One principle in Wing Chun is the maintaining of forward tension.  To explain, I’ll draw the distinction between Tension and Energy and show how this principle in Wing Chun can be applied to Change Management.

Tension is a type of Energy

A Wing Chun maxim goes as follows:

soft and relaxed strength will put your opponent in jeopardy

That maxim means that forward tension is not necessarily using force, or forcing through a barrier or “pushing through”.  But, there is soft force, or tension, such that when a gap presents itself, then the hand or arm shoots forward like a spring.  The “shooting forward” is not done with force, but is an unleashing of potential energy.

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I’d venture to say that most products and services are bloated with features that customers most likely don’t care for;  I’ve been part of product development teams where the focus is on features, with an implicit goal to stuffing as many features as possible — in consumer packaged goods and in software.   This is the wrong approach to developing memorable and sticky products.

The above statement might be best described by Kathy Sierra’s Featuritis Curve:

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The more I learn and practice ethnography and design-thinking, the more I notice subtle but incredibly frustrating experiences.  For example, I had a frustrating experience with a faucet that was in the hospital room where our adopted baby girl, Mylie, was born.  This faucet is an automated one — with a sensor.  So, whenever an object passes the sensor, the faucet would turn on even if the intention of the human was not to use the faucet.    

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In August 2006, Mary Poppendieck was nice enough to entertain questions from my readers on the topic of Lean for Software.  Some great questions were submitted and Mary answered them. 

Well, she’s willing to do that again, so please submit your questions for Mary and she will answer some of those questions.  I will then post her responses on future posts.  Here’s the process:

1. Submit your questions on Lean for Software or Agile in the comments below.
2. I will close comments on November 25.
3. I will begin posting Mary’s answers after November 25, 2007.

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In a previous post on Ethnography, I invited Aza Raskin, founder of Humanized and son of Jef Raskin, the inventor of the Macintosh and author of The Humane Interface: New Directions for Designing Interactive Systems — to possibly answer reader’s questions about design, visual management, ethnography, genchi genbutsu, man-machine interactions, or anything related.  Several readers responded with interesting questions for Aza.  In today’s post, Aza Raskin responds to a reader’s question about Google Search Results page and how messy it is.

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One Pillar of the Toyota Production System is "Respect for the Human" or, more commonly known outside of Toyota as "Respect for People."  That Pillar has given rise to an approach to improvement that is uniquely Toyota’s and is starkly different than the Taylorist approach proposed by Frederick Winslow Taylor, which fails to see the individual and under-appreciates the physical and psychological differences in people and in how people prefer to work.  The Toyota Production System, I argue, appreciates the individual and empowers the individual to improve her work within the System; by doing so, a firm can increase its ratio of problem-solvers to problem-finders.   But, this article is not about Taylorism versus The Toyota Production System — ignoring my propensity towards tangents for a moment — this article is about Root Cause Analysis, Genchi Genbutsu, and Human-Centered Design — all elements I found in the book Better: A Surgeon’s Notes on Performance, by Atul Gawande.

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What if your company only had one product?  One feature in a product?  What would life in that world be like?  Then, as an excercise, slowly add one feature and one product at a time, and see how that world changes, which processes are added, and how complexity begins to accumulate.  Lean and Six Sigma that are implemented on the shop floor often do not help because the problem with proliferate and unmanaged complexity begins with the product, not after. 

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I resigned from my previous position with Ancestry.com; after considering 3 offers, I accepted a position with eBay.  Our family will still be in Utah (eBay has a large office here), but I’ll most likely travel to other offices also.  I’m very, very excited to be at eBay.  From a high level, I’ll be leading the efforts to improve the customer experience by implementing Lean, Six Sigma, and Service Operations best practices.  I’m really looking forward to the challenge and opportunity.

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