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Every evening, I come back home, my 8 year old son shows me something which is an engineering marvel for him. He removes component from his other toys, does a mix and match and creates a new "bey blade". He creates a new assembly every day and peacefully sleeps with a sense of achievement on his face. His energy and passion to create new “innovations” is always compensated with a description and details of how today’s model is better than yesterday’s model (higher business value). He, also as a customer is very happy with his job and enjoys his success. I get a feeling that he sees infinite returns with zero investment every day.

I always wonder, how come he can do such quick prototypes and deliver great results and why can’t organizations do the same. I always constrained myself saying that it was the lack of complexity and organization politics that will enable him unless until I realized that this has greater inner meaning than mere politics.

Lean product and process development is a seminal book with immense knowledge that was collected by Allen C Ward. Allen explains that the way how Toyota develops its product. Every car developed by Toyota is a commercial success with higher quality, lesser cost and in least duration of time. I see the same results with my son. After reading Allen’s books and blogs on Lean product development, it was very clear to me that these three factors lead to my son’s remarkable success everyday.

1)     Management and Engineering are the same: My son is the one who strategizes the new model, creates a new idea, gets the various raw materials and engineers it. This enables him to change strategy quickly as engineering gives him an ability to pivot or persevere. The biggest advantage he has is that the there is no un-wanted hand offs as waste in taking these decisions. The control to make decisions is decentralized to the place where the Information is!! I see in various corporates the Management and Engineering as two different arms of the organization. The teams who takes the strategic decisions have least knowledge of the product development. They rely on reports and communication and we know how information leaks as it moves across various hands or sometimes it is flawed to keep certain people happy.

2)     Constant Interaction with Nature is learning. If we look at the works done by great scientists like Ramanujam, Sir C V Raman, Newton or Edison, a common pattern emerges. They have done multiple experiments to prove their hypothesis. These experiments were a constant interaction with the nature leading to profound innovations. They did experiments to kill their own design which gives birth to a better design. At the end when they failed to kill their own design there emerged a solution that worked and a hypothesis was proved. My son does the same thing. He gets a few toys, breaks them and creates a new hypothesis. He mixes and matches and quickly test if it works. He interacts with the product (validates) which I think is the constant interaction with nature. This is what we call as Set based engineering in Lean.  I see in various teams, there are no alternates thought. There is one plan and only one design and we have to make the design work. There is “no time” to think alternatives. The cost of failure is high and so is the probability of the success in the experiment.

3)     Everything is fractal system, systems thinking : Nature scales itself as fractals. Whether it is flower, leaf or any natural scaling product, it is a fractal. The smallest pat of the system is in align with the whole product. There is alignment structurally across. Every small object my son works with, he will try to fit such that he can use the bay blade and enjoy. He cuts the small pieces and sticks them with gum, if he does not see alignment structurally and functionally. I see organizations are so much siloes that each of them have separate goals never aligned to the organization. No matter what ever we do at a lower level, if there is a silo structure, there shall be no alignment and in such a case, alignment is impossible. Too much of scatter in sharing information, hiding information and hence there is no creation of usable knowledge

Its’ time we stop thinking of politics, self centric-goals and start thinking of customers and value delivery. You can never expect a human body to be stably working if the heart takes a day off for a vacation..

Let me know your thoughts..