November 11, 2024

Learning and Development in the form of teaching

In this edition, I explore why teaching and sharing knowledge is essential for effective teamwork.

Teach, Teach, Teach

Writing explainers is the reductionist version of my job. These fall in the category of domain knowledge, product requirement and problem scoping.

This is the visible part of the job. I wrote in my recent annual work review public post.

My realisation of seeking knowledge and explaining it to fellow builders becomes the highest order work.

The invisible part is finding a new information that is relevant for my peer group. This happens through the form of consuming blogs, papers and social media. Recently, I came across this tweet by Niranjan;

Niranjan is a prominent economic journalist in India who is talking about papers from the lens of modelling economic theory that is exposed in books.

Which brings us to the topic of explaining theory of domains where I dabble, agriculture in the past and logistics at present. I rely on papers to unpack the theory through the methods shared.

Before I showcase it with an example, I want to highlight why it is highest order bit.

Every organisation’s which has a brand of trust and value stems from a culture of teaching its teams. As a company it sends a signal to employees that increasing ones awareness of the problem/skill/topic is in the best interest of the company.

When I was a consultant, I spent time teaching my clients. When I was a founder, I spent time teaching the team. Now, when I am an individual contributor, I spend time teaching my peers.

We are now at that time of the year when annual planning kick-starts presenting me an opportunity to indulge in teaching a theory using a model which is explained with relevance.

Last year, I kick-started the process of being data driven and outcome oriented in my vocation of product building. Throughout the year, I have been up-levelling my understanding of the skillset and refining its value to the peers. A quick recap of

NFM works because it is rigorous and collaborative in nature. We have to indulge cross functional teams and capture their contributions in order to end up with a single metric that when effected in the right direction moves the overall business forward. It is also being more deliberate about the next steps to be considered to maintain your moat and also innovate. 

The journey to reach to the single metric was not just one simple workshop session but a scattered set of ad-hoc discussion talking about the importance of being data-driven and outcome oriented. It was iterative process where we tested the assumption and refine the framework to be more accessible to the team.

The end objective of this exercise would be a formula with which you can re-prioritise the roadmap basing on the changing business context. This is critical when you know the market can change suddenly. The team also gets to see its work impact the end outcome. Unfortunately, many product developers don’t feel this way when functioning in bigger orgs. It helps that we are single threaded designed org. One team for one product.

So, this year I want to teach the business context in much more depth. The outcome is to have a shared understanding among peers.

The world of supply chain planning is changing towards more agile planning with lack of forecast-ability of supply chains. The world of supply chain is becoming more uncertain due to multiple factors affecting the flow of goods. The methods we will use to unpack this theory comes from a list of research papers written by MIT faculty. Lets take a look two that will showcase how uncertainty impacts supply chain participants:

• Accounting for Uncertainty: An Empirical Analysis of Truckload Budgeting - The concept of uncertainty results budget overshoots when spending on transportation. Such phenomena is unpacked empirically in this paper which will help in formulating the scenario we inhabit within our problem space.
• Development and Evaluation of Market-Based Routing Guide Strategy - This paper invests in defining the levers that impact the budgeting itself. Instead of budgeting spend from inside-out(micro factors ) , the author suggests to use outside - in(macro factors). This paper will help in formulating the framework we adopt.

Next begins the hard part of teaching it to my peers and the overall team. I will circle back in future posts about how I fared and what I learned in the practice of teaching these models.

This may be the first time I am sharing this process in public but it is not the first time I practiced it. In the past when I was tasked with launching a fin-tech model in agri-space. We followed exact same process. Our theory was women farmers were underserved in terms of good agri services and they were good borrowers. We used papers to ascertain this theory empirically and modelled a framework that would allow us to serve these farmers through providing credit.

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Round up

Revisiting the previous section, I mentioned that the future of supply chain is becoming more uncertain. Thus leading to becoming non-forecastable. First, let us understand why forecastability is a core proponent of supply chain from Lora Cecere of Supply Chain Shaman blog.

If only the supply chain was reconfigured

Forecastability. Traditional supply chain practices are no longer best practices. This is especially true in the world of demand management. Today, due to the increase in the long tail of the supply chain and changing customer dynamics, less than 50% of items are forecastable at an item level. (Data sourced from the students in my last two classes of outside-in planning where the COV is greater than .70.)
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The Functional Manager: Supply-centric or Manufacturing Thinking. The second issue is that process companies are manufacturing-centric, while discrete organizations are supply-centric (procurement). (A process-based company is a make-to-stock process, while a discrete company operates a make-to-order or configure-to-order process.) The traditional management of functions without aligning make, source, and deliver together creates waste.

Intermix this with uncertainty that is prevailing across different aspect of supply chain like geopolitics, deviating demand patterns and climate risk. For a company with global supply chains, these disparate factors compound to increase the level of uncertainty. Budgets go haywire and things go in a flux.

Forecasts and Uncertainty

Another way of expressing the various levels of uncertainty and the forecast techniques that might be applied accordingly is as a Futures Pyramid. Its central premise is that the higher the place in the hierarchy, the higher the level of associated uncertainty. …

There are measures to dealing with each level of uncertainty. They begin with not following yesteryear's best practices and going back to theory. So, back to theory in order to address this impending change in global supply chains.

Links that resonated

Instead of sharing some more reading, I would like to share a podcast episode of Rama Bijapurkar on Story rules podcast.

Rama Bijapurkar : Foremost Expert On Consumer India — The Story Rules Podcast

“Yeah I think there’s a little bit of a tyranny of “Or” that is implicit in your question Numbers OR anecdotes you know? As you say in Indian spirituality if you examine a problem deeply enough the contradiction should vanish. So I’m often asking people that what is the story that the numbers are telling you that you’re finding resonating in your anecdotes?”

It was a fun conversation where she just exposes the lack of rigour in existing narratives and how she goes about establishing them when clients reach out to her.

Sign off

I started off this post to highlight the need to teach as I am preparing for a session with my team and stumbled across few relevant nuggets on the socials. Now we are 1000 words into my Ted Talk on “Why teaching is core of any highly functioning team or org?”.

Thank you for attending my Ted Talk.

Signing off till the next time,

Vivek, failing to write succinctly.