Imagine walking into a company where everyone feels seen and heard. The manager asks about your day, the team gathers to share wins and challenges, and every voice matters. Now, picture expecting the same energy from a customer service rep who’s just clocked in feeling ignored. It doesn’t add up.
If you don’t take the time to see and hear your people—listening to their struggles, celebrating their wins, and making them feel safe to speak up—then why would they go the extra mile for your customers? They can’t give what they don’t have. When your team feels supported and valued, they can support and value your customers.
If you want your employees to be customer-obsessed, start by being obsessed with them. Treat your people like your most important customer, and they’ll treat your customers like gold.
Many managers try to increase the output of their team by getting the team to put more effort in. This has a certain logic to it, as we generally equate more “output” with more “value”, and we think input creates output.
Unfortunately, this simple understanding isn’t remotely correct.
Making more of something nobody wants to buy isn’t creating value. It’s creating clutter.
Shipping software that users hate isn’t creating value. It’s destroying it.
Not all output is good.
And by extension, not all work creates the same value.
Different Kinds of Work
In any enterprise, you can differentiate work between the work to create something new (going from 0 to 1) and the work to make the next ones (1 to N).
Depending on any number of factors, creating the next one requires varying degrees of skill.
It is in the work of going from 1 to N that we can make concrete improvements in the processes.
The first Model T assembly line lowered the time to produce the car from 12 hours to 90 minutes.
Where Ford maybe went wrong is that the same people who used to produce 1 car a day are now producing 8 cars a day, instead of producing 4 and having time to futz around in the shop and tinker on something interesting.
The tinkering, the curiosity, the creativity. That’s where you get the breakthroughs that increase not only how many of the current cars you can produce, but come up with entirely new ideas about what a car could be.
The original assembly line workers wouldn’t take the jobs, because they were boring. They had to be incentivized with dramatically increased pay. But all that extra pay could have been subsidizing doing more human forms of work, which could have created a stream of additional inventions from those same workers.
Modern knowledge workers have a combination of well-understood (and maybe boring) tasks along with creative work.
The creativity is where surprises happen, where you get the unexpected 2-, 4-, or 10-fold increase in value.
If you can systematize your toil, and reduce the time it takes, you can maximize your time doing something interesting.
If you, as a leader, get your team to minimize the toil, but then fill up every moment of a team’s space to maximum capacity, you’re choking out the source of breakthroughs. Breakthroughs that not only help produce more of what you’re doing now, but can even create the next category of product.
Amazing work requires space for inspiration to strike, and time to explore it. Help your team make that space for themselves.
How to Systematize The Known Work
Before creating or updating systems, a few questions can help focus your efforts.
Are these the right requirements?
Do you understand the requirements that exist? Are they good requirements? Do you understand the necessity of these requirements, and how they interface with the rest of the organization?
Eliminating unnecessary requirements can be like a machete, cutting through useless overgrowth. If you can eliminate useless work, all the better.
Are these steps necessary?
If you understand those requirements, what are the required steps to meeting them? Could there be a better way?
If you know the outcome you want well enough, you’ll know a better way to get there. You need to be crystal clear on the requirements.
How can we further simplify?
As we do more of this work, what’s complicated about it?
What could we untangle for ourselves?
How can we go faster?
Where is work waiting around? Wait times are almost always the source of slow completion rates.
What’s taking the most effort or coordination? Where can we eliminate unnecessary handoffs or decision-making? What’s the source of friction?
Can we automate it entirely?
Do we need people to do this task? If yes, why? What’s the value? What’s the cost to free your people to have space to create?
Empower Your Team To Be Creative And Own Their Work
Let your team create space for creativity. Being fully utilized is probably the worst thing that can happen to a team expected to produce creative output.
There needs to be a balance between intensity and relaxation. A rhythm that allows for people to occasionally even get bored enough to start pursuing curiosity.
One major insight can completely transform a company. One breakthrough can invent a new class of products.
Breakthroughs don’t happen when you’re under the gun, working as hard as you can day after day.
When teams aren’t given space to think about hard problems and do great work, they churn out unimaginative work. This work can be valuable. But it is rarely if ever a massive leap.
Empower your teams to eliminate busy work from their days and weeks, so that they can create time and space to do something amazing.
