This is Broken = This is Waste

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 on Vimeo

I really enjoy Seth Godin's writing, his books (including this one I recently read: Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us) and blog posts. His presentations are outstanding too. In this talk, he outlines some reasons why things (services, products, and experiences) are “broken.”

As a lean thinker, you might see this all as “waste.”

Why are things broken? One of seven reasons, Seth says:

1. Not my job
2. Selfish jerks
3. The world changed
4. I didn't know
5. I'm not a fish
6. Contradictions
7. Broken on purpose

Not a fish?? See the video to see what he means:

Seth Godin at Gel 2006 from Gel Conference on Vimeo.

Seth points out many ideas related to Lean — including the fallacy of siloed thinking (not seeing the whole system), the failure to see the root cause of a problem, and the willingness of people fight the exact same battle every day instead of fixing the system.

On his blog this week, Seth pointed out the presentation (from 2006) and how things are still broken today. Sigh.

Have fun surfing the now-defunct “This is Broken” blog. What are your favorite broken examples? I see things that are broken every day. The curse of a lean thinker.