Tag: Leadership

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Toyota Kata : the “how” of “engaged leadership”

Anyone who is following this blog knows my view of “engaged leadership.” As I read this book, I had two experiences.

  1. I found it validating. There were a lot of times I said “oh yeah!”
  2. I found it clarifying. Rother turns up the contrast on a couple of crucial points and I liked that.

This is not to say I don’t have a couple of quibbles, but I’ll get to those at the end.

The bottom line is that I am pushing this book, hard, internally in my company right now as a way to get a focused conversation going about what we mean when we say “engaged leadership.”

A Caveat

Before I get into this, I want to be clear about something. There have always been individuals and small groups out there that have had a deep, intimate understanding of how the Toyota Production System works and how to teach it. What I will be commenting on here is our community’s success at getting that deep understanding into the mainstream of thought. For example, “The Machine That Changed The World” revealed nothing new to anyone who had been teaching and practicing this stuff for a decade. What it did accomplish, however, was moving the discussion into the mainstream.

Thousands of people inside, and outside, of Toyota have been following some form of the practices Rother outlines for many decades. I have seen for myself the results of just trying to follow these practices. (The results from doing it badly are vastly superior to those gained from not trying.) Toyota Kata is an opportunity for at least a fundamental understanding of these practices to spread and hopefully generate a bit of a shift.

So, this review is not intended to say to anyone who has been successfully applying these skills that you didn’t know what you were doing. Quite the opposite. It is a validation of what you have been doing. The mainstream press is finally saying “ah-ha!” and understanding just how critical this is for sustaining and success.

Rother’s book describes a crucial piece that is simply not addressed well in any of the “lean industry” publications. That is the good news. The bad news is that it is going to be enormously difficult to get this piece into place in most companies. I’ll get into why later on.

History

The Toyota Production System was never designed. There are no specifications or blueprints. It grew, and continues to grow, organically. We learn about how it works by studying it. Therefore, our knowledge and understanding should be continuing to evolve and grow, as indeed, the TPS itself continues to evolve. Anyone who says “We get it now” has stopped learning.

In the early days we looked at the TPS through the eyes of engineers. We regarded it as a machine. If we could just see all of the parts and pieces, and understand how they work, we could reverse engineer the machine. That is where we get the emphasis on the tools, like one-piece-flow, pull, “looking for waste vs. value-add,” standard work and such.

In his doctoral research, however, Steven Spear took a different look. He went in with social science eyes rather than engineering eyes. His doctorial research findings have been cited as “potentially the most significant research ever to come out of the Harvard Business School.” Spear discovered the connections that make the mechanics into a living thing that engages people in improvement. His work is summarized in “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” published in 1999.

That was 11 years ago.

Unfortunately, in the meantime, other publications of the “lean industry” have continued to imply that “all you have to do is…” and describe sequences of using and implementing the tools. This has been at best misleading, and resulted in a graveyard of failed efforts to adopt the TPS.

Everybody, though, has been clear that “engaged leaders” are crucial for success. But up to this point, nobody has really said what the term “engaged leaders” means in terms of what they actually do. There have been hints – John Shook’s Managing to Learn does a great job describing the process of mentoring, but does not set the context as well as Rother does.

So my first key point is that I believe Toyota Kata is a significant contribution to the popular body of theory – it is the first book that really describes, in detail, the mechanics of “engaged leadership” in a continuous improvement environment.

Kata

The term kata is found mostly in the study of Asian martial arts. Kata are the basic motions, “wax on, wax off,” that are foundational building blocks. Once those foundations are embedded into subconscious memory, it is no longer necessary to focus on them. Though they are not called kata, the basic drills that any athlete learns are foundational in the same way.

Rother contends that Toyota’s improvement processes are build upon two fundamental kata.

  • A kata for improvement or problem solving.
  • A kata for coaching.

This does bring up my first quibble about the book. I wish it had a different title. While it is a great metaphor, I have found that the word “kata” is foreign to many people and I end up having to spell it and explain it as I tout the book. I ran into he same thing with Spear’s book Chasing the Rabbit – having to explain what the rabbit is and why we are chasing it – and note that his book has been re-issued with a title that better explains what the book is actually about.

