Only a few weeks to go to Thinking Digital 2013 and I can’t wait for my annual fix of new ideas and creativity. If you haven’t heard of Thinking Digital you can find out more at www.thinkingdigital.co.uk I am a big fan and I wanted to share with you, from my perspective as a leadership coach, what Thinking Digital offers ‘non techies’ like me. A Trip into the Future – technology is pretty much central to most of our lives nowadays and Thinking Digital offers an amazing window on the future, a taster of the amazing new stuff that we will all have access to not far into the future. This opportunity to do a bit of time travelling is invaluable for prompting dialogue about the world of unlimited potential we live in – but often don’t notice. It’s also great to spend some time in the company of a bunch of people who live and breathe technology and have embedded it seamlessly into their work and social lives. I’ve learned loads from this and just to share one example – I’ve seen how

One of the common discussions I end up in is around lead time reduction, reducing the total amount of time it takes for an order (or a project, or an enquiry, or a complaint etc...) to move through a business. Obviously a faster and slicker turnaround can be of significant interest to your customers and can help to reduce the costs associated with that process. A simple way of looking at this problem is to think of your business process as being similar to a relay race. Can you remember those from your school days? If you do, you will remember that in order to win you had to avoid dropping the baton, have smooth changeovers and run quickly in-between changeovers. There we go then, a perfect recipe for lead time reduction. In my experience, for businesses with multiple departments, the fastest way to improve overall lead time is to find out where the baton is being dropped. This might take the form of in trays that hide work, unclear specifications in different departments leadin

Kamishibai Boards from gilesjohnston Giles Johnston Author, Consultant and Chartered Engineer

There are many ways to approach to the issue of ‘ lead time reduction ’ in a business. We can look at the interfaces between departments, we can look at changeover times, we can look at machine vulnerabilities and we can consider production flows and scheduling. We can also look at how we, as leaders, change our minds and mess up the process with alternating priorities. I realise that priorities will and do change. But sometimes priorities change because we perceive them to be needed to be changed. Could we find a way to hold off changing a priority and waiting until the current project, proposal or production is completed? Being more systematic about our priority changes could make a huge difference to your output and also yield shorter lead times. It has to my clients. Giles Johnston Author, Consultant and Chartered Engineer

There are many brilliant business improvement techniques that exist today. Some take little prior knowledge of these ways of working in order to produce excellent effects in your business. Imagine selecting an appropriate handful of these tools, making them accessible to your teams and then watching them yield tangible benefits. Often we get too caught up in trying to do things ‘right’. We don’t have to follow all of the instructions, we don’t have to use every single tool in the tool kit and we don’t have to do things because someone else told us to. We can take what makes sense to us, we can do what we can right now and we can make a system that is ours. Imperfect action can get good results, and once you get some results you can always go back and improve your system until it is perfect (whatever that means!). Giles Johnston Author, Consultant and Chartered Engineer P.S. Business Process Re-Engineering , our guide on Amazon Kindle, can give you a jump start with

To help our prospective clients understand what they want from a performance improvement workshop I have uploaded a two page guide to the main Smartspeed website. To download a copy (no registration required) please use this link . Giles Johnston Author, Consultant and Chartered Engineer P.S. The long version of the link is:  http://www.improvingbusinesses.co.uk/files/1407165/uploaded/Workshop%20Design%20Notes.pdf

Improvement projects don’t always pan out the way you might expect. Improvements often require an iterative approach, we need to try something several times before we realise the benefits of our actions. This article is a reminder of the need to be persistent when undertaking continuous improvement activities. Persistence is vital when we know the direction but we don’t know the specific actions. If we only know the next couple of steps in our improvement journey then all we can do is take the steps. After we have taken those steps we will have new insights and ideas that we can develop into the next steps, but we must be willing to persist in that direction for long enough to achieve our goal. When we undertake improvement projects some things will not go well, we will hit bumps in the road (so to speak). Our ability to move past these and strive towards our objectives is essential. If you upset people because of the way your improvement has manifested itself then say sorry, fix