Being in Place
To go and see for yourself
I’ve been going into the office more and more recently— this past week for instance I went all five days. This is an 80 mile roundtrip, which is a significant amount of commuting.
Also this past week I came across this operating principle called “Genchi Genbutsu,” which is one of the tenets of the Toyota Way, a set of principles underlying the Toyota manufacturing system. I’m surprised I just learned about these just now since for my entire life, my parents have only owned Toyota vehicles. All I can say is that it’s nice to see clearly written down standards I’ve never had the words nor experience to properly articulate but find incredibly intuitive.
Genchi Genbutsu is the Japanese principle of going to and directly observing a location in order to understand and solve problems faster and more effectively. The phrase literally translated means to “go and see for yourself.”
And I think that is how I most enjoy spending my time at work.
Concretely, this means spending time with developers (and as a developer) to figure out why millions of dollars spent to improve engineering velocity have not delivered desired results. It means that even though a manager tells me they have no headcount to devote to a certain task, I can tell that organizational headwinds are blowing in the opposite direction. It also means recognizing various grassroots efforts scattered throughout the company and attempting to nudge the corporate slime mold to bring them together towards a common goal.
It’s often impossible to fully understand a problem but I find that being at the place of action certainly helps.