Daniel Jones is a management thought leader and advisor on applying lean, process thinking to every type of business across the world. He is the founding Chairman of the Lean Enterprise Academy www.leanuk.org in the UK, dedicated to pushing forward the frontiers of lean thinking and helping others with its implementation.

Related Information:
Defining the Roles of Lean IT
When Standard Work and Customer Focus come together
The Difficulty of Mastery = The Difficulty of Lean
A Collaborative approach to Value Stream Mapping

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A couple of the reactions from my discussion on Twitter:

• @imbertti : Joe Dager has surprised everybody with a weird attendee. That’s a funny guy :) #lssc12 http://pic.twitter.com/ARJOCZTG
• (In case you missed him in the picture above) @thomasjeffrey @business901 ‘s first guest at his session for #lssc12 http://pic.twitter.com/9OOsB9p0
• @jlindenreed : Have u done a 5 Why from a positive outlook, to see what u do well?
• @thomasjeffrey: Model people according to value network @business901 #lssc12

The Value Network Modeling of Verna Allee, M.A.,Co-founder and CEO of Value Networks LLC intrigued everyone.I also introduced This is Service Design Thinking which I found most people unfamiliar with.  I may have failed to deliver on the SDCA, PDCA, EDCA concepts and in particular the message I was trying to send on Standard Work. Not sure that Standard Work should just be left out of introductory Knowledge Work conversations. No matter how strongly I feel about it.

The links below expand on the main concepts of my talk.

Related Information:
What’s New in Business Model Generation?
Where does a Customer Find Value in your Organization?
Mastering Positive Change eBook
The Common Thread of Design Thinking, Service Design and Lean Marketing
When Standard Work and Customer Focus come together
A Service Design Thinking Primer

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After talking to Dan, I reviewed the 5 basic principles of Lean:

1. Identify Value
2. Map Value Stream
3. Create Flow
4. Establish Pull
5. Seek Perfection

I certainly found an interesting relation to how I apply them from an organizational standpoint and how I could use them to improve my day. Dan gave a few tips and encouraged me to find the root cause of several of my most nagging problems. I can’t say the choices were easy but I was certainly able to address them and make decisions accordingly. Now, if I can only sustain it!!!

I reviewed the book in this blog post: How do you handle inputs into your life? and there is a written excerpt from the podcast, Can you Lean yourself?.

Related Information:
Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban
Successful Lean teams are iTeams
Kaizen is Always Individual
4 Disciplines of Execution – Lean Simplified

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In Lean you try to find the one best path – the value stream map. In the marketing, we have created the marketing funnel. However, Organizations can no longer feed products to customers, as I described in the blog post, Kill the Sales and Marketing Funnel. Customers have the ability to access resources and information comparable to their suppliers and choose suppliers by their own definition of value and how that value should be created. Organizations must adapt to the networks our customer chooses to find value in the use of our products and services.

Verna Allee, M.A., is Co-founder and CEO of Value Networks LLC introduced me last year to Value Network Mapping through this Business901 podcast, What’s behind Collaboration and Value Networks? I have played with it, not mastering and have become more and more intrigued by the concept. Our world is increasingly more collaborative driving changes in the way decisions are made. Our organizations need to change to a more collaborative structure but the question is where do we begin?

From Value Networks and the true nature of collaboration by Verna Allee with Oliver Schwabe is a digital edition book located at http://www.valuenetworksandcollaboration.com.

Roles and interactions – providing focus for collaborative work

Role-based exchange networks are the natural way that people organize and collaborate to create value and achieve outcomes. In such a network every single person executes a chosen role. Through that role they provide value contributions to others and receive value in turn. Further, as long as people experience a sense of reciprocity and perceived value or accomplishment from the interactions – people will stay engaged.

The collaboration patterns that make things work have been pushed to the background through more than two decades of focusing on business process models. Now, with the growing use of social networking and collaborative technologies, the importance of those patterns is finally being recognized.

