We’ll touch upon a few different topics in today’s Cyb3rSyn Kaleidoscope… Let’s dive in.
Table of Contents
✋🏾 Stop believing your dashboards
Stop believing your dashboards!
Especially if they are made for YOU... To truly see the problem, you must physically break your cognitive filters and go talk to the people on the ground.
It is not a coincidence that dysfunctional organizations have "leadership dashboards" that are separate from the dashboards that people on the ground see. There'd be an army of people just for building those dashboards and the data on them gets "massaged", "rounded up", "scope limited", "exception approved", through various layers before the top executive sees it sitting in an air conditioned board room.
What they are seeing is an abstraction of an abstraction of an abstraction... (you get the idea).
Taiichi Ohno's 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐡𝐢 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐬𝐮 ("Go to the actual place and see the actual thing") demands that leaders stop relying on abstraction. But, you can't go there with your "board room" attitude. Ohno deeply understood that our brains filter reality, making it impossible to see problems when looking "right-side up."
This is proven outside the factory floor by art teachers. Here is an excerpt from the book ‘Connecting this Dots’ by Harish Jose and Venkatesh Krishnamurthy.
“... when we go to the gemba with preconceived notions, we miss what is right in front of us. If we arrive already armed with the wrong answer, we will not ask the right questions. We must approach the gemba with a fresh mind and limited preconceptions.
Betty Edwards demonstrates this powerfully in her work on drawing education. When she gave students the assignment to copy a Picasso work, the results disappointed her. In a flash of insight, she hung the painting upside down and asked the students to copy it again. 𝙏𝙝𝙚 𝙪𝙥𝙨𝙞𝙙𝙚-𝙙𝙤𝙬𝙣 𝙘𝙤𝙥𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙬𝙚𝙧𝙚 𝙙𝙧𝙖𝙢𝙖𝙩𝙞𝙘𝙖𝙡𝙡𝙮 𝙗𝙚𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙖𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙧𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩-𝙨𝙞𝙙𝙚-𝙪𝙥 𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙨𝙞𝙤𝙣𝙨. Turning the painting upside down changed how the students “saw”—their brains stopped interfering with their perception, allowing them to draw what was actually there rather than what they thought should be there.
As Edwards explains, the efficient left brain says, “It is a chair, I tell you. That is enough to know. Here is a ready-made symbol for you.” 𝘽𝙪𝙩 𝙩𝙤 𝙩𝙧𝙪𝙡𝙮 𝙨𝙚𝙚, 𝙬𝙚 𝙢𝙪𝙨𝙩 𝙨𝙚𝙩 𝙖𝙨𝙞𝙙𝙚 𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙪𝙨𝙪𝙖𝙡 𝙫𝙚𝙧𝙗𝙖𝙡 𝙘𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙜𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙯𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙖𝙣𝙙 𝙩𝙪𝙧𝙣 𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙛𝙪𝙡𝙡 𝙫𝙞𝙨𝙪𝙖𝙡 𝙖𝙩𝙩𝙚𝙣𝙩𝙞𝙤𝙣 𝙩𝙤 𝙬𝙝𝙖𝙩 𝙬𝙚 𝙖𝙧𝙚 𝙥𝙚𝙧𝙘𝙚𝙞𝙫𝙞𝙣𝙜...”
Your weekly reports, aggregated metrics, and beautifully crafted dashboards are the "right-side-up" version. They show you what your "efficient left brain" thinks should be there, not the raw reality of the Gemba (where value is created).
When a project is stuck, leaders must practice the art of turning the Picasso upside down. Go beyond the fancy dashboard and powerpoint presentations. This is how you discover the waste (Muda) that data hides.
The e-book is now on Black Friday sale directly from the Cyb3rSyn website. Click below to grab a copy👇🏾
Connecting the Dots...
This book helps you to go beyond the buzzwords and discover the real thinking behind the Toyota Production System (TPS). Instead of offering a simple checklist to copy, this book takes you back to ...
BlackFriday Sale
Here are a couple of books published by Cyb3rSyn Labs that are available for download on Black Friday Sale. Grab the e-book for yourself and get a physical copy as a holiday gift for someone else.
Click on the following links to order. The sale starts from Black Friday (Nov 28) and lasts until Christmas Day - the discounted prices will automatically apply in the cart.
Cyb3rSyn Labs Podcast
Cyb3rSyn Labs Podcast explores multidisciplinary insights that help improve the effectiveness of Tech. Practitioners, Executives and Entrepreneurs.
We are now up to 28 episodes full of multidisciplinary insights. The Cyb3rSyn Community members and get exclusive ‘first dibs’ access to the full episodes and can discuss the same using the online interactive features of the Cyb3rSyn Labs Community portal and mobile apps.
After a time lag, many if not all of these episodes make their way to YouTube. I’d like to highlight a couple of videos from the public channel.
Give these podcasts a listens and share your feedback….
Residuality: Barry O'Reilly (Part 1)
Barry O'Reilly is the Founder of Black Tulip Technology and the inventor of Residuality Theory. We discuss his journey in questioning mainstream software architecture. O'Reilly explains his realization that real-world software development often diverges from theoretical models.
He details his path toward formulating Residuality Theory, driven by observing patterns in successful architectures that emerged from stressed models rather than fixed requirements. This led him to pursue a PhD to scientifically verify his observations, encountering initial skepticism before gaining acceptance, particularly among developers.
The conversation touches upon the fundamental problem of designing static software for a constantly evolving environment and how Residuality Theory offers a different perspective by considering a system's possibilities across time.
I attended Barry’s ‘Philosophy of Software Architecture’ workshop (co-hosted with Mahmoud Rasmi) last. Please sign up if you’d would like to gain a refreshing new perspective and approach to software architecture. I don’t get any cut if you sign up - I’m sharing because I loved participating in it 😀
Unlocking the Unconscious: Nippin Anand (Part 1)
This extensive interview with Nippin Anand explores his transformation from a master mariner to a risk management and decision-making consultant, emphasizing the power of unlearning and the importance of intuition over purely rational thought. Nippin advocates for a multidisciplinary approach to understanding human behavior and organizational dynamics, highlighting how actions are shaped unconsciously through shared symbols, metaphors, and narratives.
He introduces somatic mapping as a method to surface these unconscious elements and foster shared understanding within organizations, contrasting this with traditional, often ineffective, blame-focused approaches to incidents.
Checkout the video and share your feedback. Please don’t forget to subscribe to the channel while you are there.
That’s it for this week. To all the subscribers in the USA, Happy Thanksgiving 🍁 🦃!!!