Context

A “kata” is just a practice – in effect, yet another tool. There are lots of books and materials out there for problem solving methods, and John Shook’s Managing to Learn does a decent job describing the coaching process. So what is new here? In my opinion, Rother does the best job so far of setting the context – describing the improvement culture and environment if you will – of any popular press publication so far. It is this context that I find lacking in so many of the publications coming out of the “lean press.”

The book covers five interlocking topics.

  1. The role of vision and direction in continuous improvement.
  2. Critical context for the “classic lean tools” as target conditions.
  3. The problem solving kata, and how it differs from what most of us do.
  4. The coaching kata, really describing how management engages.
  5. A proposal for teaching the problem solving and coaching kata to a management team.

In addition, there is an overarching theme which compares this style of management with what is traditional taught and practiced in most business.

I would like to discuss these in detail, and offer my thoughts on each of them.

Vision and Direction

Maybe you’ve been there. “Top management” makes a “commitment” to “use lean principles” or some such. But nobody ever really defines what that means. The implementation is delegated to staff specialists, and it is up to them to provide “management education” and, ultimately, make the case for each and every improvement step.

I suppose there might be cases where this approach has worked and sustained. I just don’t know of any.

In the Toyota that Rother describes, there is an an overarching sense of direction, the true north that is used to unify the organization’s understanding of what “improvement” means.

Although Rother describes Toyota’s concept of being a perfect supplier much the same way that Spear does, (zero defects; 100% value added; one-by-one, in sequence, on demand; security for people) the concept comes through in other companies in other forms.

In “Made to Stick,” for example, Heath and Heath cite a story about Herb Kehler, then chairman of Southwest Airlines, as he describes how he uses a simple concept of the ideal to make decisions. In his case it is “We are the low-fare airline.” Thus, any “improvement” that does not consistently move Southwest in that direction is considered off track. (I should point out that “…without compromising safety or consistent performance in any way” are likely unspoken “givens” in this example.)

In The High Velocity Edge (formerly titled Chasing the Rabbit), Steven Spear points out several examples, including Toyota, where there is a strong explicit, or implicit, sense of an uncompromising direction. And Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great talks about defining what “we will be the best in the world at” as one of the key factors to sustainable breakout.

So, again, while this is not a new concept, Rother turns up the contrast and elevates it to a prominent position in decision making and direction setting.

Why is this important?

Because it focuses the debate away from “should we do it” to “what problems are in our way?” Rother gives a great example on page 50 and 51:

… we pointed out the potential for smaller batch sizes to the management team.  … closer to 1×1 flow, less inventory and waste, faster response to different customer requirements, less hidden defects and rework, kanban systems become workable and so on.

Almost immediately the assembly manager responded and said “We can’t do that,” and went on to explain why. [… the usual excuses here …] “Those extra non-value-added activities would be waste and would increase our cost. We know that lean means eliminate waste, so reducing the lot size is not a good idea.”

The plant manager concurred, and therein lies a significant difference from Toyota.

A Toyota plant manager would likely say something like this to the assembly manager.

“You are correct that the extra paperwork and first-piece inspection requirements are obstacles to achieving smaller lot size. Thank you for pointing that out. However the fact that we want to reduce lot sizes is not optional nor open for discussion because it moves us closer to our vision of a one-by-one flow. Rather than losing time discussing whether or not we should reduce the lot size, please turn your attention to those two obstacles standing in the way of our progress.”

By clearly defining what “progress” is – outside of the scope of the daily debate – the debate is shifted away from whether or not there is a problem to a discussion on how best to solve it.  This, in my view, is one of the most important policy decisions a management team can make. It gives people a foundation of consistency. But for this to work, there must be no caveat such as “when it makes sense to do so.” Adding one provides an “out” that allows people to accept the status quo rather than focusing people’s attention in solving the problems so it does make sense.

Rother goes on to point out how this sense of direction re-shapes cost-benefit analysis. The question being answered is now not whether we will make this decision, but rather whether the solution is adequate, or we must keep looking for a better one.

Step by Step

A common source of confusion in organizations trying to adopt these principles is the tension between the theoretical ideal or vision (as defined above) and the “what we can do now.” This is made worse when there is no clear sense of the ideal vision or direction because it reduces each step to a choice of “do we take it?” rather than “what must we do to get there?”

What happens in that case is some people are talking about the vision, others dismiss it as “unrealistic” and a lot of energy gets expended because people think the vision is something that must be achieved with a single comprehensive plan..

