The Lean Supply Chain & Logistics Simulation game was discussed in the podcast with Paul Myerson, author of author Lean Supply Chain and Logistics Management, a practical guide that will assist you in leveraging your improvements to both vendors and customers.

Why use a simulation game? As Paul says,

To be truly successful with Lean I think most people would agree that everybody has to be involved and understand that the concepts and the applications, so you always want to run as many people in your company through some kind of Lean training. The simulation is appropriate; I think, in the introductory types of setups where people might sit there and bored if they are listening to a lecture. This way, it gets them engaged. It’s a good team building approach to get them involved and see where it can really benefit them and the company and what their role in it is. So I find it to be very useful.

Paul’s Lean Supply Chain & Logistics Simulation says Enna, will help your company realize its goal of becoming more Lean, more agile, and take a lead over the competition. This is a hands-on simulation that demonstrates the effectiveness of Lean in the specialized context of the Supply Chain, Logistics, and Distribution environment.

This is part of a series of blog posts outlined in A Lean Service Design Approach to Gaming your Training.

After reading The Gamification of Learning and Instruction by Dr. Karl Kapp, I felt that not only did I understand the Gaming world better, but was willing to take a stab at trying a few games on my own. Something the author recommends that we all do if we are serious about Gamification. I have already purchased two copies of the book sending the hard copy to a client and a Kindle version for me to use as a reference tool no matter where I may be. An excerpt from the podcast, Should you Gamify your Simulations? 

I will forewarn you; it is not one of my shorter podcast.

About: Karl Kapp is a professor of instructional technology at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania. He teaches a variety of courses to include game design and how to design learning courses and environments, Additionally, as the assistant director of Bloomsburg’s acclaimed Institute for Interactive Technologies (IIT), Dr. Kapp helps government, corporate, and non-profit organizations leverage learning technologies for employee productivity and organizational profitability. In his spare time, he has authored or co-authored four books on the convergence of learning and technology with his latest being The Gamification of Learning and Instruction.

You can find Karl on Twitter @kKapp  or his blog, Kapp Notes.

This is part of a series of blog posts outlined in A Lean Service Design Approach to Gaming your Training.

#ServiceDesign Teacher and Practitioner, Vincenzo Di Maria work focuses on socially responsive design and innovation ranging from products to services and experiences. He trained as a designer at Central St. Martin’s College of Art Design in London, where he’ll be running the Service Design Summer Course the first two weeks of August this year.

The podcast centered on Vincenzo teaching and the learning experience of the Summer Design Course and I believe you will find his methods truly unique. I thought that 2-weeks was an awful long time for business people to dedicate to a learning experience. This one, may be well worth it.

Vincenzo Di Maria is and co-founder of Common Ground, a service design firm working across Europe. Their work focuses on socially responsive design and innovation ranging from products to services and experiences. The Common Ground approach to design is holistic, playful and people-centred.

An excerpt from the podcast,  The Two Worlds of Service Design.

Related Information:

Lean Service Design Workshop

Lean Service Design Trilogy Workshop

#ServiceDesign Specialist @sly or more formally Sylvain Cottong has worked extensively at these crossroads and as an early Internet evangelist, he has been advising governments & companies on strategies for the networked society.  He lives & works in Luxembourg and Berlin. An excerpt of the podcast can be read at An Economist who practices Service Design.

His areas of interest and expertise are:

Leadership and innovation management

Service innovation

Business model innovation

Social business & enterprise 2.0

Intellectual capital management & learning organizations

Complexity management, trendwatching, backcasting & forecasting

Customer experience management, service dominant logic & social CRM

Design management, service design & user experience design

Sylvain’s breadth of knowledge in these fields is extraordinary. Though we just grazed the surface, I think you will find the discussion quite insightful.

Where you can find Sylvain:

strategybuilders.eu: A Luxembourg based network of international consultants.

projetspublics.lu: A Luxembourg based public sector innovation consultancy.

nectar: A Berlin based user experience design & service innovation agency.

integratetplace: A design consultancy specializing in 3 dimensional design & urban communication

Member of the Internet of Things Council (http://www.theinternetofthings.eu/),

Care To Design healthcare service design collective (http://caretodesign.com/)

New Club of Paris (http://www.new-club-of-paris.org/).

