Lidar com as restrições

Ontem de manhã li duas vezes este artigo "Constraints Don’t Have to Be Constraining"

"The goal of the session was for students to hone their entrepre­neurial instincts by trying to identify opportunities, limited by the $5 they had been given. And in fact, they were very entrepreneurial.
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But which teams made the most in profit? Those that didn’t use the $5 at all.
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It’s a lesson they are all amazed to learn: Those who come back with the highest profits — one year, a team earned more than $4,000 — are typically the ones who never even use the seed money. The teams that seem to generate the greatest profit are those who look at the resources at their disposal through a completely different lens.
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“You put me at zero, [and] there is no limit to what I can achieve.”
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We have a tendency to focus on constraints and to think of them as a kind of adversity. But in fact, constraints can be a form of advantage. When we own our constraints, magical things can happen — and the constraints can become tools to propel us forward.
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 You see, focusing on the $5 limits the ideas that are possible.
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Constraints don’t have to be constraining. Those who assumed that they had nothing in start‑up capital did better. They didn’t see the $5 as a crutch, so they focused on the opportunity instead of the con­straint. That freed them up to think about what other assets they did have, and pushed them to look beyond $5 problems to more valuable opportunities. The lesson: If we let others dictate our constraints, then we can’t dictate our own opportunities.
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Constraints are inevitable, yes. But rather than accepting them, we can discover and pay attention to them. We can recognize their value. In many ways, we need them. When we notice constraints but we don’t let them define our possibilities, we can actually flip them to create an advantage."

Comecemos pelo: “You put me at zero, [and] there is no limit to what I can achieve.”
Há dias ao ler "The Essentials of Theory U: Core Principles and Applications" de Otto Scharmer o autor recorda o dia em que adolescente saiu da escola antes da hora e chegou a tempo de ver o que restava da casa com 350 anos, onde tinha nascido e vivia, a desaparecer num incêndio. Então, o autor recorda este pensamento:

“As I stood there, taking in the heat of the fire and feeling time slow down, I realized how attached I had been to all the things destroyed by the fire. Everything I thought I was had dissolved. Everything? No, perhaps not everything, for I felt that a tiny element of myself still existed. Somebody was still there, watching all this. Who?
At that moment I realized there was another dimension of myself that I hadn’t previously been aware of, a dimension that related to my future possibilities. At that moment, I felt drawn upward, above my physical body, and began watching the scene from that elevated place. I felt my mind quieting and expanding in a moment of unparalleled clarity. I was not the person I had thought I was. My real self was not attached to all the material possessions smoldering inside the ruins. I suddenly knew that I, my true Self, was still alive! It was this “I” that was the Seer. And this Seer was more alive, more awake, more acutely present than the “I” that I had known before. No longer weighed down by the material possessions the fire had just consumed, with everything gone, I was lighter and free, released to encounter the other part of myself, the part that drew me into the future—into my future—into a world waiting for me to bring it into reality.”

Quantas vezes só depois de encostadas à parede, só depois de terem perdido tudo, é que as empresas tentam o que parece absurdo, ou o que vai contra a formatação do mainstream e... resulta?

 E acerca do: "We have a tendency to focus on constraints and to think of them as a kind of adversity." E o que é assumir uma estratégia senão criar uma restrição para nos beneficiar? Como aprendi com Stephen Covey: Não é o que nos acontece que conta. É o que decidimos fazer com o que nos acontece. Adversidade ou oportunidade não é uma característica do que nos aparece no caminho, mas uma classificação que nós atribuímos.

Por fim, o truque principal: "When we notice constraints but we don’t let them define our possibilities, we can actually flip them to create an advantage."

Problemas como a base para o sucesso

Li algures durante o mês de Maio um título que rezava mais ou menos assim "Os problemas de uma empresa são a base para o seu sucesso". Infelizmente não consigo rastrear esse artigo para o recuperar. No entanto, encontro agora um outro que vai no mesmo sentido "Your greatest constraint is your greatest advantage":

"Constraints get a bad rap. People see them as wholly negative: they impede progress and diminish potential. Entrepreneurs, in particular, seem locked in a perpetual grim struggle against scarce resources and abundant obstacles.
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But constraints can also be fertile, enabling--even desirable. They can make people and businesses more than they were rather than less than they could be. Constraints force people to reframe problems and get creative. And from that fresh perspective and creativity emerge new opportunities: superior alternatives at which smooth, open roads would never have arrived."

