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Hey Chris, how you doing buddy?

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Hey, what's up man?

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Hey, loved your post just last week and I want to circle back to that.

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Let's unpack it a little bit.

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You brought up this idea of buffering systems and a process guy, you think about this more

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deeply and probably more frequently than most.

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But in the world of process, yeah, we keep stock on hand or we create some interesting

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redundancies.

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But I love that you called out this question around, what's that look like for knowledge

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workers?

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What do we do for the buffering system when all of our products are between our ears?

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So your point that you made was that this is trust, but I'd love for you to kind of

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take through, how did you come to this?

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What made you think buffering system for knowledge workers?

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Yeah, so it's-

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What's the answer?

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What's going on?

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Yeah, it's interesting.

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I've been thinking a lot about how do you see it?

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So like, what is it?

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Sixth Sense movie from, that most kids probably have never seen, which is, I see dead people,

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they're everywhere.

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Well, I've done that in Excel because I have Excel.

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I hate Excel for as much views as I have on YouTube, which is getting close to 3 million.

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I do.

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It's really fascinating.

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Yeah, I've got 3 million views on advanced Excel and I hate it.

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And it's not that I don't hate it, it just gets me used and that's what bugs me.

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But anyway, so going to the Excel piece is like, what I would tell people is like, if

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you are cutting and pasting and you're doing the same thing over and over again, come talk

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to me because I will automate it.

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I'll fix it.

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And literally there were probably more than two handfuls of times in which it took me

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less to code it than it did for them to do the manual process.

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And so we kick off this process debt podcast.

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This is number 10.

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We now have a top 10 and a bottom 10.

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Super excited about that.

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And I've been thinking about for probably the last month or so, what is the one thing

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that I can point to that says, if you see this, you will see process debt, where you

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go back to the sixth sense where it's like, I see dead people.

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It's everywhere, right?

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Where like, what's that one thing where I see process debt?

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It's everywhere.

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That's right.

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And so I've been reading a book on the Toyota production system.

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I think it's 50 books in this year on Audible, which is a bad problem that I have.

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Nice weekly counter.

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Nice.

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I know.

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I forget the exact count, but I do track that.

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But Toyota's thing is they historically have, if you go to Ford, Ford would basically, they

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do mass manufacturing.

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So you basically, you create a piece and then you create a buffer and some buffer stock

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and that safety stock so that if something goes down or there's inefficiencies, there's

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a problem.

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Right?

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And so Toyota is completely different and they're completely different because they

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were totally scrapped for cash coming out of World War II.

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And they looked at productions different because they had to.

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And so what they did is they started thinking through the system as one at a time.

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So single part at a time.

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So if in the manufacturing world, it's just in time and it's lean manufacturing and it's

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all these things.

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And so then my mind starts spinning about, well, okay, this is great.

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Good job, Chris.

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This is perfect for manufacturing.

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But as a knowledge worker, how do you translate that?

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What's the time here?

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Yeah.

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So it was like, what's the one thing of time?

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And Toyota is really about the value flow, like the flow of value.

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And they think of their business almost like a grocery store where a grocery store is essentially

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a distribution warehouse in which it's a pull system.

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So someone goes and buys something and then someone goes to the back and replaces that.

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So that's how they think about that.

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How does that work for knowledge workers?

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Well, I noodled on it a little bit.

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And I was thinking that buffer system, that buffering system in corporations is really

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about trust.

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And that's magical and it's wonderful.

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And I think it's also terrible.

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And what I mean by that is, you and I, we've known each other for decades.

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So we have high trust, which is awesome.

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But we could join a project together and you and I would have high trust with each other

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because of our history, but I could also be lying to you.

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And so if you take away that trust, if there's no process underneath it, then you have.

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It's a super interesting, Chris, because as I first started to read through your posts,

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particularly the mention of Toyota, I started thinking about the things that we associate

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with Deming.

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And so this is like pawn bonds and that pull system.

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But the notion that I place it in queue for you to pull, the queuing isn't enough.

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That just gives it a predictable place.

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But it confidence that you are going to reach for the next unit.

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And that will be completed.

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Anytime there's human intervention, even in manufacturing, there is this inherent assumption.

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And so it makes me think that knowledge workers, though, maybe there's more facets to that

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trust or the confidence we place in collaborators that's different than what we see in manufacturing.

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I think it's because your work is unseen.

