Henry David Thoreau, in 1854, said something very prophetic.
“Every man looks at his woodpile with a kind of affection. I love to have mine before my window, and the more chips the better to remind me of my pleasing work. I had an old axe which nobody claimed, with which by spells in winter days, on the sunny side of the house, I played the stumps which I had got out of my bean field. As my driver prophesied when I was plowing, they warmed me twice – once while I was splitting them, and again when they were on the fire.”
The moral is that the process, or the journey, is as rewarding as the result.
It turns out, that chopping your own wood is important for helping to change your thinking and your work behaviors.
Implementing a concept and business process like Flowcasting, in retail, requires people to change their current work practices – both internal teams and external ones. Education, as we’ve often outlined, plays a crucial role. However, it’s not enough. People need to experience the new process and get comfortable with the new ways of working. How do we typically suggest people do that?
With what we call a process prototype.
A process prototype is a day-in-the-life execution of the new process, using real, company specific data to “experience” or simulate one or more key planning scenarios – for example, product introductions and discontinuations, promotions planning, and seasonal planning to name a few big ones in retail.
End users are guided through each of these scenarios by more knowledgeable and experienced project team members. Crucially, however, the end users are the ones who operate the keystrokes and execute the new process – effectively chopping their own wood.
This helps people turn the educational theory into practical applications as they get to see, develop, manage and revise real forecasts, replenishment plans and supplier schedules for various business scenarios. In some prototypes they can even experience new collaboration approaches – for example, how demand planners, merchants and suppliers will work together in the new process to produce promotional plans that are agreed upon and executable.
For the project team who’s leading the change, process prototypes are invaluable. You get the see how well the educational program instilled new thinking, as well as getting early feedback on the newly designed processes from the people who’ll be executing it. You also often get good ideas to improve the design. Incorporating these ideas helps the change effort, as people see that they are being listened to. Invariably you’ll also get ideas that aren’t so great, often rooted in maintaining the status quo. These are also valuable as they help uncover where additional education and coaching will likely be needed.
Personally, I’ve had good success using process prototypes (having people chop their own wood) but I’ve been thinking about taking the concept up a level, so to speak.
To date, we’ve only done process prototypes with the planners who’ll execute the new processes – sometimes, to be fair, also including key suppliers to get their feedback and suggestions. An improvement, I believe, would be to develop and execute process prototypes for the senior and executive leadership teams. I believe that would help leaders better understand the new day in the life for their teams. And a process prototype where executives could see, execute and collaborate on a process like retail sales & operations planning would be valuable, but also help to cement why the concept of a single set of numbers is important in retail planning.
Of course, this is not really a new idea, and the best retailers do something like this regularly. Retail leadership teams often work many days a year in their stores – helping customers and doing the work that’s needed to deliver a brand’s promise. A very valuable learning experience and my idea would be to take this thinking to the planning processes. It’s really part of what folks call experiential learning.
David Kolb introduced the idea of experiential learning in 1984. It’s a simple concept – you basically learn by doing and it comprises four elements: concrete experience (experiencing something firsthand); reflection on and observation of that experience (thinking about it); abstract conceptualization based on the reflection (learning from the experience); and active experimentation (putting the learning into action).
A process prototype is experiential learning and is like chopping your own wood. It will warm you twice – once when you do it in practice, and then again when you do it to deliver actual business results.
