Is all scrap treated the same? In a lot of metal working operations, I see routine drop scrap mixed in with scrapped parts and products – things that were not intended to end up there.

If that is the case, what does it tell you about the attitude around scrapping a part? Is it routine, just part of getting the job done, like drop scrap?

If you find a scrapped part, can you find the defect or flaw that caused it to be unusable? How much work (and cost) was added after that defect was created? All of that is additional cost that added no value.

Was it painted? Partly assembled? Did it go through a bottleneck operation and consume capacity of the entire factory?

What about your trash cans or recycle bins in the office?

Do you see signs of frequent paper jams in printers and copiers? These events suck time away, and more than just the time to clear them. They cause a mental shifting of thought pattern away from the productive work that takes additional time to recover.

Here are a couple of thoughts.

Separate the routine drop scrap from bad parts that were supposed to be good parts. If you sacrifice parts to adjust in changeovers, separate those out into their own category.

Each of these is a different line of inquiry starting with the question “Why?”

Consider taking your bad parts from the last 24 hours and bringing them to a central location (or a location in the department). Conduct a “ morning market” and get to the bottom of at least a couple of the root causes. You don’t have to solve all of them at once, just pick one and drive it to ground. Then another.

Scrap is not simply a material and time waste. It is a reflection of how well you really understand your processes.

Fed from: The Lean Thinker. Copyright © 2012, Mark Rosenthal

Scrap Bin Kaizen

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 alternative approach is to have a small group of experts design the system.

Most of the time this results in a fairly arduous process of wringing out the issues once the system goes live. If the team isn’t prepared for that, it is likely the system will come apart as people bypass it out of necessity to get the work done.

What I am watching this week is more organic.

First, we covered a few fundamentals about flow and pull signals in a simple demonstration of “build and push” vs. one-piece-flow with a visual limiter on work-in-process inventory. They saw the throughput, productivity, stability, visibility all increase while lead time dropped by an order of magnitude. That took about an hour.

The team then set up a tabletop simulation of their existing work flow, and exercised it a few times to confirm that it is a fair representation of the way things actually work today. In doing so, they gain more understanding of the current condition because they have to replicate it.

They then set out to make their far more complex real-world situation work more like what they saw in the demonstration. To help them get started, they were given some suggestions about a few things to try, and some basic principles and rules.

Some of that advice included restricting changes to a single factor at a time, and predicting what would happen, then trying it. If you find yourself speculating, or discussing alternative speculations, try it and see.

Two days into it, the teams have full-blown multi-loop kanban working, and are devising experiments to learn how the system responds to things like machines going down, unpredicted shifts in product mix, and other things they normally need to respond to.

They are exploring not only the mechanics and the rules, but the dynamics of the process in operation. They are learning what “normal” looks like in the face of abnormal conditions. They are testing the boundaries – where and when does it break, and what does “broken” look like vs. something that will recover on its own.

They are figuring out how to make it more robust, without making it cumbersome or too complicated.

They are gaining confidence and a deep understanding by iterating through ever more complex scenarios.

The people doing this are the ones who will be working IN the system in the future. We are seeing who emerges as thought leaders.

What they have right now – mid week – is a crystal clear view of their target condition, and they are very confident that they can make it work in their real world. Are there unknown issues? Sure. There always are. Translating this to the real world will involve more cycles of iteration. Only now they know exactly how to do those iterations because they have practiced dozens of times already.

This is actually less about kanban than it is about learning how to gain knowledge about something previously unknown.

It is pretty cool to watch, and a lot more fun (for everyone) than just implementing a process designed by someone else. Even the skeptics get drawn in when people are working hands-on to try to make something work.

Oh – and I’m really glad this process works because that saves me from having to know the answers.

Fed from: The Lean Thinker. Copyright © 2012, Mark Rosenthal

Learning vs Teaching

Tom Wujec makes the same point in the Marshmallow Challenge. In that video, Tom talks about how 5 year old kids out perform most adult groups in a problem solving / learning game. While the adults engage in a single cycle of “know-build-fail” the kids engage in multiple cycles of “try-fail-learn-try again.” In the improvement world, we call this process PDCA.

Harford’s key point is that learning only happens through a process of trial of large numbers of ideas, followed by the selection and further trials on the best ones.

Hmmm… that sounds a lot like the 3P process of “Seven Ideas” as well as “Set Based Design.”

