Get on the Bus to Flexibility

Snow in Seattle today. It will be interesting to see how many of my current clients make it to their office today. I for one am taking the bus and despite it being a bendy bus, it looks like it will manage to make it downtown. It had to go out and around a jack-knifed bus to make it up and over the bridge out of my neighborhood, but it made it.

Forecasters were sure we would get snow Tuesday night, but we didn't, nor did we get snow yesterday despite their predictions all day that we would. Snow didn't come to Seattle until last night. Most schools even announced closures based on these forecasts rather than waking up early to see if it had actually snowed. Forecasters blamed it on a "donut effect" meaning that the mountains to the west and east of Seattle took all the snow.

This Seattle snow fiasco is a good lesson in risk management. Is there really such a thing as 100% probability? While it is important to have a risk management strategy to protect yourself against events of low probability and high impact and every other combination, the key aspect of any such strategy is flexibility.

What if Costco or Nordstrom's had decided to close all of their stores based purely on the weather forecast? What would the unnecessary financial losses have been?

Flexibility is key. Flexibility in everything you do, from human resources to manufacturing to risk management. Without flexibility any strategy, policy, or process is doomed to have some snowless "snow" days.

Look at GM. Underinvestment in flexibility when times were good has left GM on life support and begging for money from the federal goverment because they only are capable of producing cars people don't want at a cost structure they can't sustain.

So when you are building any business or policy or process, look at whether or not you are designing it with the necessary flexibility.

After all nobody wants to get snowed under.

What do you think?

@innovate

Followup - Why Seattle Needs Double-Decker Buses

I wanted to followup on innovation article #23 of August 20, 2007 where I campaigned for double-decker buses in Seattle as a way to reduce traffic congestion and improve the speed and the trip of public transit riders.

I was surprised to see a double-decker public bus cruising through downtown Seattle the other day. It was a route 417 on its way to Mukilteo and it effortlessly cruised through a yellow light to get the last spot in the bus zone (one a bendy bus wouldn't have fit in).

I don't know if the regional transit bureau serving areas north of Seattle has more than one double-decker bus in their fleet or whether this is a test bus for a future purchase, but it sure looked better cruising through downtown Seattle than a bendy bus bouncing up and down. There is nothing quite like the view from the upper-deck of a double-decker bus as you cruise through a city. I hope this is the sign of more to come. Bendy buses may be a newer concept, but double-decker buses are a better one.

What do you think?

@innovate