Modern Management Methods: Lean Kanban North America 2014

Anzen. It’s a foundation of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and a pillar of the Toyota Way. It helped a 100-year-old, 60,000-person aluminum manufacturer regain its greatness, and it powers the software products that millions of people love.  If you study every Lean or Agile principle and practice, you will find it’s a common denominator. Anzen is the Japanese word for safety. 

When Anzen lives within a software product, it just works; people regularly use and recommend it; engineers modify it without fear; it contains few defects; it can be deployed with ease; it is immune from threats; and it helps protect the organization’s finances, reputation and investors. Anzen lies at the heart of excellence. 

Anzeneers are empowered to engineer anzen into everything, from their culture to their workspaces, from code bases to processes, from products to services. They use short feedback loops to protect time, energy and money. They use minimum viable products/features, validated learning and innovation accounting to protect resources and stakeholders. They use big visible charts, visualized work and limited work-in-process to manage risks and protect teams from bottlenecks and decreased flow. They use automated testing, continuous builds, refactoring and collective ownership to protect development. And they use lean interaction design and usability evaluation to protect people from poor user experiences.

In this talk I will share what I have discovered about anzen, including why it promotes safe risk taking, how to identify faux safety, when it can be taken too far, challenges of growing an anzen culture and what it means to be an Anzeneer.

Peter Drucker's Challenge for the 21st Century asked us to improve the productivity of knowledge workers by 50 fold. We know where the gains will come from - eliminating delay and increasing the flow efficiency of creative work from commitment to delivery. We also understand the causes of delay.

Improving the speed of decision making will contribute greatly to realize Drucker's ambition. To do so we need to give managers tools that empower them with confidence to act decisively in a world of uncertainty.

David J. Anderson will open the main conference describing how we enable managers to be more effective, embrace uncertainty and risk and "decide with confidence!"

- The problems with traditional management, including budgeting

- The Beyond Budgeting principles and companies on the journey

- Statoil's "Ambition to Action" model;

    -  redefining performance - dynamic and relative targets and a holistic performance evaluation

    -  dynamic forecasting and resource allocation and no traditional budgets

    -  from calendar-driven to event-driven; a more self-regulating management model

- Implementation experiences and advice

The title comes from Lincoln, the content from intense frustration that many people are simply talking anew, but thinking and acting in entrained patterns of doing what others have done rather than what is needed in the present.   In this presentation, which will be polemical at times, the case will be made for using complexity to rethink they way we act in organisations.  Focusing less on idealised future states and structured processing complexity nevertheless regards tight management disciplines to execute.  In many ways it has a more in common with scientific management in its recognition of human judgement than much the the ‘systems’ approaches of the past three decades.  The presentation will combine theory with examples practice to establish the simple principles that underpin new ways of working that recognise the limitations of the past, and its value.