A client and fellow lean learner today shared a cool extension of the Toyota Kata model for establishing target conditions. Mike Rother’s Improvement Kata Handbook establishes a couple of key concepts about where a target condition should be set. The key is that the target should be somewhere beyond the learner’s knowledge threshold: The knowledge [...]
Over the years, I have been party to at least three corporate-level efforts to bring “A3” or “Practical Problem Solving” into their toolbox. Sometimes it has other names, such as “Management by Fact” or such, but the approaches are all similar. Typically these efforts, if they catch on at all, become exercises in filling out [...]
TWI Job Instruction is a structured process for breaking a job or task into teachable elements, and a 4 step process for teaching that job to someone. I am not going to try to explain everything about breaking down a job here, this post is primarily for people who use job breakdowns and job instruction [...]
Most companies use some version of the words “respect for people” in their HR mantras. But how is that respect demonstrated? A team member made a mistake today. He is building a sub-assembly on a mixed model line. He picked a part from a small blue bin with a divider in it. On one side [...]
I have been noticing a significant linguistic difference between those who still embrace the “implement the tools” paradigm, and a much smaller (but growing) group are are adopting the PDCA thinking structure as a framework for everything else. It comes down to how a problem is stated. We were looking at an operation with a [...]
(Apologies for this post being “Password Protected” – I posted it from my smart phone, and obviously need to mistake-proof something in the interface.) – MR A key element of TWI Job Instruction is breaking down the job into important steps, key points, and reasons why. An important step advances the work. A key point is a [...]
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,” [...]
I am finding good resonance with my management training sessions. Rather than doing an overview of the “tools of lean” I go in depth into the fundamental things that the leaders need to Learn to do, and do. Ensure are done. in order to build this on a solid foundation. But “resonance” seems to mean [...]
Vance left a really good comment on the recent Travel Tales post. He said, in part: Having worked in the airline business, it’s really a matter of having employees that CARE (most due to their own pride, not by management) We many times had weather and mis-connected passengers to deal with. It only took a [...]
It must be that time of the year. I see traffic in the online forums asking about how to set key performance indicators for lean staff people so their performance incentives can be set. If anyone were to ask my advice here, it comes down to one word: Don’t. Two reasons. First, we have overwhelming [...]
