Change and Kanbans

So I've been jumping in on this audible book called the Phoenix Project.

It's been pretty interesting, actually, it's written about it in a large company that's not working.

And then the breakthroughs that they have when they start using combat.

So the books are written I think 2015.

And the methodology, I believe, comes from Toyota processes.

So they're building the cars.

And they're like, how do we keep this whole thing working? Well, and it's really interesting because as a doctor, I've never come across any of this kind of idea of like throughput.

It's not something that really, we've had to think about, particularly in medicine, at least at a general practice level, perhaps, in, in medicine, where there's lots of moving parts, surgeries, or ICUs.

Thought has actually gone into this, but for general practice, because it's basically one patient, one doctor, and just seeing the next next, next, next, next, next, I am the major constraint, I am the limiting factor.

And it's pretty difficult, to think of the actual medicine, but perhaps there's some wins around or all of the time where I am looking for things or trying to get saw resources stocked with paper wares this way that actually takes away from the consulting.

And let's say that it happens three times during the day, and it takes four minutes, 12 minutes, it's roughly one consultation per day.

Last, because we just don't think this way.

But it has been interesting for me to look at the evolution of combat and through this book, and just the major breakthroughs as they link it and development to manufacturing processes.

And as they do that suddenly being able to see the whole system's being able to see the whole business objectives, being able to eliminate things because they don't make sense from a systems point of view, the insight about where is the limiting factor, and then management by identifying all of the projects, and then scaling back out to look at the systems that are in play, which are designed to create a specific result.

And so cameras might be like, Wow, these are the greatest things of all time.

But there is a conflicting factor that is showing up.

I just read an article and it was written in 2011, about the exponential rate of change.

Now thinking back to 2010 2011.

The IT world looks vastly different.

Like really the pixels haven't arrived, the design flows the evolution, I don't know, Instagram is what just hitting maybe a billion people.

There is no tick-tock, I don't know where Snapchat is.

It was really interesting.

Because around that article, there was also this video of Moore's Law and watching the prediction of the number of transistors.

And then watching the evolution of the actual processes pretty much match that whether that's still continuing or not, I don't know, in the end, I didn't really recognize many of the actual names of the processes they're all made must be like server-level stuff or stuff.

But there's a lot, a lot of transistors on these chips.

So the interesting concept is that some things in our world are not changing very much that things like logistics of transport.

Yes, they've been impacted by COVID.

But essentially, the way that we move large amounts of goods either in the air or by sea, or by land, these have not changed much.

But what has been changing is ideas.

And the way that we do things, the way that ideas spread, Amazon Prime just got to Australia maybe six or nine months ago, and I'd already been exposed to Amazon Prime in the States.

I'm like, Man, you guys can do this.

How are you logistically pulling this off? And they're like, Yeah, in the cities, it's like same day, order, boom, boom, like that.

Logistics is pretty phenomenal, driven by Amazon's back-end architecture, like their ability to move the right things to the right people.

And one of the podcasts in the past I was joking around that.

Australia really should have got Amazon to distribute the vaccination protocols for COVID That would have done a hell of a lot better job than what's actually been done, which has been relatively atrocious if you're not aware of stray has been very fortunate.

Not very many cases at all.

But that allowed for pretty much an extremely poor delivery of vaccinations.

You can't there are only two types AstraZeneca and Pfizer.

There's been all sorts of miscommunications and general difficulties that ended up the prime minister just going to go ask your GP which really, you know, as a GP, I'm like, Dude, what the hell? Why don't you sort out your own problems instead of dumping them on us?

But all of this idea change means that coming back to combat, you've got to look at what is the limitation of combat? Well remember that it came from the Toyota Production Line, think of that production line of cars coming along.

And each of these robots or these people is doing a specific step.

And then the combat tracks the movement of work.

But what is constant in that system.

And if you think about it, what's constant is the work is pretty constant, like the materials are coming in, and the robot moves that same thing, it just does that same thing, same thing, same thing, same thing.

