Well, hello, Toby, we've made it to another Processed Dead podcast.
And because we haven't stopped and no one's asked us to stop, we're just going to keep
rolling.
I have zero restraining orders that have been served last week.
Nobody was so offended at the idea of actually clarifying requests that they've taken legal
action.
So, marching ahead.
What is this episode 12?
I think we're at a 12.
Oh, man, we're so deep into double digits now I've lost track.
We have done this for so long that we've had episodes fall out of our top 10.
I know.
Yeah.
Let's just pile on here.
Over the last couple of weeks, we've been talking about buffers and manufacturing and
what a good lean process, but we lose sight of the fact that it relies on trust.
And so, last week you started to share some thinking you've done around how do you take
a zero trust process and then really clarify and you introduce this acronym called AXE,
absorb and then make a choice.
What's the choosing?
Taking some kind of action, which is usually what somebody wants and then what's the status?
What we didn't get to last week that I'd love to hear your thoughts on this week is that
zero trust process with very clear request and what's expected of fulfillment, that's
not a world we want to live in.
As human beings, we seek community.
And so, if organizations aren't a community, how do you foster that?
How do you take clearly defined process and expectations that are transactional?
How do you start to imbue that world with the trust that we all want to live with?
Yeah.
I think you have to, I mean, I think part of it and thanks for asking the question,
but I think part of it is sometimes you ask questions, I'm like, oh.
That's not the question I want to answer like a good politician.
I had to think about that one.
But I think if the community owns the process, and I know we started originally with Toyota,
but they have a deep, deep culture of the community owning the process, which is really,
really unique where like here in America, oftentimes, in our manufacturing, it was basically
very, very structured, which is like, I'm going to count the amount of time that it
takes my top producer to do XYZ.
And that's now the new standard.
And so now the new standard is time to performance, not quality of product output.
And so whereas Toyota has a completely different approach, which is the community owns it.
And they started a factory, I think in Tennessee, I think.
They did a joint thing with GM.
And one of the hardest things that they had to teach the Americans employees was pull
the line, stop the entire process.
And in Toyota, they're like, yeah, that's what we do because their battle is somewhat
against those inefficiencies.
And so unless your community is going after the process, now, part of the problem I think
we have oftentimes is processes get democratized.
And so there's no standardization as a heads up.
And so you have basically little pockets of processes that doesn't work.
But I think that whole community side, what's interesting is where we kind of kicked this
off was as human beings, if we get in trouble, we seek to solve that problem with trust.
We often don't seek to solve it with process.
That's a problem.
And that's what we naturally do.
And so our managers who are now lacking trust in us now comes and micromanages us in order
to build that trust, and then you have a bit of this vicious cycle that just is not helping
anyone.
And so I think from a community standpoint, from a work standpoint, I think it's super
important.
And I think the first thing, I came up with another acronym because apparently I like
those.
But the first one is, it just spells out care, which is you have to be, it has to be a community.
Like if your work, if your job is not a community, hate to tell it to you, but like people are
just going to start leaving.
And that's, it's just going to happen.
It makes me think of the tragedy of the commons, right?
That idea that something that might be for shared good has shared ownership.
Like no one person, otherwise they are micromanaging, they're dictating what makes everybody else.
And yeah, rarely do we seek that out.
And so just the idea.
So to make process more effective, to move beyond a zero trust.
And then I think that the second word is just assurance, right?
Which is like, look, if I screw up, if I don't fit in the process, is it going to be safe
to fail?
Right?
So like, I think the story in the US plant with the Toyota was they literally had to
go grab the guy's hand and the Toyota employee had to take the GM employee and literally
had to take his hand and have him pull it because he was so scared to get in trouble.
Right?
And so that's a community where like, no matter what happens, if you see a problem, there
has to be that psychological safety, that assurance that you're going to be loved, taken
care of, you know, whatever.
So that's, you know, that's a, so C is community.
I was going to say on that assurance front, you're right.
Like that permission to fail is exactly how we find our learning edge.
Right?
If we're never, if we're never pushing, the other element too here is that idea of you're
being evaluated as if you're in a kayak, not in a team rowboat.
It's not individual work when we're a bigger effort.
You know, play one piece in a process.
And so understanding how to synchronize, of course, we're going to sometimes be early
or we'll be a little bit late.
So that assurance that we don't get beat up while we're finding our rhythm, I think is
a great call out.
So CA.
Yeah.
CA.
And I think just one more thing on that is like a lot of companies, a lot of companies
send mixed messages there.
Where it's like, we want you to be entrepreneurial because Steve Jobs was.
Oh, we don't want you to screw up like he did.
Right?
And so you can get these mixed messages and so that just basically kills that assurance
piece where it's like, ah, you say one thing, you know, it's like tell your kids, do what
I say, not what I do.
The next, the next, the R is respect.
There has to be this respect and there has to be respect for around, you know, what you
do well.
Yeah.