Fed from: The Lean Thinker. Copyright © 2012, Mark Rosenthal

Learning vs. Knowing (or not)

• The PDCA cycle – small experiments that the “learner” develops to advance toward the target condition.
• The coaching cycle (or kata) – an introduction to the role of the coach, and how coaching is structured in practice.
• A fairly brief discussion on the current experience with the implementation path for an organization.

Roles

Even though the book and course material are quite explicit, a couple of people in the room weren’t readily grasping this until today.

Who Is Being Coached?

In the Kata model, the first level of “learner” is the first line leader who has direct responsibility for the process, and the people who work in it.

On a production floor, this would be the area supervisor.

The core material of the course is how to plan and execute continuous improvement in your work group. This is called the “Improvement Kata”

The “Coaching Kata” is covered and demonstrated (quite well), but it is not the prime topic this week.

Who is doing the coaching?

The coach is nominally the direct supervisor of the person being coached.

To learn how to coach, one must first learn the game. Thus, no matter your role in the organization chart, you come to this seminar gain awareness of the role of your first line leaders.

Then you go home and practice the role some more. Once you have lived in their shoes, then you can turn around and expect them to do the same.

What is absolutely critical to understand here is that this is not a “kaizen event” model. This is a daily improvement model. The coaching cycle happens for a few minutes every day between front line supervisor and the immediate manager. It is a process for developing better supervisors. It cannot (or at least should not) be delegated.

Here is the crucial difference: In many kaizen events, the specialist staff workshop leader is the one directing the actions of the team. The area supervisor may be a member of the team, but she is often not the one actually guiding the effort. In this model, there is no “learner” because there is no deliberate process to improve the problem solving and leadership skills of the supervisor.

If the course has a weak point it is that we “learners” are organized in a way that LOOKS more like a traditional kaizen team, which shifts the instructor / coach more into a role that LOOKS like that of the traditional kaizen workshop leader. Thus, it is easy for a participant to slip into a well-engrained mindset about kaizen events. We have all “practiced” the kaizen event pattern many times. The “kata” pattern is new.

This is the nature of the instructor coaching a group of “learners” rather than the 1:1 that is designed to happen in reality.

So, advice if you decide to attend: Be explicitly conscious that the structural limitations of the course, and deliberately work to overcome them in your mindset. This will help you grasp the material that you are there to learn.

That being said, I have a very explicit picture now of how I want shop floor supervisors to behave and lead. I have a pretty good idea of how to help them get there.

I’ve got an early flight, more later.

Fed from: The Lean Thinker. Copyright © 2012, Mark Rosenthal

Toyota Kata Seminar, Day3

• A one-day classroom overview of the concepts in Toyota Kata.
• The one-day classroom overview followed by two days of practice on a shop floor, for a total of three days.

I am taking the three day version.

Impressions of Day 1

There are about (quick count) 36 participants, a big bigger group than I expected considering the premise. I don’t know how many are not going to be attending the shop floor part, but most people are.

I suppose the ultimate irony is the slide that makes the point that classroom training doesn’t work very well for this.

Realistically, I can see it as necessary to level-up everyone on the concepts. The audience runs the gamut of people who have read, studied, written about, made training material from, and applied the concepts in the book; to people who seem to have gone to the class with quite a bit less initial information.

That being said, everyone had some kind of exposure to lean principles, though there was a lot of “look for waste” and “apply the tools” mindset present. Since one of the purposes of the class is to challenge that mindset, this is to be expected.

You can get a good feel for the flow and content of the material itself on Mike Rother’s web site. He has a lot of presentations up there (via Slide Share).

Like any course like this, the more you know when you arrive, the more nuance you can pull out of the discussion.

Since I have been trying to apply the concepts already, my personal struggles really helped me to get a couple of “ah-ha” moments from the instruction.I arrived with a clear idea of what I wanted to learn, and what I thought I already knew. Both pre-disposed me to get insight, affirmation, and surprise learning from the material.

I would not suggest this for anyone who was looking to be convinced. Classroom training in any case doesn’t do that very well, and this material isn’t going to win over a skeptic. You have to be disposed to want to learn to do it.

At the end of the day, the overall quality, etc. of the presentation was pretty typical of “corporate training” stuff – not especially riveting, but certainly interesting. But we don’t do this for the entertainment value, and the learner has a responsibility to pull out what they need in any case.

Insights from Day 2

Day 1 is intended, and sold, as a stand-alone. The next two days are available as follow-on, but not separately.

