About Mike Doherty

Mike Doherty

Secret Formulas of Implementation Success

As someone who’s been doing project work for decades, I must admit, it’s always cool and rewarding when you implement something. Shipping your work and having it exposed to reality instead of theory is the essence of innovation – taking an idea, or a design, and making it real.

But implementation work is hard, especially for a business process like Flowcasting since it touches, interacts and changes a large part of a retail business and extended eco-system.

I’ve been very lucky over my career to have either led, or co-led, three successful implementations in retail of Flowcasting or major elements of the concept. As an implementer at heart, over the years, what’s emerged are some mechanisms I’ve used that I believe are instrumental in success.

What I’d call my secret formulas.

For a key one, we’ll turn the clocks back to the mid-to-late 1990s. At the time I was the leader of a team for a national, Canadian hardgoods retailer, who’s mandate was to design and implement new processes and supporting technology to improve the planning and flow of inventory from supplier to store shelf.

The team had essentially designed what we now call Flowcasting and had selected technology to support the process. While we all understood that planning from the store level back was technically infeasible, we decided to forecast DC-level demand, and calculate and share forward looking supply projections with our merchandise vendors – in the process instilling the concept of supplier scheduling in retail. I won’t bore you with the details, but the project was quite successful and helped cement some of the principles of Flowcasting in retail, including supplier scheduling and working to a single set of numbers.

For a project of this size, like most larger scale transformations, we had a cross-functional governance team established – essentially like a steering committee – that would help guide the project and provide advice and suggestions to the implementation team. And to be honest, they did a good job.

However, inevitably, when a group of that size and functional diversity is tasked with guiding and asking questions of the leader (in this case me), there are bound to be some dumb asks and even dumber suggestions.

That was the input for me to develop my “Rule of 3”, which I/we used successfully on this implementation, and I’ve used ever since.

It works like this. If the ask/suggestion from the steering committee or large governance group sounded mental to me, I’d note it down and tell everyone I’d think about it. Then, I’d go back to the team and see what they thought. If they agreed it was mental, I’d ignore the ask/suggestion. And I’d continue to ignore it until the group had asked a third time – at which time I/we’d develop a response.

The beautiful thing about this approach is that seldom does the request ever get asked again, let alone a third time. It’s forgotten and therefore requires no cycles of thought or response from me and the team. I’m not exactly sure why but my thinking is that in larger groups people tend to like to hear themselves talk – they want to make suggestions/contributions, so they can’t help themselves and sometimes make a dumb suggestion or ask. Then, by the time the next session comes around, they completely forget about their initial request.

As an example, when I was working with our Winnipeg-based retail client designing and ultimately implementing Flowcasting, me and the team leader had to regularly present to a large cross functional group about Flowcasting – how it would work, the benefits, the implementation approach, etc.

I remember at one large, cross-project session a participant asking something like “How will the new process factor in social media sentiment into the demand planning process, to potentially revise the forecast of that item and others?” My response was, “Not sure yet, but we’ll think about it”.

I remember the team leader asking me after, “what are we going to do?”. My answer was simple: “Nothing. We’re going to ignore that and see if it’s ever asked again”. It wasn’t and the rest is history.

Now, not to brag or anything, but this client was able to improve daily in-stock from about 92% to 98%, while reducing both DC and store inventories, all while completely ignoring social media sentiment (whatever that is). Thanks to the Rule of 3.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that most of the suggestions from steering committees and cross functional groups are/were dumb – they’re not. I’m saying that a certain percentage will be and you, as an implementer, need a mechanism to ignore them and/or say “No” nicely, so you can stay focused on what matters.

For me, it’s The Rule of 3. It has been a loyal friend to me, over many years and implementations, and I hope you can use it – or something like it – as well.

It’s one of my secret formulas of implementation success.

Repetito est mater studiorum

“Repetition is the mother of learning, the father of action, which makes it the architect of accomplishment.” – Zig Ziglar

When I was growing up, I was a very competitive dude, particularly in sports. When it came to sports, for me, winning was everything. Basically, I was an asshole. Many of my friends and foes called me by a different name. What’s the name they used? Oh yeah, a cunt. It’s OK, it was the truth and they often called me that to my face.