And so combat is great, as long as the work doesn't change.

But I don't know about you, but in my life stuff keeps changing, like subtle changes, big changes, Apple coming in, with iOS 14.

And saying, right, we're going to opt you out of all pixel tracking.

And so marketers that have grown up in that pixel world are like, Well, what do we do now, you mean, I can't track someone via their app, by their, by their movements only by their actions only.

And so they're struggling and those who've been in the game for a long time, like, great, we're back to traditional internet marketing, which is the most hilarious thing.

I mean, even the godfather of internet marketing, Frank Kern, I think started in 99.

So he's around 23 years now.

But of course, internet years, if you go back to 99, I mean, geez, there it was, it was phenomenal.

I mean, it's like the Wild West back then.

Now the technology has advanced incredibly far.

And in this, what I'm what I'm getting to is the campaigns work when the work doesn't change.

But if the work is changing, and things change all the time, and technology changes and the way that things are done, changes, and optimizations occur and want to do it this way, want to move that there, then basically, you're subbing in and out machines all the time.

And so that might will mess up how you do it like them, if you've got the operating instruction for the old machine, but someone brought in the new machine, and the operating manual doesn't match that all that new machine, you're going to have problems, you're going to have troubleshooting problems, it's not going to be up to date, you might have to solve problems all the time.

So campaigns are awesome, as long as you don't change the production line all the time.

And whether that is in a physical sense, like Toyota, or whether that's in a relatively stable environment, in work.

But as soon as you're moving to a place where things are moving fast, where things are changing, where there's innovation by competitors, and you have to evolve, where you have to be able to take feedback and change things.

You're like, Hey, this is coming in.

I was reaching out to a company and the guy was sick.

Well, He had to rethink whether He was sick or whether his kids were sick.

But He wasn't in for like, a day, maybe two days.

And so his email didn't get answered.

But his email was the inbound marketing emails, like, that's who I was writing to and say, Hey, dude, I found this article.

It's really awesome.

It references this new book that you've got, can I get a copy? And nothing happened for two days.

And while that may not seem like a big thing, this is not a one-man company.

This isn't a 10 person company.

They got 70 staff, and it's like, okay, so how come your inbound marketing email, which was assigned to someone wasn't covered when somebody went on leave when He wasn't available? So while it got picked up today, no big deal.

You know, it's interesting, because it speaks about how things are done across the board.

That how you do one thing is how you do everything.

And the fact that there was no backup for that.

You might say, you know, not not a big deal, but it was interesting to experience it.

I've certainly done this for me, I just haven't responded.

And it sucks to be on the other side of my comment, I do not want to have that experience when someone's like, hey, because it's that first experience.

Now, this is a systems problem.

It's like, Hey, I'm sick, HR should know great, that job is not covered.

What needs to be covered? What work does that work? Or do oh, well, they're monitoring inbound emails.

So who we're going to deploy to cover that system, while they're not available? This is systems thinking, and this is the capacity to evolve the as different people come in, like who's on that? Even being able to see what everyone's working on is actually a critical step like that's the whole purpose of care man at some level is to be able to see the whole system.

So what do you take from this? Well, the lesson that I want you to be appreciative of is that you have to assess how much your instructions for the work are changing.

Because if you're using a campaign in an environment that continually changes as well, either you better be forcing your team to be rigorous in their use of the instructions or you better make it natural.

If you're interested in making the instructions, your processes natural to us, then I want you to head over to systemio.dev gone check out the training that I put together and learn how you can begin to have this experience of having your team naturally use the instructions.

Why? Because it's easier.

It makes their life better.

They can get through more work quickly.

They know what's going on.

They have natural optics arise naturally if you set it up in a particular way.

Alright, that's all I got for you say, I hope you enjoyed today's episode.

I certainly enjoyed producing and for you as we continue to explore the power of systems to create results.

See you again tomorrow.