The bottleneck you can't see is the one killing your program

Most government programs aren't short on effort. They're short on visibility. Work moves through layers of handoffs, approvals, and queues and no one can see where it's stalling, what's causing the delay, or which steps are failing to move the mission forward.

You can't fix what you can't see.

In this Mission O/S Live, Rise8 Product Management Enablement Lead Rob Monroe sits down with Karen Martin—award-winning author and founder of TKMG and TKMG Academy—to talk about one of the most powerful and underused diagnostic tools available to government leaders: the Value Stream Map.

Karen has spent decades walking into complex organizations, mapping how work flows, and exposing the bottlenecks hiding in plain sight. Her work spans Fortune 100 companies, federal agencies, and healthcare systems, and her core argument is simple: clarity has to come before solutions.

They'll cover:

• Why government programs struggle to see their own bottlenecks—and what it costs when waste stays invisible
• What value stream mapping reveals that dashboards, status reports, and process docs don't
• How to use a mapping exercise to build shared understanding across functions and create the conditions for real change
• Why layering AI and automation on top of unmapped processes accelerates the wrong things—and what to do first

You'll walk away with a clearer picture of where progress stalls and how to fix it.

Rob Monroe (00:28):

Hey, happy Friday everyone. Really excited about today's mission OS livestream event. The bottleneck you can't see is the one killing your program. But before we get rolling, let's do some quick introductions. My name is Rob Monroe and as Rise8's product management enablement lead, I like to leverage my product and service delivery experiences from commercial and gov tech environments to now help practitioners and portfolios, leadership, teams visualize and execute how to grow their own operating systems for achieving greater mission impacts through outcomes and production. Joining me today, I'm extremely humbled. Karen Martin, founder of TKMG and TKMG Academy, the author of several books, including Clarity First and Value Stream Mapping, and someone who has spent significant time helping Fortune 100 companies, federal agencies, healthcare systems, and several others actually see how their workflows or doesn't. And so I'm really glad that we have this opportunity to hang out today, Karen.

(01:24)
Thank you so much for being here.

Karen Martin (01:25):

Thank you so much. It's one of my favorite topics, Rob. So thank you.

Rob Monroe (01:30):

Can't wait. So for those of you who are joining us at this live event series for the very first time, we get questions about what is Mission OS. Mission OS is a practical operating system for how we ship outcomes into production. So I highly encourage everyone to check out our Mission OS video series, which breaks down why most organizations can't ship software and the conditions required to make it possible. So during live streams like this, we're going to extend the conversation and explore what it really takes to shift outcomes across people, process and technology. Just a quick reminder, we got a lot of really great pre-submitted questions, but if you have your own questions during the conversation, please submit them. We'll do our very best to try to get to them. Karen, I know you have a very tight window of opportunity today. So if I can stick around and try to offer any perspective, I will do so in your step.

(02:20)
But with all of that out of the way, what do you say we get rolling?

Karen Martin (02:24):

Let's do it.

Rob Monroe (02:25):

Cool. So I've been reflecting back on our first conversation when I first met you at Audacity and I know that there's many of us in the software delivery community that are very passionate about gaining clarity about user pains, wants, needs, as well as how information systems behave. So maybe if we could start by describing what value stream mapping is for someone who's learning about it for the first time and then maybe what might be at risk if our government acquisition and program strategies are not considering this practice in addition to that.

Karen Martin (03:01):

Yeah, that's a great place to start. So a value stream is basically a work system. It's not a process. The value stream is comprised of processes and each process is comprised of tasks. So there's this level of granularity. So value streams are usually from some sort of a request to delivering on that request. And so in the case of software, it could be from a request, it could be actually pre-requirement clarification, it could be at requirement clarification, it could be anywhere along the way. You have to define those fence posts and then all the way through to delivery or to debugging for the first couple months or whatever it might be, you have to pick those fence posts. So it's looking at all of the handoffs, all of the waiting, all of the activity from the fence posts that you set up front and you set the fence post based on the problems you want to uncover and make sure that the fence posts comprise that area.

