Month: October 2024

He listens well who takes notes. – Dante Alighieri

Tuesday, 8.18pm

Sheffield, U.K.

This is the third post as I work through ideas in John Bicheno’s “The lean toolbox for service systems”.

And the idea in this post is a particularly big one.

What do you need to do when you first encounter a system?

You need to understand it.

Let’s unpack that.

My 1,708 page “Concise” Oxford dictionary defines “understand” as perceive the intended meaning of words / the significance, explanation or cause of.

“Perceive” is the important one there – and it in turn means to “become aware of or conscious of”.

You have to learn to see what is there, not what you think is there, or what you want to be there, but what is actually there.

You have to enter a situation with what the Zen folk call beginner’s mind.

Or perhaps even, empty mind.

The problem with knowing even a little about something is that you are tempted to go in with assumptions about what is wrong with the system and what needs to be done to fix it.

Watch people the next time something comes up that’s an issue – see how quickly they jump to offering solutions.

What they find hard to do is take the time to understand what is going on.

Bicheno refers to this as the “check” phase and points to John Seddon’s six stages of check as being vitally important.

These stages are:

1. Understand the purpose of the system.
2. Understand demand.
3. Understand the capability of the system.
4. Understand flow.
5. Understand system conditions.
6. Understand management thinking.

I want to focus on number 2 in this post.

Seddon says that you don’t ask for requirements, instead listen for demands that your clients place on the system.

This is a big shift in emphasis, in case you weren’t noticing.

Never ask someone what they want. Instead, listen for what they need.

There are a number of techniques out there which are supposed to help you understand how you find product market fit.

Most of them are based on asking – complete a survey, answer these questions, participate in a focus group.

Listening requires you to be open to the possibility that what you have to sell is not what the customer is interested in – and you’ll never find that out if you insist on bringing up what you do.

How do you listen better?

That’s a big topic in itself, but let me tell you how I do it.

I take Rich Notes.

What are those, you ask?

Well, hopefully in the next year or so I’ll be able to point you to a paper that introduces this to the world but for now, Rich Notes are digital notes that I take during conversations.

I start with a blank page – literally beginner’s mind – and we talk about the situation and I take notes.

The notes are non-linear and help me explore and understand the situation, seeing it from the points of view expressed by the participants in the meeting.

When we have finished talking I know more about the situation.

In fact, we all know more about the situation and are usually starting to converge – come to a consensus on what needs to be done to improve the situation.

That’s quite a good place to be – we understand what to do next.

We’ll pick up what that means in the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

A satisfied customer is the best business strategy of all. – Michael LeBoeuf

In my last post we talked about “purpose” in a service firm and John Bicheno’s view that “the common purpose of everyone, top to bottom, is to improve the experience of the customer.”

Let’s start with this idea – that we are all working to improve the customer’s experience – how do we do that?

We improve their experience by delivering value.

But what does that mean?

I like Warren Buffett’s definition that “Price is what you pay, value is what you get.”

Value is a tricky thing to pin down – you know it when you see it and you know what it isn’t.

Value is an emergent property – it is created when you do things right. Things that the customer needs you to do.

As you know from the last post, this series is about reading the “The Lean Toolbox For Service Systems”.

One of the concepts in there is that of the value stream.

The value stream is where the customer gets value.

I find this hard to visualise – what is this stream? Is the customer dipping into it somehow? What are we trying to say here?

I think the reason we talk about streams is because the idea of flow is a big thing in lean – so I might come back to that.

But at this point, I think a more useful way to view how the customer gets value is thinking of value as emerging from carrying out a set of activities.

In other words, services are activities that provide value to a customer, rather than things that they get or use.

If I run a dry cleaning business, for example, value is created when the customer drops off dirty clothes and gets them back clean.

There are a certain number of activities we carry out in businesses.

1. Manufacturing or construction.
2. Field services or repair such a break-fix (the boiler is down, please fix it).
3. Runner activities – the things we do every day.
4. Repeater activities – regular or semi-regular tasks
5. Stranger activities – things out of the ordinary, non-routine.
6. Waste activities.

The ideas about customer experience, value, and activities are captured in the top part of the image above.

Let’s look briefly at the nature of the organisation that delivers this value.

In a service firm, the front line is closest to the customer.

When you buy a car, you’re unlikely to meet the person that finished your car door.

But you will have an interaction with the person that serves you your order at a takeaway counter.

People often think of the front line as being at the bottom of the pile – our lowest paid and most junior staff.

We should really invert this idea and see the front line as the most important people in the business when it comes to customer value.

However, it’s an inverted pyramid and their ability to serve the customer depends on how they are supported by management.

Ideally, everyone in the business will think about how to support the front line directly and indirectly.

They will be customer focused.

Often, the politics of work means that everyone is focused on what their bosses want, and end up looking away from the customer and inwards down the pyramid.

They are corporate focused.

It will not surprise you to learn that every service organisation, big and small, is bumbling its way towards figuring out how to make this structure work.

So, this is what’s happening. How can you make things better?

The first step is to understand what’s going in.

We’ll talk about how to do that in the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh

Saturday, 7.36am

Sheffield, U.K.

I sit astride life like a bad rider on a horse. I only owe it to the horse’s good nature that I am not thrown off at this very moment. – Ludwig Wittgenstein

I realised recently that I need to do some more reading.

So I’m going to do a post series where I work through John Bicheno’s “The lean toolbox for service systems”.

I’m trying to understand the core elements that help us create better services for those we work with.

I’m also watching, for the nth time, “The Good Place”, which is where the title for the post comes from.

I want to explore this idea of service as something we do for others, something valuable rather than extractive.

What does good service look like?

In Bicheno’s book, we start with the big picture, zooming out and taking a systems level look at what is going on.

But what does that mean?

When trying to understand anything – an entity, a service, we start by asking “What is its purpose?”.

This is a surprisingly hard question to answer because it depends on who answers the question.

Let’s say you run a business offering consulting services, how might the members of your team answer this question?

With my technical head on, the purpose might be to carry out a series of complicated activities quickly and efficiently.

From my customer’s perspective, the purpose of the service might be to meet the requirements set out by the board.

From my boss’s perspective, the purpose might be to maintain a gross margin of 60%.

Narrow points of view lead to narrow definitions.

But what really matters in a service model is the customer.

Bicheno says that “the common purpose of everyone, top to bottom, is to improve the experience of the customer.”

That’s what the rest of the book is about.

See you in the next post.

Cheers,

Karthik Suresh