Gregory A. Howell, co-founder and managing director of the Lean Construction Institute (LCI), a non-profit organization devoted to production management research in design and construction. A popular speaker, educator and author Howell regularly addresses industry groups on the need for a lean production revolution in design and construction. His expertise in improving productivity has resulted in consulting engagements on power plants, petro-chemical facilities, commercial and industrial buildings, and infrastructure projects in North and South America and Africa.

Being the project management fanatic that I am, we centered most of our discussion on The Lean Project Delivery System™ (LPDS) and The Last Planner.  LPDS uses lean methods to provide improved project control. The decentralization of decision and the empowerment of the people that are in direct contact with the work are the key components of the work. Many of us will think there is nothing  new; this is what we have all been talking about the last few years. The revelation I had is that Greg has been doing this for 20 years.  Lean and the construction industry are both fortunate to have Greg as a leader of this movement. Enjoy the podcast!

Related Information

Do You Know the Right Job For Your Products?

A Good Architect is an enabling Orchestra Leader,

Creating Lead Measures with Kanban

Turning your Conference Learning into Action

Tom left me thinking about the cloud and the possibilities in a totally different way. It’s not about technology. It’s about how we collaborate, work, influence and experience the world!

Thomas Koulopoulos, author of Cloud Surfing: A New Way to Think About Risk, Innovation, Scale and Success (Social Century) is my guest in this Thursday podcast. His work has been praised by luminaries such as Peter Drucker and Tom Peters, who called his writing, “a brilliant vision of where we must take our enterprises to survive and thrive.” And according to the late Peter Drucker, Tom’s writing “makes you question not only the way you run your business but the way you run yourself.”

I ask Tom in the podcast, “Who is going to read his book? He replied; It's not meant for the technologist. It's not a book about technology. It's for the businessperson who wants to understand how they can better leverage these new behaviors in the Cloud. It's for us as individuals, who will need to, in very little ways, be able to surf this tsunami of connections.” Tom is correct; however, he may be too modest. I believe the technologist will enjoy the book tremendously as they see their craft humanized in a way that may cause a little reflection of their own.

About Thomas Koulopoulos: The author of eight books and founder of Delphi Group, a 20-year-old Boston-based think tank, which was named one of the fastest growing private companies in the US by Inc. Magazine. Delphi provides advice on innovation practices and methods to Global 2000 organizations and government agencies. He is also an Executive in Residence at Bentley University, the past Executive Director of the Babson College Center for Business Innovation, and past Executive Director of the Perot Systems Innovation Lab, which was acquired in 2009 by Dell Computer.

Related Information:

Worry about Security in Cloud?

Does Lean create Innovative Companies?

Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell

Process Control Thoughts from the Poppendiecks

Joe Swartz and Mark Graban co-authors of Healthcare Kaizen: Engaging Front-Line Staff in Sustainable Continuous Improvements were my guests on the Business901podcast. You can read an excerpt from the podcast, Engaging People in Healthcare with Kaizen. The book focuses on the methods of daily continuous improvement, or “Kaizen,” for healthcare professionals and organizations.

I would encourage others outside of the Healthcare field to listen to the podcast. We discussed many of the problems found by all of us in the implementation of continuous improvement programs and a few particular to the healthcare field.  However, as more flex time is built into the workplace, the issues of multiple shifts and extended time off, for example, will not just be issues that are wrestled with by Healthcare professionals.

Joseph E. Swartz has been leading continuous improvement efforts for 18 years, including 7 years in healthcare, and has led more than 200 Lean and Six Sigma improvement projects. He is currently the Director of Business Transformation for Franciscan St. Francis Health in Indianapolis, IN.

Mark Graban is the author of Lean Healthcare and has worked as a consultant and coach to healthcare organizations throughout the world. He serves as a faculty member at the Lean Enterprise Institute and is also the Chief Improvement Officer for KaiNexus, a startup software company that helps healthcare organizations manage continuous improvement efforts. Mark writes the immensely popular Lean Blog, which has not only a focus on Healthcare but touches upon all things Lean.

