Transcript
Mark Stedman (0:00)
Oh, hey, if you're seeing this episode again, but you've already listened to it, my apologies. I made a technical error today that caused a bunch of episodes to show up twice. So sorry for the inconvenience. If you've heard this episode, feel free to move on. But if you haven't, I hope you like it. Table three, two salmon, one duck, one veggie lasagna. Table nine. Two chicken, one duck, one fish and chips. No peas. Table five. One chicken stir fry, one veggie lasagna. No nut allergy, no peanut oil in the stir fry. Can I get a yes, Chef?
Sous Chef (0:29)
Yes, Chef.
Mark Stedman (0:31)
You're the sous chef at a fancy restaurant. You're in charge of keeping the trains running, making sure food gets to the pass on time so that a guest isn't waiting on their meal while their date tucks into theirs. Sure, you can try and keep it all in your head, but then you end up having an aneurysm or being played by someone small and wiry in a streaming miniseries, or both. Whether you're a cook on their own in the back of a pub or a line cook in a burger bar, there's an element of the assembly line to what you're doing. And if for some reason you're not even in the food service industry, we can learn a lot from the world of manufacture and bring it in to the work that we do. I'm Mark Stedman, and this is undo. Thinly slicing a hunk of productivity advice, barely letting it shake hands with a hot pan and calling it rare, just like a mama used to make. You don't have to call yourself a project manager to have managed some kind of project. If you've had to move house, plan a birthday party, or travel for a holiday, you've managed a project. A project is nothing more than a series of tasks. Some of them are connected, some take longer than others. Some are binary in that they're done or not done, while others involve other people and thus are the worst to do. Lists are useful, as are methods like David Allen's Getting Things Done. But systems like that treat every task as either done or not done, which just isn't realistic. I have people in my life who are very dear to me who manage all of this stuff in their heads. I don't know how, but somehow they manage. Actually, I do know how. They simply don't sleep. Not because they're permanently running around doing stuff, but because their brains are constantly trying to run complex project management software when they should be asleep. So how do you manage a complex project with lots of moving parts? Well, first you have to build an aeroplane. After the Nazis bombed the factories making Spitfires in Southampton during the Second World War, Brits began building them in secret, hiding them in sheds, back gardens, hotels, and even a bus depot. The Allies needed as many as they could get, so efficiency was of the utmost importance at the time. A lot of factories adhered to the Henry Ford method of manufacture, which meant that parts were supplied based on anticipated demand. So a standard fork wrench might be made by affixing two rotary girdles to a stanchion tusk. But if the pimhole goes out of sync with the elbow nut, your hinkle press gets jammed, and then you have to hold production of stanchion tusks. Meanwhile, on the other side of the factory, you're still merrily making rotary girdles that'll just pile up. With no thork wrenches to affix them to. This naturally creates waste, not to mention the build up of excess fluid on the girt strain. But if you had a couple of bins at the end of the production line for each part, you could ensure you only made as much as you needed and maybe even adapt the machine to make different sorts of parts if demand for the other one slowed. And this is precisely what those plucky Brits did. Instead of making all the parts all the time, they'd make enough parts to fill two bins. Factory workers who needed, let's say, a drangle would take it from bin A. They'd keep going until bin A was empty, at which point the drangleman would pour the contents of bin B into bin A and start making new drangles. Bin A was the buffer bin, which, apart from being immensely satisfying to say, meant parts makers weren't having to estimate demand. They just made enough to fill the bin. In the late 1940s, an industrial engineer from Japan called Taiichi Ono took this idea to Toyota.