Leaders create change. They inspire others. They bring new futures into existence.
But most change efforts in organizations fail.
What are these leaders missing?
What makes people change their behavior?
It’s simple. When the way things show up for people change, their behavior changes.
Have you ever had a light bulb moment where you suddenly believed you could do something, so you started?
But most leaders don’t create that positive expectation of something good happening for their team. They often don’t even know what their team really wants, or what would make them motivated if it was part of the outcome.
If you don’t know the good things your people might want, you can’t incorporate it into the plan.
And if it’s not in the plan, they don’t have hope of attaining it.
You see, the critical ingredient in changing behaviors is ALWAYS Hope.
Hope is that positive confident expectation that you are going to get what you want.
How do people lose weight when can change your habits, and see approximately nothing happening for weeks on end? You’re hungry now, but that great body you want is months away, if ever.
How do people successfully train for marathons when they can’t even run a quarter mile on their first day out? You’re huffing and puffing like mad, and you’re not even at 1%.
If they didn’t believe they could achieve their goals, they wouldn’t start.
What gets you through the gap? Hope.
Hope is not irrational. It can’t be manufactured out of thin air that many times. Eventually reality sets in.
If you take the time to learn what your people really want, and you can help them see a path towards it through the actions you want them to take, they will be hopeful, and that hope will unleash energy and possibility.
People with real hope don’t count the costs. They don’t play by halves. They put it all out, and they push beyond what’s required or even requested.
But if you break your word, watch out.
When your people stop trusting you, they won’t have hope that they’ll get what they want. That spark will go out, and that extra energy isn’t going to come out next time.
Instead of a sparkle in their eyes, you’ll hear resigned acquiescence. “Sure, we’ll do it.”
If you want your people to change something, give them a real path towards what they want, and help them see that they can get it.
Give them real hope. And follow through. Keep your promises.
If you do that, they’ll do just about anything for you, and they’ll follow you where you want them to go after that.
You didn’t do it, but you do have some great reasons why you didn’t.
Nobody can blame you. You’re completely off the hook.
Somehow though, even with our reasons, and even though nobody can fault us, we know our relationships are not better, and we haven’t made progress.
“Great Excuses! I’m going to rely on you for even more critical tasks!”, said nobody ever.
What if there was a different way forward?
“I did not do what I said I was going to do. I will fix it by doing it now. Would that work? How else can I clean up this mess I made?”
Now, they’re going up in your estimation, because they’re still honoring what they said they’d do, and not involving you in the drama of their lives. They’re taking ownership.
Even better, they say this ahead of time “I will not be able to make my original commitment. I can do X or Y instead. Would either of those work? How can I clean this up?”
Accountability
Why don’t we hold ourselves and each other to a simple standard of “Did you do what you said you’d do?”
Because we generally think in terms of blame and consequences, instead of accountability.
Blame and guilt are constant barriers to growth.
When someone feels blamed, they get defensive, and they shut down, and they’re not accessing their own power in the moment.
When you try to shift blame away from you, you disempower yourself, because you are now saying “I could not have done anything differently.”
Maybe that’s true sometimes, but what could you learn from how things went for the future? What’s the lesson in the feedback you got from not accomplishing what you set out to accomplish?
It’s a big thing for someone to take feedback baldly, and without either apologizing or hiding, acknowledge the truth of what was said, incorporate it, and decide to move forward differently.
Ownership; Internal Commitment
Even better than accountability, however, is ownership with internal commitment.
It’s being so committed to the mission that your particular ego isn’t really what’s on your mind. It’s the fact that the work did not get done, which you are committed to, internally.
When your motivation is coming from some deep places, you don’t have to be held accountable. You are completely committed to getting the work done, and if you can’t do it, you find the people who can.
You’re not just cleaning up messes to repair trust. You’re doing it to make sure things happen, and you’re repairing trust to help the mission keep going.
If you’re committed to the mission, only results count.
In our last article, we discussed what it means to be a leader.
Being a leader means being the committed possibility of a future that otherwise wouldn’t happen. It means taking a stand for something.
“What are you talking about?”
Commitment to a Possibility
What exactly does it mean to be a committed possibility?
