The universe is hitting me from different angles on ideas that are mashing up into a lesson. I can feel it. It is just hard to think straight on it, but first I will list out the background.
I have had conversations with a lot of people about adopting an agile mindset. For me, this is what I would refer to as the core of personal empowerment. Maybe it is only my own empowerment, however, I think that the fundamental idea of it can apply to everyone. At the core of agility is making and living by the choices we make. This goes back to Design Thinking and the tenants of Designing Your Life. When we start to live our truth and start following that spark of uniqueness that makes us who we are it makes everything else around us better. We start to contribute to the world and bring meaning to ourselves and our businesses, families, etc. This is ultimately what I have set out to do to help empower people within my organization and also if I ever get my personal development coaching services off the ground.
An agile mindset is about identifying what is valuable. When defining it as a way to empower us, it is about doing things that bring us value and pivoting away from what doesn’t. For a business, this is an important philosophy because it requires us to focus on what is valuable to the customer and avoid everything else. For my new role, I am focused on continuous improvement. Therefore, I want to focus on what provides value to customers (internal or external). I have been working between departments and today I made a critical realization regarding the business as a whole. Department A focuses on streamlining the process to eliminate lead time. Department B focuses on providing value by choosing products that they believe will benefit the customer. Both departments are doing what they believe is right by the customer. However, Department B causes Department A to not be successful at what they believe is valuable. So who is right? The tricky thing is that neither one of these departments work directly with the customer and the customer is the only person that can define value. So the departments cannot possibly know what is valuable, right? They could have had insights in the past due to issues that pointed them to potential valuable points, however, that could all be obsolete now! More on that in a little bit.
My economics class talked about Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand philosophy. Copying and Pasting from google: invisible hand, metaphor, introduced by the 18th-century Scottish philosopher and economist Adam Smith, that characterizes the mechanisms through which beneficial social and economic outcomes may arise from the accumulated self-interested actions of individuals, none of whom intends to bring about such outcomes. The high-level idea is that if everyone focuses on what they feel is right, society will reach an equilibrium point on its own. It is as if an invisible hand directs this occurrence. This is actually a Taoist idea too. Yin and Yang on their own continuously spin around causing motion. If Yin were to try to become Yang or Yang to become Yin, there would be an imbalance. This kind of philosophy is dangerous because it can lead to inaction, which Taoism is paradoxically also against. However, this makes me think of two things. One, that it is important to lead by example, and two, that in the past I felt very strongly that to succeed in a project we needed to follow certain steps. I was certain that for me if those steps were skipped it would lead to mistakes. However, another person might skip those steps and fix the mistakes later. At the end of the day, it was a wash. But, I spent more time stressing about it.
I was in a meeting with a manager that is very opinionated. I mentioned to him that an implementation of a new machine would potentially save time for his team at the tradeoff of getting rid of the work that they do today. However, the manager was against this idea. He saw it as cutting corners and if we ever decided to not use this machine (whether because it goes down or we do not have the capacity), it would cause a lot of issues. He felt this way because of previous experiences. I asked how long this caused headaches in the past and he said 3 months. My point at the time of the discussion was that 3 months vs. 9 other months out of the year could still be a beneficial trade-off. Later on, as I contemplated this, I realized that doing the additional work allows for the company to be agile. How much extra work was it really adding to the engineers? For just a few extra clicks we keep ourselves agile. It likely was worth it to keep doing it. I went back to this manager to start discussing my change of heart. However, his reason for sticking to his beliefs still did not sit right with me. He felt his way for two reasons. 1) He didn’t want to revisit things that we already finished and 2) we spent 5 years beating into everyone’s heads that they need to define things completely and correctly and he did not want to step back from that. These were two points I adamantly opposed. By becoming more agile we wouldn’t worry about revisiting things we already finished and we wouldn’t worry about being completely correct (because we never can be anyway). The manager responded to my points about flexibility by suggesting that flexibility leads to laziness. So the differing opinions from me to him is that my blind optimism causes me to believe that people can become empowered by giving them a little push. This manager follows the pragmatic viewpoint that people will resort to human nature and decide to be who they always were. Does the answer fall between these two areas? It is Taoism again. Should I put the effort I am putting forth to try to change things? Does it even matter? At the end of the day, does it just wash out because of the invisible hand? The questions do not end there.
If it was not coincidental enough for most of these things hitting me today, I also was mind blown by the concepts that flew at me from the book I am reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. This book was very slow at first, but the past few days have gotten really interesting! At the point I am in the story, the author is reclaiming past memories that he lost. It is too confusing to try and explain concisely. Either way, a professor recognizes that school teaches us to imitate. It is hard to have original thought because of school. This is a strong reason why I want to target people for personal development coaching that are transitioning from college to work. The goal is to help them recognize that they no longer need to imitate and that the answers they need are within themselves. This is the same conclusion that this professor came to in the book. He recognized a possible pattern: someone goes to school to get grades. They are not motivated to get the grades so they drop out. They go to work as a mechanic and like the work and feel satisfied. Eventually, they begin to not feel satisfied by the monotonous work and decide they would like to learn more about the theory of the work they are doing so that they might be able to improve. Now, they go back to school as a “free man” because they are motivated from the inside.
The professor experimented with his students and took away the ability to know what the grades were until the semester was over. The ambiguity caused many of the class to feel unsettled at first. Towards the middle of the semester, the A students were engaging in an open discussion about the subject leading to creative thought. The B/C students were uncomfortable and unsure of what work to submit. The D/F students barely skirted by. However, towards the end of the semester, a shift occurred where the B/C students shifted more to the A student spectrum. The D/F students stayed where they were at. This showed interesting results, until a random day. On this random day, another person asked if he was providing quality to his students. At first, he said yes. However, then he started to question how can we define quality without grades? What seemed right at first now didn’t. The goal was to get the students to look inside of themselves instead of seeking outward for the answer. Wasn’t his position to teach them? If they already knew all the answers, why were they taking the classes? Did the professor need to define an overall goal that initiates creativity? How can he do so without slipping into falling into the same issue as before? He does not want to tell people what they need to know, he wants them to identify that for themselves.
So how do we identify value? In my agile example, it seems like the rational answer is to go directly to the customer. I thought about this at length as well. However, is that feasible? Even if we found a way to get to the customer, can we trust that the customer truly knows what value is? The customer is complex in and of itself. The customer can be a machine operator, a service technician, or the finance department. Value to each of them is different. Is all of this value? A customer would want everything, so do we sit and take requirements from everyone to provide value? If so, then I worry we are moving away from an agile mentality. Agile does not seek to be perfect because it will right the course eventually anyway. By being agile we know that we can always adapt and therefore what is valuable doesn’t matter. Is this the invisible hand? All of this time spent wondering what will provide value doesn’t matter as long as we focus on improvement where and when we recognize it. Ugh, but then we loop around again because that goes against the principles of agile.
The other loop is about the empowerment aspect. I feel like most people (maybe not all) just need a little push or reframe of perspective to be more engaged and empowered at work. But ultimately that comes from within them. I cannot force or teach them what they need to know and I need to lead by example. These are things that I am aware of. However, is it pointless for me to try and go out of my way as a leader or as a personal development coach to try to guide them anyway? Am I better off helping people recognize their own self-interests for the betterment of themselves and society as a whole? Is this a large realization to see that leading by example and focusing on myself is truly the only way to make the world a better place? But if I ignore trying to make things better then I will fall to inaction, which I know I cannot do.