Rob Monroe (03:57):

Even if we're dealing with complex capabilities inside of a government agency or we're talking about like normal day-to-day activities that are going on in our daily lives, like everything has become digital. We're all using technology, we're all using software. So you and I know this, we believe it. Value stream mapping really came from the manufacturing side of industry years ago, decades ago. And we're seeing it now being applied into digital spaces. We're seeing it across several different service-based organizations. It's got me really curious if this started in the late '90s, why do you believe value stream mapping is so successful? How has it endured this long?

Karen Martin (04:43):

It works. I mean, when you do it right, it is such a powerful practice that that's part of the reason why it endures. And the other thing is as it's spread from manufacturing into the knowledge work and research worlds and areas where information is pretty invisible instead of it being a physical product, it's even more powerful in those industries and those areas because there's been no other way to visualize what's actually happening from if the work is flowing or not flowing, as you said in the beginning, from area to area across an entire work system. And people are generally ... When I wrote Clarity first, I found that people are generally starved for clarity because it makes life easier. Even if it's truth you kind of don't wish you didn't know, even knowing the ugly truth is liberating in a weird way because at least you know what you're dealing with and all the cloud of ambiguity goes away.

(05:40)
So value stream mapping in the non-manufacturing world I think has so much more potential to help organizations than it does even in manufacturing.

Rob Monroe (05:52):

Yeah. And I think what's interesting, there are people who are starved for clarity and I've met organizations or teams where they're really hyper focused on the spaces that they own, but they don't know the edges. Sometimes they don't even lift their head up or they realize that they need to understand the upstream and the downstream. And so I think I've seen a lot of, I think we've talked about this before, almost like spiritual healing and having the conversations and getting people to talk and like that clarity of just getting people to engage on the conversation has been really fruitful.

Karen Martin (06:23):

Yeah. I mean, the spiritual healing, I don't usually articulate a whole lot because people get a little freaked out about it, but it's crazy what happens during a team-based value stream mapping activity in terms of the friction that used to exist between work systems or even individuals and how it melts away and it never comes back. I've worked with organizations for years and years on end and those three days or so that we spend together are the most healing things they've ever done to actually heal relationships. The other thing that's really big is when a new hire comes into an organization, especially if it is a rather large or midsize to large organization, it's kind of like they don't even understand where they fit in this world that delivers some sort of value to a customer. And so like in an airport or a mall or airports and malls are pretty good, there's a map and it says, "You are here." And for someone to come into an organization and part of their onboarding is understanding the value stream and where they sit in it and how they're either directly or indirectly enabling value to be delivered to a customer is super powerful.

(07:36)
Again, very clarifying. Yeah.

Rob Monroe (07:37):

It's funny you use like an airport as an example and talk about the things that we want to know and sometimes maybe we don't want to know. Quick funny side story here going into Utah for the very first time, for anyone who's entered into, I think it's terminal B with Southwest and you can see the map of exactly where you are and you're like, "Oh my God, I have a three mile walk to go get my bags." So just like a funny-

Karen Martin (08:00):

But at least what Southwest does on most of their boards, I don't know about that particular airport, but in Love Field and DFW, they have arrows where it says your gates that way, your gates that way. And you don't have to look at the gate signs and figure, okay, it's going down. I guess I need to go that way. So Southwest is actually really good with visuals.

Rob Monroe (08:19):

Yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. So okay, it's working, it's always worked. We have both shared really great success in having this be a technique in our toolbox. So I'm kind of curious, what do you see are the greatest challenges or obstacles with getting clients to commit in this investment of doing VSMs?

Karen Martin (08:42):

Yeah. So getting the right people in the room is basically ... And we did virtual value stream mapping a lot during COVID, the pandemic and it worked. It didn't work nearly as well as it does in person. If you can do it in person, you should absolutely do it in person. We've had clients fly people in from all over the globe to attend a three or four day mapping activity. It's a strategic activity. So it's worth the time and attention and it's worth getting people in the room where they're looking into each other's eyeballs and they're feeling each other's energy and they're having really important conversations because it's not about the map. The map is merely the enabler for the right conversations, better decisions. And the other thing it's weird, or maybe it's not weird, but it's common, it's I think 100%. When I've done these mapping activities with or without more people on the team, we find that the leaders that ... And we use leadership level in our teams.