Indeed, people, and their very human exchanges and interactions are at the heart of value creation. People, not processes, are the active agents in organizations. Only people have the unique capacity to identify opportunities, innovate, and provide value.

Value streams typically only focuses only on the more formal deliverables. In sales and marketing it is not only the formal deliverable but the informal, which in value networks are called tangible and intangible.

Verna defines these deliverables:

When we model business activity we get into the very specific kinds of exchanges that are critical for success and we define two types of exchanges. We call them tangible or intangible.Tangibles are those things that are formal, contractual. If you don’t do these somebody’s going to want their money back. The things you must do, the value that must be delivered. We also are modeling all of those intangibles or informal exchanges that really build relationships and help things run smoothly. That is what is missing from process modeling.

Value network modeling is something that allows us to understand the pattern of different activities within organization or within the same basic value network structure. It’s a very, very different way of thinking about who delivers value. I like to use red and black checker after creating a map and stack them on the individual roles. I use black for tangible and red for intangible. This way you can have a better visual on what role the customer derives the most value from and what kind of value the customer is seeking.

Below is a transcription of the podcast I had with Verna and I recommend that you view her website for more information and to download a map outline to try it out.

Verna Allee book: The Future of Knowledge: Increasing Prosperity through Value Networks

Related Information:
Pair Problem Solving in the Workplace
Business Processes as Value Networks
The Role of PDCA in a Lean Sales and Marketing Cycle
The New Knowledge Management Game eBook

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I stands for intending
To intend you decide what you want or need to accomplish, focus on the circumstances involved and direct your thoughts and actions toward your goal.

D stands for Defining.
To define you identify and describe the elements of your project and the information and resources that will be useful in reaching your goal.

e stands for Exploring
To explore you relate the elements you have defined, imagine possibilities regarding them that are related to your goal and analyze which is the best idea or approach to develop further.

S stands for Suggesting
To suggest you propose the form your solution will take or the plan of action you will follow, and present, communicate and explain it so that others will understand your objectives.

i stands for Innovating
To innovate you implement your plan of action or concept, constantly improving your skill and results to produce or perform what you intended to do.

G stands for Goal getting
To reach your goal, you observe, judge and measure what has been accomplished and evaluate whether your intentions have been fulfilled, revising your activities until you achieve your goals.

N stands for kNowing
To know, you remember and reflect on your experience to learn from it, to integrate it into what you already know and to look for future applications of the knowledge you have gained.

Maybe it does not have the polish that an IDEAO project would have but I commend Dr. Burnette for his contribution.

Website: IDESIGN Seven Ways of Design Thinking – A Teaching Resource http://www.idesignthinking.com

Related Information:
Think and Design like a Storyteller
GE CMO sheds her view on Design Thinking
The Common Thread of Design Thinking, Service Design and Lean Marketing
A Service Design Thinking Primer

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Sketching in Service Design by Ben Crothers is a brief run-through of various group-based and individual techniques for using the wonders of sketching in Service Design. The second half of the presentation covers hands-on drawing techniques to tackle common objects and other things often drawn in Service Design artifacts.

A few past blogs on this subject are Your First Prototype is with Pen and Paper and Spontaneous Marks help you think – Doodling.

Related Information:
Six Sigma Storyboards
Practical Approach to Innovation used by Disney
Storyboards give Insights to Space and Time
Storyboarding for Business

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This is an excerpt from the podcast:

Joe:  If you really sit back and take a look at what you are doing or have to do, that you have much more control over the situation than you think. Applying the Pareto Principle, you have a lot of control?.

Dan:  “I think often we do. I think oftentimes there is a lot more room for improvement than we realize. We just haven’t bothered looking. We just say, “Oh yeah, I get interrupted all the time.” “Oh yeah, I get these problems.” But we don’t really understand why because we’ve never stopped to really grasp the situation. The other thing, where I think Lean is really important, comes in the notion of visual management. I hear people saying all the time, “You know, I feel like I’m always reactive. I’m not proactive. I’m always being tactical. I can never be strategic.”