The intended purpose was to practice the “improvement kata” cycle in a live shop floor environment. Today was spent:

• Developing our “grasp of the current condition.” There is actually a quite well structured process for doing this fairly quickly, while still getting the information absolutely necessary to decide what the next appropriate target is.
• Developing a target condition. Based on what we learned, where can this process be in terms its key characteristics and how it performs, in a short-term time frame. (A week in this case)

Key Points that are becoming more tangible for me:

The “Threshold of Knowledge” concept.

I elaborated on Bill Costantino’s (spelled it right this time) presentation on this concept a while ago. In the seminar, I am “ groking” the concept of threshold of knowledge a bit better. Here is my current interpretation.

There are really three thresholds of knowledge in play, maybe more. First is the overall organization. I would define the organizations’ threshold of knowledge as the things they “just do” without giving it any thought at all.

For example – one company I know well has embedded 3P into their product design process to deeply that the two are indistinguishable from one another. It is just how they do it.

They still push the boundaries of what they accomplish with the process, but the process itself is familiar territory to them.

Likewise, this company has a signature way to lay out an assembly line, and that way is increasingly reflected in their product designs as 3P drives both.

It wasn’t always like that. It started with a handful of people who had experience with the process. They guided teams through applying it, in small steps, on successively more complex applications until they hijacked a design project and essentially redid it, and came out with something much better.

Another level of knowledge threshold is that held by the experienced practitioner.

Today I walked into a work cell in the host company for the first time, and within a few minutes of observation had a very clear picture in my own mind of what the next step was, and how to get there. My personal struggle today was not in understanding this, but in methodically applying the process being taught to get there. I knew what the answer would be, but I wasn’t here to learn that.

An extended threshold of knowledge in one person, or even in a handful of people, is not that useful to the company.

But that is exactly the model most kaizen leaders apply. They use their expert knowledge to see the target themselves, and then direct the team to apply the “lean tools” to get there.

They tell the team to “look for waste” but, in reality, they are pushing the mechanics. You can see this in their targets when they describe the mechanics as the target condition.

The team learns the mechanics of the tools, but the knowledge of why that target was set remains locked up in the head of the staff person who created it.

So his job is to set another target condition: Expanding the threshold of knowledge of the team.

He succeeds when the team develops a viable target themselves. It might be the same one he had, but it might not. If he framed the challenge correctly, and coached them correctly, they will arrive at something he believes is a good solution. If they don’t he needs to look in the mirror.

So the next level of knowledge threshold is that held by the team itself.

If enough teams develop the same depth, then they start to interconnect and work together, and we begin to advance the organization’s threshold. Now what was previously required a major “improvement event” to develop is just the starting baseline, and the ratchet goes up a bit.

None of the above was explicitly covered today, but it is what I learned. I am sure I’ll get an email from a certain .edu domain if I am off base here.

There is no Dogma in Tools

This is the third explicit approach I have been taught to do this.

The first was called a “Scan and Plan” that I learned back in the mid/late 1990’s. It was more of a consultant’s tool for selecting a high-potential area for that first “Look what this can do” improvement event.

Though I don’t use any of those forms and tools explicitly, I do carry some of the concepts along and apply them when appropriate.

Then I was exposed to Shingijutsu’s approach. This is heavily focused on the standard work forms and tools. Within the culture of Shingijutsu clients, it would be heresy not to use these forms.

The “Kata” approach targets pretty much the same information, but collects and organizes it differently. I can see, for myself, a of better focus on the structure of establishing a good target. I can also see a hybrid between this method and what I have used in the past. Each form or analytical tool has a place where it provides insight for the team.

One thing I do like about the “Kata” data collection is the emphasis on (and therefore acknowledgement of) variation in work cycles. (All of this is in the book by the way. Read it, then get in touch with me if you want some explanation.)

Now, I want to be clear – in spite of the title of this section, when I am coaching beginners, I will be dogmatic about the tools they use. In fact, I plan to be a lot more dogmatic than I have been.

I am seeing the benefit of providing structure so that is off the table. They don’t have to think about how to collect and organize the data, just getting it and understanding it.

What I can do, as someone with a bit more experience, is give them a specific tool that will give them the insight they need. That is where I say “no dogma.” That only applies when the principles are well within your threshold of knowledge.

