Leading with Obeya: Maximizing human leadership potential – Tim Wiegel
Who should read this book?
The concept of Obeya is a way for aligning organisations and creating focus around shared goals. I highly recommend this book to leaders responsible for setting strategic direction, such as CEOs, VPs, Plant Managers, Transformation Managers, and others in similar roles.
For organisational coaches, facilitators, and consultants, it is important to deepen your understanding of Obeya and its potential to drive impactful change. This book can serve as a great starting point.
Why you should read this book (or not)?
This book stands as a reference in its field. It provides an accessible and clear introduction to Obeya, linking various leadership principles to the concept. It doesn’t assume prior knowledge, making it an excellent starting point for those new to Obeya.
A significant portion of the book is devoted to general leadership practices that are widely applicable—even if you never plan to implement Obeya. It positions Obeya as a powerful tool for enhancing leadership execution.
As such, this is a comprehensive book covering leadership insights and the foundational aspects of using Obeya. It is relatively easy to read.
The book doesn’t delve deeply into the nitty-gritty of Obeya implementation, such as addressing common pitfalls or navigating real-world obstacles. If you are already familiar with Obeya and looking to advance your practice, this book may not take you to the next level.
For anyone curious about how Obeya can transform leadership and organisational practices, this book is a solid starting point.
Interesting extracts
“The Obeya functions as a forum for leadership and operational teams to openly, visibly and respectfully engage to make the realization of the organizations strategy part of their day-to-day work. If done well it helps keep out ego-centered politics, confusing prioritization, malfunctioning management practices, misalignment, lack of direction for self-organizing teams and many other types of ‘traditional management issues.’ “
“Why use obeya
- Better alignment between teams and alignment of purpose: With strategy, between teams, within the team → = more meaningful work
- More effective meetings: Important stuff first, in the least possible time, clear accountabilities
- Better insights & decision-making: Avoiding bias (as much as possible), using available (visual) context, facts & figures instead of assumptions
- People development: Building leadership & improvement capabilities
- Trust & collaboration: Transparency through visualization and dialogue creates trust in teams, up- and downstream
- Rewarding:
- Effective change enabler
- Visible results
- Get rid of dusty boring traditional meetings”
“Many teams, if they feel they need to improve their game, first start addressing their culture. They might do an assessment, coloring their team personalities or writing down their values, and later sign a charter to promise they’ll abide by those values and agreements and use them in their daily practice. They might even primarily look at the culture of the operational team rather than at their own leadership level when it comes to options for improvement. However, over and over we are learning that change doesn’t happen by thinking about change, it happens by actually changing the way we do things on a daily basis. As some say “we can’t think our way into a new way of acting, but we can act our way into a new way of thinking” “
“In the Obeya, the rhythm and routines help us free up time so we can engage our System 2. That means we have more System 2 availability to address complex problems, rather than focusing on the proceedings of the meeting itself.
Moreover, in the Obeya, we engage our brains more actively by using various stimuli consistently in relation to goals and facts, Rather than reading an email or a report, there is active engagement. People move around the room, pointing things out. There is not a speaker and an audience, or just two people at a table of eight that are actively engaged in the discussion. Instead, there is a life-size visual structure with facts and data, with people standing and actively engaging in answering questions that are essential to practicing the craft of leading organizations. Effectively, that means your brain is lighting up more synaptic activity than in the dusty old meetings that you’re used to. This creates more engagement, stronger memory and supports System 2 thinking.”
“Important aspects of Hoshin Kanri are to connect all levels of the organization both in terms of Direction and Focus (exercised through decision- or policymaking) as well as Alignment (through participative dialogue at each level or area of the organization with the next) and Reason to learn together and provide evidence of the effect of that strategic direction and learnings to pivot or persevere from the strategic path. “
“THE MESSY SCHEDULE OF A MANAGER
Is your daily work schedule as messy as most managers? Do you try to squeeze in more meetings in an already full schedule, run a bit later on every next meeting, and have the feeling you’re actually not getting any value out of it?
Usually, if you’re in a leadership position, your agenda is a challenge by itself. The first problem is that meetings are everywhere and you’re schedule’s simply fully booked. The second challenge is that you leave a lot of these meetings and feel in your gut that it has to be possible to get a lot more results out of them. Sometimes, discussions get so lengthy we’re not even able to get through all the topics on the agenda, which means you’ll have to wait another two weeks before getting a decision on your proposal.
On many occasions I have met leaders that were either late or cancelled meetings completely at the last minute simply because other meetings were more important, they were running late or their priority apparently wasn’t on their meeting with me. Also, many of the managers I met accepted this issue, coming late to almost every meeting, keeping members of their team waiting and seemingly running behind on things that needed to be discussed. It seems like this is just the fate of the manager and nothing can be done about it.
1x 1.5 hour Drive Performance or Deliver Value = 1.5 hour
See if you can get more structure and free up time by adopting a rhythm, allowing a few key meetings to take care of most of your responsibilities as a leader. If all goes well, a manager needs less than eight hours per week to fully align with your leadership team:
→ 3x 0.5 hour Act & Respond = 1.5 hour
→ 4x (2x 30 minutes) Solve Problems = 4 hours
→ 0.5x 1.5 hour content / deep dive meetings = 45 minutes.
→ Total = 7 hours and 45 minutes
In practice, you could take care of almost all your leadership responsibilities with in your leadership team in just one day’s effort. That includes spending time with members of your teams to work on structured problem solving, which is usually the first topic to be disregarded when the going gets tough.”
“As a rule, when teams are pushed over their available capacity by deadlines given to them by leadership or customers, they will go slower without a doubt. Teams know best what they are capable of and should be responsible for planning of their own work. Leadership should not push work but rather provide strategic guidance, help translate stakeholder needs and support teams in effective planning and execution of their work.”
“Essentially, a leader has 5 key responsibilities which represent the fundamental work of a leader:
- Lead Successful Strategies – The primary goal of a leader is to help the organization achieve its purpose. For this, a strategy that is best suited for the organization, given the circumstances, must be formulated, executed tested and continuously improved. If a leader fails at this, the organization will not achieve its goals.
- Deliver Value – Every organization delivers some kind of value to customers and or stakeholders. But we can only spend our money and our time once. A leader must be concerned with the selection of value that is being delivered in order to know whether it will fulfill customer and stakeholder needs. Ensuring maximum value is created is a key responsibility leadership will need to attend to. It’s all about doing the right things
- Drive Performance – Not just the selection of, but also how value is being delivered is key to the success of the organization. If we don’t improve our capabilities, things like delivery lead time or quality of our products and services will suffer. We must do things right in order to get the desired outcome and value for customers and stakeholders.
- Act & Respond – Making a plan and making sure teams can get to work is one thing, but making sure they can then work without hassle or problems means leaders must constantly be available to Act & Respond to questions, requests, problems and new learnings that are uncovered on a daily basis on our path to glory
- Solve problems – In any organization there will be problems that have no obvious answer or solution. Recognizing them and actively identifying and working with teams to solve these problems is a key responsibility for leaders.”
“Here are a few surprises that usually turn up when creating value stream maps, that make it a valuable exercise in spite of what a biased brain might think
- People appear to have different ideas on how the process really works.
- A lot of problems are caused by unclear definition of input, output or who the customer really is.
- Teams are focused on their own activities, rather than optimizing the lead time for the entire value stream.
- Unless you’ve adopted Continuous Improvement for a while now, your process efficiency is likely to be below 10%.”