Here’s a story, from high school, that helps confirm my then status. 

In the basement of our school, down near the gym, there was a ping pong table. And, during lunch and breaks, students would play. The rule was simple: the winner stays on the table, until someone beats them, and then they take over. So, a very good player could play for quite a while.

One day, me and my pals sauntered down and watched as a girl named Dana beat all comers. Then, at the insistence of my mates, it was my turn to challenge her. She crushed me. My buddies, of course, knowing how competitive I was, absolutely shamed me that day and for many weeks after.

So, what did I do?

I did what any red-blooded, super competitive dude would do. I bought my own racket and a ping pong table.  I was determined to win.

Ping pong tables fold in the middle where the net is so that, when folded, the other side of the table is upright. It allows a single player to hit the ball, over the net, against the other side of the table and it pretty much guarantees that the ball will be returned. So, I set up the folded table in my parents’ basement and, every chance I got, would go down and pound balls against the returning wall.

Over and over. Harder and faster. Learning how to put overspin on both a forehand and backhand. Learning how to smash and return a smash. Repetition after repetition – for hours and days on end.  

I would soon get to challenge Dana again. And, with my buddies watching, I would demolish her and would become not only the ping pong champion of my school, but also the best high school player in the county.

The moral of this true story isn’t to confirm that I was an asshole. The moral of the story is highlighting the importance of repetition.

There’s an old Latin saying, “repetito est mater studiorum” which means repetition is the mother of learning.

When it comes to instilling new ways of working, turns out repetition really is the mother of learning.

Implementing a new planning approach like Flowcasting in retail benefits greatly from repetition. You’re essentially teaching the planners and the wider organization (including suppliers) how to think differently about integrated demand and supply planning, so the more often people are exposed to the idea, the better. 

I recently read a great book about change called The Human Element.  In it they outline one of the most important strategies for instilling change is to “Acclimate the Idea” through repetition and repeated exposure (i.e., give people time to think and internalize the idea/change)

In a recent implementation of Flowcasting, the idea of repetition was leveraged extensively to help people make the change journey, including:

  • An ongoing education program which started with a cascade from the CEO and delivered repeated educational sessions to help people internalize the change in thinking and underlying principles of the new process
  • Process prototypes where the Buying Teams (Merch and Supply Chain) would execute a day in the life scenario, with company-specific data for every major planning scenario – like product life cycle, promotions planning, seasonal planning, etc.
  • A supplier education & training program to teach suppliers and the Buying Teams the new approach to collaboration
  • Training sessions to demonstrate how people would execute the new ways of working
  • Coaching sessions and ongoing coaching with job aides to help people transition from the old to the new

What do all these activities do? 

They constantly repeat and demonstrate to people the underlying change and principles of the new process. As an example, in each of the process prototypes, the Buying Teams could see what was meant by a valid simulation of reality, what the supplier would see in their supplier schedules, why postponing creating a purchase order for promotional volume was better for everyone, plus many other learnings. Repetition, with real scenarios, helped them instill new thinking and helped acclimate the ideas.

Getting good at anything (Flowcasting or ping pong) requires learning.  And learning needs repetition.

After all, she really is the mother of learning.

A dynamic, digital twin

Frank Gehry is widely acclaimed as one of the world’s greatest architects. His most famous and celebrated building, the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, is the design and subsequent construction that elevated him to superstardom.

The story of how Gehry designs and the technologies he used to develop this, and subsequent masterpieces, is instructive and very relevant for supply chain planning and management.

Gehry usually begins by sketching ideas on paper with scrawls that would mystify most folks. Then he mostly works with models – usually working with wooden building blocks of different sizes that he stacks, and restacks, always looking for something that might be functional and is visually appealing.

