Simply copying what someone else is doing may be functional in child development but is a poor way to improve organisations. The problem is that practices don’t translate well between contexts. But it’s easy to be seduced by what you see, the practices, and forget about what you don’t see. We need to look beyond the practices. Improvement must be based on agreed outcomes, principles, and fundamental needs. Practices should be pulled in mindfully and tweaked to fit the local context. Don’t adopt – adapt!
At one of the major banks in Sweden, they had spent years on a big Lean change programme. This was before my time at the bank. I had heard about it, as in “the management consultants came in and told us how to work”, but saw no sign of it. Until one day, when I found a paper on a desk which mentioned Lean. I got interested and picked it up. After some reading I realised this was about 5S, which I knew a bit about from reading books on Lean Software Development.
5S is a Lean practice. The five ‘S’ in English is for Sort, Set in order, Shine, Standardize and Sustain. It is a system of practices invented and used in Toyota manufacturing to maintain cleanliness and order at the work stations. Every tool and materials in its place is important in a factory. It increases productivity by reducing the time to find a tool and it reduces risk of injury, for example by using the wrong tool. This makes sense.
On the other hand, in an office… What would even 5S mean in an office? I realised that what they meant were things like keeping the desk clean and sorting each document into the correct binder. Really? Did a bank really need a Lean transformation to tell them that? As far as I know, people working in banks are already quite skilled in paperwork. How valuable was it for the bank officers to learn about 5S? I believe they must have thought it pretty useless and maybe even quite a bit insulting.
That’s an example of what happens when we mindlessly translate a practice from one setting to another. A valuable practice in one setting makes less sense in another.
We often overestimate the importance of what we see. In his book Thinking Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman called this bias WYSIATI, What You See Is All There Is. It’s hard to see what’s not there. You need to know it should be there to catch it. When we’re talking about ways of working, this bias leads us to put too much focus on roles, processes, and practices.
But practices is just what we do – not how we think about it. A layperson walking by a team having a daily standup may conclude: “Ah, that’s one of these agile team I hear about”. The agile expert will tell you that the observation of a standup contains almost no information at all around the agility of the team. It’s quite possible to have a daily standup in a manner more consistent with a command-and-control style of management and without fulfilling any of its intended purposes. Unless the practice is informed by agile principles, guided by agile values and an agile mindset, it won’t be valuable to the team.
That’s why we get superficial “adoptions” or “implementations” of the latest management fad. Teams start working according to given instructions, not really understanding why. What’s the purpose? After a while it becomes rote. The practices become theater, gestures performed on a stage. In that situations, trust is hurt. Teams become less willing to take ownership and less engaged in improvement. Repeat with the next fad. Perhaps we can now start to see one underlying reason for the fact that only 15 % of the global workforce are actively engaged at work[1].
I think we need to move away from the copying and the adoption. Instead we should discover people’s needs and agree on a shared set of outcomes to centre the work. We may then select guiding principles on which teams and individuals can base their practices. By basing change on principles, the practices used can be adapted to each team and situation. This enables teams to take ownership of how they work, shape suitable ways of working, and stay engaged in improvement.
For example, imagine our organisation values quality. One principle we could have is Stop dependence on mass testing and build quality into the development process (from Deming). To one development team, this could mean an experiment to create a better test coverage in a certain, bug-ridden part of the codebase. To another team, with solid test-driven practices, this could mean experimenting with mob programming. Or it could mean interweaving usability testing in the deploy pipeline, regular code reviews, contract testing or including a test specialist in the startup meeting of every initiative. The possibilities are many, but the goal and the underlying principle are the same.
There are no “best practices” in complex situations. The exact practices you use are not important. Most of the time, it doesn’t matter much, which ones you choose, as long as you follow the principles, live the values, and move towards agreed outcomes. The practices won’t make you agile or lean. You need to look beyond the visible.
[1] Source: 12 Employee Engagement Statistics You Need To Know In 2020
Previous posts in the series on principles of organisational development:
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