1. Transforming Ways of Working
The Importance of Focus & How to Find It
A ReBoot Co. blog series that helps you & your teams discover a better way of working.
When everything presents as an improvement opportunity, we can put too many improvement initiatives into progress at once.
I once worked inside one of the biggest companies in Australia, it was an ambitious time to be in their technology team of many thousands of people. The company has a workforce of 75,000 workers and we were on the brink of a huge change in ways of working and thinking about how they built and delivered solutions. The demand for work from our teams in the digital technology team was so big, we had to create a 'front door' process, just so we could shut that door.
My other leadership chums and I had maxed out calendars going from meeting to meeting all day, to talk about estimates, solutions, issues and fires. I crammed too much into my day, my work-life balance was upside down, and I wasn't alone. It was a culturally acceptable work behaviour, and modelled by the leaders of that company at that time. An unsustainable pace.
I had a work peer who seemed immune to the overwhelm that I felt and saw all around me. He was able to manage his days without the same panic I witnessed and felt.
How was he doing that?
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It's very frustrating to know that things can be better, to know how to make things better, but not be able to do that fast enough to counter the speed of things getting worse.
That pretty much sums up the personalities of the people I work with everyday now, they are people who have this trait. Things not working well are a source of irritation to them, and they want to make improvements. Nigel Dalton, who I had the pleasure of working with at REA Group said it best:
"Unfortunately, we employ a lot of bright people who are impatient to improve things."
Nigel's comments were tongue in cheek but there is a problem if TOO MUCH improvement is tackled at the same time, and this is one of the anti-patterns we see in Transformation work. When everything presents as an improvement opportunity, we can put too many improvement initiatives into progress at once.
Limiting WIP Means… All the Way Down
Agilists and Lean aficionados use Work In Process or "WIP" limits to create Focus. WIP limits encourage us to finish work that’s already in process before introducing more work into the system. The more work teams try to juggle at once, the harder it is for them to finish any of it.
In Lean, limiting WIP is introduced to encourage us to eliminate waste and create an even flow of value. But I think the magical part or at least secret side effect, is the resultant FOCUS.
Focus can be the make or break of your company's success, your team's success, your personal success. Focusing on what you want allows you to take your precious time and brain space off everything else that is splintering your attention and energy, and it shows up everywhere in the way we work.
Allow me to tour you through some examples:
Limit the WIP of Strategy - Focus Your Goals
Big organisations love to create "Strategies". They have protracted discussion, planning and funding phases, and come up with groovy names for things like "Future Proof", "Re-Platform" and "Next-Gen". They spend a lot of time fancying up slide decks to communicate their strategies to their teams. This trickle down "strategy-nomics" view of the world is a common pattern to connect teams to desired outcomes. I'm not 100% against it, however the sheer number of strategic "things" going on at the same time becomes a yucky mess.
If you limit your Strategic goals to fewer, you see more focus and less waste. The clearer and fewer number of goals, the greater the focus and the less time wasted on less important things - like slides about strategy.
An extreme example is elite sports teams, they are focused on winning a season, and everything and everyone is aligned to that goal and activities that serve that goal. Imagine the focus you could achieve with just one goal for your company?
Limit the WIP of Backlog Items - Focus Your Ideas
Focus on the outcomes you want to achieve by limiting the size of the backlogs that you allow to form. Mustering a lengthly backlog incurs a requisite amount of processing work, e.g. are Product Owners having conversations at length about things that are no-where near getting to the top of the pile? This is a form of waste and distraction. Instead be very clear about the small number of ideas you want to prove or disprove very quickly to focus your attention.
You might think that having things sitting in a 'backlog' means it's not doing any harm, but it's still there in the 'backlog' of your mind taking up some of your processing, some of your worry.
Limit the Work The Team has Planned to Complete
Focus what the team commits to at their iterative planning by limiting it to what's possible. If you did 20 things last sprint you might be able to do 21 next time, but you certainly can't do 100. If you constrain yourself to 20 or less very strictly you've created a focus for the whole team.
It continues to amaze me how many Scrum and Agile teams sign up to too much work EVERY sprint routinely. It's a fast track to slowing everything down. The Lean folks from the 60s would be very disappointed in us, they understood that STARTING LESS is the route to FINISHING MORE.
Create more FOCUS for the team by declaring a sprint goal - try just one each sprint!