Until recently, he’s worked with these types of models his whole life. His studio is filled with them – the culmination of decades of model building. He usually starts at one scale, then tries another and then another to see the project from varying perspectives. He zeroes in on some aspects of the design in his model, zooming in and out until he better understands the design from many different viewpoints and angles. He’s always trying new ideas, reviewing his designs with his team and client, eventually deciding on what works or doesn’t. Eventually he settles on the design and then they get on with it.

After landing the project to design the Guggenheim Bilbao, he and his team spent the better part of two years working through these iterative models, using the decidedly analog world of building blocks and cardboard to visualize the result.

Then, our old friend technology made a house call and changed his design capability forever.

Gehry would be introduced to computer simulation software called CATIA, allowing Gehry to build his designs on a computer. Originally the software was built to help design jets but was modified to allow buildings to be designed – on a computer – in three dimensions. Early in his career his designs were mostly straight lines and box-like shapes, but this technology would allow him to design curves and spirals that would be beautiful and aesthetically pleasing.

CATIA’s capabilities proved incredible. Gehry and his team could alter the design quickly, change curves or shapes, and the system would instantly calculate the implications for the entire design – from structural integrity to electrical/plumbing requirements, to overall cost. They could iterate new ideas and concepts on the computer, simulate the results, then rinse and repeat, and only then, once happy, begin construction.

The Guggenheim building was first fully designed on a computer.

In a moment of foreshadowing, the design and digital design process was labelled a “digital twin”. Once the digital twin was finalized and agreed to, only then did construction begin.

The term “digital twin” has become somewhat fashionable and, to be honest, quite important in supply chain. And what do people mean by the term “digital twin”, when thinking about the supply chain? Here’s one definition…

A digital twin is a digital replica of a physical supply chain. It helps organizations recreate their real supply chain in a virtual world so they can test scenarios, model different nodes, modes, flows, and policies and understand how decisions and disruptions will impact network operations.

For most supply chain folks, the digital twin is relatively static and represents the current state, or outlines a snapshot of the supply chain, as of today – for example, what’s happening in the supply chain, as of right now.

But, like Gehry’s ability to dynamically change design elements and immediately see the impact overall, wouldn’t the best digital twin for supply chains also be dynamic, complete, and forward-looking?

It would.

And isn’t that what Flowcasting is?

It’s a future-dated, up-to-date, complete model of the business. It depicts all current and projected demand, supply, inventory, and financial flows and resource requirements, based on the strategies and tactics that are driving a retailer and their trading partners. If something changes, then the dynamic model re-calculates the projections – so the forward-looking digital twin is always current. Everyone can see the projections in their respective language of the business (e.g., units, cases, dollars, capacities, resources) and work to a single set of numbers.

The architectural “digital twin” was a breakthrough approach for Frank Gehry and architecture in general.

The forward-looking, dynamic “digital twin” – that is, Flowcasting – is a similar breakthrough approach for supply chain planning.

New Model for Retailer-Supplier Collaboration

Thank you to Supply Chain Management Review for publishing our latest article, “A New Model for Retailer-Supplier Collaboration” in the March/April edition of their always excellent magazine.

Check it out here: https://bt.e-ditionsbyfry.com/publication/?m=24891&i=816750&p=34&ver=html5

The article outlines a new approach to collaborative inventory planning, based on the profound insight of Dr. Joseph Orlicky and the ideas and concepts developed and implemented by our long-time colleague, Andre Martin.

We’d also like to thank two forward-looking companies, Princess Auto Ltd and Watson Gloves, for agreeing to be featured in the article, demonstrating that the approach works and benefits consumers and both retailer and supplier.

It turns out that Joe and Andre are right – you should never forecast what you can calculate!

Subtract

“Life can be improved by adding, or by subtracting. The world pushes us to add because that benefits them. But the secret is to focus on subtracting.”

                    - Derek Sivers

People don’t subtract.

Our minds add before even considering taking away.

Don’t believe me?

Leidy Klotz is a Behavioral Science Professor at the University of Virginia and a student of “less”. He conducted a series of experiments that demonstrate people think “more” instead of “less”.

