Simplification highlights how leaders can manage the conditions in which people are operating, so solving problems—particularly complex ones—is quicker, easier, and more productive. Simplification moves people in the direction of the winning zone via the following: •Easier experiments: Simplification creates opportunities to solve smaller problems;

As a leader, this should make you ask the following questions: When you create plans, do you treat them as “finished,” something ready for performance, for execution in operation? Do you expect a “Yes, Admiral” reply? Or, do you treat plans as your first, best guess of what to do, why to do it, and how to get it done? Do you invite challenges to al

Slowification helps us create better approaches to situations instead of repeatedly exercising old habits and routines. A common objection to slowification is that maintaining operational tempo is the highest, even overwhelming, priority. But, as is warned in Ecclesiastes 10:10, “If the ax becomes dull and he has not whetted the edge, he must exert

As a leader, this should make you ask the following questions: When you create plans, do you treat them as “finished,” something ready for performance, for execution in operation? Do you expect a “Yes, Admiral” reply? Or, do you treat plans as your first, best guess of what to do, why to do it, and how to get it done? Do you invite challenges to al

actual practice at Toyota, its best suppliers, and those organizations that have been high-fidelity learners—also employs all three mechanisms. There’s process simplification by way of linearization. This is not just for assembly line operations but, in the extreme, all processes, such as onboarding of new employees, ramp-up production in new produ

What we have found is that in winning organizations, leaders are deliberate about ensuring that Layer 3 (social circuitry) is supportive of people’s efforts in solving Layer 1 (technical object) and Layer 2 (tools) problems. Their role is less supervisory, in the characterized fashion of directive leadership or command and control (e.g., “I say; yo

Lean startup methodologies, as defined by Steve Blank and Eric Ries, are also an alternative to waterfall-like approaches to business planning. There are simply too many untested assumptions in product development and customer discovery to have a reasonable prediction of features, including customer ability and willingness to pay, readiness of supp

It was mathematically proven over fifty years ago that it is often impossible to compute a correct and optimal scheduling solution in finite time for schedules of any significant size.§

Each year, it took longer and longer to ship features to customers, and the risk of even small changes causing major problems kept growing. In 1998, developers could make changes and deploy them immediately. By 2004, pushing code changes into production required hours, even days, to be deployed.39 Teams were no longer able to solve Layer 1 problems