I was in a newly opened store of a large big-box outdoor sports store, and saw an item on display that I had already decided to buy this summer. The displayed price was actually a bit less than what I had been encountering online, so I went ahead. Unfortunately the one “in stock” on the [...]
One of the more famous tools taught by Chihiro Nakao of Shingijutsu fame is to direct the learner to observe an operation and “sketch the flows.” Another Time Ideas article by Anne Murphy Paul, How to Increase Your Powers of Observation, validates Nakao’s instinct. She makes the distinction between casual observation that we all do, [...]
One of the challenges of teaching and consulting is resisting the temptation to give people the answers. Honestly, I like giving people the answers. It feels genuinely helpful, and it provides a nice ego boost. But according to this article on Time’s “Time Ideas” site by Anne Murphy Paul titled “ Why Floundering is Good,” [...]
If you are in a production operation, be it a factory or even administration, take a look in your scrap bins (or trash cans). What you find there can be very informative. Is all scrap treated the same? In a lot of metal working operations, I see routine drop scrap mixed in with scrapped parts [...]
Mike Rother sent out an email today pointing out that the Lean Enterprise Institute’s web site now has a Toyota Kata page. I believe this is a significant event for the lean community as a whole, as well as for the LEI. As many of my regular readers know, I have maintained the view that [...]
A great insight from a client today. The target condition at this point is simply to establish some degree of transparency of the current condition on a status board without having to resort to probing questions to elicit what is working, and what is not. The observation was: “We’ll know we are succeeding when we [...]
I was driving home today and saw a construction sign on the sidewalk. It read: “Sidewalk Closed, Use Other Side.” Ahead was a section of the sidewalk which was, indeed, closed off and impassible. By the time a pedestrian encounters this sign, he is well into the middle of a long block. The sign is [...]
This video by Charles Duhigg is promoting his book The Power of Habit . I haven’t read the book but there is a lot of study that draws the same basic model. A habit is based on an urge to do something that triggers a reward (dopamine shot) in your brain. Every time it happens, [...]
Coincidently my experience this week ties in nicely to the last post. I have a couple of teams working to develop pull systems through their respective work areas. The conventional approach (I suppose) is a lot of PowerPoint about kanban, some exercises, developing a future state value stream map, then devising an implementation plan. An [...]
PC once again left a provocative post in the Lean Thinker’s Community, and gave us a link to this Tim Harford TED talk that drives home the point that learning and improvement is more about rapidly discovering things that don’t work than about designing things that do. Trial and Error Tom Wujec makes the same [...]