 | What’s the key to success in a start-up (or anything novel for that matter)? According to Steve Blank, who inspired and informed the Lean Startup deal, no matter your inspiration, aspiration, or enthusiasm, your first ideas are just best guesses. Build whatever elaborate plans around those best guesses you want, but until you start running tests early and often, getting feedback and iterating through improved understanding, then all your elaborate structure is on an unstable base. |
| This theme of fast and frequent feedback, early, often about everything is hardly unique to lean startups. It’s the basis of agile development and core to the essence of the Toyota Production System. |  |
| We just aired a webinar (click next door to watch the recording). We explain how jidoka to immediately see and andon to immediate escalate problems provides fast feedback to stabilize and rapidly improve complex operations. We discuss those ideas applied in production, on the one hand, and early stage drug development on the other. |  |
| Steven Spear DBA MS MS Principal, See to Solve LLC Senior Lecturer, MIT Sloan School of Management Senior Fellow, Institute for Healthcare Improvement Author, The High Velocity Edge |
| Click here for Chapter 6 of my book, which talks about how to design systems of various types with tests built in to see problems that can be quickly solved. Chapter 7 for how to make disciplined problem solving a broad based capability (and above if you want to get the whole thing). |