Consider the following diagram and the ask.

Thousands of participants were asked to make the patterns on the left and right side of the dark middle vertical line match each other, with the least number of changes.

There are two best answers. One is to add four shaded blocks on the left and the other is to subtract four shaded blocks on the right.

Only about 15 percent of participants chose to subtract.

Intrigued, Professor Klotz and his research assistants concocted numerous additional experiments to test whether people would add or subtract. They all produced the same result and conclusion – people are addicted to and inclined to add. It wasn’t close.

Big fucking deal, right?

Not so fast. Unfortunately, adding almost always makes things more complicated, polluted, and worse. You’d be better off subtracting.

A great example in supply chain is demand planning.

Demand planning, according to many, is becoming the poster child of adding. Let’s factor in more variables to produce an even more beautiful and voluptuous forecast. Are you sure you all these additional variables will improve the demand plan?

I doubt it.

First, many companies are forecasting what should be calculated. It’s been proven that the farther away from end consumption you’re trying to forecast, the more variables you’ll try to add. And the resulting forecast usually gets worse the more you add – since you’re often adding noise.

We have a retail client that is forecasting consumer demand at the item/store level only and calculating all inventory flows from store to supplier – what we call Flowcasting. Their demand planning process only considers two variables to calculate the baseline forecast:
• the sales history in units
• an indication if the sales was influenced by something abnormal (e.g., like promotions, clearance, out of stock, etc.)

All “other” variables that the “experts” say should be included have been subtracted.

Yet their planning process consistently delivers industry leading daily in-stocks and inventory flows to the store shelf.

The idea is simple, profound, and extremely difficult for us all. For process and solution designs, and pretty much everything, you need to remove what’s unnecessary.

You need to subtract.

Soak Time

“If a plant gets nothing but sunlight, it’s very harmful. It must have darkness too.” – Robert Pirsig

Did you know that if a plant gets nothing but sunlight, it’s extremely harmful and even deadly? It must have darkness as well. In the sun, it converts carbon dioxide to oxygen, but in the dark, it takes some oxygen and converts it back into carbon dioxide.

People, as it turns out, are the same. We need periods of darkness – essentially doing nothing – to develop ideas and/or internalize new ones. We often refer to it as “soak time” – the time where you let your mind just soak stuff in, subconsciously thinking about things. This, inevitably, helps your understanding and allows your creative juices to work.

Turns out many creative folks embrace the concept of soak time.

The film director Quentin Tarantino outlines his creative process and the role of soak time. This is his approach. He basically writes during the daytime. Then after a while, he stops writing. Now comes the key part of his process, he says. “I have a pool, and I keep it heated. And I jump in my pool and just float around in the water…and then, boom, a lot of shit will come to me. Literally, a ton of ideas. Then I get out of the pool and make notes on that. But not do it. That will be tomorrow’s work. Or the day after. Or the day after that.” Another filmmaker, Darren Aronofsky, said, “procrastination is a critical part of the process. Your brain needs a break…so that even when you’re not working, you’re working. Your brain is putting shit together.”

In his excellent book, Deep Work, Cal Newport teaches the benefits of downtime. One study by Dutch psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis showed that when working on a complex problem or decision, you should let your unconscious mind work on it as much as possible. Anders Ericsson wrote a seminal paper, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” which showed that our brains have a limited window for cognitively demanding efforts. “Decades of study from multiple fields within psychology,” Newport writes, “all conclude that regularly resting your brain improves the quality of your work.”

For us, soak time is a core component of our approach to help people change and embrace new technologies and ideas like Flowcasting. It’s why we start the education process very early – so people have time to soak in the new thinking, ponder it and slowly accept it (hopefully).

Designing new processes and work methods also benefits from regular and ongoing doses of soak time. Instead of plowing through a design phase, grinding your way through session after session, a far better approach is to work on some aspect of the design, then let it sit, or go dark for a while. Subconsciously though, that beautiful brain of yours can’t turn off the tap – and will be thinking and pondering even when you’ve gone dark on that topic. The result? Better designs and solutions, guaranteed.

