Organization Horsepower

Organization Horsepower was written based on my experiences in life and business. One of those experiences was the time I spent as a crew member on race team. In the book, I tried to keep things simple by concentrating on how a race team functioned in relation to performance. How successful I was at that endeavor I will leave to you, the reader. However, today I feel a tinge of regret that I did not more fully explore the people who served with in those roles. In all cases, those people defined the roles they played on the team and they served in those roles because of who they are, not because it was the role we had to fill.

One of those people, is Bruce Blake, Crew Chief for the Greg Hutcheson Racing team.

The reason why I feel compelled to talk specifically about Bruce is because he passed away the morning of July 16^th. Much of what I know about motorcycle racing at the professional level I learned from Bruce, and to cater to cliché, Bruce had forgotten more about racing than I will ever know. In this article, I will analyze the role that Bruce played in the content of the book and try my best to honor his contribution.

Before we look, at the role of Crew Chief, it’s helpful to understand the context of that role by understanding the overall structure or Organizational Design of the race team. The following excerpt is from chapter 8, “The Crew”:

Organizational Design of a Race Crew

Organizational design (OD) on a race team is purposeful and lean and is comprised of specialists who are well aware of their contribution to the cause. Much like in business, a smaller capital investment means that each crew member must play more, less-specialized roles. However, as capitalization grows, the race team can scale based on its strengths. The overall structure of a race team remains flat. Everyone has a job to do, everyone knows why it’s important, and everyone is accountable. Most race crews are made of up of these four identities: team owner, crew chief, team manager, and specialists.

Bruce was an Engineer by trade, a motorcyclist by passion. He approached motorcycle racing from the perspective he knew best, with precision and a scientific understanding of the interplay of the mechanics of the rider and machine.

Of the many stories Bruce had to tell, it was never clear to me how involved he was with racing before his son Justin Blake got involved with racing, first in motocross, and then adding road racing. Justin was the Bo Jackson of motorcycle racing, riding at the professional level in both motocross and road racing simultaneously. In addition to role as Father, this is where Bruce first assumed mantle of crew chief.

Subsequent to Justin’s racing career, Bruce ran a successful racing focused shop with particular specialty in suspension. However, being the crew chief in a family-based race team meant at one time or another he played all the roles on the team, some at the same time.

This juxtaposition makes me wonder how much of our traditional corporate organizational design is influenced by traditional western family roles. Regardless, Bruce had a unique set of life experiences, combined with a perspective that made him our ideal Crew Chief. Once again, the following excerpt is from chapter 8, “The Crew”:

Crew Chief

Like the rider, the crew chief fills several roles in the structure of the race team. Before the race, the crew chief is a trainer and a coach, making sure the crew can execute exactly as they need to come race day. The chief makes sure the crew has all the parts and tools they need to their jobs. The chief works with the rider during development, interpreting for the crew what the rider feels he needs from the machine. The chief also acts as an advisor for the rider by providing the data needed to increase performance.

On race day, the crew chief is the head coach, directing and coordinating the efforts of the crew and the rider to maximum performance. The crew chief is the business equivalent of the COO (Chief Operating Officer), responsible for the execution of all the organization’s core competencies.

…

When a rider and crew chief work well together, they tend to stay together, sometimes even switching teams together as a package deal. It speaks to the complex but symbiotic relationship that can develop between the visionary and the operational aspects of a high-performing team.

When it works, you tend to want to leave it alone. This type of symbiotic relationship is also often seen at the upper echelons of corporations, with really great entrepreneurial officers who bring trusted operations leadership with them from company to company.

Bruce was meticulous in in his planning, he had checklists for what tools needed to be on pit lane, and had a special tool box to get them there. He ran drills with us on who stood where and how not to get in each others way. He knew that if we knew exactly what we were supposed to do, he could concentrate on the rider, what the rider wanted from the machine, and what adjustments needed to made for changing conditions.

Greg Hutcheson, the rider, is also an engineer by trade, and the relationship they were able to forge was able to reach that symbiotic level. They shared a common lexicon, and common understanding of speed and performance, but in a way that they both continued to learn from one another.

As for me, I learned a couple different jobs on the team, learned a whole lot about the mechanics of motorcycles, and even got to spend a couple race weekends where I was the rider and Bruce was my crew chief of sorts. Perhaps more important, I learned what it took and what it meant to lead an organization’s operational aspects. A lesson that I will today, and will forever aspire to embody.

In Memory of Bruce D. Blake, 19??-2016

It seems that every month of the year has a theme these days.

In some ways this is a good thing, it creates focus on an issue that we cannot sustain over a greater period of time. Perhaps in that month we can move the bar just a little bit. If the theme carries through the next year, maybe you move the bar a little more, maybe it last a few weeks into the next month and so on.

On the other hand, the beard I started in November is still here in February.

Which brings us to the theme of this month, which I have heard from a few sources: Failure.

It’s talked about in business circles, it’s almost cliché.

Yet, very few business know how to do it, recognize it, or recover from it.

One of the reasons I wrote Organization Horsepower, was to give people non-business models or metaphors for performance issues. Of course there’s a whole chapter on failure.

Chapter 17: The Inevitable Crash

Just as there are a million different ways to win a motorcycle race, there are equally as many ways to lose. Business is no different. However, the more catastrophic the failure the more opportunity there is to learn. But we need to be ever mindful of the potential consequences of the risks we take.

There are only two kinds of motorcycle racers, those who have crashed and those who haven’t—yet.

Everyone crashes eventually.

Failure in this respect is not optional.

What is learned from those crashes will largely determine the resilience of the rider and team. No one has ever gotten significantly faster than everyone else without an epic failure of some sort.