Like there has to be respect for, you know, this, you know, being a respectful part of
the community.
Yeah.
One of my favorite elements that falls in that respect is, is you may not have succeeded
with the task or you may not be competent, but it's not that you've failed.
It's that you aren't there yet.
Yeah.
And you know, so much of parenting I think comes right back into the workplace in terms
of value, certainly for me and how I interact with others.
And that idea that somebody may have missed it a little bit, it's just that they're not
there yet.
Yeah.
What you know is regardless of what they've said, they haven't been able to internalize
it and take action.
Yeah.
So that respect that recognizes that sometimes we all need a second run at it.
So.
And then the last one is just empower.
Like you have to be, you have to be in a place where you were allowed to be the very best
you that you were made to be.
Yeah.
Boy, that's a, that's a really beautiful model.
And I think that you started this by saying there's a difference in mindset, you know,
and oftentimes as a country of cowboys, rugged individualism, what we're focusing on is what's
my individual performance?
How fast you run the Boston marathon as opposed to did your team successfully complete quality
ideas inclusive, whereas timed metrics are so narrowly defined, we lose sight of the
whole.
So.
Well, what's interesting, like, you know, just in thinking through these things, it's
like, look, it's like, again, if you have that zero sum, but then you also have that
community piece and the community is in charge for building that process and fixing the entire
system.
Magic, man.
It's magic.
I love that.
Yeah.
The idea of a well-defined process, I think absolutely is the underpinning.
Yeah.
So there's logical flow, each step has a purpose, and then there's validations at key, at key
points so that it doesn't go too far with weak quality.
But then we could overlay a sense of community and respect for one another that's acknowledging
that mistakes happen, but it's not a death now.
I think it's really beautiful.
So well, I think Eric, the hard part here is that oftentimes the process doesn't support
the acts.
Meaning we're doing businessy things because that's what you're supposed to do, but we
haven't done the hard work of saying, why are we doing this?
What's the real purpose of the QBR here?
Yeah.
Again, those things should be done, but if you don't know the purpose of them, then what's
the purpose?
And so process fails us on the zero sum side and then fails us also on the community side
because we're trying to solve something that the structure just isn't there.
I have to say, I kind of got hung up on the businessy things.
I feel like that-
I kind of hate businessy things.
That workshop, do you want to offer a, are we going to launch a workshop around how to
appear doing businessy things?
You know where you find when you're doing businessy things, you just ask different levels
that are doing the businessy things, why we're doing the businessy things.
That sounds inflammatory.
Are you picking fights?
What's going on?
Am I picking fights?
I don't know.
I sit in meetings sometimes and I just think, why are we doing this?
What's the real value add?
So this sometimes, maybe this is why I make acronyms.
I'm not even sure.
But I'm sitting there and I'm like, I'm not absorbing or I'm absorbing body blows.
That's always fun.
I don't know what choice we're making.
I don't know what we're deciding on and I don't know if I'm taking something or not.
And I don't know if it's like, and sometimes we get really heavy on status updates.
We love status updates, but what's the purpose of those?
I know when I've written a status report that I don't care about and it's just a laundry
list of stuff I've done, but it's not evident that I'm moving the agenda forward.
That is a wholly unsatisfying week for me.
I think you run into it in existing frameworks.
So you run into it where we do Scrum or we do Agile or I've got KBI's or we need RAC
or we have OKRs.
There's this assumption that everybody knows what that means, but no one knows what it
means.
Bingo.
I had all the...
No, you're right though.
If somebody spews that laundry list, you know that they're in the business of doing businessy
things, not in...
Yeah, and those things should be done.
Those frameworks should be done, but you should understand why you're using them.
And they don't all belong in one sentence.
Outside of our part.
Maybe why I'm so annoyingly stuck on process all the time is because I want to know what
people do.
I don't really care about the words.
I was in an interview one time and they were like, well, how do you do this?
And I'm like, does it matter?
Because I'm just going to do it the way you ask me to or the way that I'm supposed to.
So asking me how something should be done, like, do you do Scrum?
What are your rituals?
And I'm like, I'm going to tell you what I do, but ultimately I'm going to have to sneak
into whatever rituals you have.
Isn't that interesting?
Yeah.
It's oftentimes the, how are you going to do it?
I don't even think they care.
I think they're trying to evaluate.
Can I trust you to deliver the outcome?
I think they're trying to wrap their head around your method.
So that's interesting.
Acts and care.
Trust, trust, trust.
Putting in the process.
Yeah.
Trust, trust is the buffer.
And if you think about that, like you think about these people that come in and you're
like, how the heck did they do it?
They're like confident as hell, but they don't know what they're doing.
You're like, they got trust.
So they've got runway.
God forbid that you're competent and personable.
Whoa.
EQ plus competency is a powerful mix.
Could be dangerous.
I like that cocktail.
All right.
Cool, man.
Thank you, sir.
All right.
See you next week.
It's a deal, buddy.
Bye for now.