It simply means you act out of a commitment. You identify with the commitment. You embody the commitment. The space for the possibility of something coming to be exists in you. You see the world through the lens of that possibility. You associate things together in that space, where that new future can come into being.
In some significant way, we become what we say we are, so long as we speak with integrity and intention.
When we speak certain declarations, we change the world, because we change the world as it shows up for persons.
When I got married, I declared my fidelity. This was a self-defining and relationship-defining action, and my wife did the same. We then saw the world differently, out of the space of being married.
It didn’t happen all at once. But you come back to it. You re-commit, and deepen your understanding.
Choosing to be true to this declaration is an ongoing commitment. It shapes us every day.
In the same way, to be a leader is to take a committed stand to a future that has not yet come into being, and to live out that commitment. To be the commitment, in the world. To be the space interiorly where that reality can be fit together, and opportunities can be discovered to make it happen.
How then, do you become a commitment?
A Declaration and Integrity
Leadership is a way of being. It comes about by declaring your commitment to some new future, and then by living it out.
The strength of your leadership comes about through living that commitment, and intensifying it, and becoming more fully in integrity with it, and discovering more fully what it means to be it as you grow toward fidelity with it.
Integrity, in this sense, simply means honoring your word – your declaration – so that you exist with it fully.
This is not something that happens overnight, or even something that you ever finish doing.
It is something that comes to be in us in a mature and full way only through practice.
Your first attempts at leadership will likely be small, like a child’s first steps. Learning first to be in integrity with your commitments to yourself, before you are able to be in integrity with others, and to bring others into your vision.
But like the child, as you persist, your ability grows. Your efforts are refined through striving towards an ideal. And eventually, in a very full way, you embody the future as a firm possibility. As something that increasingly likely will come into being in the world.
If you start on the path, like a child, and persevere, your will be a leader.
But almost all of it misses the heart of what it means to be a leader, or how to become one.
What is it to be a leader? What is it like internally? How does one become a leader?
More than circumstances, leadership comes from within. But what does that even mean?
The Need to Change Directions
Let’s say I eat like crap and feel terrible. I’m in the habit of using food to make myself feel better.
The trajectory I’m on is to keep feeling bad and putting on weight.
That’s my default future. It’s my habit. My system of my life is set up to create that.
That is the future that’s written in the present.
If I want to change it, I have to do something else. But where does that come from?
The New Direction
We all know that the difference between being in shape and out of shape is exercise.
Why then do some people do it, and some don’t?
Simply speaking, to some, exercise does not appear (at least on some level) to lead to the result they want. It doesn’t occur to them as the right way. It either appears futile, or too difficult, or unlikely to succeed.
A shift is needed. A sense of possibility.
And then, the right actions must be chosen and performed.
To create that shift, we need to have a vision of the future. We need to believe it to be possible. We need to connect with reality to make the right plan to get there. And we need to act.
None of these is effective without the others.
If I’m moving in a random fashion, I don’t go anywhere in particular.
If I don’t believe it’s possible, I don’t try.
If I know what to do and believe it’s possible, but sit on my hands, it doesn’t happen.
If I’m disconnected from reality, I’m navigating with the wrong map, and I won’t get where I intend.
But once you get those things, you become the embodiment of a new future in the present. Because you are acting in ways that bring that new future into being.
That can be thought of as “being on the path”.
If you’re on the path, the new future will happen. If you’re not, it won’t.
It is in that creation of that new future from the present that we are leaders. We internally hold a new future, and that new future comes to be externally through our actions.
Being a Leader
A leader is then the space where a different future, one that wouldn’t have happened without their intentional effort, becomes in the present.
To become a leader, you must create your vision, believe it to be possible, find the right path by connecting with reality, and then walk on that path through action.
It is, in a way, taking a stand against the present way things are going.
And of course, we all recognize in “taking a stand” the essence of leadership. A commitment to something that wouldn’t be that way without us.
A leader is the future existing now in the world, as a possibility not fully realized.
If, however, you’re aware of this, and you want to improve your results instead of blaming people, there are some things you can do.
Identifying the Problem
There is only ever one bottleneck at a time. If two processes have the same pace, the current bottleneck is the upstream one. When you fix that, the next one is the bottleneck.
