At a past AME Conference, the President of Toyota North America was asked, "There have been a lot of books written about Toyota product development... why doesn't Toyota write one?" He thought for a moment, and then answered: "Because it would only be one page long. Just:
• Keep it Simple
• Make it Visual
• Trust your people to do the right thing."
When working with our clients and designing our tools (both software and manual tools), we often come back to that answer.
The fundamental technique that we teach to "Keep it Simple" is to focus on the Decisions that need to be made. Your team knows what those are... and they know when they have the knowledge to make those with confidence vs. when they are guessing. Key among those are the Customer & Business Interests that you are going to choose to satisfy (or not). Teams often think of that satisfaction as results, rather than the Decisions that they are. But that's because the effects of their Decisions on those Customer & Business Interests have not been made visible... they are fuzzy at best. Once those have been made visible, then you realize that you have complete control over what Customer & Business Interests you will satisfy, and which you will not.
The first step to "Make it Visual" is to start asking for it... ask to see the limits on those decisions... ask to see the trade-offs between those decisions... ask to see the gaps preventing you from making those decisions confidently. But if you're going to ask for that from your team, you need to be willing to provide them the tools to make that easy. (See how TCC can help for more on our tools.)
With the right knowledge made visible to all, and a focus on the right decisions, your people will make the correct decisions. With that done, "Trust your People" is easy. Without that done, when decisions are made by arguing out various opinions on the guesses that have been put forward for how to accomplish the various wish lists, none of which may even be possible, there is some wisdom in not trusting the output of such meetings... in making sure the arguments were won for the right reasons... and in injecting your own (more experienced) guesses into the equation.
While that Foundation is far from trivial to put in place, the benefits are both immediate and growing over time...