Building And Adaptive Organization

• At IMVU we wound up building a training program that was so good, new hires were productive on their first day of employment.
• It required a huge effort to standardize our work processes and prepare a curriculum of the concepts that new employees should learn.
• Every new engineer would be assigned a mentor, who would help the new employee work through a curriculum of systems, concepts, and techniques.
• The performance of the mentor and mentee were linked, so the mentors took this education seriously.
• The training program evolved organically out of a methodical approach to evolving our own process. This process of orientation was subject to constant experimentation and revision so that it grew more effective and less burdensome over time.
• I call this building an adaptive organization, one that automatically adjusts its process and performance to current conditions.

Can You Go Too Fast?

• So far this book has emphasized the importance of speed. However, focusing on speed alone would be destructive. To work, startups require built-in speed regulators that help teams find their optimal pace of work.
• We saw an example of speed regulation in Chapter 9 with the use of the andon cord in systems such as continuous deployment. The key to the andon cord is that it brings work to a stop as soon as an uncorrectable quality problem surfaces which forces it to be investigated.
• When I teach the Lean Startup approach to entrepreneurs with an engineering background, this is one of the hardest concepts to grasp.
• On the one hand, the logic of validated learning and the minimum viable product says that we should get a product into customers’ hands as soon as possible and that any extra work we do beyond what is required to learn from customers is waste.On the other hand, the Build-Measure-Learn feedback loop is a continuous process. We don’t stop after one minimum viable product but use what we have learned to get to work immediately on the next iteration.
• The same dynamics happen in a service business, since any new rules may conflict with existing rules, and the more rules, the more possibilities for conflict.
• IMVU used the techniques of this chapter to achieve scale and quality in a just-in-time fashion.

The Wisdom of the Five Whys

• To accelerate, Lean Startups need a process that provides a natural feedback loop. When you’re going too fast, you cause more problems.
• Adaptive processes force you to slow down and invest in preventing the kinds of problems that are currently wasting time. As those preventive efforts pay off, you naturally speed up again.
• In the previous example of employees lacking training, how do you decide if the investment in training is worth the benefit of speed due to reduced interruptions? Figuring this out from a top-down perspective is challenging, because it requires estimating two completely unknown quantities:
• How much it will cost to build an unknown program against an unknown benefit you might reap. Even worse, the traditional way to make these kinds of decisions is decidedly large-batch thinking. A company either has an elaborate training program or it does not. Until they can justify the return on investment from building a full program, most companies generally do nothing.The alternative is to use a system called the Five Whys to make incremental investments and evolve a startup’s processes gradually. The core idea of Five Whys is to tie investments directly to the prevention of the most problematic symptoms. The system takes its name from the investigative method of asking the question “Why?” five times to understand what has happened (the root cause).
• At the root of every seemingly technical problem is a human problem. Five Whys provides an opportunity to discover what that human problem might be.