Increasing your Performance Tremendously by Using Lean Principles

You might know the situation: I wanted to make the design for one of our products. It was a motivating and creative task. However I couldn't start since I was somehow doubtful about the first step. I felt like that first step could lead me either to a great goal or an embarrassing failure...

Why is it often so hard to do this first step? I guess that we somehow think, that the first step might be decisive for all following steps. This might be true for linear processes, but merely is for complex ones. Once you drop a football it will fall on the ground. If you drop a butterfly instead, it might do the same. Or it flies away. Or it causes storms on the other side of the world (also see "Butterfly Effect"). 

Almost every situation in our everyday life is a complex one. We don't know the outcome of an action in advance and must adapt our behavior steadily. From this perspective it seems less frightening how we perform on first steps. It's not about doing everything right straight from the beginning, but about learning and adapting. Sometimes the best thing is just to start without making huge plans. Do it and learn from it.

This is also known as one of the key principles of "lean thinking". Build - Measure - Learn. Building means to make experiments. Whenever we start something new it's actually an experiment. Consider this example: You want to get fitter, so you do short runs in the morning. After we took action we need somehow to measure the outcome - even if it's not necessary to measure by using numbers. It could also be something like "I feel more energized than usual in the morning". Finally we create our conclusion about the experiment - When I do some running in the morning I feel more energized than usual. We learned something and based on this new assumption we can start with new experiments.

In the world of entrepreneurship this principle is used to develop products with true customer value. I love this approach of making small steps and using customer's feedback. You can start much faster, skipping an everlasting planning phase and don't have to be afraid of developing in the wrong direction. The worst thing that can happen is that that you learn that your assumption was wrong without spending too much effort.

"If you learn from defeat, you haven't really lost." - Zig Ziglar

Currently we use this technique for creating one of our applications. Instead of just developing and hoping that the customers will like it, we use a bunch of experiments. We created a landing page (you can find it here), which advises our potential customers of our project and thereby gives us an indication of their interest. If we see potential, we'll make a questionnaire to get their opinion more detailed. Once we proofed those assumptions we know how to proceed. By making baby steps, we are much less frightened to do something wrong. And less mistakes means more productivity.