(09:39)
The leaders in the room, there's not one, not one of them that can even with any degree of accuracy explain how value is delivered to an external customer. And when you've got an entire leadership team where not one person can really understand that, it makes for tough decision making, budgetary kinds of decisions, prioritization for new products. I mean, if you don't understand that you're really operating in a deficit position and value stream mapping is such a clear way and it's not easy, but it's a relatively easy way to get that clarity. So I kind of say, why would you not?

Rob Monroe (10:22):

Yeah. I mean, it's kind of interesting. I get asked this a couple of times in the government space like, "Wow, I don't know how you pull that off because that was really expensive to get those individuals into a single room through travel." And I get it, it's really challenging to make those types of requests, right? But I have to stop and ask in reverse, "Hey, how long does acquisition normally take?" Like eight months, 18 months. So a three-day investment of time to ensure or at least get really good clarity of what it is we're trying to solve in the first place and how will we know that it's going to impact the mission.

Rob Monroe (10:58):

I don't know, that seems pretty important to shaping the contract in the first place.

Karen Martin (11:02):

Yeah, absolutely. And the other thing is I've never had, and never say never, never say always. Seriously, I have never had even one leader in a value stream mapping team for three or four days in a room sequestered like a jury leave and go, "What a big waste of my time." Not once. They are usually like, "Oh my goodness, I learned so much I didn't know. " It's like everything's ripped off their eyes that have been clouding them from being able to see the truth about the operation and about the way work gets done. Now, again, it's not even at a granular level. There's a whole lot more discovery to happen at the process level, but the value stream level is really there to get consensus among the leadership team on what are the priorities you're going to work on so that you can just get at it and get her done, as we say in Pittsburgh, "Get her done." And not have leaders kind of fighting for resources because there's all these other priorities or saying, "No, no, no, no, no, what are you doing that for?

(12:02)
No, we didn't ever talk about that. " You get all that out of the way so that you can execute and execute quickly.

Rob Monroe (12:09):

Yeah. I think another powerful thing about getting people in the room where the right things happen and doing these exercises, having those conversations we not only tear down the walls to have these conversations happen, but we get everyone back on the same page of why we're doing it in the first place. Exactly. Why each of us are doing our roles and while we have our own opinions and we have our own priorities, we have to remember that there's a customer here.

Karen Martin (12:36):

We're

Rob Monroe (12:36):

Trying to deliver value and we're trying to deliver impact to the mission. And so if we can agree, even sometimes disagreeably on the things that we want to prioritize and how we're going to resource them, this is another really great tactic to make sure that we're doing the right thing by the mission or by our business, right?

Karen Martin (12:54):

Yeah. That consensus building is the reason to do it really. At the end of the day, you're also doing work design and redesign. So that's kind of like the icing on the cake, but the cake is getting everyone aligned on what matters, why it matters, and what do you need to do about it to make it work more effectively.

Rob Monroe (13:14):

Yeah. Couldn't have said it better. I mean, so reflecting on some of your previous client engagements, what traits or behaviors ... We're starting to talk a lot about people and who's in the room and what's going to make success here, right? So what have you seen as far as traits and behaviors that you've identified really separate the teams from mediocre success versus wild success with improvement cycles?

Karen Martin (13:35):

Well, at the leadership level, unfortunately, I don't get to choose the traits and behaviors that actually make it most successful, like having an open mind and having a curious nature and things like that because what you want to do is once those fence posts are set and you're clear on what the scope's going to be, you want to get leadership that represents all of the functional areas as high a level as possible within those fence posts. The team composition is biased toward the future state design and the prioritization and plan definition. So the current state, they may not know any of the details about the timing for work flowing or whatever, but there's all kinds of things you can do to get that during the mapping by phone a friend, go walk the workplace. If it's something physical, go interview people, you can get data in advance.

(14:26)
So there's all kinds of ways to get that. You still want the same team, current state and future state, highest levels possible because they've got authority, budget, et cetera. And so they come with all their personal quirks. And so you also need a very, very strong facilitator.

(14:46)
You didn't ask us directly, but that's one failure I see a lot is that there'll be an internal improvement team of junior people that don't have a lot of experience and they put one in charge of facilitating a leadership level, strategic thinking type of activity. And first of all, the leaders often, they don't have a whole lot of respect for someone who's never walked even close to their shoes in their shoes. And second of all, a lot of the junior people, the minute they start arguing, start getting really nervous. But if they're not having spirited conversation, especially in the future state design, there's probably something not being said that needs to be said in the room because there are many ways to slice the cake as they say. And so you should be debating and it can get kind of-

Rob Monroe (15:34):

Spicy.

