I grew up in the manufacturing world. I think I might have learned how to weld before I learned how to walk. I ended up putting myself through college along with help from the G.I. bill as a welder and later moved into industrial drafting. I even built process equipment. I loved process mapping; value stream mapping and flow diagrams. I eventually moved into the sales and marketing area and fell in love once again with sales funnels, marketing funnels, customer journey mapping and later workflows. I was a process guy through and through.
Reinforcing all this, I think I purchase the first version of Microsoft Project. Not sure it was the first, but it came on (2) 5¼” floppy discs. My projects were always lined up on a Gantt charts. These projects were well defined, well scoped, and we delivered on time, on budget and at high quality.
I was first introduced to Lean through Peter Senge and The Fifth Discipline but for the life of me could not understand what Senge was thinking with all those loops. I eventually move into Six Sigma, later Lean Six Sigma and later Lean. I was still primarily a process thinker, but those loops still bothered me.
As time moved forward, I saw the world changing around me. Those end to end linear processes that I understood so well and could map out have started getting shorter and shorter. I started justifying doing the work using the analogy that it was the planning that was important more so than the plan itself. However, reality was that the world had more influence on what I was doing, and I had less control. My planning became more frequent and less conclusive, I discovered I was no longer living in a linear world.
What should I do?
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