The idea of "Fail fast" is that many of our ideas will not work, therefore the faster we rip through them, the faster we get to success. Great. But this approach is essentially doing what we do now (only better). Did we ever try to do something we thought would fail? Not so much. We always take the ...

The myths about Agile generally come from two groups. The first, and high in number, are the Agilists who have almost a religious view of ‘Capital A’ Agile. The second group is comprised of more tenured hardware engineers and their managers. They are both wrong, but for different reasons. ...

Be brave! Draw on the strategic import of Lean. Trust in and embrace the people involved. Start a new revolution! Often! Bring back the JOY to peoples working lives. By “joy” I mean doing work which is valuable for the business of the stakeholder, and also brings a feeling of personal and prof...

In my daily work, improving innovation in globally leading companies, I experience two dominant problem areas –innovation level decreasing and overloading of innovation resources. These seem to be systemic and my thinking is that they are based on some ‘traps’: companies driving themselves into more...

In my experience, a holistic view of waste in product development must include knowledge management – the ability of the organization to retain and apply knowledge once it was acquired the first time. Put another way, any mistake that has been made more than once by an organization is a failure of ...

How cognitive bias can hamper innovation, and what to do about it...

It has been said that the Wright Brothers were one of the original practitioners of knowledge based development. In fact, the museum listed their three knowledge gaps (Lift, Power, and Control). They started with kites, then gliders, then a wind tunnel, more gliders, and once they were confident the...

Somewhere beyond right and wrong resonates throughout the Lean system in Genchi Genbutsu and is at the center of Lean Product and Process Development. To truly understand, we must go beyond our current understanding, refrain from wishful thinking and ‘go and see for ourselves’ to collect data first ...