Karen Martin (15:35):

A little sassy, spicy at times. And so you need a really strong facilitator to handle that part of it as well.

Rob Monroe (15:43):

Yeah. There's some humility there in terms of that relationship of the facilitator and the team that's in the room, but there's also those like if we take gimbal walks, if we go see how the work is actually getting done and we've been sitting in our rooms, our board meetings, our whatever, and not truly understand what's going on and you get to have that firsthand visibility of what's going on, I think that that really kind of opens things up for folks.

Karen Martin (16:09):

Yeah. And people think sometimes if everything's in a computer, why do a gemba walk? But when you walk it, you're talking with the people that do the work and you're learning things, you have to try to not go too far into the weeds because it'll take a lot of time, but you're getting big picture answers from them about the workflow or the lack of flow and the frustrations that they have that make them less successful than they could be and all those things. So it's super helpful to just go talk to people. But again, you can do it virtually if you have to.

Rob Monroe (16:42):

Yeah. I definitely can attest to the challenges of trying to do this virtually, but still coming out on top with value and I can't stress enough if you can make it happen, happen in person, there's definitely a lot bigger value proposition there for everything that happens.

Karen Martin (17:01):

Virtual Beat's not doing it.

Rob Monroe (17:03):

Yeah. Agreed.

Rob Monroe (17:06):

Yeah. Don't worry about perfection

Karen Martin (17:07):

Here. Rock, paper, scissors.

Rob Monroe (17:11):

So we've talked about people that are in the room. You and I had kind of a healthy tension, healthy debate on this once upon a time with my team where we talked about this idea of like, what if we brought actual customers into the value stream conversation? I'm curious, what's your take on that now after some time has passed and how would you even begin recommending assessing that decision because it's an important one, right? Well,

Karen Martin (17:40):

So if any of the people that are listening have not seen a value stream map, a classic value stream map, well, I'm going to talk about a non-manufacturing value stream map because this is the primary audience. A classic non-manufacturing value stream map has the customer in the top and the middle. They're the one that they're ultimately requesting something and then you're delivering to them. So they are the top dog. When you are working on a value stream, customers typically somehow know whether you're delivering flow or not. They can see it based on how long it takes to deliver. They can see when they get a product or a service and see if there's kinks that have to still be worked out in it. They can see it when they're trying to get service with a well functioning product and how fast they can get services, all those things.

(18:28)
So they're kind of sort of already experiencing the dirty laundry. And so a lot of organizations are terrified to bring a customer in and have them learn the dirty laundry. So obviously it has to be the right customer. It has to be a friendly, as we call it, someone who's really loyal to the organization and has a healthy respect for just the nature of improvement and the desire to constantly get better. And so you have to choose wisely on the customer and there are things that if you're something very IP oriented intellectual property or security oriented in the case of Intel, things like that, you have to figure out ways to get through the map without exposing things that no customer should hear. And so there's those things to work through, but if you can get a customer on the Teams, it is just so powerful and they provide so much clarity to what has happening.

(19:26)
And also one more thing, customer's request coming in is often fraught with problems from the internal perspective. And so oftentimes internal people will say, "Well, we can't do anything about it. It's the customer. We can't control them." Yes, you can. And by them seeing what their actions are doing to the very beginning of the value stream and how this domino effect all the way down, they're often like, "Oh my gosh, I had no idea we were doing this to you. " And they become very collaborative. And so that's another reason to have them in the team when they see very clearly the metric that you know and I love is the percent completed accurate. And so when that's coming in at 30% complete and accurate, 70% rework from the beginning, customers are motivated to help. They want you to be able to have good flow.

Rob Monroe (20:20):

Honestly, when I think about the metrics that I've been exposed to both through you or my time being at Boeing when I was learning value stream mapping, I can't think of one that's more important. If you want steady flow, then we're really just talking about ensuring that we actually have good quality work going from unit to unit, right?

Karen Martin (20:39):

Yes. It's the little beast.