In reality, though, no one has any idea what the clear path is. Trying to build a detailed plan to “implement lean” is destructive because there is no way to predict what problems will need to be solved until they are encountered. If you think about it a comprehensive project plan assumes that we have such a clear grasp of the current condition and already know what must be done to get us to the desired end state. In reality, we are driving on a winding road in the dark. We can only see as far as our headlights.

“We’ll just solve the problems before we discover them”

– Dilbert

Rother describes a series of target conditions as the true objectives of improvement.

Because there is a strong sense of direction, it makes sense to set an immediate target just beyond what we can achieve today. While there is no clear path to the notional end state, the target condition is much closer, so the immediate issues that must be overcome are plainly visible.

While this is somewhat understood in general principle, Rother takes it down a couple of layers. He points out that each of the common “tools and techniques of lean” are actually targets to strive for. Only by setting an objective, and then trying to hit it can we learn why we cannot. That, in turn, becomes the focus for kaizen.

The example that will most challenge a lot of practitioners out there is takt time as a target condition. This is one of the few mainstream books that gets beyond the overly-simplistic notion of takt time only as the rate of customer demand. Rother acknowledges that, internally, there is an intentional overspeed built into the system as a target. And here is the key point: You rarely hit the target. At least not at first. It is established as something to strive for, step by step, each day. The system is set up so people can both succeed in meeting the customer’s needs every day and have a challenge for the next level of performance.

From this foundation, Rother expands the concept across the other “tools of lean” – not as things you implement, but devices to focus your attention on the next problem. The common excuses and obstacles we are used to hearing are turned around into those challenges. The work cycle is too unbalanced to achieve one-by-one flow? OK – then that is the focus or our kaizen activity until we break down that problem. The kanban discipline broke down? Great! What didn’t we understand when we set it up?

In each case the questions are:

Can we run this way? (smooth, level pulls; one-by-one; cycle time = takt time; etc)

If no, then “What is preventing us… now… from doing so?” Crutch the system while you work on the problem, but work on the problem. Rather than using the problem as a barrier, it become the next challenge.

Rother goes into quite a bit of detail for each of the common tools, and resets the commonly held idea that they are something to implement. I am glad for this chapter because it clarifies (or contradicts?) the idea that these tools are “what makes a value stream lean.” That idea has been firmly entrenched by the middle chapter of Rother and Shook’s book Learning to See which, in turn, is the cornerstone of the LEI’s publications and doctrine. We are finally starting to move beyond that anchor and understand that these tools are not the fundamentals of lean.

The entire concept of a target condition, that describes not simply the performance but the operating characteristics of the system, is a critical one. The vision of ideal sets the general direction for forward progress, the target condition issues a clear done-or-not-done challenge for the next step.

This concept links back to Learning to See in that the “future state map” can define an overall target condition rather than some long-term end state. Perhaps that was the intention all along. But Learning to See and its publishers are vague about that, and many companies have tried to reach too far into the ideal with their future state with the idea that it describes an end game rather than the next challenge.

Kata 1: Problem Solving

Of course if the target could be achieved today, it is a poorly set target. There are likely problems to solve.

Where we commonly fall short in problem solving is trying to take on too much at once. We try to take on complex problems, create elaborate dependencies, and work on multiple things at the same time. As a result, we never really gain a clear understanding of what worked (or didn’t) or why because we are manipulating all of the variables at once.

Unfortunately most “problem solving” courses teach us to do it just this way.

Rother, on the other hand, points out that rapid, linear solution of small problems, focusing on single issues and single countermeasures, lets us gain that process understanding – and increase our profound knowledge in the process.

A really telling chart on the crucial difference between a problem solving culture and a problem avoiding culture is in the section titled What Toyota Emphasizes in Problem Solving.

 

Toyota “Us”
Focus Learn about the work system.Understand the situation. Stop the problem!
Typical Behavior Observe and study the situation.Apply only one countermeasure at a time in order to see cause and effect. Hide the problem.Quickly move into countermeasures. 

Apply several countermeasures at once.

This little chart covers a lot of ground. Where “we” are primarily interested in eliminating the effects of the problem so we can move on to something else, the Toyota approach, according to Rother, is to learn and understand more about the process. So while solving the problem is the goal, it is only acceptable to solve it in a way that improves understanding. A blind solution is no solution.

