Clean starts

I’m thinking about clean starts. Back in January, I was reading the review copy of Mary Poppendieck’s forthcoming book, Lean Development: An Agile Toolkit. I blogged about a very troubled car factory, discussed in the book, that was closed down and reopened under the management of GM and Toyota. Niklas Johansson responded to this (in Swedish), saying that an important factor in the success must have been that they made a clean start. I can’t remember whether Poppendieck mentioned this in the book, but I surely didn’t pick it up at the time. I was more interested in the transfer of control down to the workers.

Last fall, we moved to a new apartment. As we bought it, we underestimated the need for renovation. What we should have done, was to have it repainted, replace kitchen appliances, et cetera. As we had lived here for a couple of months, we began to realize that we had to do this soon. The state of the apartment kept us from getting organized, and with a one-year-old, you need order. This week, the fix-up was done and this weekend we will be cleaning the apartment so we can move back in.

Also, it’s interesting to compare the new building with the old one. I have already mentioned the laundry rooms in the old and the new buildings. In the old building, the laundry room was a complete mess, despite angry notes about how it’s everyone’s responsibility to keep it tidy (anonymously posted to the laundry room door). Here, in the new building, the laundry room is squeaky clean, and nearly everyone seems to wipe off the washing machines and the floor after having used it. What interests me is the reason why this one works, and the previous one didn’t. I’m sure nothing but a clean start would help at the old place: a complete renovation, replacing the old machines with new ones, et cetera.

At work, I have been in, and heard of several projects that have gone astray, where things are really bad and motivation drops rapidly, where everyone wishes things would be different, but where this change never happens. Loads of time can be spent at coffee breaks and in meetings, complaining about the current situation – and things still remain the same. Sometimes things get so bad that management calls for drastic measures, which is very risky since it can actually make things even worse, if it’s not carried out with great sensitivity to the particular circumstances that have caused the trouble. Again, I can’t think of anything else but a clean start – especially if this has gone on for long. Curiously, new hope is quite easily inspired, after all – even at (or, perhaps, especially at) places where motivation is really low.

As I thought about this, I felt that this is related to the “Broken Window Theory”, retold in the context of software development by Dave Thomas and Andy Hunt – see this excerpt from their book, The Pragmatic Programmer (which I haven’t read yet, but I will; and, by the way, they both have weblogs.) Also, I hope that Death and Life will say something that can be connected to this, in the chapters about unslumming.