Rob Monroe (20:42):

So you're kind of sharing some of your secrets here in real time and maybe it's subtle and people aren't realizing it. So I'm going to force and draw that out of you a little bit more, which is I admire most about you as a master facilitator is how well you manage expectations and how well you scope conversations and these workshops. So if you're willing to, what are some secret tips that you would share with some newbies or intermediary level facilitators that are watching today? Yeah.

Karen Martin (21:09):

I'm very open to sharing charter, charter, charter, charter, charter, charter, charter. You have to have a charter. It will save you, it will save time, it clarifies, it needs to be a really good charter and we've got plenty of them in all kinds of places that people can access. The charter is a scoping document, it's a logistics communication document, it's an alignment document. It is a clarification about how you're going to measure success. That's really critical and we refer to the charter. If it's a three-day value stream mapping activity, we probably refer to the charter at least twice a day and sometimes four or five times a day to keep the team corralled a little bit and keep them ... Because it's easy when you start talking about the current state and the future state and you're just in design mode. It's easy to want to boil the ocean because it's like, "Oh, this is fun.

(22:04)
Let's do everything." And you have to keep them corralled to the original focus so that you can actually execute and get it done well and use that learning to then fuel the next value stream cycle. And so there's a reason to not go too broad. And also just it helps so much in stopping arguments. It's really good at when people start kind of sparring a little bit and saying, "Okay, what's our mission?" And get the charter backup and it has to be really well socialized beforehand. Most organizations do a pretty bad job of socialization even when we're at their side coaching every day. It's just not in the natural, in the bloodstream of an organization sometimes to socialize a charter the way it's supposed to be where it's a collaboration, it's a conversation, it's not an email attachment or not solely an email attachment and those kinds of things.

(23:02)
I mean, chartering is just amazing. And then one more thing, last thing. When facilitators get into a situation where there's tension in the room, something feels unsaid, you've got to pull it out. You've got to bring the elephant in the room out into the open and deal with it. You can't be afraid that's a rich discovery when there's something that's not being said that needs to be said.

Rob Monroe (23:28):

Yeah. There was something very subtle there that you mentioned around like you don't just send it as a PDF or an attachment and share it out and assume that people understood it, agree with it, et cetera. So socialization and getting those smaller conversations with individual parties that you need to have corral around this common goal, you're kind of building all of that muscle, you're building all of that empathy, you're building all of that along the way with the strategy, I think.

Karen Martin (23:54):

Yeah. And the other thing is since at the leadership level team, you're socializing the charter, not just with the team, but also with other people and inviting them an opportunity in advance to share their take on the value stream and its performance, share their take on some possible improvements they'd love to see. And then that way you're getting more people involved that are outside of the actual team doing the mapping. And then you could also have briefings at the end of every day or maybe every two out of three days or something like that where you bring in others to kind of keep with the team and what they're discovering and growing with them. But the team needs to be, I'm a militant on this now, no more than 10. I will not take 11, I just won't. I've tried it. I've tried 11, I've tried 12, 13, no, 10.

(24:43)
And we have to choose wisely who the 10 are because it's 10 and ideally it's eight. You get a lot more done a lot more quickly when it's not 10, but 10 maps. And in most IT areas, 10 tends to be the number because there's just so many cooks in the kitchen.

Rob Monroe (25:01):

And we didn't ask you to use the number eight, just for the record- Oh yeah,

Karen Martin (25:04):

RISE eight. Sponsored by RISE eight.

Rob Monroe (25:09):

So one maybe big last question for me, I'm kind of curious to have everyone understand some complexity here that you've been involved with and so that'll help our audience understand how to relate to complexity in their own spaces. What is the most regulated or compliance heavy SM engagement you've experienced to date?

Karen Martin (25:31):

It's a tie between government and pharma and medical device systems also because it's very FDA heavy, but government, those are all really heavy. So here's my little insider scoop on heavily regulated industries and value streams. So never say never, never say hunt, never say always. Almost always maybe 100%, but I'm not sure we discover somewhere in the value stream that something is kind of clunky, janky, and it's not flowing smoothly and someone in the room will insist that an approval needs to be made at that point and that's where the queuing is happening, this approval is sitting there and it's just queuing up because they're busy. I've never heard of this in the government. That never, never happens. And when you poke a little bit, there's no regulatory requirement that that particular thing be done. And so the requirement is on outcomes and that's true of most government regulations. It's about the outcome. They're not dictating exactly how you have to do the work and a lot of quality teams, legal teams, compliance teams wrapped around the axle with dictating the exact way work has to happen and who has to approve and so getting the organization open to challenging that is something that should be done upfront as you're starting to scope it and socialize the charter because you need to have permission and a safe environment to say, "Well, wait a minute, what would happen if? " And then the other thing you do is you guarantee people that the future state isn't going to just rip out a safety net and have nothing there.