Logically, of course, this makes sense. But in real life it is extraordinarily difficult in the heat of the moment, with people demanding a quick fix, to exercise this kind of discipline. This is driven by a fear that thorough = slow, which is simply not true.

And as each countermeasure is applied, the next problem becomes apparent – and that problem is the next barrier to better performance. Progress can be made very quickly in this way because there is a much reduced risk of leaving problems behind us as we move forward.

In contrast, I find two main issues with most “problem solving” approaches.

First, they spend an inordinate amount of time deciding which problem to work on. While that may feel like working on solving problems, no actual progress is being made. The countermeasure for this waste is to have a clear sense of direction, and a clear target objective that makes “which problem to work on” painfully clear – it is the obstacle between the current state and where you want to go.

Second, and perhaps worse, is that we like to think we are working on “important” problems, which seems to mean difficult ones. Maybe this is because if feels like a waste of time to work on the simple issues. “Problem solving” is often taught as a complex, drawn out process (which often begins with deciding which problem to solve…). We learn about designed experiments, statistical analysis, stratification techniques. Some problems require this kind of work, but not very many. Worse, learning to solve those problems well requires a thorough grounding in the fundamental logic which is best learned by solving lots of problems.

The only way to solve lots of problems is to start with the simple ones, but apply rigorous methods in doing so. But we skip that part, and then wonder why “problem solving” doesn’t take hold. We are trying to teach multivariate calculus before we learn algebra.

Toyota avoids this issue because they develop these skills from the basics, at the very start of their employment. Teaching the fundamentals – the entry level stuff – to senior people with advanced career positions can be problematic. More about that later.

Kata 2: Developing People (Coaching)

Even in the rare organizations that have fantastic problem solving and kaizen skills, the development of people often a very weak process. There is no systematic approach to doing it.

Let me be specific about this, just to be clear.

Most companies have some kind of “performance management” system that is built around some form of “management by objectives.” The team member is supposed to develop a set of goals with his boss. Those goals may even include “developmental goals.” They might even be specific things like taking a class or performing an assignment. Then, at the end of the rating period, the team member is evaluated on his performance against those goals.

This is not developing people. Not by a long shot.

“Coaching” is often a euphemism for the boss telling the team member that something in his behavior or performance is seriously inadequate. It is the first step in the “steps of accountability” which, in itself, is a euphemism for escalating punitive actions on a path to termination for cause.

This is not coaching. Not by a long shot.

And both of these functions are usually delegated to Human Resources rather than being clearly owned and adminstered by line leaders.

Rother, on the other hand, describes a process of mentoring. The boss has skin in the game because he is accountable to his boss for the results. Yet he does not direct solutions. He guides the subordinate through the process of solving the problem in the correct way. In fact, upon study, it becomes clear that the process of coaching (the “coaching kata”) is simply an instance of the problem solving kata. There is a target condition for the team member’s capability. The current condition is understood, gaps are assessed, and at each step of the way, countermeasures are applied in the form of direction that will build the team member’s problem solving skills. In the end, it is the team member, not the boss, who comes up with the solution, and the boss has to live with whatever it is as long as it works.

What is critical to understand here is a difference in who carries out improvements. In most of our companies, improvements are the domain of skilled staff specialists. These are the people who plan and lead kaizen events, or carry out black belt projects, or whatever improvement process is used. Those people are probably quite good at what they do, but they are the only ones who do it. The attention is always on solving the problem. Yes, they go through the motions of developing people – they teach them the principles, they guide them to the correct solution, but in the end, the process of how to improve is the domain of the specialists.

This is, in reality, a very traditional approach – a slight evolution from the practices outlined by Fredrick Taylor in 1911. Yes, they do a better job of “engaging the workers” vs. just telling them what to do, but when that engagement is limited to specially planned events, we are really not developing anyone, nor are we truly engaging them.

In a Toyota Kata type environment, most improvements are led by lower level line leaders, and they do so in way that is designed to develop people’s depth of knowledge. Yes there are staff specialists, but they are pulled in when a problem requires technical help rather than being pushed in to “fix things.”

The other key point is that in the Toyota-type environment, the entire operation is built around flagging problems immediately. Spear describes how work, information flows, material flows, and indeed the flow of problem solving itself is deliberately structured to always be testing against an explicit intent.

