Archive
on the fail fast principle
For most of us we have become used to the fail safe way of working. I am old enough to remember a time when air brakes failed off leaving you with the best way of stopping being to find something soft to drive into. We don’t allow that these days.
Failures are things to be avoided and we work hard on our processes to find ways of doing it right first time, every time. If you are failing your KPIs it is career threatening, a thing of shame. No wonder that so many people are afraid of failure.
Yet we all know that we learn more from our failures and something that I adopt is based on a way of thinking that is called fail fast. The principle is to have something monitoring the system that warns of potential failure somewhere and puts things into a safe mode. It is similar to the Limp Mode that you may have found on your car. Some engineers are using it to push for failures, to encourage them to enable their eradication and this type of thinking is used in high pressure areas like Grand Prix motor sport to find and eliminate potential weak spots in any system or component.
Forty years or so ago we were doing something like this with software testing. The classic test was to take historic data and run that through the program to check that it was doing its sums correctly, but we mixed in erroneous inputs to see what happened. We would also overload the software beyond its specified capacities again to see what it would take, or otherwise.
With more manual processes this approach can also be tried and it will tend to show where the flow starts to fail. Critical Path Analysis is a good companion tool here and using the two can show how the CP can change user different circumstances.
These things can start as desktop exercises, but there is no substitute for doing them in real time because the the working environment will often through up things that would otherwise be missed; the story of my old boss and his M1 traffic jam has been told here before, but it was a classic case of the real world making a bugger’s muddle of what looked like a great plan.
The key message here is to always look at what other people in unrelated industries are doing. It is time rarely wasted because everyone has a need to make things happen as efficiently as possible. How they do it and the way that they think about their problems can often through up an idea that you can adopt or adapt. Take time to look around; you never know what you might find.
on other ways of making things happen
I mentioned recently the EFQM model, another tool that, when used well, can serve a useful purpose. For me the great benefit that I got from it was understanding the linkages between ideas and results, the enablers. I have been reading a succession of political biographies and commentaries of late and there are many instances where promises made at the hustings have not been delivered. There are many reasons for this and, in general, it is not because the politician is telling lies. Certainly sometimes they do relying on the fact that we are too gullible to see the truth, but there are three other key barriers.
Read more…on times when thinking is a bad idea
Sounds daft to propose that there are times when thinking is not too clever, but I firmly believe it to be true. I would not advocate it as a blanket strategy, but there are times when being able to block certain thoughts will pay dividends. Read more…
on implementation
Almost anything that you change can be a project, so from simple things within the office to nationwide rollouts I have seen a lot. Some I have been on the receiving end for, in others I have been part of the roll out team and for some I have been the sponsor. Not all have gone well, so let us have a look at why. Read more…
the lockdown log 3
Whilst the lock down is not having a huge impact on life for the Berkshire Belle and I there is a danger that elements of the basic skill set can get atrophied during any period of disuse so the trick is to find ways of using them in this strange world. Read more…
on motivation for leaders
The ability to motivate is one of those traits that we expect in a leader; keeping the team positive, productive and, for at least short bursts, galvanised should be bread and butter to a good leader as should the ability to keep the team’s collective heads up when things are not going too well. Read more…
on waste
Here I am not thinking about green issues or recycling in particular, although these are important and do form part of my thinking on this subject, but the overall issue is of wasting anything. Taking offence has become an international pastime, but we choose whether or not to be offended and my preference is not to take umbrage at almost everything, why, because it is a waste of my time and emotions and the one thing that does offend me is waste. Read more…
on the EFQM model
Back in the early nineteen nineties I was introduced to the EFQM (European Foundation for Quality Management) model and, like many of my peers, I struggled with the company-wide desire to implement it, but one aspect of being taught to use it stuck with me and made an important addition to my management tool box. Read more…
on demotivating people
We all have obsessions and those of us who lead teams may have a few for we are driven people. We like to refer to these foibles as being focussed, having a clear vision or something of that kind, but behind whatever management speak we wrap it up in we are still obsessed.
on negotiation, part two
One of the early lessons that I grasped in my management career was that you always needed to know what would happen if you did nothing. It may sound odd to an outsider, but a manager is always under pressure to do better and that requires change to some, or greater, degree and to do that you need to know what will happen if you do nothing.
When you go into a negotiation you also need be aware of what will happen if you fail to reach a deal. You will have your desired outcome, your concessions, your drop-dead option, your giveaways and your deal breakers and have a plan to work to. You will have all the intelligence that you can muster on the opposition and, once in the room, have your radar on as you probe and respond to their probes in return. Read more…
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