The real ah-ha is that, unlike the Shingijutsu approach, we weren’t collecting cycle times at the detailed work breakdown level. Why not? Because, at this stage of improvement, at this stage of knowledge threshold for the team, the work cell, that level of detail is not yet necessary to see the next step.

I will become necessary, it just isn’t necessary now.

Target Conditions and PDCA Cycles

One place where my work team bogged down a bit this afternoon was mixing up the target condition that we are setting for a week from now, and what we are going to try first thing in the morning.

The target condition ultimately requires setting up a fairly rigid standard-work-in-process (SWIP) (sometimes called “standard in-process stock) level in the work cell.

There was some concern that trying that would break things. And it will. For sure. We have to stabilize the downstream operation first, get it working to one-by-one, and make sure it is capable of doing so.

The last thing we want to do while messing with them is to starve them of material.

So – key learning point – be explicitly clear, more than once, that the Target Condition is not what you are trying right away. It is the predicted, attainable, result of a series of PDCA steps – single factor experiments. You don’t have the answers of how to do it yet. So don’t worry about the SWIP level right now. That will become easier… when it is easier.

More tomorrow…

Fed from: The Lean Thinker. Copyright © 2012, Mark Rosenthal

From The Toyota Kata Seminar

I addressed this at a conceptual level in the “Morning Market” post a while ago.

Last week I was working with a client who has begun using the work-around as their key insight into the issue they have to solve.

When the work flow is disrupted, they are careful to capture what they had to do in order to clear the problem and get the item back into the normal production flow.

“We had to wait for parts.”

“We had to rework _____.”

“We had to get on someone else’s login for enough security to do the task.”

“We had to find the ____.”

“We had to replace ___”

This is really valuable information. By appending “Why did…” in front of the statement, they have a fairly well defined starting point for getting to the bottom of the actual issue.

By making the containment action the first “Why?” they get off the containment-as-solution mindset.

It might not work for everyone, but it is working very well for them.

“Please continue.” 

Fed from: The Lean Thinker. Copyright © 2012, Mark Rosenthal

Clearing the Problem / Solving the Problem

One of the many good points that struck me was that you can’t rally around an ROI.

Yet companies try to do just that. They set something ROI or margin objectives, and wonder why everyone doesn’t pick them up and run with them.

Even companies that do issue a good challenge often come up wondering why the organization doesn’t align around it. Rother mentions one good reason: Nobody is there to coach them through meeting their part of the challenge.

A similar fallacy is trying to rally people around an abstract vision. I have experienced this a couple of times. A company tries to apply general education to people – lots of it – in the (vain) hope that once people “understand” then they will pick up the ball and run. But without consistent direction toward a limited objective that is easily articulated, people freeze up. “What do we work on?” There are too many choices.

Chip and Dan Heath discuss the importance of a rallying point in their book about culture change, Switch. They talk about “Pointing to the Destination” and “Scripting the Critical Moves.” When we talk about an aligning challenge, we are saying the same thing. Remember – in these initial stages you are trying to infuse a fundamental behavior and culture change. You can’t just tell people what it is and expect things to change tomorrow.

Classroom training may teach people the words, but it does little to accelerate the process of learning on the shop floor. That takes leadership.

More after the video:

One of the concepts that Rother discusses in Toyota Kata is the concept of “True North.” Spear also talks about it as striving toward the ideal process. Same thing, different words.

But at another level, when we are trying to shape a different management system, it is equally important for the leaders to have a “true north” for the ideal leadership process. I think this is different (or should be expressed differently) from the True North of the ideal value-adding process.

As I develop my own practice, I am honing in on those key elements of “leadership true north” and making it the cornerstone of my engagements. Mainly I try to describe specific behaviors and critical elements that need to be in place. This seems to play better than abstract concepts like “servant leadership” because it tells people what they need to do. (See “Script the Critical Moves.”)

Fed from: The Lean Thinker. Copyright © 2012, Mark Rosenthal

Leadership and Challenges

A key theme woven throughout Spear’s work is the world today is orders of magnitude more complex than it was even 10 or 15 years ago. Where, in the past, it was feasible for a single person or small group to oversee every aspect of a system, today that simply isn’t possible except in trivial cases. Where, in 1965 it was possible for one person to understand every detail of how an automobile worked, today it is not.

My interpretation goes something like this:

Systems are composed of nodes, each acting on inputs and triggering outputs. In the past, most systems were largely linear. The output of upstream nodes was the input of those immediately downstream. You can see this in the Ford Mustang example that Spear discusses in the webinar.