In this environment, the vast majority of problems are discovered and handled while they are relatively small and manageable. In contrast, “traditional” organizations deal with problems only when they can no longer be tolerated. Where Toyota deliberately stops the process at the first hint of trouble, other organizations run it until it is so overwhelmed that it is brought to its knees.

Following that, in the Toyota-environment, someone other than the production operator responds to the problem. This, again, is a huge contrast. But if you think about it, the only thing the production worker can do is work around the problem enough to keep moving. He doesn’t have time to solve it and continue production. So when we say “We want out workers to see problems and solve them” that may be well intentioned, but it isn’t going to happen without the rest of the structure in place.

What this means is that there is no such thing as an entirely autonomous worker, nor can there be a “self directed team” that operates completely independently. Trying to do so is leaving people on their own, without support from the rest of the organization. That doesn’t mean we micro manage, but it does mean that there is a clear delineation between “normal” and “abnormal” and, further, “abnormal” demands that someone gets notified right away, and responds in a specified, standard way.

The role of leaders in this world is two fold.

  1. Respond immediately at the first hint of a problem. Take ownership of the issue. Get the problem cleared – that is, establish a temporary countermeasure which allows safe, defect-free production to resume.
  2. The problem has revealed something that was not previously understood about the process. Work together with the people in the trenches to develop that understanding and guide them through the process of implementing a workable solution.

The coaching kata is how this is done.

In the end, not only is the problem fixed, but the profound knowledge of the entire organization has improved.

A couple of things that make this different.

The initial temporary countermeasure will likely “bust the system.” By that I mean it takes things away from the ideal. But that happens all of the time, everywhere, doesn’t it? True, but what happens next is critical. The leader is responsible for the issue until the system is not only restored, but improved. Where “the rest of us” willingly accept that we have to compromise and make things a little less than ideal to get the product out the door, the Toyota Kata mindset accepts this only as a scaffold to hold up the process until it can be repaired… and strengthened so it won’t break again. With one mindset, things get a little worse. With the other, they get better. “Chatter is signal.”

Rother describes this process with a few stories and examples that make the point very well. So does John Shook in Managing to Learn.

Adopting the Kata

One thing I like about this book over many others is that Rother goes beyond just describing an ideal environment. In Chapter 9 Developing Improvement Kata Behavior in Your Organization he openly discusses the very real barriers that an organization must surmount to get this thinking and practice into place.

He says the challenge is:

“Not to implement or add on some new techniques, practices or even principles”

rather it is

“To develop consistent behavior patterns across the organization.”

He is, of course, talking about a fundamental change in culture. Let’s talk about that a bit. “Culture” is really defined, not so much by the behavior of individuals, but rather, it is something that emerges from the norms and rituals people follow when they interact with one another. This is true of a national or ethnic culture as much as a corporate culture.

The coaching kata describes a specific way that people interact with one another when solving a problem. It is not individual behavior – what we commonly teach in “problem solving” – it is group behavior. Therefore, this is not something that can be taught to individuals.

Rother is clear about a couple of things. First is that nobody has succeeded in doing this as well as Toyota yet. We are cutting new ground here. There is no clear path to the end state. There is a clear vision for what the end state looks like, and each of us should know (or be able to assess) the current state in our individual organizations. If this sounds familiar, it is. Rother is describing a process of using the very principles discussed in the book to put these patterns into place. Why? Because when the practices are applied correctly, they work. If they don’t work, we must look at the quality of our application, not the validity of the approach. “If the student hadn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”

He is equally clear in a section titled What will not work.

  • Classroom training does not work any better here than it would to teach you to swim or ride a bicycle.
  • “Workshops” do not work – especially if they are focused on making improvements vs. developing behaviors. I’ll talk more about that in the next post.
  • Hiring consultants to lead improvements for you, does not work.
  • Using metrics to alter people’s behavior. Management by measurement does not work.
  • Reorganizing, “re-engineering,” whatever you call altering the lines on the org chart, does not work.

What does work?

Continuous and conscious practice with the oversight of a coach. Every world-class athlete in the world has a coach. Only the coach can observe her performance objectively and see what must be adjusted to improve it. I always wonder why it is that, in business or operations, we believe that once some level is reached there is no need for this.

In this section Rother outlines what seems to be a pretty good plan for applying the improvement kata to the problem of developing the organization’s skills.