(27:20)
It's like you have to have some way of making sure that it's 100% compliant all the time, but there are so many ways to do that. And so it's really getting people to relax into the ... You're not going to design undue risk into a future state, the opposite. And so you have to be a little more creative in how you actually assure 100% clients. And most of the time, those steps that we end up in those approvals that we end up ripping out, they were actually causing more risk than they were solving.

Rob Monroe (27:56):

Which I think a lot of times the decisions we make in engineering processes and making some of these decisions come from some scar.

Rob Monroe (28:03):

So there's, again, kind of coming back to the right people in the room, socialization, centering on the goals and the outcomes we want and getting people to open up and embrace an opportunity to just improve and speak objectively to what is the reality of our situation right now.

Karen Martin (28:20):

I mean, if I had a dime for a time I've said, "Show me the reg." 

Rob Monroe (28:28):

I know we're running really short on time here, so we'll do our best to get through one last question. I don't think it's possible to go a single day or week now where we're not hearing or reading about the next big AI idea or story. So I'm kind of curious to hear from someone like yourself, what are your thoughts on where AI has already shown value inside the value stream mapping or techniques surrounding it and what gaps, if any, are still things that we need to overcome in order to consider it a game changer?

Karen Martin (28:58):

Yeah. So in a nutshell, where we're using it consistently is in the pre-mapping analysis, data analysis phase. I'm just always blown away with ... I happen to still use ChatGPT. All my friends are encouraging me to switch over to Claude, but I also have had several friends switch over that have come back to chat for various reasons. So I don't know, but I can only speak to ChatGPT and it is genius at mashing data and drawing conclusions and you have to validate them though. You can't just take what it says as the gospel. You have to know enough to know how to validate it to make sure because it does hallucinate every once in a while and go kind of cray cray. So you have to do that. So that pre-mapping piece we use a lot. I've been doing experiments on the actual mapping and I've been giving it real world sanitized current state maps that we facilitated with different clients and stripped everything out that could be recognizable and ask it to design a future state and the Humans have far exceeded the performance of ChatGPT.

Rob Monroe (30:05):

Interesting. What do you think led to that?

Karen Martin (30:07):

So I asked, I said, "Hey, how come the humans are better than you? " And what it said was, and I was really happy that it said this. It's like we don't understand all the nuances and the situations surrounding the work and the maturity of the organization and the market stressors that they've got that would make something impossible to do or we don't know how safe it is for them to be more aggressive. And it kind of was giving a lot of excuses in a way, but that's where I think that's not a proper use, at least not yet. It may get there, but I can't imagine really designing a work system with 100% AI because they're humans, mostly humans still doing the work and that may change also, but it's just like there's psychology involved. I mean, work systems are filled with psychology and it's just really difficult to mandate things without considering whether that's even feasible from a emotional and readiness and maturity and all that perspective.

(31:15)
Anyway, so I would not use it to design a future state map.

Rob Monroe (31:20):

Yeah. My quick thought here is context windows are both a thing for machines as well as they offer humans. Similarly, when you made the comment earlier, not one person can describe how value is delivered to an end customer. I think the same can be said here in this instance, but I think we are getting closer and closer to opportunities where we can maximize the outcomes of this technology, for sure.

Karen Martin (31:44):

Yeah. And I think those of us are kicking the tires a lot. We're learning a lot about where we can use it and where it's not so great. I just would caution everyone that there's a lot of snake oil out there right now and you need to be really, really careful to make sure that it's going to deliver.

Rob Monroe (32:01):

Yeah. Well, Karen, I know I need to let you go. You've got a very busy day today ahead of you. And so I want to thank everyone for watching today's event. I'm going to stick around to answer one more question. Be sure to follow Karen Martin on LinkedIn and remember if you can't or you can't fix what you can't see. And so use this as an opportunity to bring people together, get them in the room, do amazing things. Thank you.