Today nodes are far more interconnected. Cause and effect is not clear. There are feed-back and feed-forward connections and loop-backs. Interactions between processes impact the results as much as the processes themselves.

Traditional management still tries to manage what is inside the nodes. Performance, and problems, come from the interconnections between nodes more than from within them.

The other key point is that traditional management seeks to first define, then develop a system with the goal of eventually reaching a steady state. Today, though, the steady state simply does not exist.

Product development cycles are quickening. Before one product is stable, the next one is launched. There is no plateau anymore in most industries.

From my notes – “The right answer is not the answer for very long. It changes continuously.”

Therefore, it is vital that organizations be able to handle rapid shifts quickly.

With that, here is the recorded webinar.

A couple of things struck me as I participated in this.

Acknowledging that Spear has a bias here (as do I), the fact that Toyota’s inherent structure and management system is set up to deal with the world this way is probably one of the greatest advantages ever created by happenstance.

I say that because I don’t believe Toyota ever set out to design a system to manage complexity. It just emerged from necessity.

We have an advantage of being able to study it and try to grasp how it works, but we won’t be able to replicate it by decomposing its pieces and putting it back together.

Like all complex systems, this one works because of the connections, and those connections are ever changing and adapting. You can’t take a snapshot and say “this is it” any more than you can create a static neural net and say you have a brain.

Local Capability

One thing that emerges as critical is developing a local capability for this creative experimentation.

I think, what Spear calls “creative experimentation” is not that different from what Rother calls the “ improvement kata.” Rother brings more structure to the process, but they are describing essentially the same thing.

Why is local capability critical? Processes today are too complex to have a single point of influence. One small team cannot see the entire picture. Neither can that small team go from node to node and fix everything. (This is the model that is used in operations that have dedicated staff improvement specialists, and this is why improvements plateau.)

The only way to respond as quickly as change is happening is to have the response system embedded throughout the network.

How do you develop local capability? That is the crux of the problem in most organizations. I was in an online coaching session on Tuesday discussing a similar problem. But, in reality, you develop the capability the way you develop any skill: practice. And this brings us back to the key point in Kata.

Practice goes no good unless you are striving against an ideal standard. It is, therefore, crucial to have a standardized problem solving approach that people are trying to master.

To be clear, after they have mastered it, they earn a license to push the boundaries a bit. But I am referring to true mastery here, not simple proficiency. My advice is  to focus on establishing the standard. That is difficult enough.

An Example: Decoding Mary – Find the Bright Spots

Spear’s story of “Decoding Mary” where the re-admission rate of patients to a hospital directly correlated with the particular nurse handled their transfer reminded me of Heath & Heath’s stories from Switch. One of the nine levers for change that they cite is “ find the bright spots.”

In this case the creative experimentation was the process of trying to figure out exactly what Mary did differently so it could be codified and replicated for a more consistent result independent of who did it.

The key, in both of these cases, is to find success and study it, trying to capture what is different – and capture it in a way that can be easily replicated. That is exactly what happened here.

A lot of organizations do this backwards. They study what (or who) is not performing to determine what is wrong.

Sometimes it is far easier to try to extract the essence what works. Where are your bright spots for superb quality? Does one shift, or one crew, perform better than the others? Do you even know? It took some real digging to reveal that “Mary” was even the correlating factor here.

Continuous Improvement Means Continuous Change

Since “continuous improvement” really means “continuously improving the capability of your people,” now perhaps we have “to do what.” I have said (and still say) that the “what” is problem solving.

What you get for that, though, is a deep capability to deal with accelerating change at an accelerating rate without losing your orientation or balance.

It is the means to allow the pieces of the organization to continue to operate in harmony while everything is changing. That brings us back to another dilemma: What is the ROI on learning to become very, very good? You don’t know what the future is going to throw at you, only that you need the capability to deal with it at an ever quicker pace.

But none of this works unless you make a concerted effort to get good at it.

Here is the original link to the MIT page with the video, and a download link for PDFs of the slides:

http://sdm.mit.edu/news/news_articles/webinar_010912/webinar-spear-complex-operating-systems.html

Fed from: The Lean Thinker. Copyright © 2012, Mark Rosenthal

Steve Spear on Creative Experimentation

Link to full story: Networks are smart at the edges.

The factory is having a quality issue. The response is pretty typical:

The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution — on time, on budget, high quality and everyone in the project had a great time. They solved the problem by using some high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weighing less than it should. The line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done.

