That sounds like a rather weird title for an article. Hmmm… Well, it pretty much describes 2014’s highlights of my blog. As another year is over, I thought it might be a good idea to take a look at my blog statistics. What were the most read articles past year? Here they are:

1. Identifying stakeholders and their dissatisfactions 
This article got the most views in 2014. Maybe it’s because of the picture of beautiful Buffy holding a stake. Stake holder – what a joke… ;-/ Perhaps it was also a bit about the content – I basically explained how to draw a stakeholder map which is actually the groundwork when it comes to addressing dissatisfactions of stakeholders.

2. That’s not what I mean with Lean
This article summarized a lot of my pain I was going through this year. I was an involuntary observer of so called Lean initiatives within different industries. The consultant company’s approach was  pretty much the same every time: shadow staff with a stop watch and squeeze the last drop of efficiency out of human beings. Well, that’s definitely not what I mean with Lean!!

3. Achieving continuous improvement through Kanban
I actually quite like this one because it covers the fundamentals of improvement work: Forget the Highlander principle and change the way you change resp. improve the way you improve.

4. Kanban is like a Home Trainer
That’s my number one! It’s really important for me to get the message across that Kanban or whatever other approach you find useful will fail if you don’t get individuals to actively participate. It sounds so obvious, however, it is not! Unfortunately, people prefer to waste tons of money trying the latest panaceas instead of actively changing their own behavior.

5. Leadership at all levels
This article is about the 4th principle of Kanban: “Encourage leadership at all levels in your organization,” featuring a survey of British first line managers with a rather curious self-perception: 80% of the asked managers believe they are among the top 20% managers. Happy self-reflecting!!

I think one article is missing in this list: Optimize value creation and not teams. From time to time I get the feeling that the whole world decided team improvements are the holy grail of organizational improvement. Yes, it’s easy. And yes, most (Agile) methods target on teams. Nevertheless, the performance of an organization is by no means the sum of its team performances! In my Kanban training classes I often run an experiment which shows that optimizing teams often leads to poorer organizational performance. Although teams are delivering faster, the customer gets stuff later. That’s not intuitive! Nevertheless, that’s correct!

I’m really not good in New Year’s resolutions, however, writing more about agility beyond teams will be mine for 2015! And I think I can accomplish this resolution because “Agility beyond teams” is the subtitle of my new book which is coming out in October 2015.

In this sense, Happy New Year!!