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:
Read more…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.
Read more…Prefer to watch rather than read? Click here, five minutes, with captions.
Last time I went through the principles which simply let you deliver more projects with less stress.
Yes, totally true. Read it here.
The super-short summary is that by lining them up and focusing on finishing instead of starting, you get benefits earlier which lowers stress and interruption, while also reducing switching cost. It’s one of the key aspects of the method I call The Project Factory.™
Here’s a picture of the principle:
I finished by saying: “I know what you’re thinking – ‘great, but that’s not how the real world works’.
I know – I live in it too. Which is why there’s a Part II to this article coming soon…”
Which is what you’re reading right now.
Read more…Prefer to watch rather than read? Click here, five minutes, with captions.
There’s so many projects on, it’s overwhelming. Yet, when we look at the total work and the total salary budget…we should be able to get it all done! We get the seemingly absurd situation of not being able to spend that very capital or project funding we worked so hard to get!
What’s going on here? Luckily…it’s something quite natural…and quite simple. And it’s also one of the key aspects of the method I call The Project Factory ™
Goes like this:
We’ve got three projects, Blue, Red and Green. All equal value. All due the same time. All break down into four parts, each part takes one month. This isn’t a trick, they’re all equal.
Read more…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.
Read more…(Prefer to watch rather than read? Click here, 5 mins with captions.)
“System-thinking”. It’s been around for decades and gets increasingly more popular as complexity ratchets up. But what does it mean?
I recently had 24 hours off life (I have three kids) and took the chance to read “In Defense of Food” by Michael Pollan, great writer from the New York Times. One piece stood out to me as a great way to explain systems thinking.
Pollan talks about “nutritionism”, the idea that we can work out what’s good in food by breaking it down to its component parts. Take broccoli – we generally consider that to be healthy, and you might know about anti-oxidants, those things that fight baddies inside us.
Here’s what’s interesting – when certain anti-oxidants are isolated, removed from the food and administered, they don’t always have the same healthy effect as when they are consumed as part of eating the vegetable. This means there’s something going on in the way the whole thing works together to create the healthy effect…broccoli is more than just a delivery system for anti-oxidants.
In other words…broccoli is a system!
Read more…Prefer to watch on video rather than read? Click here, 5 minutes with captions.
Getting your culture moving in the direction you need doesn’t have to be a mystery. There are tangible actions you can take right now that will make a difference.
I’ve named them the 4 S’s, and if you know the work of Frances Frei and Anne Morriss in Unleashed, and the body of work known as Systems Leadership developed by Ian Macdonald, Catherine Burke and Karl Stewart…you’ll already be familiar with some of these ideas.
First – my definition – culture is the shared understanding about the way you need act to fit in around here. Don’t get too caught up in it…this works fine.
Read more…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.
Read more…This is definitely one that’s better to watch on video. Click here, 5 mins, with captions.
Have you seen the show Ted Lasso? You should. Warms the coldest heart, and it’s funny. And…we can find lessons in there about how we can make our own workplaces better.
Read more…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.
Read more…