And a great solution. It stops the line and forces someone to pay attention to the problem. While I would usually add that these instances need to be followed up by problem solving to eliminate the issue, even if I were doing so, I wouldn’t eliminate the final verification check. Even Toyota performs a thorough and rigorous final inspection. But that’s not the point here.

It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of production use. It should’ve been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers come back saying the report was actually correct. The scales really weren’t picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.

Puzzled, the CEO travels down to the factory, and walks up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed. A few feet before it, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.

“Oh, that — one of the guys put it there ’cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang”, says one of the workers.

Like the Dilbert cartoon about 25 critical focus areas, this is more funny because the original reaction is totally typical, especially in companies who are comfortable with technology, controls, automation, etc.

Cudos to the CEO who realized, at least, that “No problem is a problem” and went to investigate at the actual gemba.

Once the team had a challenge (in this case provided by the annoying bell) they dealt with what they saw as the issue.

Oh – and this graphic? It is an inside joke for some of my readers. Maybe we should have put some fans on the conveyer.

Thanks to Hal for sending the original link to this article.

Fed from: The Lean Thinker. Copyright © 2012, Mark Rosenthal

Simple Solutions

Where in Chapter 2 the authors were outlining the individual leader’s responsibility for self-development, now they are describing the environment and the process of supporting and focusing that drive.

Rather than just outline the chapter, I want to dig into some key elements of the context that Toyota creates for their leaders.

First is the expectation that leaders lead.

Leading vs. Delegating

Chapter 3 has a great story that exemplifies the key differences in management styles that I alluded to in the post about Chapter 2.

In that story, NUMMI has equipment reliability problems in the body shop. Mr. Ito, the President has instructed Convis to have each engineer prepare and present a one page report for every breakdown lasting over 30 minutes. The telling moment is Convis behavior in the presentations:

While Ito was critiquing the [A3] presentations and reports, Gary [Convis] simply stood to one side, marveling at Ito’s insight and amused at the struggles of the engineers’ efforts to learn this way of thinking.

This quote nails the core issue we have to deal with in any company that wants to succeed with lean production.

Convis was newly hired from the U.S. automobile industry, and was acting exactly as he was trained as a manager. He was acting as every manager in the USA is trained.

He has delegated the process of training the engineers to Ito, who he sees as the technical expert. Convis viewed his presence here as overseeing how well his engineers are responding to that training.

Ito, though, had other ideas.

After a few sessions, Ito asked Gary how he was coaching the engineers through the process before the presentations. Ito pointed out that there was still a lot of red on the reports, and if Gary had been teaching the engineers properly, there would be less red ink. […] problems with the reports were a reflection of Gary’s leadership, and he was more responsible for any failures than the engineers were.

Zing.

You can’t even cite “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught” here because the delegation paradigm was so strong that Convis didn’t realize he had responsibility for being the teacher.

Convis, of course, “got it” and began seeing the red ink as his failure, rather than the engineers’. The drive for self-development kicked in and worked. And of course, in the process of struggling to coach the problem solving process, he had to struggle to learn it well enough to do so.

Personally, I see the idea of delegating and then passively overseeing improvement and people development is a cancer that is difficult to excise from even the most well intentioned organization.

I have seen this with my own eyes – senior executives struggling with how to “implement lean.” What was their concern? What metrics they could use to gage everyone’s progress through reports to corporate headquarters. They simply saw no need to get personally involved in learning, much less going to see, and certainly not teaching, the messy details. Not surprisingly, that company still struggles with the concepts.

Of course it cascades down from there. The various sites’ leaders follow the example, and delegate to their professional staff people. The staff’s job? To come up with “the lean plan” and “drive improvement” while the leaders watch. At some point, someone in charge of the operation actually has to do something different, but that, it seems, is always the next level down.

I am not going to get into what stops leaders from stepping up to this responsibility or what do to about it because that would be a book in itself.

It doesn’t help that, with the revolving-door of leadership we often encounter, each new leader comes in with the old mindset. OK </rant> and back to the book.

The Technical Support

This expectation of leaders leading does not operate in a vacuum. Toyota processes are deliberately set up to remove any ambiguity about what the next challenge is by surfacing problems immediately

In the words of Lean Leadership, these problems are framed as challenges for leader development.

In a much earlier post, I objected to our western euphemism of “opportunity” when we meant “problem.” My objection was treating this “opportunity” as an something that could be taken on, or not.