They cite the same thing that you talked about ? an email comes in that’s kind of important or my boss comes in and says, “We have to do X, Y, and Z.” I think what I see is that because we are knowledge workers our work tends to be invisible. It tends to reside in bits and bytes of electrons of data sitting in our email inbox, sitting in a document somewhere on our computer desktop, whatever.

But it’s not real visible. It’s not like an engine assembly in front of you. It’s not like a fan blade that you’re working on in front of you. As a consequence what happens is that it’s very easy to pull my attention away from what I’m working on.

I think visual management, the notion of taking the work that you’re doing and somehow making it more visible, making it more visual, enables us to better judge whether we should be responding to this new problem rather than the thing that we were working on.

So again, the simple example, Joe, would be, I am working on something and then an email comes in, and I look at it and I say, “Oh, boy. I’m going to handle this,” and I get distracted by that.

The problem is I don’t know what I’m supposed to be working on. Because my work is relatively invisible, I don’t really have the ability to say which is truly more important, this new thing that came in or this old thing that I was supposed to be working on.

And so what happens is we’re always distracted by the squeaky wheel and we start giving it the oil or the grease, instead of saying, “Gosh, this wheel maybe squeaking, but I’ve got much bigger issues to take care of.”

I think ideas that you see in something like Jim Benson’s Personal Kanban, that’s one way of making the work visible. You’ve got the physical representation of it on a white board and now you can say, “These are the three things that I am working on now. This is my work in progress. Oops. Here comes something new. Well, is it more important than these three things, yes or no?” If the answer is yes, well then, great, change. If the answer is no, well then, figure out how you are going to handle it.

Stick with what you are doing and then figure out how you are going to cue up that new thing, or hand it off to someone else or ignore it or whatever.”

Related Information:
The Resilience of PDCA
Successful Lean teams are iTeams
Kaizen is Always Individual
4 Disciplines of Execution – Lean Simplified

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Related Information:
Gamestorming for Service Design
Service Design via a Design Thinker ebook
Do you co-create value with your Customer?
A Service Design Thinking Primer

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The Lean Software and Systems Conference emphasizes Lean concepts representing the next wave of ideas in methods, process and organization for software and systems engineering. It brings together an international community of practitioners, consultants, thought leaders and authors to cross-pollinate ideas and foster a sense of community for those promoting better economic and sociological outcomes in their workplace.

Three Events, One Venue – 3-Day Conference, Lean Camp & Lean Tutorials
Lean Software & Systems Conference 2012 (LSSC12) May 13-18, 2012, in Boston, MA

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This is what I call my Customer Kenny Project discussed in the video.

Related Information:
Insight into the Customer Experience through Theater
The Starting Point for Lean Sales and Marketing
The Show Business side of Service Design
The Lean Business Practices of a Deli

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Would you add anything? Or take anything away?

Related Information:
The End of Best in Market
Do You Know the Right Job For Your Products?
Lean Engagement Team Book Released
Appreciative Inquiry instead of Problem Solving

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Daniel Jones is the co-author, with James P. Womack, of the influential, best-selling management books:
The Machine That Changed the World: The Story of Lean Production
Lean Thinking: Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation, Revised and Updated
Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together
Seeing the Whole Value Stream.

Dan will not disappoint you in this podcast. Though he is firmly rooted in the principles of Lean, you may be surprised by his forward-thinking and interpretation.  An excerpt can be read in this blog post, The Challenge of Lean with Dan Jones.

Download Podcast: Click and choose options: Download Here  or go to the Business901 iTunes Store.

