Agile Pharma, Where Art Thou?

It's no secret that the heyday of Big Pharma research is a thing of the past. Thousands of workers lost their jobs, many of them never to practice science again. 

What's behind this trend? Did all the Big Pharmas down a whole bottle of crazy pills? Of course not. 

The order of the day is decentralization. The old research model relied on a few massive campuses filled with thousands of scientists. It worked for decades, but started to break down about fifteen years ago. The problem was an over-reliance on a single business model. It didn't help that the model was prone to bloat and waste, either. Bureaucracy and silos were tolerable while the low hanging fruit was still on the tree. Not anymore. The model that aimed to produce multibillion dollar blockbusters has hit a few snags. 

So now there's a steady stream of deals and collaborations to go with the layoffs. Maybe all the pharma CEOs read Frans Johannson's The Click Moment. His advice is to make many small bets, then double down on what works. And that's exactly what we see. Big Pharma's new partners are VC-backed biotechs, nonprofits, academia, and more. 

The emerging consensus is that speed to market is just as important as having a great drug. A study from the Boston Consulting Group explains why. A new drug must be first or second to market, and be first or second-best in its class, and it can't be second in both categories. Don't bother with anything else. It's winner take all.

From: Schultze, U., Ringel, M. Nature Reviews Drug Discovery 2013, 12, 419-420.

A careless organization that's ahead of the competition can squander their opportunity through costly but avoidable mistakes. That's exactly what kaizen aims to fix. Companies need to get better at getting better. Maybe acceleration to market is a better term? 

Tools like kanban take the mystery and waste out of any kind of process, even drug discovery. And just like software developers, pharma researchers are knowledge workers. It isn't voodoo. It's science, and it follows an articulable process that's amenable to improvement. It's high time we turned our highly trained minds on ourselves. To echo Peter Drucker, we need to examine how we work just as much as we examine what we work on. 

Software developers borrowed kanban from the manufacturing industry. They adapted it to fit their needs and innovated new tools like scrum along the way. Likewise, the pharma industry can do the same. We don't have to reinvent the wheel. The tools have been there for decades, hiding in plain sight. 

Now is Big Pharma's time to embrace the concepts of Agile and kaizen all the way from discovery through post-marketing surveillance. Not just talk about it, but do it using specific tools like kanban. The first to do so will eat their competitor's lunch. Bet on it. 

How Kanban's 'Done' Column Prevents Tunneling

Success as a chemist often means persistence. There's always more than one way to approach the synthesis of a new molecule. If fact, there are more possibilities than you could ever hope to try. In the face of a challenging synthesis, when do you call it quits? There's no right answer. Those who quit too early don't fare well. They're the type who drops out of college or loses their job. Sure they're plenty smart enough, but what they lack is grit. But can there be too much of a good thing? That depends on the context. 

Not the best solution

In graduate school, chemistry students toil away to make a specific target molecule. If that means six weeks or six years, so be it. Just use a bigger hammer until you solve the problem. 

But the business world is more complex. The specific target is not so important as the question at hand. It's a means to an end, not an end in itself. If you can answer the question with a compound that's easier to synthesize, then go with the easier compound. Why beat your head against the wall? 

But how do you make that call? When do you move on to a more promising avenue of research? The balance between speed and determination rests on an ever-shifting fulcrum. 

The biggest obstacle to that decision often involves the curious phenomenon of tunneling. You can read about its evils in this fascinating new book. I also wrote about tunneling as it applies to music in this post on my other blog. To wit, it's easy to fall into a trap where we lose sight of the forest for the trees. That's exactly what I did too many times last year. It landed me in trouble with the boss, but it also drove me into the arms of kanban. In the bargain, I'm a better chemist than ever. Quite the antifragile solution, I must say. Nothing succeeds like failure!

Most of my kanban stickies look like this:

I draw the chemical structure of the target I'm working on along with a couple reference numbers I need. If a particular reaction doesn't work, it gets moved into the 'done' column after I write FAIL across it. Next I'll make a new sticky note with the same structure, but this time I'll use a different synthetic approach. 

Kanban is my anti-tunneling tool. When too many sticky notes with the same structure pile up in my 'done' column with FAIL written on them, I know I'm in trouble. 

Before kanban, it would be too easy for me to forget how many previous attempts had failed. With kanban, it's easy to see when I'm starting to succumb to tunneling. That's how I know to take a step back, ask for help, or talk to the boss. The best part is that I don't have to spend any extra cognitive effort to do this. It's impossible to ignore the story the board tells me. It's the truth and nothing but the truth. I don't have to wait until a month has passed with nothing to show for it. I don't have to explain to my supervisor why I spent so much time with so little progress. It's a lifesaver!

