of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum, award-winning game designer, and career counselor in his varied career.