Hey Chris, how you doing buddy?
Hey, what's up man?
Hey, loved your post just last week and I want to circle back to that.
Let's unpack it a little bit.
You brought up this idea of buffering systems and a process guy, you think about this more
deeply and probably more frequently than most.
But in the world of process, yeah, we keep stock on hand or we create some interesting
redundancies.
But I love that you called out this question around, what's that look like for knowledge
workers?
What do we do for the buffering system when all of our products are between our ears?
So your point that you made was that this is trust, but I'd love for you to kind of
take through, how did you come to this?
What made you think buffering system for knowledge workers?
Yeah, so it's-
What's the answer?
What's going on?
Yeah, it's interesting.
I've been thinking a lot about how do you see it?
So like, what is it?
Sixth Sense movie from, that most kids probably have never seen, which is, I see dead people,
they're everywhere.
Well, I've done that in Excel because I have Excel.
I hate Excel for as much views as I have on YouTube, which is getting close to 3 million.
I do.
It's really fascinating.
Yeah, I've got 3 million views on advanced Excel and I hate it.
And it's not that I don't hate it, it just gets me used and that's what bugs me.
But anyway, so going to the Excel piece is like, what I would tell people is like, if
you are cutting and pasting and you're doing the same thing over and over again, come talk
to me because I will automate it.
I'll fix it.
And literally there were probably more than two handfuls of times in which it took me
less to code it than it did for them to do the manual process.
And so we kick off this process debt podcast.
This is number 10.
We now have a top 10 and a bottom 10.
Super excited about that.
And I've been thinking about for probably the last month or so, what is the one thing
that I can point to that says, if you see this, you will see process debt, where you
go back to the sixth sense where it's like, I see dead people.
It's everywhere, right?
Where like, what's that one thing where I see process debt?
It's everywhere.
That's right.
And so I've been reading a book on the Toyota production system.
I think it's 50 books in this year on Audible, which is a bad problem that I have.
Nice weekly counter.
Nice.
I know.
I forget the exact count, but I do track that.
But Toyota's thing is they historically have, if you go to Ford, Ford would basically, they
do mass manufacturing.
So you basically, you create a piece and then you create a buffer and some buffer stock
and that safety stock so that if something goes down or there's inefficiencies, there's
a problem.
Right?
And so Toyota is completely different and they're completely different because they
were totally scrapped for cash coming out of World War II.
And they looked at productions different because they had to.
And so what they did is they started thinking through the system as one at a time.
So single part at a time.
So if in the manufacturing world, it's just in time and it's lean manufacturing and it's
all these things.
And so then my mind starts spinning about, well, okay, this is great.
Good job, Chris.
This is perfect for manufacturing.
But as a knowledge worker, how do you translate that?
What's the time here?
Yeah.
So it was like, what's the one thing of time?
And Toyota is really about the value flow, like the flow of value.
And they think of their business almost like a grocery store where a grocery store is essentially
a distribution warehouse in which it's a pull system.
So someone goes and buys something and then someone goes to the back and replaces that.
So that's how they think about that.
How does that work for knowledge workers?
Well, I noodled on it a little bit.
And I was thinking that buffer system, that buffering system in corporations is really
about trust.
And that's magical and it's wonderful.
And I think it's also terrible.
And what I mean by that is, you and I, we've known each other for decades.
So we have high trust, which is awesome.
But we could join a project together and you and I would have high trust with each other
because of our history, but I could also be lying to you.
And so if you take away that trust, if there's no process underneath it, then you have.
It's a super interesting, Chris, because as I first started to read through your posts,
particularly the mention of Toyota, I started thinking about the things that we associate
with Deming.
And so this is like pawn bonds and that pull system.
But the notion that I place it in queue for you to pull, the queuing isn't enough.
That just gives it a predictable place.
But it confidence that you are going to reach for the next unit.
And that will be completed.
Anytime there's human intervention, even in manufacturing, there is this inherent assumption.
And so it makes me think that knowledge workers, though, maybe there's more facets to that
trust or the confidence we place in collaborators that's different than what we see in manufacturing.