Adding capacity before or after the bottleneck will have no effect (or bad effects if you use it to produce more work that can’t be finished).
So it’s important to find the issue.
In knowledge work, we can do this by looking at what teams are generally complaining of having too much to do, or getting behind on their delivery dates.
If you have a ticketing system, the teams that have ever growing backlogs of projects and requests are usually a bottleneck in your process.
Now What?
Stop creating work that can’t be finished.
Prematurely starting projects that don’t have resources available to finish them is the source of your problems. It is, by definition, wasteful.
Inventory that can’t be sold won’t be as valuable when version 2 comes out from your competitors (or you) next year. Piling it up isn’t useful.
Control the release of work, and you’ve more or less won.
How do we control the release of work?
In The Goal (yes, this may be one of my favorite books), Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR) is introduced.
Drum-Buffer-Rope (DBR) is a simple method of letting the constraint control the flow of work.
The drum refers to the constraint setting the pace.
The buffer refers to the amount of work that needs to be ready at the constraint so that the constraint is never left idle. Idle time at the constraint is production time lost forever.
The rope refers to the constraint pulling work, rather than having work pushed into it. This allows the constraint to avoid the setup and teardown costs of stopping a job midway.
In knowledge work, we could identify team dependencies for work that needs to be done, and only release work when that team will have a space for it to get done.
Have you ever been in a company where everybody keeps working harder and harder, and yet everything is getting slower and more congested? And there’s always one team that seems to be the problem!
If so, you might be experiencing the Theory of Constraints in action.
I’ll never forget my talk with a tech CEO where I worked. When we started talking, I thought he got it. He talked about how much time they spent working on their process bottlenecks.
So I continued…
Me: “So if you’re producing more at a non-bottleneck, it slows down the bottleneck because they end up doing work that isn’t producing value.”
CEO: “Absolutely, I get it, I get it.”
Me: “So if we want to go faster, we actually want some people to do less work.”
CEO: “Yeah, that doesn’t work for me, I want everybody putting in 100%.”
Me: “But that… will make the overall production of the company slower and more expensive, right?”
CEO: “Yeah, but having people sitting around… that just doesn’t work for me.”
This implication of the theory of constraints go against our intuition, and sometimes our values.
But let’s investigate what happens when everyone is cranking at 100%.
What happens when everyone is working 100%?
Overproducing in non-bottlenecks does not simply create a backlog for the bottleneck, but slows down performance at the bottleneck.
What happens if I am doing exactly as much work as I can do, and the amount of work I can do is coming to me at the pace I can do it?
I am simply doing the work as it shows up. I take the work and I do it, and then it’s done. I don’t have to think too hard, I just do the work. There’s very little work management.
Mediocre stick drawings courtesy of Dall-E
But what happens if I am getting a bit more work than I can do?
Suddenly I need a system to organize the inventory of work (parts that I’ll use, work orders, etc).
The extra work, by simply being extra, has just created the need for a management system.
Hey this art is still better than what I draw…
Now I’m doing the work AND managing the work to be done.
I am already slower!
The mere fact of having too much work causes a problem.
As one bottleneck piles up, other parts of the system also get backed up! Now we need sophisticated management!
In physical space, this amounts to warehouses. That makes the problem easy to detect, and therefore avoid (if one is conscious it’s a problem).
In virtual space, it amounts to confusion and reprocessing things that have been processed to see if they’re now ready for work, or should be prioritized.
Warehouses need increasing sophistication to manage more inventory, just like knowledge work. And if that system is not in place, things get dropped. People lose track of what’s important.
When a team seems to be constantly drowning in designs and explorations and questions and requests that never gets turned into implementation, this is likely what’s happening.
Upstream teams are overproducing. Work piles up. Increasingly sophisticated management is required, which inevitably pulls team resources away from delivering work.
The entire situation would be dramatically improved by having half the company sit on their hands and do nothing.
But hey, we don’t want people just sitting around! We’re paid too much to sit around!
Usually, the source of the problem is missed, and instead of looking at systems, people look at people, and typical unproductive patterns emerge. Finger-pointing, scapegoating, etc.
