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.

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.

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.

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.

Stepping Up to Senior Management – Your New Kettle Of Fish

If you’d like to watch me go through this on video, just click here.  6 mins with captions.

Senior Management is not just more management.  It’s a new kettle of fish.  I’ll go through:

• The change in the nature of the work
• What the job actually is
• Action To Take

Senior Management

First – what are we talking about here?  The key thing is manager of managers.  Or, managers of multiple teams, who each have their own leadership.  These roles can be called various things, some of the ones from my clients are:

Utilisation Obsession – why your organisation is in permanently clogged chaos

If you’d prefer to watch on video than read, click here!

A state of overload and chaos has become sadly normal in organisations.  Here’s the thing – it comes from a very natural condition – an obsession with utilisation.   I’ll explain…

These ideas originated from one of the all-time gurus – Eli Goldratt.

Way Basic Work System

To demonstrate, I’ll draw my favourite diagram that my long-time clients will recognise (with one change):

The Middle System – Why Cross-Functional Collaboration Doesn’t Happen And What To Do

This article also exists as a 5-minute video.  Click here to watch if you’d prefer that to reading.

We all want more cross-functional collaboration, whether you’re an executive wanting the areas to sort it amongst themselves, in the middle yourself trying to get work done with other areas, or on the frontline just wanting some consistent messages.

There’s a reason this is often so hard, and one I can give you right upfront – it’s because we can’t see it!  Let me explain….

The social system relationships in most workplaces

As I did in my article and video on the Disgruntled Masses, this piece relies on the Organic Systems Framework of Barry Oshry.  It’s simply great stuff…look into it.  You can watch him talk on YouTube too.

Will It Make The Car Go Faster? A Crucial Work Design Principle From Formula 1

Click here to watch this as a 5-minute video instead.
(It’s got captions)

There’s a lesson in the industry of Formula 1, by which I mean Grand Prix racing, either the most boring thing you’ve ever watched, or an amazing mix of technical skill, driver skill, and one huge political social gossip fest!

The Goal is Clear

There’s one goal in Formula 1 – to win the world championship.  Call that the vision.  From there, the breakdown is clear:

To win the world championship, you need to win more races.  You get the latest version of this after every race, it’s like your monthly report going to your governing body.  Looks like this:

How To Know Which Services To Keep Doing After COVID

(Click here to watch me go through this on video).

(You can catch up on previous videos here)

The COVID experience let us try some new things. We had to adjust the way we serve the people that we serve, and now we’re doing some sort of returning back to a new normal.  In this article we’re going to talk about how you figure out what to keep doing, start doing and stop doing after the COVID situation.

First, there are foundations that we need to have in place.

How to make your organisation more adaptable WITH your hierarchy.

(Would you prefer to watch me explain this on video?  Just click here!)

This time we’re going into “fluid, flexible, task-based structures”.  Very fancy sounding words.

First, a quote.  This is from a KPMG report on the things that will change from COVID that was titled with great importance: “Our New Reality: Predictions after COVID-19”.

Remote work will break traditional management structures

As we shift from managing inputs to managing by outcomes, current organisational hierarchies won’t make sense. A shift to flatter and more fluid task-based structures will follow and require new management skills and changes to performance measurement and reward programs. Company culture will also need to be re-examined.

Hierarchies “won’t make sense”.  Come on!