Limit the Work The Team Pulls into Progress at Any Time During The Sprint
Not only should your Sprint plan be constrained, but the work picked up at any point can also be subject to WIP limits. This is easiest achieved by using a 'pull' approach to the work, and not allowing any new work to start until work in progress is finished.
We use Kanban to help manage that flow of work. At any time the work in progress is in FOCUS and it's not allowed to lose focus until it's done. That stops us from allowing work to be blocked, stopped or stuck in a wait cycle, and having the whole team work collaboratively to get the work completed is enhanced BY this approach, and also enhances FOCUS.
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So now we have WIP Limits and have created focus all the way down, there are a few adjacent and complimentary ways to limit WIP and create focus to add to your repertoire.
One Metric
Focusing on Data is a good thing, but putting all of the metrics in place at once can be overwhelming. Limit your choice to one metric, implement one, start measuring and then build from there, it's a more effective way to start your measuring efforts.
People Flow
Focus on getting your team performing by limiting the amount of hiring and new starter WIP, the ability for your teams to absorb new people has an optimal rate too. If you can keep it as an even flow rather than a tsunami of new people you will give new starters a better change to become proficient and that will pay you back faster than cramming too many new people towards a problem.
Every time someone new joins the team everyone needs time to adjust, build trust and convey team goals. Not to mention hiring is a time consuming process, so using up all your leaders time on interviewing takes their focus away from existing team members.
Improvement Flow
Limit the WIP on improvements in order to find focus. Maybe your first improvement initiative is to share with your leaders the concept of limiting WIP and gaining Focus, that should make all of your choices on what to do from there more focused, or at least more supported when you do implement limits.
In addition applying all the patterns we know that work for value creation work, also works for improvements; prioritisation, limiting WIP, finishing improvements before you start more.
Personal WIP
This brings me back to my colleague at that huge company who was unflappable in the face of unlimited chaos. His tool of choice was actually the same, I realise it so clearly now. He always had a view of his 'Top Three priorities', whenever he had a weekly update with our GM he reiterated them "Here are the three things that I'm working on at the moment". Using this approach he could have a good conversation about where those three things were in order of importance and how they were going. Did they need a re-juggle? Did he want to add something that means something else needs to come off the list?
He also had a genius way of dealing with other things that inevitably came up in the chaos, he would smile, have a pleasant passing comment or joke about them, but unless it was on his list of three they would never distract him for more time than that. He was 100% focused on his three. He never felt the weight of the world piling up on him - or if he did, he never let on.
Three things to have on your plate as work activities is enough. Will you always get them done? Maybe not, but it's easy for you to hold three of the most important things in your head, to negotiate which ones should come first and to protect those important priorities at the expense of others.
Limit the Limited WIP
And when it comes to working on your own personal backlog then these limiting and constraining patterns help us again, there's a huge amount of evidence that multi-tasking doesn't work.
“The human brain cannot perform two tasks that require high-level brain function at once. Low-level functions like breathing and pumping blood aren’t considered in multitasking. Only the tasks you have to “think” about are considered. What actually happens when you think you are multitasking is that you are rapidly switching between tasks.”
Instead we can make our thinking time more effective by limiting our attention to actively doing ONE task at a time. Things like the Pomodoro technique can help you apply this constraint and really focus your powerful brain in a way that's most effective.
These natural patterns of limiting work, applying constraints and finding focus are repeated and found again and again in Agile and Lean ways of working. We're crazy to ignore them and apply patterns that DON'T work such as a lack of limits and focus.
Focusing on The Past
Reflecting back on my time at that company I see that I allowed myself to be fragmented across too many people, and too many problems. I should have followed my co-worker 's approach and let the majority of other things go through to the keeper with a smile and passing comment. I should have focused where I could make the most impact. Maybe I was doing that intuitively but I doubt I was making the best decisions as I felt so burned out putting efforts towards a myriad of systemic and intractable problems.
I ended up resigning from that job and enjoying 9 months of family time and rescuing dogs. During my break, soul searching about my experiences and how awful it is to work amidst overwhelm, drove me towards wanting to help more companies and teams, and release them from these kinds of wasteful anti-patterns. I am one of those "people impatient to improve things" and that's where the seeds of ReBoot Co. were sown.
Could it be that answer to Transformational improvement is as simple as limiting our focus to three things?
Maybe, but there's certainly more to it than just that, so join us here as we uncover more nuggets of goodness that help us to Transform Ways of Working and enjoy that sweet feeling of performance at work and in our teams.
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Next time we talk about Prioritising your Priorities with Visualisation!
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