Related Information:
Has Lean Thinking fallen short on the Demand Side?
Thinking Back from the Customer –Lean Summit 2011
4 Disciplines of Execution – Lean Simplified
Defining the Roles of Lean IT

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The ever increasing platforms of co-producing, open-innovation, co-creation is moving innovation from an exclusive internal platform to a more external platform. True innovation is not happening inside the 4 walls of an organization but out in the customers’ playground. As Voice of Customer tools get more sophisticated, we are not reacting and thinking of the next step needed to delight our customers, we are allowing them to show us the way. Organizations may lead in “design” but in use it is the customer and in use is where the value is derived (Service Dominant Logic Thinking Vargo and Lusch,2006).

Many would argue the Lean is about incremental improvement. It does not allow for breakthrough thinking. I agree that SDCA and PDCA and even the continuous mindset may not deliver breakthrough thinking. However, like most things you start one step at a time. The culture of Innovation starts with culture of continuous improvement. To start with breakthrough thinking is very difficult and typically not successful.  You cannot just turn it on. So starting with PDCA and a continuous improvement is the only successful way, to create this “i (little i) culture.

Ramping it up and truly doing breakthrough thinking, the big ‘I” is when you must engage and understand your customer/market extremely well. This could be a description of the culture a Lean company from a Scott Anthony FastCompany Post on innovation:

A classic example of this is how a calligraphy class inspired Apple legend Steve Jobs’s emphasis on typography on early computers. The professors then detail what they call the “Innovator’s DNA,” four time-tested approaches successful innovators follow to gather stimuli that spur these connections:

• Questioning: Asking probing questions that impose or remove constraints. Example: What if we were legally prohibited from selling to our current customer?
• Networking: Interacting with people from different backgrounds who provide access to new ways of thinking.
• Observing: Watching the world around them for surprising stimuli.
• Experimenting: Consciously complicating their lives by trying new things or going to new places.

I like to use the term EDCA learned from Graham Hill  to designate the Explore aspect of Lean.  I view it as more of Design Type thinking content that allows for that collaborative learning cycle with a customer. This is a link to my blog post on the tools of SDCA, PDCA, EDCA: http://business901.com/?p=8490.

Why Lean? Design and Innovation takes place outside the four walls and Lean can be the methodology of choice. It drives both the Little i and the Big I.  The first and foremost reason is that it allows the 1st step for innovation. Lean is the primary driver for the little i DNA. As a result, it allows for that culture to spread and create the DNA for the BIG I. Without Lean and the little i, you may never start!

My upcoming Podcast with Dan Jones dives into this type of Lean Thinking. Review these past post to provide some additional background, Thinking Back from the Customer –Lean Summit 2011 and The Challenge of Lean with Dan Jones.

Related Information:
Applying Cellular Concepts to Marketing Segments
The End of Best in Market
Do You Know the Right Job For Your Products?

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The authors provided compelling examples ranging from a variety of companies.  Fujitsu, a leading service company for technology, has transformed the way call centers solve problems— learning how to eliminate the underlying cause of current problems rather than fixing them again and again. Tesco’s lean provision systems have enabled the company to emerge as the leanest, highest-quality, and best-managed retailer in Europe.  An extremely successful car dealership has adopted lean principles to streamline its business, making for dramatically reduced wait time, fewer return trips, and greater satisfaction for customers— and a far more lucrative enterprise.

Are all Lean organizations implementing these practices on the consumption side? Has Lean crossed that bridge from supply to the demand side? Alan Mitchell, co founder of Mydex and Crtl-Shift presents “Responding to the Empowered Consumer” at the Lean Enterprise Academy’s annual conference “Lean Summit 2011 – Solving Business Problems” I think he has a few answers why Lean Thinking on the demand/consumption side has fallen short.

The entire presentation is interesting. You can choose to start at the 20:00 mark to review only the part on Lean Solutions.

Related Information:
Lean Solutions: How Companies and Customers Can Create Value and Wealth Together
Does Lean Marketing deliver what the customer wants?
Do you understand where demand comes from?
In your Organization, who is responsible for Demand?

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