Related Information:

PDCA from the Outside-in

Transforming Healthcare with Lean eBook

Story of Going Lean in Healthcare: On the Mend

Mark Graban of the Lean Blog discusses Lean Healthcare

At #LSSC!12, I had a chance to listen to Mary Poppendieck’s talk on, Continuous Feedback: Process Control for Developing Software-Intensive Systems. I had a few questions afterwards that developed into an entire podcast.

Mary Poppendieck has been in the Information Technology industry for over thirty years. She has managed solutions for companies in several disciplines, including supply chain management, manufacturing systems, and digital media. As a seasoned leader in both operations and new product development, she brings a practical, customer-focused approach to software development problems.

Tom Poppendieck is an enterprise analyst and architect, and an agile process mentor. He focuses on identifying real business value and enabling product teams to realize that value. Tom specializes in understanding customer processes and in effective collaboration of customer, development and support specialists to maximize development efficiency, system flexibility, and business value.

Our conversation also spurred these thoughts that I expressed  in a recent post, Time Based Thinking limits Lean Sales and Marketing.

Related Information:

Turning your Conference Learning into Action

Does Lean create Innovative Companies?

Defining Lean IT with Steve Bell.

Lean Kanban lessons from a Software Developer

Saul Kaplan (@skap5), the author of The Business Model Innovation Factory: How to Stay Relevant When The World is Changing was my guest on the podcast. Saul is an innovation junkie!  He is the founder and chief catalyst of the Business Innovation Factory (BIF), a real-world laboratory for exploring and testing new business models and social systems. 

BIF has attracted a global community of over 5,000 innovators and organizes the internationally renowned BIF Collaborative Innovation Summit. Saul shares his innovation musings on Twitter (@skap5) and his blog (It’s Saul Connected), and as regular contributor to the Harvard Business Review, Fortune, and Bloomberg Businessweek.

What others said about the book:

Daniel H. Pink, author of Drive and A Whole New Mind: To be competitive and stay competitive in today's business environment, you have to be fast on your feet Saul Kaplan knows how to take innovation from napkin sketch to market share, and in this book he teaches you exactly how to create your own 'innovation factory' from scratch. But be careful - once you start working with these ideas, it might be hard to stop!

Tony Hsieh, author of Delivering Happiness and CEO of Zappos.com, Inc.: Saul gets below the buzzwords of innovation and provides an inspiring and actionable roadmap to help transform how any organization creates, delivers and captures value. The Business Model Innovation Factory is a must read for any leader who wants to deliver innovation in the 2lst century.

A written excerpt from the book: Can a Mature Company Risk Experimentation?

Related Information:

What’s New in Business Model Generation?

Do You Know the Right Job For Your Products?

Will Product Managers embrace Open Innovation?

Steve Blank on the Lean Startup at Ann Arbor

Practical Approach to Innovation used by Disney

Dr. Charles Burnette created iDeSIGN, a Design Thinking course for children. He freely shares this information on his website idesignthinking.com. The program began with a university course, Design With Kids, that placed design students in classrooms to help teachers conduct design projects related to their teaching goals.

Our podcast discussed teaching Design Thinking to both children and adults. In a recent blog post, A Teaching Resource for Design Thinking, I discussed the seven principles of Dr. Charles Burnette’s IDeSiGN.

I stands for intending

D stands for Defining.

e stands for Exploring

S stands for Suggesting

i stands for Innovating

G stands for Goal getting

N stands for kNowing

Charles Burnette received his BA, MA and PhD degrees from the University of Pennsylvania where he was also a Research Associate doing research on the uses of information during design. A licensed, award winning architect, he became Director of the Philadelphia AIA, founding Director of the Center for Planning Design and Construction in Philadelphia, and Dean of the School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin.  He returned to teaching to become the Director of the Industrial Design Department at the University of the Arts, both while co-directing the Design Based Education K-12 Program. The graduate program was conceived and implemented to explore the design thinking model and to demonstrate its potential in a computer support system for interdisciplinary design.

Dr. Burnette has been a frequent speaker in European design schools and at the European Union’s Cumulus Program on Design Education, and is widely published on topics such as design management, design systems, ecological design and design education. He is now writing a book about the design model, its foundations in cognitive science and its application.

Related Information:

A Short Course in Design Thinking

Sketching an important Leadership Tool

When it comes to creativity, give me a 5 year old!

GE CMO sheds her view on Design Thinking