All the extra work creating work to be done (that can’t be finished) is likely money gone forever. It’s knowledge work and knowledge work requires someone’s headspace to stay relevant. So it dies on the vine, and continues to exist as clutter.
This clutter overshadows the core problems, as the clutter itself becomes a problem.
This in turn, exacerbates a lack of focus.
Then you get a morale problem, and some in-fighting, and people start to get burnt out when it’s hard to see how they can possibly win.
The Team at the Bottleneck
In our warehouse example, if the person making the tables was asked, he’d say he had way too much work to do. Things are backing up.
The teams making table tops and table legs, on the other hand, have plenty of capacity. They have so much time and space they even have time to improve the efficiency of their production processes.
“We’ve increased our output by 100% over the last year, and reduced costs! We’re making more table legs and tops than ever!”
A naive management, unaware of the Theory of Constraints, might even reward them for creating so many extra parts.
This same management may even identify a problem, that not enough tables are being assembled by the Assembly team.
They may then try to figure out why, and might look at the people making the tables. Maybe the problem is the people making the tables. They’re the ones getting more and more behind, after all. Not getting further and further ahead, like our Legs and Tops teams.
The narrative that the Assembly team is having trouble, or doesn’t know what it’s doing, or isn’t prioritizing properly, is likely to occur.
But the Assembly team, until they can stop being the bottleneck, is essentially hopeless in this situation to change the narrative.
This seems terribly silly perhaps, because it is.
But this kind of thing happens in knowledge work all the time. It is because there is no visualization of flow across complex product development. The interdependencies of work are generally not well understood. The impact of scheduling exploration meetings with team members for work that won’t ever happen is not noticed.
Essentially, all the work is invisible.
Why do we work in ways that don’t work?
People don’t do what makes sense based on the situation. They do what makes sense based on how the situation occurs to them.
The laziest analysis is usually “They’re not doing a very good job” which immediately becomes “It must be because they’re not very good” or “They don’t know what they’re doing.”
While you might think that some level of intelligence would preclude you from arriving at these conclusions, you’d be wrong.
Our perceptions are informed by theory, and most of us have a theory that People produce results through their effort and dedication.
This is true, but when you have everyone in a system, that is no longer strictly true.
In systems, people produce results through the correct application in the right place of their efforts and dedication.
Not all work increases the output of the system.
Local optimizations are system-wide degradations, unless it’s optimizing the bottleneck.
If we misidentify the problem, we will waste even more effort on things that make no difference.
Rather than increased efforts, we need measurements and clarity, so that we can identify and focus on what will make the difference.
Until you can measure or at least observe results, you can’t get away from the typical dynamics of needing to look like you’re working hard.
If you could ask one question that would make the difference: How do we know when things are working?
Value is not created in business until work is completed, and work is not completed until the finished product has been sold.
A table that is not ready for sale is work in progress, and is not really valuable. It represents the inputs, but no outputs.
If you have tables that are ready to sell, but nobody is buying them, they are still inventory, which is to say, value that has been put into making tables, but cannot be extracted. It still only represents potential, but it is actually an accumulation of costs, both in work, as well as in inventory carrying costs.
How do you reduce inventory and production costs, while maximizing throughput (which is sales)?
An analogy, by way of a story, helps to illustrate.
In The Goal, at one point, the hero is leading a boy scout troop on a hike.
He keeps noticing gaps in the line of boy scouts, as parts of the troop are going faster and pulling ahead.
He notices that the trail isn’t “hiked” until the last scout passes over, and he realizes it is just like his factory. The part is not “done” until it’s sold. And he realizes that the fastest walkers have the illusion of getting a lot done, but overall, they are just creating inventory, or work in progress, which in this case is the distance between the first and last scout.
But how to fix it?
His solution is somewhat surprising. He first starts by pausing the line, keeping it in order, and then reorganizes it with the slowest in front, and fastest behind.
The line, predictably, moves at the same pace in terms of how much trail has been “hiked” because the end of the line is moving at the same pace.
One might conclude this was a pointless exercise, but in fact, the capital required for the business to create the same throughput has gone down! Work in progress, represented by the distance from front to back, is much lower, which means there is less money invested in things that can’t be sold.
The financial risk of the business is lower.
