In this presentation, my great inspiration David L. Marquet, drops a quote that I somehow hadn’t heard before:
[When changing our ways of working] we act our way to new thinking, rather than think our way into new ways of acting.
This aligns well with many lean and Toyota Production System (TPS) principles. Toyota kata by Mike Rother shows how this practice is used extensively throughout Toyota.
I just had a mini-experience of this, where I wanted to document a pretty unwieldy conversation that was touching highs and lows in a large-ish writing undertaking we’re doing at work. Rather than start, because I didn’t know where, I thought about the best approach.
In my mind, each idea for how to approach this task, was presented and discarded. Then I just went ahead and did it. I opened a place where we had previously written parts of this - a FigJam Board. And then just threw in a few stickies and tried to fit it in the current structure.
By doing that I realized that the current structure did not only guide me to know where to put the new ideas, but also helped me formulate them. And much of the things that we had discussed in the meeting was already in there, but differently formatted.
Frequently I find myself trying to think my work into being done. When it would be better to just try something and see what I could learn by doing.
It reminds me of the first part of Bob Bemer’s motto:
((((DO SOMETHING!) SMALL) USEFUL) NOW!)
It’s better to just get going and do something. If you do it small, you will soon realize if it is useful.