When I consult with retail clients, I’m aghast at how little soak time is built into people’s calendars, especially for folks that work in Home Office or Support Centres. Everybody seems to be busy doing busywork, and there’s barely time to schedule a 30-minute session, let alone have some soak time. The organization would be far better off by scheduling 20-50% of slack time for all these folks – essentially blocking off time for them to daydream, read, walk, or just do nothing at all. Let the mind wander and subconsciously connect things.

In both my Canadian and UK home offices I have a couch. When I need to let things soak, I sometimes go for a walk, or most of the time, I just lay down and do nothing. Just rest and relax and let the mind soak for a while. I do it often, almost every day and for some period.

Does it help? Yes, I think it does. Sure, over time, most of my ideas have been shit, but the odd decent one slips through. I’m convinced it’s because of nurturing it with soak time.

If you’re delivering projects or have a job that requires you to develop new ideas and initiatives, then my advice is simple: plan and schedule lots of soak time.

Maybe also get a couch so when you need to, you can just lie down and relax, breath slowly and let your mind wander and connect stuff, all while converting oxygen to carbon dioxide.

Sorta like a plant does.

Collaborate, then calculate

“Never forecast what you can calculate.” – Dr. Joseph Orlicky

Collaboration promises much to the retail supply chain, and rightly so. Retailers and their trading partners are beginning to understand they are not alone. The retail supply chain does not act as a series of islands – each independent entity working for its own purpose. Rather, smart companies understand that they are really working as part of one, completely integrated network that is designed (or should be) to deliver products to their end customers.

Almost 50 years ago, at the 1975 APICS conference in San Diego, Dr. Joseph Orlicky (the pioneer of MRP – Material Requirements Planning) made a profound statement regarding supply chain planning. Having just learned of Andre Martin’s idea to calculate factory demand from the distribution centre requirements, he told Andre that his idea was good since you should “never forecast what you can calculate”.

Leveraging this profound truth is the key to improved collaboration, addressing the shortcomings of CPFR and, importantly, making a significant dent in stock outs, overstocks, and the bullwhip effect.

The retail/CPG supply chain should be driven only by a forecast of consumer demand – time-phased by item/selling-location (e.g., store, webstore, etc.). The consumer demand forecast should then be used to calculate a series of integrated, time-phased product flow plans and planned shipments (for a 52+ week planning horizon) from the store to the supplier factory – what we call Flowcasting.

Sharing planned shipments allows the retailer to inform the supplier about future product flow requirements, by item and shipping location, with all known variables factored in – what we often refer to as the supplier schedule. This allows the supplier to eliminate all efforts previously expended to attempt to forecast that retailer orders. The planned shipments replace all this effort – improving the supplier order plan and allowing the collaborative process to work using the profound power of silence.

In the new collaborative model, since the planned shipments provide a long-term view of future required inventory flows, the expectation is that the retailer and supplier work to the principle of “silence is approval”. What that means is that the retailer expects the supplier to be prepared to deliver to the up-to-date, forward-looking schedule and only when they cannot supply to the schedule and/or they don’t understand the projected schedule, is collaboration required.

Collaboration based on a shared view of planned shipments (i.e., the supplier schedule) allows for the collaborative model to become more strategic and value added. In this new approach retailers and suppliers will collaborate on strategies to drive sales and potentially inventory plans – in essence, the inputs to drive joint business plans.

That’s a complete reversal of the traditional CPFR model where each company developed their own independent order forecasts and then spent considerable time and effort to reconcile these forecasts. In the new approach, the collaboration mostly focuses on a common language: sales to the end consumer. And, again, largely by exception. There is no need to collaborate on the plethora of retail forecasts and planned shipments since these have been automatically translated into the requirements, product flows and various languages of the business (e.g., dollars, cube, capacity, resource needs) for all trading partners.

