Four Hundred Forty-Nine

Posted on May 7, 2025 by Mike Doherty

“Failure is an option here. If you’re not comfortable with failure, you’re not comfortable with innovation.”
– Jeff Bezos

Unilever is a consumer-packaged goods giant. Several years ago, they had a serious production problem at one of their factories near Liverpool, in the north-west of England. They were making washing powder in the standard way – the way washing powder is still made today, where boiling chemicals are forced through a nozzle at very high speeds and as the pressure drops, they disperse into vapor and powder. Then, the vapor is siphoned off and the powder collected in a vat, where additional chemicals and ingredients are added and then sold as washing powders.

The problem Unilever had was that the nozzles didn’t work very well or smoothly – they kept clogging up. They were inefficient (causing numerous production delays), kept blocking and produced varying grains of powder, of different sizes. This was a major issue for Unilever, not just because of maintenance and lost time, but also in terms of the quality of the product which was rightly disappointing customers. They needed to develop a better nozzle. Much better.

So, they turned to an internal team of crackpot mathematicians. Unilever, like many large industrial giants, could afford the best and the brightest and had on staff a team of math folks who were experts in high-pressure systems and fluid dynamics. They were also experts in the physics of what is called “phase transition” – the process that governs the transformation of matter from one state to another (e.g., from liquid to gas).

The expert math team did what experts often do – they delved deep into the problem and developed sophisticated equations and solutions. After a long period of study and design, they came up with a new and what they believed was brilliant, design.

Problem was, it didn’t work. The powder granularity remained inconsistent, and the process was still inefficient.

In desperation, Unilever also turned to their team of biologists – a team with no knowledge of fluid dynamics and phase transitions. This team had something else that would prove crucial – a design approach that was rooted in experimentation. A test, fail and learn approach. One that seemed to understand that failure was part of learning, and often a necessity for innovation.

Instead of a brilliant design, they would make some minor tweaks, try it, see what worked and didn’t work, adjust and test again. Then, rinse and repeat, until they had a better nozzle that worked in practice, not just on paper.

They would take ten copies of the nozzle and apply a small change to each one, then test each one to see which ones failed, but importantly, which one performed the best. They would then take the “best” nozzle and do the same thing again: create ten slightly different copies and then repeat the process. Then repeat it again. And again. And again.

After 45 generations they had finally developed a nozzle that was excellent.

A world class nozzle had been built because of testing, discarding and improving upon four hundred forty-nine ‘failures’.

Progress/innovation had been achieved not by a grand, brilliant design, but instead by rapid interactions with the real world.

An approach, it turns out, that is fundamental to designing something better, even in supply chain management.

When it comes to inventory planning, people are embracing the concept of Flowcasting. That’s good. In my opinion, the breakthrough that’s made Flowcasting possible, is the capability to forecast, replenish and managing slow and super-slow selling items at store level.

The best solution to this chronic issue that had plagued planning system providers, was developed and architected by our long-time colleague, Darryl Landvater of the Oliver Wight Americas Team. And, largely by using the same approach as the biologists from Unilever – a test and learn approach, refining based on real-world learning’s, then doing it again and again until an elegant, intuitive solution was proven.

I won’t bore you with the details, but repeated tests and learning’s helped him understand and correctly conclude that managing slow sellers at the store level is simultaneously a forecasting and replenishment issue. His solution is the only approach that I know of that manages both the forecast and replenishment plan at store level in unison. It ensures a valid simulation of reality and, critically, that inventory can be maintained close to the store safety stock level for these types of items. That’s critical for a retailer, since most retailers have a significant percentage of slow sellers.

I’ve never asked Darryl how many ‘failures’ he endured on his journey to developing his slow seller solution, because it doesn’t really matter.

I’m just glad he did.

Keep buggering on

Posted on March 5, 2025 by Mike Doherty

There are few people that have had such a profound impact on world history as Sir Winston Churchill. A personal hero of mine, Churchill was an inspirational statesman, writer, orator and leader who led Britain and her allies to victory in the Second World War.

Churchill was an enduring optimist, who believed in duty, hard work and a never say never attitude. In my humble opinion, it was his passion and total belief that ultimately freed Britain, and Europe, from the grip of the gestapo.