Karen Martin (32:23):

Thank you so much, Rob. Great. And I'll be talking with you again soon. Of course. Hi, everyone. Happy value stream mapping. And remember, it's not about the map. It's the conversations and decisions that result. That's what's really important. 100%. And then make sure to execute.

Rob Monroe (32:36):

Yeah. Thanks for that. Appreciate it. So folks, I'm going to handle one question that we did get that was pre-submitted and I thought it was an interesting one. The question was, from your perspective, what is the least visible bottleneck and complex programs today and which signals should leaders look for to identify it before it becomes critical? So I've got a couple of thoughts here. Honestly, I actually think it's delayed to learning. I don't see our problem as being a lack of effort or a lack of funding. And most of the time it's probably not the technology because we've been able to get technology into every corner of our lives. So it's the organization's inability to detect changes fast enough, make decisions fast enough and adapt to their environment before small problems become the systemic failures that we dread. So the reason why I think that's really hard to see is let's look at some things that maybe we're used to seeing look really great on the surface.

(33:36)
So what makes it dangerous is that a system can look productive. Teams can be busy. They can say they're very busy and I believe that we all are very busy and we're also very productive. Milestones can show up green on anyone's chart or slides. The tickets from our backlogs, they're closing at rates we've never seen before. Governance is governing. Everything's doing the things we needed to do. Everything is green on the surface, but underneath that surface I have to wonder and I'd challenge everyone else to think about this as well is what is your learning velocity?

(34:12)
What are the outcomes that are driving the mission forward and are they actually collapsing on themselves? And so when I'm thinking about learning velocity, I'm talking about real work, real software, real products into the hands of civilians, war fighters, operators, and what is it doing for the mission from an impact statement perspective? So if all those other things that are a means to an end or green, but the ultimate end state is not where we need it to be, we've got to have a real conversation about whether or not that matters. And maybe they do matter, but only if we actually see the results that truly matter to the mission. And so maybe some signals that I would offer for folks to watch inside of their own programs, they might be subtle, but I think that they might be more consistent than you think. First off, I would think about increasing decision latency.

(35:05)
When simple questions require multiple meetings, multiple layers of approvals and the learning process or the learning feedback loop is slowing down because of that, we might need to design a better system. Second, high coordination energy, kind of similar, but if people spend more time aligning and reporting than solving the actual problem, then flow is constrained. We're actually hurting ourselves in terms of adding unnecessary lead time here. And so again, we might need to design or adjust the design of our operating system. Third, and I've only got four here, passive problem detection. So I'm thinking if issues are found through escalations or failures instead of telemetry, feedback loops are weak. If we are looking through the lens of having to manually go and find data, if we have to think about escalating decisions or escalating through layers to access the information that we need, we're not doing ourselves any good service of being able to close that feedback loop any faster either.

(36:08)
Fourth, and I think this actually comes up a lot when you don't have value stream mapping as one of the tools in your toolkit. It's local optimization while global outcomes stall. So teams look efficient, right? Individual spaces might be really efficient. They might be really effective, but the outcomes overarchingly through the system as a whole don't improve proportionally to that fact. Sometimes maybe the good things that are happening in one space are having ramifications or negative consequences elsewhere. Those are four signals that I would offer to leaders to maybe watch and some practical things to help your monitoring of those things. So maybe let's kind of close this and try to synthesize this down to a tight closure here. So when you see any of these patterns stacking up, it's usually a sign that the real bottleneck isn't within a given team, it's actually more between them.

(37:07)
It happens in information flow, it happens in trust flow and I think also decision flow. So look for these signals, look for these patterns and maybe don't think about one team. Think about how the teams around you or the functions or departments are interacting or not. And my final closing thought here is like, the key insight for leaders that I'd want you to walk away with is that complex programs fail when the operating system rewards output more than learning or more than the outcomes. So because without validating learning, you can't reliably produce outcomes. And so I would always say, look for the opportunity to increase the efficacy and your ability to learn through feedback loops before you go and over invest in alignment and try to avoid that alignment trap. And so with answering that final question, I really appreciate your time today. I hope this was as exciting for you as it was for Karen and I.

(37:58)And again, follow Karen Martin on LinkedIn and I hope you all have a great weekend. Thank you very much.