I'm good at noticing things. I can ask dumb questions, observe, put a finger on the pulse. I'm very fast, an auto-didact, a strong self-learner, so I can find fixes and patterns for changes. Creating the dance of change takes some hunting and fishing.

One often meets:    Too busy   Fighting fires, no future    Oblivious     Dunno    Don't care    Denial    Don't get it

My experience base is wide and rocky. From logging, sawmills, and logging camps, city businesses, to doctor's offices (software and deft office manager training), house building, and tourism. I've helped start a lot of things, and helped make them go. I've spent quite a bit of time going through dead operations in British Columbia, looking for good ideas and good machinery and parts.

"It's not my problem. The hole is in their side of the boat." - John Brewer

You want lean? Start with used, make part work, patch more on, do more. Grow organically.  I've spent a lot of time and energy moving ideas and machinery to new homes in other operations. 

I'm a good pattern matcher, fitting things together, as a variant on troubleshooting. There are some success patterns in that searching - hunter – gathering needs matching, such as searching for software. Software outfits have 'outsourced' standard libraries and all kinds of special libraries and databases and so on to other outfits for a long time. Evaluating commercial software and open source software, is akin to looking at the thinking patterns of the people who created the software.

Of course that's only a starter step. Here's a very very common pattern:

1. Org. has weak systems, maybe call it a progress barrier, and decides to try something new.

2. Trial xxx (name your flavour:  lean, TPS, Scrum, agile, donuts, wazzit, ... )

3. The trial just skates across the surface. The instant fix, instant food thing.

4. Some time later. Abandon trial.  xxx is no good - it's just a fad, or whatever.

5. Go to step 2.

We need to step in, to actually do, in enough depth to make a difference. The agile pattern shows results fast, fast success and fast failure. It cycles 1. to 5. faster, until something gives, to allow a few things going through the progress barrier.  Such steps to success are often beyond logic, rubbing against socio-cultural barriers until a door opens.

"For every one of our failures, we had spreadsheets that looked awesome." -- Intuit founder Scott Cook

In China I started up some schools, helped refresh schools, in buyout re-starts, inspected all kinds of products and factories and watched products going into containers. I also consulted on various things. With the downturn, I was there when a whole lot of things died. People just got on planes and left the country, abandoning whole factories and enterprises. A Chinese pattern is to let something die, then regrow it again later when the 'spring season' comes around again. Allied with that is the propensity to keep trying. Plant new seeds for new products and new operations, some die and some live, learn from the process and keep going. That's a pattern to follow when outsourcing to China. And beyond.

My Consulting offers:

• An outside look in

• Change processing

• Opportunity – Crisis handling

• Cultural awareness

• The China Factor – outsourcing, extending, BOT

• Interpersonal skills

• Exploration

• Swamp navigation
  

Many people and many businesses bump into a 'progress barrier,' as in the diagram below. A bunch of things interact like a net or mesh to hold things and people back, they build up and swamp progress. A few people and some businesses slip through. For individuals success lies in following their high performance pattern, and it's a good bet for business too. You may have your niche now, and you really need an awareness of your 'future niche' where you might slip through to be more successful. You also need awareness, adaptability, and tolerance to create your ongoing future – most outfits cut-off some part of their future, then shrivel and die, leaving no future.

Very often the answer does not lie in taking a course or getting a new computer system or getting a new hotshot boss or consultant. It lies in generalizing the answer into a way of approaching things. The tree pattern in “How Agile works” is basic strategy. It's success lies in changing to a new way - new products, new sales methods, whatever - when needed. The success pattern lives in adopting a strategic blurry map of futures and adjusting well as one future becomes real. The idea is to be vaguely right instead of precisely wrong.

My forte often shows in noticing things, in learning fast, in showing then adopting an agile entrepreneurial pattern.

I'm computer adept in that my intelligence extends beyond my fingertips, through the keyboard, flowing into our web of resources. I use my mind and my computer and the living web of connections as an interactive team.

I grew up doing things in our family-business, using machinery and fixing machinery, so I tend to roll up my sleeves and to wade into things. That's a good pattern for learning about things, for consulting.

Later I learned to stand back, fade into the background, and let things and people develop. That's a coaching model, a learning model that matches observing software users when debugging or writing new software. It matches the servant-leader pattern. It's a yin pattern that matches the yang 'wade into things' pattern.

I tend to work on ways ahead, things that work. Natural patterns suggest solutions if we find them and use them. Solutions-Focused thinking and the agile entrepreneurial pattern tend to discard the problems and to find new solutions, better ways ahead. Bit by bit improving things, with agile cycling back reviewing, ensuring the gains are learnings towards the end goal/solution.

If you are a hunter, it's a hunting pattern. If you're a general, it's the pattern your troops follow filtering through and beyond enemy lines.

So it's there, at Next:  the phone number and an email address. Here's another one: process.facilitator@gmail.com