Aproveitar a restrição (parte III)

Parte I e parte II.
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Como é que tendo a nossa empresa uma estrutura de custos mais pesada e, operando num mercado onde os clientes valorizam sobretudo o preço, pode ter uma oportunidade de futuro interessante?
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Como é que a nossa empresa que tem máquinas velhas e obsoletas, pode competir com a concorrência que tem máquinas novas, eficientes e muito rápidas?
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Como é que a nossa empresa conseguirá ter os produtos com a sua marca, expostos nas prateleiras controladas pela distribuição grande que tem marcas próprias, sem perder margens?
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A resposta será sempre do tipo: can... if

"When you don’t have resources, you become resourceful.
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If you’ve seen any improv theatre, or the TV show Whose Line Is It Anyway? you’ve seen two actors walk out on stage to improvise a scene. They start with nothing, get a couple of suggestions from the audience about who they are and what they are doing, and make up a scene on the spot: “You’re at a job interview at  NASA, but you are a pianist. Go!”
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Robert Poynton is an expert in applying the techniques of improv to the world of business and leadership. A prerequisite for success in the world of improv, he observes, is finding value in what you have. The uninitiated find this hard and might adopt the victim mindset - “What am I supposed to do with that!?” But the  skilled performer finds the value in the offer, accepts it, and builds on it.
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We have seem something akin to this in the way that transformers of constraints accept a constraint as an offer...
They recognized the opportunities inherent in constraints. It's this positive mindset coupled with a simple, repeatable method that gives improvisers and transformers the confidence to know that they can make something out of very little every time. They see offers everywhere. So when faced with apparent scarcity and constraints, we need to find and build new value in what we have, no matter how meager it may initially appear to us. And we need to understand how to trade this value with other parties [Moi ici: Aprender a pensar a nível de ecossistema e em relações ganhar-ganhar-ganhar] in order to get what we want, in the way improvisers trade offers to get a story. What can we offer them in exchange for what we need and they have in abundance? What might we do together that could have more impact than what we can do alone? How might we combine limited resources with others to create collective abundance?" 

E continuo a minha leitura de livro "A Beautiful Constraint".

Aproveitar a restrição (parte II)

Parte I.
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E volto ao livro "A Beautiful Constraint". Um excelente livro que recomendo sem hesitações. Por exemplo, em "Douro e o Evangelho do Valor", sublinhei:

"Mas há ainda «muito potencial a explorar» nas castas que o Douro oferece e no que se pode fazer com as vinhas velhas, as mais antigas e por isso menos produtivas,[Moi ici: Como podemos tirar partido das vinhas velhas, das mais antigas, das menos produtivas?] que podem proporcionar pequenas produções de excepcional qualidade."

"Propelling questions—using a higher level of ambition to force us to find the opportunity in apparent constraints—require us to work towards solutions that lie outside our experience and comfort zone.
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Some scientists have suggested that there’s an evolutionary advantage to optimism. Optimism underpins progress by allowing us to believe in a better future, and so  make it more likely that we will plan for and begin creating it.
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But our optimism bias can’t be fully relied upon. It tends to overestimate our chance of success, so that we underprepare for challenges, and it tends to be far more personal than collective: I am optimistic about my future, but pessimistic about our future.
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the potentially strong solutions his team proposed were frequently blocked by others explaining that “we can’t do this because. …” The nature of the “can’t because” varied. Sometimes it had to do with cost or capability, sometimes impact on other processes, sometimes simply the sheer degree of difficulty involved. But the effect was the same: every time someone introduced a “can’t because,” Kelly noted, the conversation reached a dead end. The flow had stopped. Kelly couldn’t change the nature of the organization, but he could change the nature of the conversation, particularly the beginning of each sentence in the problem-solving  process. He didn’t let people start with “We can’t because.” He forced them to start with “We can if.”
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It keeps the conversation on the right question. It keeps the conversation about how something could be possible, rather than whether it would be possible.
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It keeps the oxygen of optimism continually in the process. It keeps optimism and inquisitiveness alive at the same time.
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It forces everyone involved in the conversation to take responsibility for finding answers, rather than identifying barriers. It doesn’t allow someone to identify obstacles, without looking for a solution to that obstacle in the same sentence.
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The story it tells us about ourselves is that we are people who look for solutions, rather than a group of people who find problems and obstacles. It builds and  reinforces our thinking about ourselves as a culture of potential transformers, rather than impotent victims of insuperable circumstance.
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It is a method that maintains a mindset. The failure to generate an answer with one line of enquiry simply leads to another can-if, another how."

