Thoughts and Insights from the Shop Floor
Another great insight from “Toyota Kata” by Mike Rother. We often think great problem solving means solving the problem, that is applying countermeasures, and we may even propose and apply several countermeasures in the hope that one of them will stop the problem. In contrast, in Toyota’s way of thinking, if the solution is not …
The idea of a continuous improvement culture, a problem solving culture, a kaizen culture, has been with us for decades. Ultimately it is what everyone says they want to create. Yet creating that culture remains elusive for all but a few. I have noticed that, generally, when people describe the culture they are trying to …
I am in the process of (finally!) reading Mike Rother’s great book Toyota Kata. The book has already gotten great reviews out there, and I am not going to contribute a lot more to that dialog except to say I think it is the first substantial addition to community knowledge about TPS since Steven Spear …
Bryan Zeigler has a great post on his “Lean is Good” blog site. Titled “Andon Calls and Muri,” he describes Toyota’s phenomenal capacity for responding to problems, and then takes us back to where the rest of us are with some really great questions: If it is physically impossible to answer every andon call in order …
Last fall I got to spend another week hanging out with the awesome team at Menlo Innovations in Ann Arbor. My last visit there was scheduled for early April 2020… but we probably all know what happened back then. I am saying all of that because I am going to use their project management system …
Continue reading “Project Management is Daily Management at Menlo Innovations”
“No… this is coaching. That means I talk, you listen.” Many years ago, those words began a 20 minute session that I can best describe as an “a** chewing.” The boss systematically went through all of the little notes he had been saving for over a year – like the fact that someone had commented …
Continue reading “HBR: Managers Think They’re Good At Coaching. They’re Not.”
In this TED Talk, Amy Edmondson of the Harvard Business School talks about “How to turn a group of strangers into a team.” Although long-standing teams are able to perform, our workplaces today require ad-hoc collaboration between diverse groups. The question is: What kind of leadership, and what kind of structure, contributes to working together …
Imagine a factory with a large monument machine. It takes several days to set up. When it does run, it runs very fast, much faster than you can actually use its output. Therefore, you take the excess output and store it to use later. Actually, you don’t know how many items you need to make, …
An organization’s culture and mindset evolve over time. When confronted with a problem or challenge, the organization (or more accurately, the people in the organization) view it through a filter of their experiences. Ideas that they believe have worked for them under past similar conditions are more likely to be applied again. Ideas that have …
“My computer won’t boot.” Mrs. TheLeanThinker’s computer was hanging on the logo screen, keyboard unresponsive. I know already that if the CPU were bad it wouldn’t get this far. I also knew that the system hasn’t even tried to boot the OS from the hard drive yet, so that likely isn’t the problem. Working hypothesis: …
Continue reading “Learning = Extending the Threshold of Knowledge”