The rest of the workers are spending less energy, which also could represent the opportunity reduce labor and materials costs.
But his next realization is that the slow guy is slow because he’s carrying a lot. He’s got 60 pounds of gear in his bag.
By making it clear what the bottleneck is, he was able to put his attention on the slowest part of the process, which made a real improvement in flow, which is the amount of trail the troop could hike.
In a real business, this would translate to being able to produce more with the same amount invested as inventory.
Once he unburdened the slowest kid, the whole troop marched faster. It kept its formation tight and quickly converted trail started into trail finished.
Anytime there are multiple steps in a process, the important thing is the speed of the slowest or last finished, not the speed of the first.
Tech debt is probably the most common complaints of software developers when feature delivery starts to slow down.
It doesn’t really come up until someone starts noticing things aren’t going fast anymore.
We usually scratch the itch to go fast by taking shortcuts instead of addressing the problems as they occur, but eventually we run out of shortcuts, and things break down.
Eventually, doing anything at all requires “yak shaving”.
Yak Shaving is the last step of a series of steps that occurs when you find something you need to do. “I want to wax the car today.”
“Oops, the hose is still broken from the winter. I’ll need to buy a new one at Home Depot.”
“But Home Depot is on the other side of the Tappan Zee bridge and getting there without my EZPass is miserable because of the tolls.”
“But, wait! I could borrow my neighbor’s EZPass…”
“Bob won’t lend me his EZPass until I return the mooshi pillow my son borrowed, though.”
“And we haven’t returned it because some of the stuffing fell out and we need to get some yak hair to restuff it.”
And the next thing you know, you’re at the zoo, shaving a yak, all so you can wax your car.
Mindset -> Practices -> Results
Technical debt is not strictly-speaking bad. Like anything else, it is a decision we can make.
When it is used consciously and strategically, it can capitalize on opportunities in the rest of the business.
However, sloppy thinking leads to tech debt being the norm. We don’t think in second-order effects, or pay the cost of deferred decisions or deferred work (i.e. by following up with integrity).
Teams love being firefighters and heroes. This means they are eager to say yes, and get things done as quickly as possible. The problem is that this often comes at the cost of neglecting the conditions that allow for work to be done quickly, which leads to clutter and entanglements, and eventually no shortcuts are left.
At that point, people start complaining about “tech debt” like it’s something that wasn’t present until just now and wasn’t a result of what they’ve been doing for the last 6 month.
Relentless high-quality delivery at a sustainable pace is attainable, even at an accelerating pace.
But instead of that, we rush from one thing to the next, and let errors accumulate.
To be clear, I am not talking about going fast, or being focused, but rushing – the stress-fueled urgency that creates bad decisions that take more time to sort out later. Bad decisions lead to more rushing.
Slow it down. Break it into pieces. Continuously make progress on improving things. Look for insights gained through a deeper engagement. That’s where you get breakthroughs in productivity.
Rushing makes us stupid, which slows us down. Slowing down lets you go deeper, which makes you smarter, which speeds you up.
If we want an agile codebase ready for any feature you throw at it (the Result), we need teams that continuously improve things (the Practice) which means we need a mindset.
What mindset creates the practice of Continuous Improvement?
Ownership (I take responsibility for outcomes), Impeccability (I create quality at every level of work) and Presence (I am here now, not worrying about what might happen) are some mindsets that help.
A team that owns the outcomes, sees nothing as worth doing poorly (while nonetheless knowing when a thing needs to be sacrificed for a greater good), and can calmly sit in any situation, no matter how bad it is, and create the best response given what’s happening – that’s a team that will get amazing results.
As a leader, you can give your teams this by making a request of them and holding a standard for yourself.
You can be relaxed and ready for anything, do your job well, and take responsibility for what goes wrong. You can give all the credit away, and take full responsibility. And you can do this while allowing your team to also take full responsibility.
As teams create these mindsets, they start to create more and more space for new possibilities. More gets done with less effort. Outcomes happen easily and fluidly.
When technical debt is simply handled as a matter of course because of who the team members choose to be, you don’t need a special initiative to handle it. People just take care of it. It is not negotiated. It is not cajoled out of them. They don’t have to make a special project.
When a team creates the right mindset, the practices and results naturally follow.