I think it's because your work is unseen.
You can't physically see half as far.
You can't physically see the report that you're supposed to deliver.
And I also think, I think most of the time, businesses don't think through what value
is being added here.
Really at every level.
And I mean, you're new to the company.
You're a junior employee.
You're rushing around trying to point out everything.
Then you end up in management and you have a different, you have different problems.
But like, what's the value that's been added?
Chris, when I was documenting process and then doing Sarbanes-Oxley compliance work
and documenting financial agencies, the most fascinating thing to me was getting a group
of people in a room, even if they all lived within one fabric of a process, but as we
start to literally line it out line by line and ask, what's the input?
What is that transformation or additive activity?
And then how's the output different?
The number of folks you could always tell who didn't really have a meaningful role in
that cycle because they got really queasy and they started picking and kind of office
space like, right, where they're like, I'm a people person.
Yeah.
There's not, you're not adding anything.
So yeah, it's not a discoverable work product.
And so that's an interesting.
Well, so here's what's interesting.
Here's what's interesting is we, we feel that.
So we feel stress in our day to day, right?
And so how we try to feel that is by building that trust, which is through community, which
is completely different than work.
Yeah.
Good point.
So we have a completely different, we have a completely different, we, we intuitively
know because we've been around, you know, he was been around for a long time.
We kind of know that, oh shoot, I'm stressed.
What I need is a community, right?
The problem is, is sometimes like, so that's why it's interesting to think about this whole
trust thing is like, okay, if you have trust, right?
Yeah.
If you have trust, then you're fine.
Right.
And it's finite meaning.
And it's also, we also don't view it well, right?
Meaning, you know, the Dunning-Kruger effect, right?
Where if you're the more ignorant you are, the more confident you are, which means do
you garner more trust?
Right.
And so, you know, someone who doesn't know how to do anything is never messed up in a
business.
I mean, that's never happened.
No, no, cause we never give them sharp knives to run with.
So, yeah, that's interesting.
So what you're suggesting is that in newer relationships, we may be putting more trust
in people simply because of how they represent themselves rather than what they're capable
of.
Yeah.
Like if you think about someone who's very successful in their role, they're not a manager,
but they're a very highly successful IC.
Yeah.
Right?
Their major frustration oftentimes is that they're sitting in the corner and they're
saying, hey, check out this problem I found, right?
Which is increasing the stress, right?
Which doesn't lead to more trust.
It actually means that you're less trustworthy.
Yeah.
Right?
And therefore you end up with this really funky, you end up with these, a lot of these
ICs, they just end up hitting the ceiling and they're like, what's going on?
And you're like, oh, because ultimately a lot of times the managers don't want, they don't
want to necessarily expose that inefficiency or that problem because they don't have a
place to catch it.
There's no, there's no home, right?
And I think maybe that's, maybe that's part of the problem here is like, we seek community
to get trust, but then if you take out trust as a variable, then you're left with where's
the home and where's the process and then it's managed by everybody.
Yeah.
Which isn't how humans relate to one another very effectively, right?
We can queue up as a tribe, but a bunch of people in a room is neither a tribe nor a
community.
And oftentimes that's what the workplace is.
It's just a bunch of solo contributors that are not in any way connected.
Correct.
Or you end up with, you end up with misalignment or misses, right?
So like what's interesting is like the solution I think is you, you think about your business
from a process standpoint with the apps, with basically zero trust, right?
So from a process sense, you build it from a zero trust standpoint, from a community
standpoint, right?
That trust side, build it with complete and total safety.
Well the security guys are going to love you for acknowledging a zero trust environment.
We've all heard that beat.
But you know what?
Let's explore that more next week.
As always the longest five minutes of anybody's work week.
But yeah, what is a zero trust work environment look like when it's knowledge workers and
not from a security, but from a how do you design process?
So think all through the cracks and how do you simultaneously build just a kick-ass community?
Ooh, right.
Where nothing drops, right?
Everything's caught from a knowledge work standpoint.
So you're safe and the system protects you as well.
Love it.
All right.
Forward to next week.
All right.
Thanks, sir.
One more question.