The following diagram depicts the paradigm shift in collaborative planning between retailers and their merchandise suppliers – collaborating primarily on the inputs to the joint business plans, and only by exception if any issues or opportunities arise based on the resultant operational product flow plans:

Leading retailers and their suppliers will collaborate where they believe it is worthy of each partner’s time and largely on strategies (i.e., inputs to the joint plans) that drive growth and/or improved performance. That could be on promotional forecasts, new items, and ideas and concepts about product flows – to name a few. Both partners understand that the planned shipments resulting from these strategies are calculated – so collaboration on these shared projections is only needed if supply is at risk.

Dr. Orlicky’s famous and profound quote, “never forecast what you can calculate” is embedded in my mind and cemented in all the retail clients I’ve worked with. We can, and should, build on this profound truth and work to ingrain this thinking and practice between retailers and their trading partners…

Collaborate, then calculate.

Celebrating an autotelic

A few days after losing the 2010 French Open Final, Novak Djokovic said to his coach, Marián Vajda, that he wanted to quit. He was ranked third in the world, a grand slam winner, and one of the favorites to win Wimbledon.

His coach asked him, “Why do you play?”

Djokovic immediately sensed the problem: He was focusing on rankings, titles, and playing to impress others. As a result, he said, “I was really messed up, mentally.”

As he pondered the question, he realized something. Most of his fondest childhood memories included his “favorite toy” – a small tennis racket and a soft foam ball. He started playing, “because I loved holding that racket.”

“Do you still love it?” his coach asked. Djokovic thought about it, got excited, and said: “I do. I still love holding a racket in my hand. Whether it’s a final on center court or just horsing around, I like playing for the sake of playing.”

His coach then nodded and said, “That’s your inspiration. That’s what you need to tap into. Put aside rankings, titles and other external stuff, and just play, for the love of it.”

Djokovic agreed. And he has never looked back.

The following season, Djokovic enjoyed one of the greatest seasons in sports history. He won 43 straight matches, including his first Wimbledon title. And he finished the year as the No. 1 ranked player in the world.

“I started to play freely,” he said. “I became the kid again, who just loved to play.” There’s a word for doing something for the love of doing it:

Autotelic.

The word stems from the Greek auto (self) and telos (end) – an autotelic is “someone that has a purpose in, and not apart from, itself.”

For an autotelic,” The work is the win,” as Ryan Holiday says. “You need to get to a place where doing the work is the win and everything else is extra.”

Today I’d like to celebrate an inventory planning autotelic – my colleague and collaborator, Darryl Landvater, of the Oliver Wight Americas Group.

Before we became colleagues, Darryl worked with Andre Martin to build and implement the first Distribution Resource Planning (DRP) system at Abbott Labs in Montreal – connecting distribution and manufacturing operations, working to a single set of numbers, and changing how distribution and manufacturing operations were planned forever.

We met and began our collaboration at Canadian Tire, in Toronto, Canada in the mid-1990s. The team I was leading was in the process of re-engineering how product flow planning was done. Darryl (and Andre) helped us convince the Executive team that our design – essentially Flowcasting – would work and also helped us during the initial implementation, especially with respect to education and supplier scheduling.

Shortly after, he and Andre took their idea of an integrated supply chain to see some of the big technology players in the supply chain planning space – with a goal to get them to build a store-level, integrated solution – even offering to help in the process. But every one of them said no. They didn’t believe the market need was there and/or a solution could be built to scale to the retail volumes and specific planning challenges.

Undaunted, and in keeping with an autotelic philosophy, they said “fuck it, we’ll build it ourselves. And they did. Darryl was the chief architect, along the way teaching himself Java and how to code again.

The result was a stunningly simple and elegant solution, including developing leading retail solutions for slow sellers, seasonal planning, promotions, scalability, and true daily net-change planning, among others.

The love of the work inspired him…and still does.

In fact, he’s just finishing re-architecting the solution to a leading-edge, ultra-modern platform to provide clients a robust, flexible, infinitely scalable, and affordable solution.

At any time, someone is always the best in the world.

