Fail Forward Friday Vol. 2 Part 2
Jeff Burstein
Chief Student Advocate @ L-EAF Lab | Agile Learning Experiences for Students - Chief Student Advocate @ L-EAF | Educational Agility - Speaker - Leadership Coach
"How did I miss that the 1st time" or "Oops I failed again"!!!
In my previous post * I shared a failure and subsequent learning in my attempt to right-size reporting; stopping the Daily Scrum report (DSR) and how it’s more important to be kind and compassionate than to be “right.” If you missed part one, you can read it here https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/fail-forward-friday-vol-2-part-1-jeff-burstein.
About five or six years following my “DSR solutioning” I sit to eat lunch with one of my colleagues, Brian Irwin. We are both enterprise agile coaches, each having facilitated several transformations. We began sharing tales of woe, not unlike two warriors comparing scars accumulated throughout a lifetime of seemingly endless battles.
So proud of how transformed and agile I am, I retell the story of the DSU. After listening to my failure, Brian said, “You may have missed another important lesson.”
He proceeds to highlight something that, when looking back, should have been patently obvious. “If you want to get the attention of executives about something you know is wasteful, show them the financial consequences,” he explained.
Probing further he asked, “How many individuals were creating these reports?”
“In my program, about seventeen,” I replied.
“How many hours per week, roughly, was spent crafting the report, and do you have a general idea of the hourly rate?”
Thinking more deeply about it, I explained that it was about an hour a day, four days per week at about $90 per hour. He opened the calculator on his phone and punched in the numbers.
An overcooked fry parting his lips, he softly spoke as he ran the calculation, “Ok, that’s 17 people x 4 hrs per week x $90 per hour x 46 weeks per year. Well, it looks like it costs about $281,520 per year to create that report that few, if anyone read. If we consider a 46-week working year, that’s just over $6,000 a week…and that’s just to create the report. It doesn’t consider infrastructure bandwidth or the impact of reduced morale from employees being distrusted. Was that report worth that amount of money to them, especially if it wasn’t being used to drive strategic decisions?”
Instead of pointing out the lunacy of the DSR, he said it would have been more powerful to approach them from the perspective of what they had to gain, rather than what they had to lose, should they decide to rethink having every SM submit it. Instead of leaving them with the absence that was left due to no longer receiving the DSR, what if I had asked, “I think I see a way that we can save you over two-hundred fifty-thousand dollars per year. Would you like me to explain?” The language of gain influences more than the language of loss.
Having missed that for almost 6 years, I must call that a
Double Epic Fail.
Since that time, I’ve learned that he is using a novel approach as a lever to system change—the power of hidden costs. Approaching executives armed with financial data hits them with information they can use to assist with objective decision-making.
His approach is part of a larger organization development framework called the Socio-Economic Approach to Management (SEAM) and it is proving to be a superb enabler of agility. In addition to hidden costs it provides managers with a proven set of practical tools that help them change the way they manage, something that’s surprisingly spoken of very little in the agile community.
We explain to managers they need to be “servant leaders” and grow an “agile mindset” but do surprisingly little about helping them understand what that means to them or supplying pragmatic tools to help them steer agile organizations. If you want to find out more about SEAM and what he and some of his colleagues are doing with it, reach out to him. He explained to me that he has recently done an intervention with an organization that exposed annual per-person hidden costs exceeding $90,000. And no, that is not a typo. Imagine the power in quantifying the cost of your organizational dependencies? That would be huge!
Missing the opportunity to learn from our failures simply means that we will have to fail again to learn a lesson that could have already learned. The funny thing about Mother Nature is that she keeps teaching us the same lessons repeatedly until we learn them.
To read Fail Forward Friday Vol. 2 Part 1, click here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/posts/jeffburstein_failforwardfriday-agilemindset-activity-6689865442950963200-is8a
To read Fail Forward Friday Vol. 1, click here: https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/fail-forward-friday-vol-1-jeff-burstein
“The best lessons in life are the ones that cost the most.” - Jeff Burstein 2003
#FailForwardFriday
Helping founders and executives reduce the friction associated with rapid growth | Over $4M of Hidden Costs Reduced ??
4 年We're just as excited, if not more, than you Terri Givens . It's going to be a challenging and rewarding endeavor bringing #agility and revolutionary thinking to #highered. And partnering with professionals as experienced in the sector as you and Gary Stocker will be an honor.
Consultant, Keynote Speaker, and Professor of Political Science at University of British Columbia
4 年So glad to be working with Jeff Burstein and Brian Irwin to improve outcomes in #highered.
VP of Higher Education at Pangram Labs | Co-Founder of the EdUp Experience | Podcaster | Author | Husband | Girl Dad | #EdUp
4 年“The language of gain influences more than the language of loss.” Such a powerful line Jeff Burstein! Well done! Another fantastic article that Jason Feifer might find interesting.