Category: Innovation

The 5S method is a way to organise work spaces in manufacturing – and is a core part of the concept of lean.

It uses 5 Japanese words: seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu and shitsuke. They can be translated as sort, set in order, shine, standardise and sustain.

It’s easy to see that having an organised workspace makes a difference in physical work.

But what about knowledge work? Can it be used there as well?

Bradley Staats, David Brunner and David Upton looked at whether lean principles could be embedded into a software company.

Staats and Upton write in the Harvard Business Review that lean projects don’t necessarily produce better quality work but do come in on time and under budget.

Knowledge work has specific aspects that make it different from manufacturing, such as uncertainty over the tasks that need doing, the fact that a lot of knowledge may be inside people’s heads as tacit understanding and that how things are done may change during the projects as requirements evolve.

In manufacturing, we usually know what we need to do, how to do it and in what order we should do it.

An assembly line designed to make cars doesn’t usually end up producing pizzas. But that seems to happen quite often in knowledge work.

So, how might we apply 5S in knowledge work?

Sort is all about removing obstacles. It means getting rid of piles of paper, books that we are never going to read and clutter that gets in the way.

The things that are in front of us or on our desks should be the things that we use every day. Everything else should either be discarded or be put somewhere where we can get them when we need them.

Set in order is then about arranging things in the way that makes it most efficient for us to use them.

For example, if you are right handed and your office phone is on your right side, the chances are that you’ll pick up the phone in your right hand, and then move it to your left to take a note.

When you put the phone down, it will probably introduce a kink into the cord – and that’s why so many office phones have such twisted wires.

Putting the phone on the left should sort this out.

Shine is about keeping our desks and workspaces clean.

Standardise is about doing things in a particular way – that’s crucial in manufacturing so that variation is minimised and everything comes out the same.

In knowledge work this is sometimes taken to mean that everything should be documented and made explicit so that people can follow a set of instructions and do things.

This is something I disagree with. If you can make something into a procedure then it should also be possible to automate it and remove the human element.

Instead, standardise in the context of knowledge work should be more about getting ourselves in the right frame of mind to do creative and innovative work.

We should aim to set ourselves up to get into flow with what we are doing, so standardisation should really mean things like checking email at set times, doing timed pieces of work, creating spaces for deep work without interruption and so on.

Finally sustain is about what we do every day.

Because knowledge work is so intangible, it’s easy to get bogged down in day-to-day firefighting and forget that we also need to innovate and create.

And that takes time and energy.

Which we might be able to create if we use the 5S method to address the things around us getting in the way and grabbing our attention.

What should we do when we’re trying to start something new – whether it’s a new product line within an existing business or a startup dedicated to the idea?

All too often, we can come up with ideas for products and services and go quite far down the track of designing and creating them before finding out that the market isn’t that interested.

Alexander Osterwalder came up with the Business Model Canvas – a way to model a business using a one page framework.

This was much simpler than writing a 50-page business plan, and was enthusiastically adopted by the startup community.

A variant of the model by Ash Maurya is the Lean Canvas.

While the Business Model Canvas is designed to address all aspects of a business, the Lean Canvas focuses specifically on new product development.

The Lean Canvas retains five components of the Business Model Canvas:

• Value proposition: What does the customer get?
• Customer segments: Who is going to want this product?
• Channels: How are we going to get to speak to them?
• Revenue streams: What will they be willing to pay?
• Cost structure: What will it cost us to deliver the product or service?

It adds four new components.

First – what is the problem we are trying to solve for a customer?

As Theodore Levitt said, People don’t want to buy a quarter-inch drill, they want a quarter-inch hole.

If the product doesn’t address a real problem that potential customers have then it’s hard to justify its purchase.

Then, what is the solution we are proposing?

The solutions needs to be simple – easy to understand. That doesn’t mean it has to be easy to do – or the customer could just do it themselves.

It must be possible, however, to see how the solution solves the problem.

We then need to look at two more components – metrics and unfair advantage.

Success or failure needs to be measured in an objective way and for that we need to select metrics.

Selecting a metric directly influences the activities we do in order to improve our score on that metric – so it’s important to select a few and important ones.

Finally, there isn’t much point spending time and money developing a solution if it can be easily copied or bought from someone else.

We have a competitive advantage only when it is hard for others to compete with us.

So, in summary, in order to build something useful, we need to start with a customer’s problems, come up with a solution, make sure we are doing the right things, and make sure that what we do is unique to us.

An easy list to write – but not a simple one to do.

How can we raise a happy family?

Modern families are often overwhelmed by the amount things we have to do – it often feels like are out of control.

And, according to Brice Feiler, the author of The Secrets of Happy Families, our children sense that is the case.

The way to make things better, it turns out, may be to bring some practices from work into our homes.

Many organisations, whether they realise it or not, are having to become more agile – a way of working that involves small teams working for short periods of time on small elements of projects, with a focus on making real, tangible progress.

These teams use tools like checklists, daily updates, weekly reviews and feedback.

An agile approach shifts power from executives directing work to teams that work towards a goal and increasingly manage themselves.

In this TED talk, Feiler says that when some families tried to use this approach in their homes, their children loved it, it helped reduce stress, increase communication and made them happier.

Everybody likes checklists. Children really like them.

If they have checklists of things to do in the morning, they quickly get into the habit of doing things on the list and checking them off.

But to make a real difference, we need to sit down and talk together.

During weekly family meetings, which don’t need to last more than 20 minutes, we should asks things like what worked well this week, what didn’t work well and what shall we agree to work on next week.

The agile manifesto sets out the principles that underpin agile work – highlighting the importance of face-to-face communication, adaptabilty, self-organising teams and regular reflection as a group.

As parents it’s instinctive to want to tell our kids what to do.

That is not going to prepare them for a job market where they will be valued more for their creative ability than their willingness to follow orders.

Instead, Feiler says, we should try and empower our kids – helping them practice how to make decisions, come up with consequences for their actions.

If we help kids set their own goals, make plans to achieve them and teach them how to reflect on how things are going and how they should adjust their own actions – we may raise children better prepared for the changing world of work.

And, more importantly, we may be able to build a happy family that feels like it’s a close knit team.

Once upon a time you needed to be a big company, with research and marketing departments and lots of money in order to find out what people wanted and give it to them.

That’s not the case any more.

The big companies that sat between creators and consumers are disappearing, as the internet makes it easier for people who want a thing to find the people who make that thing.

But, we still have barriers in many places.

Take innovation inside an organisation, for example.

If someone wants to improve a process or a particular way of doing things – can they just do it, or do they need to go through other people first?

How many layers are involved? Does IT need to install the software needed? Does a manager need to approve time to work on the idea?

Approval processes and managers rarely come up with cool new things. IT departments, which should be enablers, often become blockers.

People messing about with ideas and trying to make them work do.

There is a very simple test to see if an innovation has potential.

And that is – does someone else want it?

Whether we’re trying to improve an excel application, create a new product for our customer base or set up a new startup – if we make a thing that someone else wants, then we’re on the track to somewhere.

Will we make any money?

Possibly – perhaps not in the way many people think.

New revenue models are popping up all the time. For creators, Jack Conte created Patreon, a platform that allows people that make stuff to get paid through membership subscriptions.

He did that because money from adverts on platforms like YouTube were plummeting.

So.. if someone wants the thing you make, there is probably a way to make money from it.

At YCombinator, the startup incubator, this idea has become a mantra.

Make something people want. Don’t worry too much about making money.