Are you ready to transform your business? Ready to transform your thinking? Unleash your potential?
This weekend, dive into these crucial Lean Thinking insights. Here are the key highlights that will help you revolutionise your operations,
1. Stop Optimising the Fringes:
Focus your efforts on creating time for deep thinking 💭
YouTube productivity gurus offer useful strategies, tools, and workflows to enhance productivity and accomplish more tasks. They can assist in speeding up the completion of to-do lists, eliminating unnecessary actions, and optimizing one’s entire day. However, they focus mainly on peripheral aspects.
To produce our best work, it’s important to have focused moments that allow for deep thinking. These moments could be as short as 45 minutes or as long as a rare afternoon slot, but they are crucial for making meaningful changes for ourselves and our organizations. During these moments, we might discuss our team’s strategy for upcoming months, analyse business results to determine our next focus area or create a presentation that we’re genuinely proud of.
It is important to optimize the fringes when possible, but the goal should be to create more time for deep thinking rather than just adding more fringe activities to your schedule.
2. Creating Tidal Waves:
Why Leaders Need to be More Aware!
YouTube productivity gurus offer useful strategies, tools, and workflows to enhance productivity and accomplish more tasks. They can assist in speeding up the completion of to-do lists, eliminating unnecessary actions, and optimizing one’s entire day. However, they focus mainly on peripheral aspects.
To produce our best work, it’s important to have focused moments that allow for deep thinking. These moments could be as short as 45 minutes or as long as a rare afternoon slot, but they are crucial for making meaningful changes for ourselves and our organizations. During these moments, we might discuss our team’s strategy for upcoming months, analyse business results to determine our next focus area or create a presentation that we’re genuinely proud of.
It is important to optimize the fringes when possible, but the goal should be to create more time for deep thinking rather than just adding more fringe activities to your schedule.
3: Why Brainstorming Sessions Deliver Poor Results:
Discover the surprising truth and learn more effective tactics💡!
During a brainstorming session, it is common for ideas as they are shared to be reviewed, evaluated, and even criticized or overruled by a senior person. This will be experienced by everyone at some point in their careers. We will hear things like “We have tried that before!”, “That won’t work!”, “Management won´t like that idea!”, “It will cost too much!”, “That´s not their job!”.
This is the best way to kill a brainstorming session!
If you want brainstorming sessions to work, you must separate the idea generation and the idea evaluation. Here is our 3 phase guide to successful brainstorming sessions:
Start by setting the scene for the session, stating the problem before allowing the team to brainstorm silently. Please encourage them to steal other ideas, piggyback on other people’s ideas, expand on other people’s ideas and let it keep going! But don’t talk, evaluate, or comment on anyone’s ideas.
Next, group the ideas. Evaluation is not yet allowed. You can allow questions that help clarify the idea without criticism or commentary. Just get the team to work at grouping the ideas around themes. We call this the affinity diagram, but by grouping the ideas, you can quickly identify key themes more important than others (simply by the volume of ideas if nothing else.
Once they are grouped, now begin the discussion and evaluation. This can begin by removing or combining duplicated ideas. It can be done by allowing people to vote on the ideas raised or allowing each person to select 3 of their favourite ideas and present their thinking behind selecting the idea. You can also begin prioritising the ideas based on a simple matrix (effort vs payback) or a more complex evaluation process. But avoid the HiPPO (Highest Paid Persons Opinion) using some voting or evaluation matrix.
4: Start Small to Go Fast
Gain new perspectives on building change across organisations, from incremental steps to large-scale transformations
Start small if you or your organisation is serious about kicking off a Transformation program using the Lean concepts and principles! Transformation programs fail for two key principle reasons. First is the speed, or the lack of speed, to be more precise. Secondly, there is a lack of buy-in at the right levels within the organisation to support the focus and dedication needed.
This is why we always recommend starting small to create momentum. Start by creating a short-term impact within 90 days. The focused improvement must be big enough so everyone can see and feel the improvement. The aim is to show a big change to build momentum within a tightly focused improvement project.
If you want to train people in Lean Six Sigma, don’t plan to train 300 people and spend an eternity getting budget approval and submitting business justification. Train 12 of your team and focus on delivering real projects within 3 to 6 months. The results will justify scaling, and the business leaders will start requesting places on the next course for their team members.
5: Invest in Your Learning
Master problem-solving and critical thinking skills, vital for ensuring your organisation’s future success
Investing in problem-solving and critical thinking skills is essential for any organisation that wants to remain competitive.
As author and entrepreneur Seth Godin once said, “The only sustainable competitive advantage is the ability to learn faster than your competitors.”
Investing in problem-solving and critical thinking skills allows an organisation to stay ahead of the competition by quickly identifying opportunities, developing innovative solutions, and making better decisions. It’s also key for ensuring organisational resilience during change or crisis. Harvard Business Review states, “Organizations must invest deeply in developing their collective intelligence if they are going to be able to adapt rapidly enough.”
https://hbr.org/2019/05/the-power-of-collective-intelligence