An accomplished writer and orator, he was renowned for many sayings that summarized his philosophy and outlook on things. One of these, was the phrase “keep buggering on” – a phrase used to encourage people to keep going, even when faced with overwhelming odds. Churchill believed that to achieve one’s goal, you need to “keep buggering on” – never giving in and continuing the journey until you reach your goal.

I’d like to share a true story of my colleague, Andre Martin, who – for roughly 50 years – has “kept buggering on” to realize his dream of a completely connected, seamlessly integrated supply chain from consumption to source; what we call Flowcasting.

To begin, let’s turn the clocks back to 1974. Andre has a huge problem on his hands as the Director of Manufacturing and Distribution at Abbott Labs in Montreal, Canada. He’s getting beat up about and trying to understand why the service levels in Similac (an infant nutritional product), and others, are dismal. They hover around 90% or so, but the target is 98%, or better. To make things worse, his manufacturing and distribution folks are at loggerheads and often in a fight.

Andre recalled a Jay Forrester article entitled “Industrial Dynamics” written in 1958 and decided what was needed was an inventory planning system that connects and manages 4 separate levels of inventory – their 10 regional DC’s supplied by a central DC, which was supplied by 3 factories which were supplied by multiple vendors.

About the same time a colleague recommended that he attend an Oliver Wight MRP seminar in Boston – which he did and where he met Oliver Wight. Soon after he would retain Oliver Wight in a consulting capacity. Andre would share his idea how he was thinking of planning production and synchronizing purchases with suppliers using the principles of MRP. Given that Abott had two more levels of inventory to manage, what Andre concluded was that he needed a four-level planning system that would integrate all levels.

Ollie liked the idea and agreed with the concept but informed Andre that no such software system existed in the market. To realize his design, he would need to develop it himself but could count on Ollie’s support and guidance should he choose to do so.

In fact, Oliver Wight informed Andre that he knew a person that could help develop the new software and introduced him to a young dude named Darryl Landvater. Two days later Darryl visited Montreal to work with Andre and began the journey to develop the very first integrated DRP/MRP solution – connecting distribution and manufacturing into an integrated system.

Once designed and implemented, the results were phenomenal! Service levels increased to 98-99% consistently, inventories were reduced at all levels by 25-60%, obsolescence was down by 60% and the cost of production fell by 15% as well.

Given the success of this initiative, Andre continued to think about seamlessly integrating any industrial supply chain. At the 1975 APICS conference in San Diego, California, he’d confirm his thinking. He had been pondering about an integrated supply chain driven from store-level to supplier using the principles of what they implemented at Abbott Labs. His breakthrough idea was that he flipped the MRP concept of a bill of material and instead created a bill of distribution – so the integrated supply chain could be driven by only one forecast.

At the conference he’d bump into and discuss this idea with the legendary Dr. Joseph Orlicky, the father of Material Requirements Planning (MRP) and a planning guru. Upon hearing Andre’s idea, Joe thought about it for a few minutes, then responded in a profound manner. “Andre”, he said, “your idea is sound, because you should never forecast what you can calculate.”

Not long after his success with Abott Labs and the DRP/MRP integration, Andre would join the Oliver Wight organization to help take DRP mainstream, including writing the seminal DRP book and later a book called “Infopartnering”. During his time at Oliver Wight, he would help lead the successful implementation of DRP with more than 40 companies – helping to cement the principles of DRP in distribution and manufacturing.

He then decided that the thinking should be taken to retail. To that end he would work with early retailers like Sears to help them implement DRP for their distribution operations, including early pilots of supplier scheduling in retail – i.e., sharing time-phased shipment projections with merchandise suppliers.

He would re-join forces with Darryl and create the Retail Pipeline Integration Group, focused on helping retailers embrace these concepts and drive their entire integrated supply chain from a forecast of consumer demand at the store level. They would help several retailers, including my team at Canadian Tire, and dabble in determining what was needed to build a retail focused solution capable of enabling Flowcasting – including how to process the massive volumes in retail and the retail specific planning challenges, like managing slow sellers as an example.

