Move Laterally – A Common Sense Project Lesson from Matthew McConaughey

If you don’t feel like reading, you can watch my video by clicking here.

When you’re feeling the overwhelm, the pressure, and you need a way to make projects run better in your organisation…who do you turn to?

Matthew MConaughey of course!

Hang with me here – check out the below, McConaughey from an interview on Joe Rogan’s podcast, with my emphasis:

Get That Work Landed!  Lessons from Air Traffic Control

Prefer to watch rather than read? Click here to watch the video – 4 mins, with captions.

Air Traffic Control has it’s act together.  Because if it doesn’t, things go wrong.  Really wrong.

Here’s four lessons we can pick up that are easy to apply in your organisation to lift your performance in getting strategy delivered.

Just a Spoonful of Capacity Cuts the Wait Time in HALF!

Prefer to watch rather than read?  Just click here, under 5 mins with captions.

In office work the queue doesn’t snake out the door.  Its piles up emotionally in the form of the ever-expanding Inbox, and the increasing rates of friendly-but-scary “where’s my thing?”  It feels like there’s no way out….but it turns out just a spoonful of capacity goes a long way.

Retention Strategy? No! Do this instead.

(Prefer to watch rather than read? Click here, 5 mins, with captions.)

“We need a retention strategy”.  A common cry.

The thing is…you don’t.  What you need is to set things up so talented people want to stay.  And the good news is…they are the same things that make your organisation productive.

Which is good.

There are just two things:

1. People can use their abilities to be useful
2. People don’t mind who they are working with.

That’s it!

Know Where to Focus – how to spot the Pacesetter in your process

Prefer to watch rather than read?  Click here – 5 mins with captions.

You don’t want to waste your money and your people’s time by not working on the highest leverage point of the system.  Here’s how to make sure you get this right.

In a previous post I went through the importance of Not Bothering the Barista.  I know I’m a broken record on this, but once again:

If a process must go through A, B and C to get to the customer and the number in each box represents how many they can do per period, then the system can’t go any faster than B.  And rather than using the term ‘constraint’ or ‘bottleneck’, I use ‘Pacesetter’ because it’s, well, nicer.

And conveniently B is the first letter of ‘Barista’, which will always be the Pacesetter in a café.  Therefore, Don’t Bother the Barista!

All of this comes from Eli Goldratt in his book The Goal, where he even lays out five steps for improvement, the first of which is of course (in my words)

Identify the Pacesetter.

Here’s some ways to do that.

Standards and Devotion – Leadership that changes people’s lives

Prefer to watch on video than read?  Click here – 5 mins with captions.

Ever had a leader that changed your life?  A teacher, a coach, a manager?  Would you like to be able to make that sort of difference?

What’s needed is simple, but not easy – the combination of Standards and Devotion that Frances Frei and Anne Morriss write about in their book Unleashed, which you should read.

Four Boxes!

So, what are we talking about?

Standards are as it sounds – the performance we want out of people. The level they are supposed to meet.

Devotion is about how much we care for another.  Their wellbeing, their success, whether they are OK.

Don’t Bother the Barista – make any work system better

Prefer to watch on video than read?  Click here, 6 mins with captions.

If you’ve been with me for a while, chances are I’ve run through this with you.  The purpose of this is to put it all in the one spot.

This is about understanding the focussing point required to get any system (any system) to work better.  And by ‘better’, I mean better for customers, better for those working in it, and better for the bank balance and purpose of the organisation too.

Command and Control – not automatically evil

Prefer to watch on video than read?  Click here – 4 mins with captions.

The Paintball Experience

I went paintballing once.  Thought it would be fun – I’d played a lot of sport, am pretty coordinated, I like reading about war…

And it sucked.

The whistle goes, I attempted to move…POP…..POP….POP and I’m out.

Regroup, go again, POP…..POP….POP and I’m out.

You know what I needed?

Some sort of sergeant.  Some sort of person who could yell at me

“Thompson, over there…NOW”.

The Empowerment Formula

Prefer to watch on video than read?  Click here – 4 mins with captions.

“Empowerment”.  We’re into it.  And why not?  It’s a good thing.  A condition of being OK is ‘agency’, which means being able to take actions that make a difference.  To have some sort of power.  To be ‘empowered’.

Unfortunately, a decree of “YOU ARE NOW EMPOWERED” combined with matching posters and distribution of keep-cups with catchy slogans is not going to be enough.

The WIP Secret – 4x increase in throughput with one simple change

Why read when you can watch on video?  Click here – 5 mins, with captions.

You can increase the throughput of your show hugely with one simple change.

For real life.

But don’t take my word for it, let’s turn to one of the total gurus – Eli Goldratt. 

As part of the brilliant Goldratt Satellite Program, which you can still buy and watch the legend himself (I’m not associated with it BTW), he tells the story about the maintenance area of the Israeli Air Force.