Tim Wiegel - Enter the Obeya: Using a Big Room to Lead Successful Strategies

This book is about leading organizations using Obeya, which, if used well, helps maximize human leadership potential. In recognizing our human flaws, were all willing, but not always able to do whats necessary to realize our dreams with an organization. I truly believe that leading with Obeya a big room in which we visualize our work in relation to our goals, catering to our cognitive abilities maximizes our human potential to help organizations on their quest to glory. I hope, in particular, those organizations whose quest is related to making this world a bit of a better place will be inspired to increase their impact because of this book.

Speaking of glory, who has seen much of it in their organization lately? Ive seen many organizations embark on Lean or Agile transformation journeys, improvement programs, or stay with the status quo. But with the exception of just a few, none of them had major success in terms of successfully transforming the way they work and the way they think at least not while I was there. Maybe I bring bad luck. Or maybe something else was going on.

Ive seen organizations and management teams struggling with seemingly similar problems; I wonder if you might recognize a few of them:

Meaningless strategic planning sessions and follow-up documentation that ends up gathering dust on the intranet.

Trying to push a hundred projects simultaneously and nothing gets done.

Getting stuck in firefighting mode as a result of operational debt (fixing your structural problems).

Long, stale management meetings that seem to add little value, and everybody knows it.

Administrative burden from reports that nobody seems to read.

Siloed departments that barely cooperate or even communicate.

Increased KPI steering by senior management in an attempt to gain control over whats happening in the organization.

Stating people are the most important asset, but no one actually experiences it that way.

Adopting and transforming new ways of working, like Agile from the outside, but sticking to the old habits from the inside.

And so on

I do hear stories about overcoming these typical issues from teams or departments that achieve major successes, but they seem to be very rare. In fact, they seem to be so rare that when they do occur, news travels fast and a lot of other companies start to try to copy whatever happened there and paste it onto their own organization. Take the Lean tools weve tried to copy from Toyota, the Scrum methods we tried to copy from Nokia, the squads and tribes model weve tried to copy from Spotify, or the OKR approach were trying to copy from Google. But, like with real copies, whenever you copy something the quality just isnt the same, and on some copies, the ink tends to completely disappear after a while.

When I evaluate organizations and their approach to making things better and I set out to achieve their goals, it often comes down to a change program that focuses on operational teams, adheres to some new and sometimes hyped form or way of working, and is ultimately driven by the need to either make more money or spend less money. But since we cant describe it that way, well tell people were looking for things like agility. Ive seen some pretty agile teams indeed, all scattered going in different directions but never the same. Unfortunately, that doesnt really help achieve the financial goals either.

I was never really lucky enough to come across an organization in person that, from work floor to top management, decided to do things radically different. The Dutch home-care organization Buurtzorg comes to mind, Semco comes to mind and now we find ourselves back at naming a handful of companies that deliver major successes that others are trying to copy (and are failing in the process).

And here I am writing a book for you with a name in the title that probably fits your definition of a new hype. So why bother with reading about Obeya, after reading my perhaps somewhat cynical foreword this far? Well, lucky for me, Obeya isnt anything new, its been around since the mid-90s, so technically Im not sure we can call it a hype.

But using Obeya, or a big room with visuals, will not add any value unless you put the principles into practice. Those principles are easy to trace back to an origin well before I was born (1981). They are pretty straightforward and you will nod in recognition looking at them, but possibly go back to doing your work like you always did without displaying any sign of changed behavior. So no hype there either, but rather a question: whats holding us back to simply start applying a set of principles and ways of working that make complete sense?