Based on their learning regarding a retail-focused solution during their initial prototypes and pilots, they would visit several large planning solution providers to convince them that a retail solution would be needed. All the major players declined to build one. So, given they were both committed to the cause, they decided to build a solution themselves. It’s a solution that has eventually found a home with the Oliver Wight Group – ironically the organization where the ideas, thinking and concepts of integrated planning largely originated.

In terms of the Flowcasting concept, early pilots and implementations have proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Andre was correct in his initial thinking regarding an integrated supply chain. In retail, the entire supply chain for early adopters is driven by only a forecast of consumer demand and all other demands are calculated – providing all partners a model of the business and the ability to work in harmony using a single set of numbers.

Andre is retired now, but he still interacts with me and the original Flowcasting pioneers to share his wisdom and talk a little smack about hockey (btw, Andre, the Leafs are better than the Canadiens, at least for now).

I suppose that I’m now one of the ones that will continue to drive the thinking and adoption of the principles and concepts of Flowcasting. Which reminds me of another famous Churchill quote to help inspire us; “Never give in. Never, never, never, never—in nothing, great or small, large or petty.”

Don’t worry, we won’t, so when it comes to Flowcasting adoption…

We’ll “keep buggering on”.

Scaffolding

Posted on January 1, 2025 by Mike Doherty

It’s an early spring weekend, 1991. A cold and dreary day. Several of America’s sharpest young minds have gathered at a hotel near Detroit. After the students find their way to their seats and the event starts, the room would fall dead quiet. All eyes were fixated on the 8X8 rows of squares. It was the start of the National Junior High School Chess Championships.

The tournament was usually dominated by teams from fancy, elite schools. Most of them had the resources and desire to make chess part of the school curriculum. Dalton – an elite New York school – were the defending champs and had won three straight national championships. For students at Dalton, chess was part of student life.

At school, every kindergarten student took a chess class, and every 1st grade student studied the game for an entire year. As they did in subsequent years. The best players would receive additional lessons from some of the country’s best chess teachers. When it came to chess, Dalton was a powerhouse and the odds-on favorite to win again.

That year, another New York based school had entered the competition as a bit of an unknown wild card. They were the Raging Rooks – students representing a school hailing from Harlem. The Raging Rooks were a group of poor students of color, mostly living in neighborhoods dominated by drugs, violence, and crime.

No one gave the Raging Rooks a chance. As they walked nervously into the hotel, many heads turned. They had very little in common with their wealthy, elite opponents.

To everyone’s shock, the leading teams stumbled slightly, allowing the Raging Rooks to tie for first place. In under two years, the poor kids from Harlem had become national champions. The biggest surprise wasn’t that they had won – it’s why.

They won because they had had great scaffolding.

In construction, scaffolding is a temporary structure that allows workers to scale heights beyond their reach and work/build safely. Once the job is done, the support is removed. After that, the building stands on its own.

In learning, scaffolding serves a similar purpose. A teacher or coach offers initial instruction, knowledge and guidance, and then gradually removes the support. A key goal is to shift the responsibility to you, so you develop your own approach and methods to learning. That’s what Maurice Ashley – the coach of the Raging Rooks – did. He provided structures, coaching and guidance to give them the opportunity and motivation to learn and improve.

He would use unorthodox and creative ways to provide scaffolding to help the students not only learn but become very interested in chess, including self-learning and improvement. They would draw and use cartoons sometimes to highlight key moves and variations. Other times, they’d write stories about chess matches. They also wrote and recorded rap songs about the importance of central control of the chessboard.

As they became better and more of a team, the players started taking the motivation and opportunity to learn into their own hands. They would study and analyze each other’s games, with a goal for better understanding and learning. They didn’t care about being the smartest player in the room – they wanted to make the team smarter.

Another type of scaffolding is teaching others, with research showing teaching, tutoring or having to explain ideas and concepts boosts the tutor’s own learning. The oldest children appear to benefit from explaining to their younger siblings, for example.

As it turns out, scaffolding is crucial in learning and development, which was used extensively by Ashley to coach his chess team to a national title. It’s about aiding at the right time, gradually reducing support as the student learns and increases their competence. This approach not only fosters independence but also instills confidence, paving the way for individuals to harness their potential and improve their overall competence.

