When We Watch The Baton, Not The Runner...

There are so many other instances of the old world colliding with the new to explore, but I promised myself a week on this topic, so this must be the last for now. As an idea, this one certainly adds a new range of problems.

I'm a big believer in the degree to which the human mind becomes increasingly fixed over time. One way of looking at it is around the simple mechanics of how the brain works. The older we get, the more neural pathways are formed in our brains, and the more fixed those neural pathways become. As the saying goes, it's easier to learn a new language as a kid than as an adult.

Another way of looking at it is around heuristics. Heuristics are the mental shortcuts we've evolved to have as human beings, so we can react quickly to threatening situations, rather than having to stop and think through from first principles everything that happens to us each day. The more we learn, the more heuristics our brains form, and so the more time we spend instinctivly reacting to events around us rather than actually thinking them through.

Now the problem with this is that very often new approaches aren't simply about process changes, or organisational restructures. They actually require the same problems to be thought about in different ways. As the book says, what got you here won't get you there . To make things worse in this regard, thinking about things in new ways isn't necessarily simple. Sometimes, new ways of thinking require us to believe the exact opposite of what we've traditionally believed.

Take for example the idea of 'resource utilisation'. The traditional and largely majority view in businesses is that if you're paying people, they should be working. Working all the time in fact. If someone isn't 100% busy, then they're lazy and slacking off, or at the very least in need of being given more work to do.

However, in a more modern approach, we realise that people being 100% busy all of the time is actually a fantastically bad idea that leads to nothing getting done. Just as a road with too many cars on it grinds to a halt with a traffic jam, a system made up of people who are 100% utilised grinds to a halt too.

Instead what we should care about is how much work is moving through the system, even if that means parts of the system are sometimes sitting there doing nothing. Using the analogy of a relay race, we watch the baton, not the runners, for as long as our baton goes over the line before anyone else's, we win. Even if that means three of the four runners are standing there doing nothing for most of the race.

There are so many other opposites to get our heads around as we move from the old world to the new. Just look at Work In Process limits, which tell us that the way to get more done is to do less. Or quality issues, where traditionally people would drop the quality of a delivery to increase its speed, but in reality the way to speed up over the medium to longer term is to spend time increasing the quality of a delivery. I'm sure you can think of many other contrarian opposites like these too.

Now we see the problem that has faced transitions to new ways of getting stuff done for a while now. People's mindsets are pretty fixed, and will take a long time to change, if indeed they can ever be changed. To make this harder, we're not looking for people to make subtle shifts in their thinking either. We're asking them to believe the exact opposite of many things they've previously held to be unquestionably true.

I'm still not 100% on how to square this circle, but I have an idea. The lean-agile community has been great at creating games to help explain these sorts of concepts to people, but often there's too much dissonance between playing a game on a training course, and actually applying the practice to their every day lives. Without a simple way of directly applying a new concept quickly, and immediately seeing benefit from it, the new concepts will always seem 'too theoretical' and be prone to the sort of conservatism pretending to be pragmatism that we discussed earlier in the week.

True pragmatism is about applying new ideas in real life and seeing what they do before deciding whether to continue with them. Therefore it is this bridge we need to focus on building. The bridge between theory and people's lived practice on a day to day basis. Because expecting people to change their increasingly fixed mindsets to believe the exact opposite of what they've always held to be true is a potentially massive river to get across.

We're gonna need a bigger bridge.