Hanzatsu

Anyone who has been following the discussions in the Lean Startup community has seen the image below.  It was created by Eric Ries and does a great job visualizing the value generation loop that he is most concerned with: Build -> Measure -> Learn.  I like it a lot, in part because it’s so clear and simple, and in part because it emphasizes the critical importance of learning (which I like to think of as “capability development”) as a deliverable from knowledge work.

Of course, we all bring our own interests, biases, and past experiences to this Agile journey, and because of my work at BrainStore, I have a strong interest in the processes used for and around idea generation.  Based on the experience that we’ve gained during the last years, I can say with some confidence that the flow as illustrated above from learning to ideas to building is a bit lengthier and bumpier than it might appear.

In fact, in thinking about the three deliverables in the diagram, I can tell you that lots of companies are great at executing, pretty good at generating data, and just plain terrible at formulating ideas quickly and systematically.

With this in mind, I challenged myself to expand on Eric’s diagram in a way that incorporates our observations about what it takes to decrease cycle time for that space between (emergent) strategy and execution. The  principles on the left side of the diagram will be obvious to anyone who has studied lean thinking, but were totally mysterious to me until I attended the Lean Software and Systems Conference in Atlanta last week. Many thanks to the wise and generous folks from that group for their help, insights, and general warmth! And obviously, the notion of the pivot point comes directly from the Lean Startup community.

You’ll notice that the words “code”, “product”, and “build” are not used in my version. The reason for this is that I feel a strong urge to work towards a common model that applies not just to tech startups but to any organization that is trying to solve a problem or create something new under conditions (as Eric says) of extreme uncertainty. For example, internal process improvements at large companies are just as challenging and urgent and uncertain as any startup situation, so we need to work as hard as we can to find approaches that fit there too.

One final point. At BrainStore, we’ve spent a lot of time trying to understand how speed up the flow from strategy to customer needs to idea generation to risk balancing, and how to involve key stakeholders in all aspects of that process.  Since (at least not to my knowledge) these topics are not very common in the lean/agile literature, I’d be happy to go into any of this material in greater depth.  Feel free to leave a comment or email me directly. And if you know of resources that go in this direction, please share them!