In tennis, it’s Novak.

For Flowcasting solutions, it’s Darryl.

Perhaps there’s a lesson here.

Maybe, to be the best in the world, you need to be autotelic!

The hardest math of all

It’s September 1981 and I’d walk into and sit down at my first class at the University of Waterloo, in Waterloo, Ontario. It’s algebra, taught by Professor Lee Dickey. After he introduces himself, he walks to the large blackboard and proceeds to write Fermat’s Last Theorem on the board – a world famous mathematical theorem that Fermat had claimed he’d had a brilliantly wonderful proof that he hadn’t written out before he unexpectedly passed away.

It’s a theorem that had eluded the brightest minds in mathematics for 350 years. Professor Dickey told the class that if anyone could prove this, they’d be immortalized in the mathematics community. After class, I considered looking at it, but instead decided to go to the bomb-shelter (the campus pub) with some new friends for a dozen or so pints.

Mathematics is a wonderful discipline, providing foundational constructs and principles for engineering, computing, and architecture, to name only a few. But mathematics is hard. Differential equations, calculus, algebra, probability distributions, number theory, string theory, etc. – the list of branches of mathematics is amazing.

And, of course, mathematics plays a huge role in business, especially in supply chain management.

In business, one math concept stands out as the most influential, but also the hardest to instill and master.

That concept would be “subtraction”.

Whether you’re designing new products or business processes, everyone worships at the altar of simplicity. And, with good reason.

Simplicity sells. It sticks. Simplicity made hits of the Nest thermostat, Fitbit, and TiVo. Simple brought Apple back from the dead. It’s why we have Netflix. The Fisher Space Pen and the Swiss Army Knife are some of our most enduring products. All marvels of simplicity.

Yet while many mechanical marvels of simplicity remain true to their original form, many electronic ones don’t.

Travel back in time to use an early microwave and you’ll likely see a box with three buttons (High, Medium, Low) and a timer. Today, one of LG’s current models boasts 33 buttons. Do you press Auto Defrost or Express Defrost? And what does Less/More do? None of these make your popcorn or pizza cook faster, or taste better. And it’s not easy to use. Why do products almost always become more complex as they evolve?

“Simplicity is about subtraction,” says Mike Monteiro, author of Design Is a Job. “We live in a culture of consumption, where quality is associated with more. Designers and manufacturers tend to believe that to succeed you must provide more”.

Consider Apple. Simplicity saved the company. Starting with the iMac, it rolled out a series of stunningly simple hits: OS X, iTunes, the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. Google was also built on simplicity. Google won dominance with its sparse and very simple search page. Simplicity made Google a verb.

Executives, managers, and project teams alike struggle with keeping things simple. That’s because they can’t subtract. I read a recent Wall Street Journal report that workers now spend over two full days a week either in meetings or on emails. That’s incredibly ineffective and hardly the way to innovate or drive change.

To innovate or change, your calendar needs white space. Lots of it. Ideas rarely happen in meetings. They usually occur when you’re daydreaming, showering, walking, taking a dump, or when you’re bored and not doing anything. So, why don’t we have more white space in our calendars? Easy – we can’t seem to subtract those meetings.

The same chronic issue happens with meeting sizes. Most of the time there’s too many people, who could have been more easily informed or communicated with via email. Again, most people can’t subtract participants from the sessions.

It’s a similar phenomenon in product and process design. Virtually everyone wants to add when you really should be looking to subtract. Is it any wonder that most business processes and their corresponding solutions are too complex?

Simplicity is quite easy to say, but very hard to achieve. It requires paring things away when market forces want you to add. It means removing layers rather than adding them.

It’s achieved by subtraction.

Which is, in fact, the hardest math of all.

Think Different

An accountant and a former pig farmer would take the elevator and head to the 9th floor of an office building located at 2180 Yonge Street in Toronto, Canada. It’s fall, 1994. They’d make their way to a corner of the floor and be joined by a few other new teammates. A recent economics graduate, an operations research PhD candidate, an engineer from overseas, a former grocery IT analyst, and a person from a large multi-national CPG company with an educational background in history and geography.