A challenge, especially in the context of leader development, isn’t optional. A top level athlete grasps the meaning of a challenge. He is driven to take it on and push himself to meet it. He improves in the process. It isn’t about the record, per se, it is about what he must develop and pull from within himself to get there.

Just as the world-class athlete has a stopwatch on every lap, the assembly line is set up to verify the timing of every cycle. Any discrepancy is immediately apparent to both the team member and the leaders. If the work can’t be done, the line is stopped and things are made right. Then we figure out why. And everyone learns.

TPS […] creates a never-ending stream of opportunities for on-the-job development and increased challenges. Toyota sensei do not need to create artificial training situations […]. The daily process of producing cars generates all the development opportunities and challenges that are needed.

If your organization has trouble finding problems, it isn’t because they aren’t there. It is because your processes are blind to them. That is why “No problem is a big problem.”

The key is that when we talk about “implementing the tools of lean” we are doing nothing more than setting up the baseline process to present the challenges for leadership development. That’s it. It is the difference between playing a casual game and deciding to keep score.

You can’t improve without keeping score, to be sure. But keeping score alone doesn’t cause things to get better. If anything, it increases people’s frustration because they see they are coming up short, but don’t have the support or opportunity to do anything about it.

What happens then? They start seeing problems as “normal” and start blinding the system. They add padding to cycle times to “allow for variation.” They decouple processes and put in extra inventory. They start running two at a time, then four, and return to batching.

If a problem remains hidden below the surface long enough, it can stop being perceived as a problem and become part of normal operating procedure.

OK, so I’ve beaten that to death yet again. It is critical to structure the work so that we can see whether things are going as planned or not.

But it is just as critical to have the problem solving processes engaged immediately. If those processes don’t yet exist, you have no hope of your so-called improvements sustaining for long.

That’s not all. There is another standard that is just as critical – if not more: A standard for problem solving.

The A3

We just got done exploring how critical it is to have a process that is totally transparent. Why? So we can clearly see any difference between how it is and how it should be.

The purpose of the A3 is to provide that level of visual control to the problem solving process itself.

And yes, problem solving is a process. It follows standard work. It is perhaps the most critical thing to standardize. The only way to gain skill at something is to practice against a clear standard. It really helps to have a coach watching your every move and calling out small adjustments, things you need to pay more attention to the next time you do it (which should be immediately).

The A3 is the game film, the slow motion camera, the visual control of how problem solving is being done. It is not sufficient to find the solution. It is more important to develop a consistent approach to problem solving across the entire organization.

But outside of Toyota and a few companies that are starting to grasp what this is about, the A3 is, sadly, one of the more recent fads in the lean community.

An A3 isn’t something you tell someone else to do. It is a visual control, just like the moving line, that works only in the context of direct observation and participation by all parties involved. In the above story, Ito was setting an example, and expecting Convis to follow it. Once that started happening, Ito’s participation shifted from coaching the engineers to coaching Convis as he coached them.

Just as the tools of takt time, standard work, pull systems, etc. do not stand alone and “make you lean,” neither does filling out A3 forms. Even if you have “the tools” and a problem solving process, it doesn’t help if they are not intimately linked together.

All of these things are designed for 1:1 interaction. They are messy testaments to the fact that problem solving often loops back to previous steps as more is learned.

The Big Picture

This chapter provoked a lot of thought for me, and I have tried to share some of that. When / if you choose to read the book, I hope you have your own thoughts, and even share them here or in the forum (that could use some life right now).

Fundamentally, Chapter 3 is about the phenomenal support Toyota provides those leaders who have the self-motivation to learn.

• Every operation is structured to provide challenges and opportunities for them to develop their skills. There is no shortage of things that obviously need improving.
• Every leader is positioned to teach and mentor those who are willing to step up to the challenges that are there.
• The problem solving process itself is structured as standard work so that a prospective leader can practice against a standard and improve skill through repetition and coaching.

Aside from a couple of case studies and examples, this chapter is a bit of a synopsis of Toyota Kata. I continue to bring Kata into this discussion because there is obvious overlap in topics, and I see these two books complimenting each other. Kata gets into the nitty-gritty of how problem solving and coaching happens. Lean Leadership is providing a context and case examples of the entire ecosystem.

More to follow.

Fed from: The Lean Thinker. Copyright © 2012, Mark Rosenthal

The Structure Behind Leader Development