Value, Problem Solving, Human Development

Kenji thinks the heart of Lean is "Think for yourself in your context" and I would agree. So what happens if we actually do that?

Ignore the Agile manifesto, ignore Lean principles. Clear your mind and just consider what you actually see and have seen. What's there? What are the core problems that need to be addressed?

For me there are three major themes:

1. Insufficient organisational understanding of value from the perspective of the final customer (aka consumer). If this knowledge ever exists, it tends not to survive hand-offs.
2. Generally poor problem-solving and decision-making approaches. Expensive decisions are routinely made with insufficient knowledge. A common example is a an incorrect technical architecture decision causing significant cost and schedule increase to the project (and all subsequent projects).
3. Insufficient focus on developing people due to the talent myth. Most places will claim to value people but won't have any visibility of their people's capabilities, their motivations, their passions nor will they have any deliberate structures to reliably develop people. This is because most places still believe that skill is due to inherent talent versus hours and hours of dedicated practice and development.

A more pithy way of summarising this is Value, Problem Solving, Human Development.

I'm not sure this is where I'll end and I'm sure that when I study this more closely, this model will change.

What do you see?