Grassroots Innovation: The 3rd Way.
Greg captures a concept in 183 words that entire books have utterly failed to explain.
When we are trying to solve a problem, there are always people involved. And people have positions, feelings, and are always emotionally tied to this-or-that outcome.
It is critically important to find “The 3rd Way” when working on [...]
5S audits, standard work audits, and for that matter ISO-900x audits, are a frequent source of questions in various online discussion forums. At the same time, the topic of “leader standard work” comes up frequently, as it did in a recent question / comment on “
Walking the Gemba.”
I think the topic is worth exploring a [...]
Occasionally it is good to think about not only the product we make or service we deliver, but to reflect a bit on exactly what value the customer receives from that product or service. Sometimes we confuse the technology we apply to get something done with what we are really trying to do.
This post on the Fastcompany.com blog shows a clever desktop manufacturing invention.
But what really got my attention was the development process that starts at 3:40 in the video. It shows the process of developing it. They may not call it “3P” but, by and large, this is what it looks like.
As they develop ideas, they [...]
This morning I got an email from a friend that recounts a (still ongoing) story of a failed freezer.
We arrived home Tuesday from a week away to find the “extra” freezer in the garage totally kaput…..much of the stuff inside already ruined but some still partially frozen. It’s only 4 years old and within warranty, [...]
One of the things I often hear when we start talking about mistake-proofing and standardizing operations is that we are taking away people’s “creativity.”
“Creativity” in this case is usually the challenge of figuring out how to make a broken process function, or figuring out how to make the product work when, as designed, it doesn’t. [...]
A couple of days ago I had an interesting session with an improvement team in a fairly large company. They have been working on this for almost 10 years, and believe that while they have made some spot progress, they are clear that they have spent a lot of money but not yet established what [...]
John Shook dives into some of the messy issues of true root cause
in his most recent post.
We touched on a similar issue here
a few months ago. But it is always worth coming back around to people because because in this system (actually in any system) there are always two issues with people.
People are [...]
In most references describing the process of good problem solving, the first real step is to explain what actually is the problem.
It is easy to get tripped up at this stage and describe the problem in terms of the desired target, or in terms of “lack of” a specific countermeasure. That, of course, skips over [...]
A couple of posts ago, I tried to emphasize “hypothesis testing” as the key, core thinking behind the TPS. For that matter, I think that anyone who truly understands any of the various improvement approaches out there will find the same thinking at the core. Certainly Six Sigma; Theory of Constraints; and TQM are all [...]