In my opinion, scaffolding is crucial for any business transformation – especially, as an example, for retailers who are moving to a holistic, integrated inventory planning approach like Flowcasting. The better the scaffolding, the better the implementation – both in the short-term and, importantly, the long term.

From experience, a coaching and support team that provides learning about the underlying principles and concepts of Flowcasting helps planners learn and understand. Not just the how, but the why. Flowcasting is not about the calculations (though, that’s important to learn as well). It’s about changing the working relationships amongst the entire retail eco-system participants, improving collaboration and working in harmony with a single set of numbers, driven by the heartbeat of the consumer. It’s about changing behaviors, and that kind of change needs to be supported by good scaffolding.

Ongoing coaching, including discussions and example walk-throughs regarding business scenarios and applying the principles/concepts helps to further ingrain new ways of thinking and working. The more a coaching and support team provides ongoing learning to the entire organization (including the merchants, suppliers and key service providers), the better. In short, the more scaffolding the better. In these kinds of transformations, the scaffolding is not temporary, like it is in construction. It needs to be enduring.

In my opinion, it’s so important that I would argue that the long-term success of a transformation to Flowcasting, or any other significant business transformation, can be determined by how well you answer this question…

How good is your scaffolding?

Think Inside the Box

Posted on November 6, 2024 by Mike Doherty

Flowcharts are standard tools for delivering projects. At an overall project level, it depicts, from left to right, what needs to be done and the rough sequence, with the project concluding when the goal is achieved in the final box on the right.

The goal is the box on the right. Every project, or change initiative, should begin by thoughtfully exploring what should go in that box. Some people call this “thinking from right to left”, and other people in various disciplines have used different language to describe what is fundamentally the same idea.

“Backcasting” is a term coined by University of Toronto Professor John B. Robinson to help in urban, environmental and energy planning. Backcasting starts by developing a detailed description of the desirable future state and then you work backwards to determine what needs to happen for that aspirational future state to become reality.

The key is detailed. The more detailed and specific you can articulate the desired future, the better.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is a Backcasting superstar and an inventor at heart. One of his brilliant inventions/innovations is the PR/FAQ document. His brainstormed idea was to make the traditional last step in a project, the first. To pitch a new project and have it embraced at Amazon, you need to write a PR/FAQ document – outlining the desired future state of the project, including the goal of the effort in the opening sentences of the press release.

The initial PR/FAQ document is shared with the leadership team, who meet and read the document in silence. Then they begin to provide input and feedback. People ask hard questions and engage in intense debate, discussing key ideas about the project, very focused on the goal and how it will help the customer.

The author of the PR/FAQ document then takes the feedback into account, revises the document and brings it back to the group. And this process unfolds again. And again. And again. Everything about the project is pressure tested and improved through multiple iterations. And the beautiful thing is that the concept that finally emerges is seen with equal clarity amongst the team and, importantly, everyone is on the same page from the start of the project.

Everything that happens after project approval is working backwards from the PR/FAQ – essentially backcasting from what’s in the box on the right.

The critical component of the approach is that the box on the right – the goal of the project/initiative or the desired future state – is a written narrative.

When you need to document your project using proper sentences and complete thoughts, it makes a significant difference to the quality of the idea/proposal. You can’t hide behind PowerPoint bullet points, and the thinking needs to be clear, concise and able to be understood by a critical team reading the document. This forces the project leader/team to think better. Getting people’s involvement and feedback through multiple iterations strengthens the narrative and helps to build commitment.

At Demand Clarity, when it comes to narratives, we’ve become Bezos disciples. We now use a 6-page written narrative for both our initial assessments of how well a retailer is in terms of planning and for outlining our future state recommendations – whereby we usually articulate how Flowcasting could work for the retail customer/client. The narrative approach has improved our thinking and the quality of the work we’ve delivered.

However, what’s inside the box on the right can also be used early during the project as a key change management mechanism for articulating the change and, more importantly, building commitment and ownership – especially amongst the senior leaders and sponsors.

The idea would be to document a future-dated PR/FAQ document to describe the end-state transformation to a Flowcasting-driven, integrated inventory flow planning process, whereby everyone in the extended eco-system was planning to a single set of numbers. The document should outline how the extended organization (including suppliers) would be working in the future and, importantly, contain quotes from all key stakeholders about the impact of the change. These quotes are building commitment for change.

