The Topography of Problems, and the Importance of Distributed Problem Solving with Dr. Steve Spear

In this bonus follow-up interview, Gene Kim and Dr. Steve Spear dig into what makes for great leadership today, including the importance of distributed decision-making and problem-solving. They showcase the real advantages of allowing more decisions to be made by the people closest to the work, who are the most suited to solve them.

 

Dr. Spear also shares his personal accounts of the honorable Paul O’Neill, the late CEO of Alcoa who built an incredible culture of safety and performance during his tenure. And Kim and Spear dive deeper into the structure and dynamics of the famous MIT beer game.

 

ABOUT THE GUEST

Dr. Steve Spear (DBA MS MS) is principal for HVE LLC, the award-winning author of The High Velocity Edge, and patent holder for the See to Solve Real Time Alert System.  A Senior Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School and a Senior Fellow at the Institute, Spear’s work focuses on accelerating learning dynamics within organizations so they know better faster what to do and how to do it. This has been informed and tested in practice in multiple “verticals” including heavy industry, high tech design, biopharm R&D, healthcare delivery and other social services, Army rapid equipping, and Navy readiness.  

High velocity learning concepts became the basis of the Alcoa Business System—which led to 100s of millions in recurring savings, the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiatives “Perfecting Patient Care System”—credited with sharp reductions in complications like MRSA and CLABs, Pratt & Whitney’s “Engineering Standard Work”—which when piloted led to winning the engine contract for the Joint Strike Fighter, the operating system for Detroit Edison, and the Navy’s high velocity learning line of effort—an initiative led by the Chief of Naval Operations. A pilot with a pharma company cut the time for the ‘hit to lead’ phase in early stage drug discovery from twelve months to six.

Spear has published in Annals of Internal Medicine, Academic Medicine, Health Services Research, Harvard Business Review, Academic Administrator, and the US Naval Institute’s Proceedings He invented the patented See to Solve Real Time Alert System and is principal investigator for new research on making critical decisions when faced with hostile data.  He’s supervised more than 40 theses and dissertations. He holds degrees from Harvard, MIT, and Princeton and worked at the University of Tokyo, the US Congress Office of Technology Assessment and Prudential Bache.

LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/stevespear

Email: steve@hvellc.com

Website: thehighvelocityedge.com

 

You’ll Learn About:

• Distributed decision-making
• Developing group leader core
• Safety culture at ALCOA
• The need for specialization in an increasingly complex world
• MIT beer game
• Feedback builds trust

Episode Timeline:

• [00:10] Intro
• [01:36] Limitations of the leader
• [08:03] Taking the Moses example to the assembly line at Toyota
• [11:12] Developing group leader core
• [13:32] Back to the Moses problem
• [14:19] Gene’s two thoughts
• [16:01] Planet Money’s SUMMER SCHOOL 2: Markets & Pickles
• [18:38] An Excerpt from The DevOps Handbook
• [20:57] Paul O’Neill’s job to set standards
• [22:35] Elements of rugged topography
• [23:37] Sponsored ad: DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual
• [24:39] Setting context
• [25:30] The structure and resulting dynamics
• [28:00] Call it out early and often
• [30:45] Making everyone feel responsible
• [36:51] Safety culture at ALCOA
• [37:33] “If there’s a failure, it’s my failure”
• [38:52] Topography of the problem
• [42:27] Applying to the car example
• [46:50] Benefits of specialization in modern medicine
• [50:37] Complexity will keep increasing as time goes by or is it reduced?
• [52:31] The need for specialization will continue to grow
• [53:22] MIT Beer Game through the lens of structure and dynamics
• [1:00:14] Feedback builds trust
• [1:01:21] Dirty Harry’s final scene
• [1:03:08] Outro

Resources:

• SUMMER SCHOOL 2: Markets & Pickles on Planet Money
• Paul O'Neill interview worker safety at ALCOA
• Paul O'Neill on Safety Leadership
• Paul O'Neill Speech on "The Irreducible Components of Leadership"
• DevOps Enterprise Summit
• DevOps Enterprise Summit Las Vegas - Virtual
• Team of Teams: New Rules of Engagement for a Complex World by General Stanley McChrystal with Tantum Collins, David Silverman and Chris Fussell
• The DevOps Handbook: How to Create World-Class Agility, Reliability, and Security in Technology Organizations by Gene Kim, Patrick Debois, John Willis and Jez Humble
• The High-Velocity Edge: How Market Leaders Leverage Operational Excellence to Beat the Competition by Dr. Steve Spear
• “The Beer Game” by Prof. John D. Sterman
• The Idealcast EP. 5: The Pursuit of Perfection: Dominant Architectures, Structure, and Dynamics: a Conversation With Dr. Steve Spear
• The Idealcast EP. 6: (Dispatch from the Scenius) Dr. Steven Spear’s 2019 and 2020 DOES Talks on Rapid, Distributed, Dynamic Learning