Game in the Brain

Have you ever used someone else’ combo? Someone’s technique as to make your current technique look like shit? That’s my early experience when I used to GM and my younger brother, by four years, was a better GM than me. This began a path of both borrowing ideas and trying to improve on them. Its not enough to copy, but to really improve on the other persons ideas : because you want to “win”.

I didn’t know I was slowly using techniques LONG ago used before, in Work and Productivity. In Traveller I used basic business planning: projecting and estimating the revenues and opportunities per jump. I was taking my Masters in Entrepreneurship in DLSU around the time Bobby Navarro was running Traveller.

Lean is the Strategy Guide to Life I was looking for. The Push Pull system, the Value engineering, Waste reducing, the Inventory management, etc… are the decisions I make everyday. In life there is WORK we cannot avoid (non value adding but necessary; called support operations) and managing it was one of the techniques in lean.

As a former Artist I LOVE LEAN and Quality Management Principles. If Artists learned lean (aka TPS) and the problem solving that comes with it, it would have SAVED them/us/me SO MUCH heartache. Because its Frustrating to talk to someone who Doesnt know what they want and amount of skills needed to EXTRACT their specifications falls in the entire discipline on Problem Solving and Total Quality management principles. In school and at work – all I had to go on is that “The client is always RIGHT” – FUCK THAT. A flawed human is always right… HOW USEFUL IS THAT???

Fast forward today when now I WILL BE doing lean and problem-solving training for other people. I had a life time of failures and wrong directions. I was an artist when being one was already in decline and diminishing quality of life. I was sheltered and had very little in life skills. I had to learn everything when I was older and more challenged to form habits. I had to be leaner and agile in how I learned.

ISO and my Past.
Journalizing or Keeping a Journal is the earliest incarnation of ISO Quality Management principles. Write what you do, and Do what you write. It is the beginning of creating a database of what I’ve done and how I do things. How keeping a journal helps you improve can be found in the basic ISO quality management system (9001).

ISO QMS is WRITING. how simple and elegant is that?/retorical.  Writing is thought given a physical form so as it can be measured and monitored. The fact that you can see how screwed Up a person is by their writing is enough of a working amount of data to move towards improvement. It puts down measures and data for Action.

Moving forward, as I teach in the AGILE way (fast feedback loop reacting to needs of the customer), and we will problem solve the LEAN way (fast iteration with minimum viable product, with small incremental improvements). First people need to know how this makes their work easier, and then most* will realize it will make their life easier.

*try as I might no-one can ever completely remove anecdotal experience trumping statistical, empirical, and experimental data. I believe that 80% of people will never be convinced of any methodical and transparent process in data analysis but that 20% can be empowered to move towards shaping systems to match the reality.