lean leadership for greater good
why doing more with less starts with making room for yourself
Changing the world is not easy
Changing the world is not easy, and changing ourselves is also hard.
Imagine if you and everyone working with you could upgrade your thinking, stress less and achieve more. Lean leadership creates the opportunity for this to happen by teaching us how to update our inner software and access greater mental agility and power.
Every leader and indeed everyone can innovate more easily and be more nimble
They just have to get out of the way of themselves and remove obstacles that waste energy and create lag.
Gandhi wrote a causal analysis that shows very well how our thoughts shape our journey and our final destination!
Lean leadership allows everyone to:
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experience the journey (not for it to go by in a blur)
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enjoy the journey
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shape the journey
If you are a leader, in whatever form (and there are many), it all starts with you.
“Keep your thoughts positive because your thoughts become
YOUR WORDS.
Keep your words positive because your words become
YOUR BEHAVIOUR
Keep your behaviour positive because your behaviour becomes
YOUR HABITS
Keep your habits positive because your habits become
YOUR VALUES
Keep your values positive because your values become
YOUR DESTINY”
Mahatma Gandhi
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Daniel Kahneman
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"We think, each of us, that we're much more rational than we are. And we think that we make our decisions because we have good reasons to make them. Even when it's the other way around. We believe in the reasons, because we've already made the decision."
95% of what influences our actions is subconscious.
Our hidden brain houses our most basic instincts and deeply rooted conditionings. We reason in our prefrontal cortex and believe we are in charge of ourselves, but in reality there are submerged drivers.
The human brain is also non linear. We regularly jump from idea to idea, and perform in cycles or waves. We resist change, weigh losses more than gains, and adopt systems and processes without understanding other people let alone ourselves.
No wonder the workplace can become debilitating.
Many methodologies focus only on our reasoning process. Lean leadership gets to our habits and mental models too.
Mostly, it makes room for us to learn and be more mindful, aware and connected.
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loosen the lasso without losing your horse
Lean leadership is a model for bringing about radically greater good in the world. A lean leader creates a learning culture across the entire organisation based on achieving customer value at the lowest possible total cost. How can this not be perfect for social purpose organisations?
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The first step is lightweight, mentoring leadership. Agility hinges on an organisation’s ability to utilise and adapt to the most current information. This requires short feedback loops, validated learning, shared knowledge, constant communication and experimentation alongside beneficiaries and customers.
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Continuous improvement drives the day to day. Effectively practicing lean management requires leaders to trust in the skills, knowledge, and experience of their employees. This means hiring smart, ambitious team players, giving them the tools they need to be successful, and then, most importantly, getting out of their way.
improvement is the best mindset
Tom Peters
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Excellent firms don't believe in excellence - only in constant improvement and constant change.
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Michael Porter
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The thing is, continuity of strategic direction and continuous improvement in how you do things are absolutely consistent with each other. In fact, they're mutually reinforcing.
Organisations do not change overnight or because new systems or processes arrive. they change because the people in them adapt, learn and evolve.
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Everyday wins
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Fabulous failures
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Radical listening and respect.
Everyday wins - learn to finish often, but finish small things and iterate them forwards
Celebrations - It's hard to spot and celebrate continuous improvement without knowing what good looks like for your organisation.
Start with "What does 80% right look like?"
Lean pillars
If you don't feel you and your organisation are lean, there are a few pillars that will surely let you find out how lean you truly are, and prop up your building along the way.
They are interlinked, so if you start the first step wholeheartedly, the rest tend to follow or flow.
1. Make work visible.
It is just as, if not more, important for knowledge and service work to be visible. There can be domain experts in your organisation but there is no room for territorialism.
Opacity tends to hide the opportunities for collaboration, problem-solving etc.
4. Daily accountability
Stand ups and trackers that show movement and momentum eg cadence
Operate radical transparency.
2. Get More Over The Line.
Too many concurrent projects or campaigns and bottlenecks are debilitating. Learn to finish little and often. Work in bursts (sprints), kill projects, operate through experiments, pivot.
3. Know what good looks like
The key to doing more with less starts with learning your standard, then keeping to the standard and finally perfecting the standard.
Only then can you hit benchmark with ease and begin to surpass yourself.
Learning what good looks like is best done via customer satisfaction feedback. Competitor evaluation (respected rivals) and envy helps too. KPIs and OKRs are a given. Be realistic and as always, be ready to improve!
Some charities produce factsheets and guides to show co-workers what to look for as 'good', 'better' and 'best'.
4. Daily accountability.
Know your why. Transparency. Constant communication. Have the difficult conversations. Finish. Folllow up.
Get the techniques and the tools: eg. better meetings and clearer, more usable and collaborative / real-time systems. Show your organisation movement (progress) and momentum eg cadence or pace.
5. Love failure & problems.
Failing is a learning experience that builds emotional muscle, flexibility and resilience.
Problems are where breakthroughs lie - have a problems - solution board or tree. Ask: can we re-frame this?
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you've (already) got this
A lean mind is:
- a curious scientist
- a critical friend
- quick to spot improvements
- quick to celebrate small wins
- tuned in to how people thrive
- conscious that the bigger picture is made one step at a time
The fact is that organizations don't just change because of new systems, processes or structures. They change because the people within the organization adapt and evolve as well. Only when people have made their own personal transitions can an organization truly reap the benefits of change.
The lean leader goes first by learning how to be:
- a scientist, exploring and experimenting for strong and replicable results
- an entrepreneur, balancing risk and reward to reach traction, growth through customer delight
- an empath - sensing the wellbeing of stakeholders and synergising the way that programmes, people and systems interoperate
At charity21 we are developing buddy programmes for this lean leadership transition. The stages are:
- Simplify - diagnose and reduce pain points. Stop any over-doing, co-work and reduce waste. Go slow in order to gain speed.
- Synergise - create lightweight systems for workflow, feedback loops and continuous improvement. Find your cadence and nimble focus.
- Shape - get upstream, generate executable ideas and innovate. Kill projects, create MVPs, pivot or start afresh.
Innovating for good is much harder than turning a profit. And it can take a toll on our mental health.
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lean building blocks
Putting in place the building blocks for lean leadership will support and accelerate the changes you need to make.
1 page strategy or strategy map.
Workflow or Kanban.
KPIs and/or OKRs.
Theory of Change or Change Models (RSA, Lewin).
Problem & Celebration boards.
Minimal meetings (huddles, coffee, town hall, stand ups...).
Huddles or stand up meetings are short, sharp, focused, daily team meetings. They involve the whole team and take place around a physical or virtual information center. When done well they improve the performance and engagement of those attending. Typically, the team gathers around a visual management board (this typically includes metrics, problem solving, continuous improvement ideas, and process status/plan)
Town hall or all hands meetings allow management to connect with the whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Their best part? The Q&A.
lean innovation meets social impact
In 2019, whilst prepping the close of my failed tech startup, I read the book 'Lean Impact - How to Innovate for Radically Greater Social Good' by Ann Mei Chang. It was instantly clear that I had found the nexus for my own experiences in the non profit, corporate and startup worlds.
Lean Impact takes the best of lean innovation and marries it with social impact, using a 3 principle framework:
Think Big – set audacious goals and build an engine for growth that will move the needle relative to the size of the problem
Start Small – build the agility to run fast experiments and drive feedback loops that will accelerate your pace of learning and reduce waste of time and money
Relentlessly Pursue Impact – identify and track the metrics that matter to increase impact and scale
It is radical because it forces social purpose organisations to address their engines of growth.
The only thing it misses is the people element!