On the opposite end, the board also says when you haven't tried hard enough. One or two FAIL tickets isn't enough to give up. Rather, it should get you thinking. Curiosity and imagination should spur at least a couple more attempts. 

Science is a messy affair. Nature doesn't make it easy. But kanban makes it easier.

Who benefits?

I'm not in software development or manufacturing, so kanban was unknown to me until about a year ago. Unsure if I could adapt it to the messy and complex world of pharmaceutical research, I tried anyway. Turns out it works pretty darn well! A couple people were curious about my board, but most just gave it an odd glance or flat ignored it. 

Several months went by, and my board went through four iterations. I wanted to share what I learned with my colleagues because I saw a lot of potential in wide-scale adoption. Kanban was too good not to share, so I put together a seminar and presented it a couple times. I convinced a few people to try it, but none of them are my direct coworkers. So for now, I'm still flying solo. 

Kanban comes into its own as a tool for collaboration, but does that mean a solo user is wasting his time? Not at all! Take my colleague Tim as an example. 

The idea of kanban clicked for Tim right away. Like me, he updates his boss at a weekly one-on-one meeting. To prepare, he spent ninety minutes to compose a PowerPoint deck, but not anymore. Not when you can bring your entire board right into the boss's office.

Why is that better? Compare the slide deck to the board. Not only is the slide deck tedious to prepare, it's obsolete the moment the meeting starts. Notes are scribbled, items are added, deleted, and changed. You'll need more time after the meeting to translate it all into some kind of to-do list. All told, that one hour meeting with your boss takes three hours of your time. Almost half a day every week? Good grief! That's a lot of wasted time and effort. 

Cui bono?

Even if you're the only one to use kanban, there's indirect benefits for others, starting with your boss. Yes, it seems silly at first to plop a large sticky-covered whiteboard in front of your boss. My own was dubious at first but humored me anyway. Now he doesn't think it's so weird because it makes his job easier. 

Between meetings, impromptu updates are a breeze. I just turn around in my chair and point at sticky notes while I talk. The board makes it impossible to forget anything. It's all right there. No more fumbling through notebooks and to-do lists! I have a constructive, meaningful conversation with no preparation at all. There's even been some collaborative insights that wouldn't have happened without the board to act as a catalyst. 

So if you're getting started with kanban where you work, don't fret if you're the only one. With time, I bet that'll change. 

Kanban to the rescue!

Why do managers sometimes make such odd decisions, and why do employees become disengaged? Yves Morieux of the Boston Consulting Group has some insights in this TED talk. Stop the video at just after eight minutes. You won't need to see any more if don't follow the first of his ‘Six Simple Rules’.

Yves Morieux

That first rule is understand what your people do. Not their official job description, but the actual processes. Without this deep understanding, what good are the other rules? How could a manager help her employees improve if she doesn't appreciate their viewpoint? 

Of course, you say. This makes perfect sense, and the solution is straightforward. Create a safe, private environment and take as much time as you need. Turn the lights down. Talk with your people. Get them to open up without fear of bad consequences. Invoke the spirit of Carl Rogers if that helps. 

Although sensible, this advice misses some important realities. It's far less helpful than it appears, and it’s a gamble whether it would help or harm. But how could this be? Isn't this the standard advice given to managers?

Behavioral economics makes a sharp distinction between stated preferences and revealed behavior. The former is what people tell you they do. The latter is what they actually do, and there’s often a wide gap between them. Moreover, employees aren’t covering up the unsavory details. They might not be so aware of what they do, nor how they do it. At least not in as much detail as either of you assume. You’re asking for trouble if you take them at their word. Ask Timothy Wilson. He wrote the book(s) on just this sort of thing. 

Kanban is more than stickies on a whiteboard!

That’s where kanban comes in. It’s a tool you can use to fulfill Morieux’s first rule. Kanban has a first rule too, and it’s visualize your work. Doing this can be quite an eye opener. So ask someone to do this. Get a stack of sticky notes and a marker. What are all the steps involved in their job?  Write them all down, then arrange them from left to right on a white board. Does this resemble what’s in their official job description? Next ask them to explain how a recent project followed only these steps. Any inconsistencies?  Don't forget to ask how things moved between each step. Did it involve handoffs to others? Waiting for others to hand it back to you?  You’ll discover the hidden wellspring of much employee frustration, mediocrity, and disengagement. 

Morieux has that first step correct all right, but it's not so easy! It's the age old question of how do you know that? If employees don’t quite understand their own work, managers are flying blind. Only they don't know it. That misinformation will result in damaging but well intentioned decisions. Managers and employees alike become angry and frustrated. The cycle of disengagement and nonperformance takes another downward turn. And so on.