This section was inspired by the notion that failure is not optional, it is not completely avoidable, but it can be very valuable as long as we don’t blow off the analysis of those failures. As with most analysis, we need data, but that data needs to be collected in such a way that we can make sense of it. We have to categorize it in a broad enough way that we focus the data we collect.

Low Sides, High Sides, and Off-Track Excursions

As advanced as motorcycles and riders have become, no one has invented a new way to crash nor have we eliminated any single type of crash. We are still crashing exactly the same way we were 100 years ago.

In an elemental sense, all crashes are caused by a loss of traction or the sudden and unmitigated application of traction; all other variations of the crash describe the conditions or severity of the crash.

Business isn’t finding new ways to fail either. Elementally failures in business can be distilled one way or another. Recently a colleague of mine at TiER1 Performance, Eric Lodor, attempted to categorize the types of failures a consulting business like ours can experience:

• Project (missed deadline, malfunctioning team, over on hours….)
• Financial (low margin, no margin or failure to maximize margin – failure to capture value)
• Relationship (failed to establish, maximize or extend our relationships)
• Account (lost the account, or did not maximize opportunity)
• Technical (tools not working, huge support load)
• Delivery (development successful, implementation was not)
• Impact/Measurement (couldn’t prove ROI)
• Adoption (built great stuff, nobody used it)
• HR/Human Capital (wrong role, too many hours, lack of coaching/mentoring)
• Innovation (missed an opportunity to promote, realize or advance innovation)

I suspect with some additional introspection, we could reduce this list even further, but it’s a good starting point. If we are then able to categorize the type of failure we can then further refine the type of data we want to analyze. Of course not all failures are created equal and some are more or less damaging/useful than others.

The most common of all motorcycle racing crashes is the “low side.” The low side occurs when traction is lost while turning and the side of the motorcycle that is lowest to the ground contacts first. In a low side the motorcycle appears to slide out from beneath the rider, and typically both the rider and bike will slide together on roughly equivalent trajectory for a distance largely dictated by the speed at which the incident occurred.

…

There is no such thing as a harmless crash, but if you had to choose one, it would be a low side. Low sides tell us physically what the limit is and the cause is almost always that we pushed too far over the line.

Of course with any search for causation, you run into limits. There is a point where it get hard to see the forest through the trees. A point of diminishing return.

Collisions and Racing Incidents

If you race long enough, you’re going to hit someone or someone is going to hit you, or maybe both. Collisions are rarely intentional but the net effect is a crash that will leave you struggling to identify exactly what to learn from the failure. Sometimes things are beyond the rider’s control at least until he’s good enough to remove himself from the potential risk.

In racing a collision is sometimes “written off” as a “racing incident,” a racer’s way of acknowledging that there is risk that increases when two riders are trying to occupy the same place on the track at the same time.

What’s needed is to find and acknowledge the point where the search for a cause exceeds the value of the information potentially gained. That’s not to say we bury our heads in sand, but there always new races and new opportunities to perform better.

I’d love to hear from you on what if anything I’ve shared here strikes a chord with you as you think about #FailFebruary. If you’d like to read more of the book it’s available in print and Kindle editions from Amazon. http://amzn.com/1605440329

Having just returned from a few days at PEX Week 2014, I would like to share a few of my thoughts. This will not be a blow-by-blow recap, but rather an attempt to collect my thoughts into a set of themes and takeaways that I left the conference with.

Visually, I was struck at this conference by how many people were wearing suit and tie, buttoned-down business wear. I know that seems like a shallow impression to lead with, but I think it speaks to how seriously people who are engaged with process excellence take themselves and their craft. I admire the pride, but I can’t help feeling that particular display is getting a bit dated.

There was a tremendous focus from the vendor community on tools and software for the process mapping or process tracking standpoint. As a first time attendee of the conference, I was impressed with the functionality of many of the tools, but as someone who is also interested in usability and user experience, there were some really abhorrent interfaces and design schemes.

I believe that some aspects of the software design reflect a continued undervaluation of the people side of process improvement. While black belt and green belt professionals are the primary architects of process improvement, the vast majority of the users of those processes are blissfully unaware of the intricacies of continuous improvement and the language it uses to describe itself. We must never lose sight that even when we seek automation, the human aspect of change is still our ultimate goal. As Brad Power said in his keynote on the first day of the conference: “Build people first, get results second.”

The truth is that if you don’t build people first, you will still get results; they just won’t be the results you were looking for.

Another theme that I noticed was that technology driven disruptors continue to affect process excellence and improvement. Mobile, Social, Cloud, and Big Data technologies are all causing many to reevaluate some long-held and stable processes. However, it is up to us to look at these disruptors as either threats or opportunities. Some process can still be leveraged through continuous improvement, while others are disrupted to the point where we really should start over.

My primary interest in attending PEX was to network and get a sense of where companies are with process improvement as it relates to people and more specifically, traditional “HR” roles.  As I talked to people, I got a lot of reactions that HR was “really broken” and I saw a lot of light bulbs go off that HR could really use a process improvement touch.

One of the best sessions of the entire conference for me was Christina Gasperino from Cott Beverages, who spoke about HR service Delivery transformation. She’s doing at Cott what I had hoped to see more companies doing—a series of people- and process-centric improvement projects aimed at bettering employee’s experiences with service delivery and reducing cost and waste at the same time.

Process improvement in the HR space is clearly something most companies have a large potential to benefit from. While there weren’t a lot of HR practitioners present, I don’t think the topic should be out of bounds for anyone who is focused on the betterment of their business through process excellence.