Aproveitar a restrição (parte I)

Mais um exemplo interessante do sector do calçado "Reinventar calçado militar com rendas e flores".

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Uma empresa nascida para a produção mecanizada, para a produção de grandes séries de modelos funcionais para o exército, e a sua história de reposicionamento, de conjugação do seu ADN com outras alternativas.

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Relacionei logo este exemplo com a mensagem do livro "A Beautiful Constraint". Uma empresa limitada a uma experiência de produto [uma restrição] num mundo em mudança:

"a key difference between being victim to a constraint and transforming it is the relationship between the constraint and the ambition attached to it - they are intrinsically linked. We saw that people in the victim stage tended to reduce the ambition to fit the constraint, while those in the transformer stage tended to leave the ambition high, and use the tension between the ambition and the constraint to drive the search for solutions....A propelling question is one that has both a bold ambition and a significant constraint linked together. It is called a propelling question because the presence of those two different elements together in the same question does not allow it to be answered in the way we have answered previous questions; it propels us off the path on which we have become dependent."

Como poderemos vencer a nível de facturação e margens sem abdicar da nossa experiência de produção?

"A Cortebel decide então usar o que tem à mão para criar colecções com marca própria. Inspira-se no espólio vintage, nas botas militares, na sapatilha de ginástica de biqueira resistente, mantém o formato do calçado e procura novos padrões e materiais para reinventar o seu produto. O burel de Manteigas, tecido de lã artesanal, já está a ser utilizado. Tem também botas e sapatos com flores, rendas, bordados, riscas."

Continua.

Mudar é um acto de coragem!

Ontem favoritei no Twitter este:

#Inovação em Processos é a + demandada. A última: inovação em RH e Inovação em Produção. via @luisarnal @insitum pic.twitter.com/bnX38qkOxa

— Paulo Peres (@pauloperes) September 11, 2015

Reparem naquele trecho sublinhado:

"Você não imagina como é difícil mudar processos que existem há anos e que têm funcionado bem."

Precisamente ontem, terminei a leitura do segundo capítulo, "Break Path Dependence" do livro "A Beautiful Constraint":

"Path dependence is the term, borrowed from mathematics, that is used to describe the persistence of features like the width of railway tracks. We can see it in the QWERTY keyboard, the internal combustion engine, and even in formulations like the famous Moore’s Law. And we can also see it in how organizations lock-in self-reinforcing processes and the cognitive rigidities that can come with them.

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organizations go through three phases in developing path dependence. In the first phase, there is a broad range of approaches used within the organization, and a high degree of managerial discretion on which to use and when.

During this phase, an event occurs (an important success of some kind, for instance) that leads to a dominant approach developing in phase two (“That worked well—let’s do more of that”); in this phase there is still some flexibility, but the dominant example is visible and celebrated. Phase three is the lock-in phase in which a greater degree of self-reinforcing processes and behavior patterns predominate, and there is much less room for variations in approach.

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In a workplace culture that prizes efficiency and repeatability, these are the ones that endure, because they have worked before. They have become part of the identity of the company. And they can be almost invisible to the people working there,

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In other words, today’s approaches are in effect yesterday’s approaches, based on what was appropriate then, not necessarily now. [Moi ici: Pois... Zapatero et al] They are not simply processes, but paths made up of self-reinforcing bundles of beliefs, assumptions, and behaviors, whose nature—and underlying rationale—may no longer be visible, and rarely questioned.

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Because path dependence is about beliefs and behaviors, it is a personal phenomenon as much as an organizational one.

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the faster and harder we are asked to work, the more we will want to lean on these protocols. You don’t want your team to use their finite resources questioning every good decision you made yesterday, when the pace of work is only increasing.

Indeed, research suggests that we’re more likely to stick to habits when stressed, because change requires more cognitive energy than we have in those moments. When a track record of proven success meets an increased demand to do more, the tendency to become locked-in is greater than ever."

E, depois, o mundo muda... e continuamos agarrados às práticas e comportamentos que resultaram... mas deixaram de resultar.
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Reclamamos o nosso queijo!
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Lançamos providências cautelares!
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Gritamos por direitos adquiridos!
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E o mundo boceja, e continua a girar indiferente, sem deixar de nos lançar uma provocação:

- É a vida! Amanhem-se!

Mudar é um acto de coragem!