Leading with Obeya – The book
When Tim Wiegel was introduced to the concept of Obeya in 2014, pieces of a puzzle fell into place. The Obeya (Japanese for “big room”) is a physical space where visual management is used to align operational teams and leadership in their efforts to translate strategy into meaningful daily work and results.
Obeya is the missing puzzle piece for alignment between leadership and operational teams. It helps develop the ability to hold meetings that create meaningful context based on reality and avoid distractions such as bias, ego and over-complexity.
When deployed to lead the organization, Obeya supports the development of a systematic approach to leadership that enables consistent, coherent and effective decision-making. Leading With Obeya helps teams to move from firefighting to sustainable improvement of the performance of their organizational system.
The book is the result of his research on leadership, psychology, Lean and Agile practices and describes a visual leadership approach in a physical space where leaders can practice and develop their craftsmanship.
The book applies Lean and Agile practices, as well as success factors for project, program and portfolio management. The book is written in an accessible, no-nonsense way and instead of sprinkling with terminologies, the author takes you to “the meaning” behind the trendy words.
Mark Uijen de Klein –
Incredibly powerful how underlying principles (with underlying theories such as Lean, overcome your cognitive biases and how your brain works) are linked to practice, always with transparency and dialogue to improve towards the organizational goal. In practice I have used Obeya, but this book has given me a lot of extra context and background, with many additional practical examples.
Certainly not dogmatic (“it is not going to magically shift your operational teams into high performance mode and it will not increase your earnings before the quarter is over”). It is warned in the beginning that – to really improve as an organization – a lot of discipline and a change in the current behavior of the leadership is needed.
Even if you cannot / do not want to use Obeya immediately, it is very inspiring for anyone who wants to improve their organization. Many practical matters can be applied quickly.