This change-focused PR/FAQ document would be shared and referenced throughout the project teams and leadership/governance teams to help ensure people stay focused on the goal, understand the change and stay committed to the transformation. The written narrative about what’s in the box on the right becomes the rallying call for change.

I’m pretty sure you’ve heard the phrase “you need to think outside the box”. Sure, that’s good advice in many cases but to drive real, meaningful and lasting change you need to start by articulating, in detail, the desired change or future state.

You need to “think inside the box”.

The box on the right.

Secret Formulas of Implementation Success

Posted on September 4, 2024 by Mike Doherty

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.

Collaborate, then calculate

Posted on November 1, 2023 by Mike Doherty

“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.

Fossilized thinking

Posted on March 3, 2021 by Mike Doherty

In August 1949 a group of fifteen smokejumpers – elite wild land firefighters – descended from the Montana sky to contain an aggressive fire near the Missouri River. After hiking for a few minutes the foreman, Wagner Dodge, saw that the fire was raging – flames stretching over 30 feet in the air and blazing forward fast enough to cover two football fields every minute.

The plan was to dig a trench around the fire to contain it and divert it towards an area with little to burn.

Soon it became clear that the fire was out of control and the plan was out the window. The fire was unstoppable so, instead, they’d try to outrun it, to safer ground.

For the next ten minutes, burdened by their heavy gear and tiring legs, the team raced up an incline, reaching an area that was only a few hundred yards from safety. But the fire was unflinching, gaining ground like a wolf chasing down a wounded animal.

Suddenly, Dodge stopped. He threw off his gear and, incredibly, took out some matches, lit them, and tossed them onto the grass. His crew screamed at him but to no avail – when Dodge didn’t listen, they had no choice and turned and ran as fast as they could, leaving their foreman to what they believed to be certain peril.

But Dodge had quickly devised a different survival strategy: an escape fire. By torching an area in front of him, he choked off the fuel for the fire to feed on. Then, he poured water on a rag, put it over his mouth and lay down, face first, on the freshly burnt grass while the fire raged and sped past and over him. In total, he’d spend close to 15 minutes living off the oxygen close the ground he’d just torched.

Sadly, of the rest of his crew that tried to outrun the blaze, only two would survive.

Wagner Dodge was able to survive not because of his physical fitness, but his mental fitness – the ability to rethink and unlearn. The prevailing paradigm was that, at some stage for an out-of-control blaze, your only option is to try to out run it. But Dodge was able to quickly rethink things – believing that, perhaps, by choking off it’s fuel line and providing his own small wasteland area, the fire might avoid him. The ability to rethink had saved his life.

As it turns out, the ability to rethink and unlearn is also crucial for retails survival and revival.

It’s no secret, many retailers are struggling. The same is true of many retail supply chains.

Do you ever really wonder why?

Lots of people blame retail’s generally slow adoption of new technologies and business models as the main factor, but I think it’s a deeper, more fundamental and chronic problem.

Technology is not eating retail. Fossilized thinking is.

What’s fossilized thinking? It’s people – at all levels in an organization – who are unwilling or unable to challenge their long-held beliefs. Not only challenge them, but be able to rethink, unlearn and change them often.

As a case in point, many people who work in the retail supply chain don’t include the consumer as part of the supply chain. Yet, if you think about it, the retail supply chain begins and ends with the consumer. There are even a number of folks who don’t consider the store part of the supply chain. Once the product has shipped from the DC to the store, then, incredibly, job done according to them.

Don’t believe me?

I won’t embarrass them, but just recently I read a “thought leadership” article from one of the world’s pre-eminent consulting firms regarding the top trends in retail supply chain management. At #3, and I kid you not, was the growing view that the store was a key part of the supply chain.

Flowcasting tribe members know better and think differently. The consumer and store have, and always will be, part of the supply chain. That’s why we understand that, in retail, there is no such thing as a push supply chain – since you can’t push the product to the consumer.

In my opinion (and I’m not alone), fossilized thinking, not technology adoption, is the real disruptor in retail.

If you want to improve, innovate or disrupt then you must…

Constantly rethink, unlearn and challenge your own thinking!