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You can't physically see half as far.

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You can't physically see the report that you're supposed to deliver.

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And I also think, I think most of the time, businesses don't think through what value

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is being added here.

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Really at every level.

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And I mean, you're new to the company.

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You're a junior employee.

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You're rushing around trying to point out everything.

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Then you end up in management and you have a different, you have different problems.

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But like, what's the value that's been added?

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Chris, when I was documenting process and then doing Sarbanes-Oxley compliance work

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and documenting financial agencies, the most fascinating thing to me was getting a group

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of people in a room, even if they all lived within one fabric of a process, but as we

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start to literally line it out line by line and ask, what's the input?

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What is that transformation or additive activity?

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And then how's the output different?

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The number of folks you could always tell who didn't really have a meaningful role in

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that cycle because they got really queasy and they started picking and kind of office

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space like, right, where they're like, I'm a people person.

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Yeah.

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There's not, you're not adding anything.

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So yeah, it's not a discoverable work product.

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And so that's an interesting.

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Well, so here's what's interesting.

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Here's what's interesting is we, we feel that.

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So we feel stress in our day to day, right?

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And so how we try to feel that is by building that trust, which is through community, which

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is completely different than work.

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Yeah.

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Good point.

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So we have a completely different, we have a completely different, we, we intuitively

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know because we've been around, you know, he was been around for a long time.

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We kind of know that, oh shoot, I'm stressed.

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What I need is a community, right?

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The problem is, is sometimes like, so that's why it's interesting to think about this whole

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trust thing is like, okay, if you have trust, right?

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Yeah.

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If you have trust, then you're fine.

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Right.

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And it's finite meaning.

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And it's also, we also don't view it well, right?

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Meaning, you know, the Dunning-Kruger effect, right?

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Where if you're the more ignorant you are, the more confident you are, which means do

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you garner more trust?

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Right.

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Right.

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And so, you know, someone who doesn't know how to do anything is never messed up in a

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business.

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I mean, that's never happened.

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No, no, cause we never give them sharp knives to run with.

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So, yeah, that's interesting.

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So what you're suggesting is that in newer relationships, we may be putting more trust

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in people simply because of how they represent themselves rather than what they're capable

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of.

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Yeah.

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Like if you think about someone who's very successful in their role, they're not a manager,

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but they're a very highly successful IC.

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Yeah.

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Right?

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Their major frustration oftentimes is that they're sitting in the corner and they're

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saying, hey, check out this problem I found, right?

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Which is increasing the stress, right?

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Which doesn't lead to more trust.

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It actually means that you're less trustworthy.

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Yeah.

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Right?

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And therefore you end up with this really funky, you end up with these, a lot of these

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ICs, they just end up hitting the ceiling and they're like, what's going on?

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And you're like, oh, because ultimately a lot of times the managers don't want, they don't

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want to necessarily expose that inefficiency or that problem because they don't have a

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place to catch it.

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There's no, there's no home, right?

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And I think maybe that's, maybe that's part of the problem here is like, we seek community

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to get trust, but then if you take out trust as a variable, then you're left with where's

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the home and where's the process and then it's managed by everybody.

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Yeah.

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Which isn't how humans relate to one another very effectively, right?

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We can queue up as a tribe, but a bunch of people in a room is neither a tribe nor a

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community.

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And oftentimes that's what the workplace is.

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It's just a bunch of solo contributors that are not in any way connected.

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Correct.

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Or you end up with, you end up with misalignment or misses, right?

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So like what's interesting is like the solution I think is you, you think about your business

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from a process standpoint with the apps, with basically zero trust, right?

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So from a process sense, you build it from a zero trust standpoint, from a community

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standpoint, right?

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That trust side, build it with complete and total safety.

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Well the security guys are going to love you for acknowledging a zero trust environment.

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We've all heard that beat.

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But you know what?

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Let's explore that more next week.

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As always the longest five minutes of anybody's work week.

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But yeah, what is a zero trust work environment look like when it's knowledge workers and

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not from a security, but from a how do you design process?

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So think all through the cracks and how do you simultaneously build just a kick-ass community?

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Ooh, right.

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Where nothing drops, right?

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Everything's caught from a knowledge work standpoint.

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So you're safe and the system protects you as well.

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Love it.

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All right.

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Forward to next week.

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All right.

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Thanks, sir.

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One more question.