There they’d meet their team leader – a dude that had worked in industry and in consulting and was self-described as “a bit of a maverick, who had little regard for hierarchy and was equal part genius, equal part buffoon”.

Their mandate?

Completely change the way product was planned and flowed in a retail supply chain, from factory to store shelf, for this $5billion Canadian retailer with more than 450 stores from coast to coast.

To say this team was unconventional was an understatement. As an example, every team was given the latitude to select their own furniture for meeting rooms and workspaces. After reviewing various options and costs, the team would decide that instead of a costly large meeting table they’d instead buy a ping-pong table and use it for working sessions. It was considerably cheaper, and at lunch and during breaks, they could play ping pong.

The introduction of a ping pong table as a work area became the stuff of legends. Lunch times were dominated with ferocious matches and the Senior Vice President of Supply Chain (the ultimate boss of this team) would famously have his ass handed to him one day during a match with one of the team members. No one worried about taking it easy on him. Both his forehand and backhand were weak and, as a result, he got what he deserved – crushed!

Work wise, the team would stutter and stumble. They’d take too long and get bogged down numerous times. They’d spend considerable time in stores, listening to store owners lament about poor product flows and shit service levels. Several ideas were documented, debated, and eventually scrapped.

One idea, though, would survive and the team continued to refine and improve it. Eventually, the idea of what we now call Flowcasting would be documented, and the team was certain the idea was simple, intuitive, and potentially game changing.

Unfortunately, the Senior Executive team didn’t concur. Several executives considered the idea a pipe dream and told the team, “Change the design since this will never work”.

Luckily the team leader was also a bit of a c*nt and was not too keen at being “told” to change the design, especially by speculators – no one knows if something will work before you do it, so how can anyone say, with certainty, that “this will never work”. Never is long time.

As it turned out, one of the technology team members would connect the business folks with Andre Martin and Darryl Landvater and they would reassure the team with the fact that they had already conceived and ran some pilots of this design idea a few years before. A turning point for the design and the Flowcasting concept in general.

They would help convince the Senior Executive team that arrival-based, integrated, time-phased planning (the foundation that Flowcasting is built on) would be a critical capability retailers would need to enable their supply chains to flow product and deliver. The design direction would be approved, and subsequently implemented from DC to supplier and the rest is history.

What was the secret sauce of that pioneering team from Canadian Tire?

Diversity.

There’s lots of talk today, and rightly so, about diversity. I think, however, many companies and especially teams are missing the real key to diversity – that is, cognitive diversity.

Are you looking for ways to inject fresh perspectives and innovative thinking into work?

Step forward, cognitive diversity.

Numerous studies have shown that people like working with others who think like them and have similar values.

The problem, however, is that it leads to groupthink, stifles creativity, and can limit the solutions that are proposed. Instead, you should embrace cognitive diversity, which means forming teams of people who are quite likely to disagree and bring widely varying perspectives and experiences to the table.

Look for people with different beliefs and/or personalities. Seek out colleagues with different educational backgrounds, widely different work experiences, from different parts of the world, or with different levels of risk acceptance.

The best teams, who deliver real and meaningful change, are ones with diverse perspectives and skills that complement each other. The best teams are cognitively diverse.

Think about many supply chain transformation initiatives. More often, the teams are composed of people with a similar background – type A personalities with a technical, mathematical, or engineering background. And what does that almost for certain guarantee? Groupthink and that the designs will be factual and logical.

Everyone who’s implemented something knows that logic plays a small role. Implementations are about people and people have feelings, emotions, wants and needs. They can, at times, seem quite illogical. A cognitively diverse team will have better understanding, wider perspectives, better questioning & listening skills, and more empathy – all ingredients needed for successful change.

So, the next time you need to recruit a new team member and you have a candidate that’s got pig farming (or other seemingly oddball experiences that don’t fit the standard mold) in their experience, my advice is to hire them.

You’ll be glad you did.