Some of us have a very real and worrying ailment that blights our working lives, elephant in the room blindness—or to give it its medical name, Pachyderm in situ vision impairedness. Those inflicted are aware of a big problem or issue that is in their way, impeding their progress, efficiency, and willingness to engage and draining their morale. What do these poor souls normally do? They normally choose to either simply accept it or worse still, ignore it—depending on the size of the problem. Those that don't bury their heads in the sand, so to speak, then find ingenious ways to work around, circumvent, or avoid said problem by making very localized changes to how they work. Sometimes, at the detriment to others. In fact, they normally invest a lot of effort, time, and money in building these ingenious solutions and then convince themselves...

With any examination, expose, investigation, or inspection there will be, to some degree, dirt that will need to be dug up—figuratively speaking. This is inevitable and should not be taken lightly or treated flippantly. The sort of questions that will be asked will include the following:

• Why are things done in certain ways?
• Who came up with this process in the first place?
• Who makes the priority decisions to do one thing over another and what right to they have to make the decision?
• When exactly are these decisions made?
• Who owns the overall product delivery process?
• Who owns the various steps within the process?
• Has anyone previously questioned the process? If so, what happened?

• Does anyone actually know how the process works end to end?
• Why can't the management see the obvious issues and why don't they listen to us?

These types of questions...

What you need is information and insight from individuals who can actively contribute, are engaged, are ideally open to change (or at least would like to see things change for the better) and understand and agree to the aforementioned rules. These engaged contributors should come from all parts of the business—if they are involved in product creation and delivery, they should be considered. You will need a broad set of information and data to move forward, therefore you need to get a broad set of engaged contributors involved.

To ensure you can identify as many people as possible, you will need to establish a good network across the organization or at the very least access to those who already have one—especially if your organization is sizable as it's not practical to identify and be on speaking terms with everyone. You will normally...

To truly get to the bottom of a given problem, you need to gather as much information and data about it as possible, so that you can collectively analyze and agree the best way to overcome or address it—you need to know how big the elephant truly is before you can expose it and remove it. The natural reaction of most senior management types—especially those in the higher MBA educated echelons—will be to then enlist a costly business change consultancy agency to run a closed-session top-level investigation with a handpicked select few from middle management to take part to produce a management report.

Although this well-trodden approach may provide some information and data, I would argue that it will not give you or the business what you need. In addition, during these types of investigations the environment is normally...

Let's presume at this point that you have overcome all of the challenges of getting people in the same location (physically and/or virtually), you have obtained buy-in from the various management teams, have agreed some downtime, and have a safe environment set up in a neutral venue. You're almost ready to embark on the elephant disclosure—almost. What you now need to do is actually pull everyone together and run the workshop(s) to capture the data you need.

To make things a little less daunting it may help to consider your overall end to end process as four distinct stages:

Breaking the overall process into these smaller stages can assist in mapping out the flow and structure of the workshop(s) you'll be facilitating. For example, if you decide to run an...

Throughout this chapter, you have been given an insight into the following aspects: how to expose problems within your product delivery process (what we're calling the elephant in the room), the challenges and benefits of using collaborative and engaging approaches to identify these problems, and some effective tools and techniques to help you break down the problems into easily identifiable chunks of work.

Now, you know how to obtain valuable information and data about your problem(s) and have some much-needed actions to work with. You also now know how to inspect. Let's presume these problems revolve around the waste created through long release cycles and a siloed organization. That being the case, you have a very clear objective that will almost certainly address the problems and deliver what the entire business needs. All you now need to do is pull together...