A couple of keys.

  • Learn to do before learning to coach.

While this makes sense when we write it, again, in business organizations it seems that people’s capabilities to do something they have never done before are not questioned once they reach some level of seniority. This is, of course, silly. Rother proposes to start at the top with the basics – not because they end up as the primary coaches. No, that is primarily the domain of the middle managers and below. But because someone has to coach those middle managers, and it has to come from above. Rother’s point is around classic change management. I would add that starting in the middle puts those people in an untenable position because they are being taught to behave in ways that their bosses do not understand. Getting the top level team not only involved, but embedded, in the process is a countermeasure.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail and spoil the book. Get it and read it. Form your own view on this. Just understand that getting this thinking into place is a big deal.

Final Thoughts

This book is a good one, but I want to add a little reality here.

Like every book before it, Toyota Kata is targeted primarily at senior leaders. I would like to say that it will take off like The Goal or The Machine that Changed the World. It is probably too early to tell, but I don’t see it happening yet. Like most books of these books, its primary readers are going to be technical practitioners.

Those technical practitioners are the ones leading the classroom training, leading the kaizen workshops or black belt projects. They are the ones who are doing most of the things that do not work. They are doing those things because that is what their bosses expect (or allow) them to do since, rightly or wrongly, “improvement” is largely delegated to them.

Odds are you are one of those people if you are reading this blog, and odds are you are the only one who will be reading this book. It is a great book, but you will find it frustrating because you bosses aren’t reading it.

Here is what you can do.

First, practice this stuff on your own. Coach each other. It will feel awkward. Get as good at this as you can.

Then start altering how you run your events. Shift them to changing the behavior of team leaders and supervisors. Teach them to see, clear, and solve problems quickly. Set more clear target objectives. Hold yourself to a higher bar. At the end of an event, where you have traditionally focused on clearing newspaper action items, focus instead on ensuring that this behavior is embedded. Coach and support those front line leaders until they are habitually employing the kata every single day. That is the only way your results will sustain. Then, and only then, move to the next “event.” Your objective is not so much to make change in the way things flow as it is to systematically transfer this behavior to those critical first two or three levels in the organization.

Then comes the hard part.

The leadership above is going to say and do things that introduce problems. You have to intervene, but use it as a coaching opportunity. Apply the kata, just like you would for any other issue. Now, though, you are coaching those leaders – gently – through the process of understanding what is really happening, what they truly want to achieve, and understanding what is truly in their way. Maybe, just maybe a few of them will listen.

And maybe you can lead them through a study of this book so they can begin to understand what you are doing.

Just to be clear, Rother says that everything I have just said is the wrong way to go about this. It has to start from the top. Perhaps he is right. But sometimes you do what you can, where you can.

In the end, these concepts have to overcome huge momentum. Our business leaders today are firmly entrenched in a management paradigm that was developed, ironically, in General Motors. It is taught by every major business school in the world. Now we are beginning to see that there is a better way. But the better way is very different from anything they understand, and it is a lot of work. Its focus on developing people, first and foremost, runs counter to the paradigm of an objective, numbers-based analytical “business decision.” Ironically Toyota’s approach is based in far deeper understanding of objective facts than the financial-decision paradigm, but it does not feel that way when you are doing it.

Thus – this is a great book. Read it. Do what it says. But it isn’t going to move the Earth for us. There is still a lot of work we have to do ourselves.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

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Deciding vs. Discovering and Developing

In a recent blog post, Why C level executives don’t engage in ‘lean’…, Steven Spear makes a really interesting observation. He cites two main reasons.

1) “Lean” is regarded as a tool kit. There has already been a lot written here, and elsewhere, on this fallacy and how it continues to be propagated. Spear’s most interesting observation is his second point.

2) Business leaders are trained to make decisions. They are not trained to engage in discovery and development of the organization.

This really hit home for me. Synchronicity being what it is, last week in Prague this very topic was the subject of more than one conversation over a glass some glasses of Pilsner Urquell.

Spear sums it up here:

The thing is, business managers are not trained to learn/discover.  Rather they are trained to decide about transactions.  Consider the MBA curriculum core:

  • Finance–how to value transactions
  • Accounting–how to track transactions
  • Strategy–taught as a transactional discipline of entering or exiting markets based on relative strength and weakness.
  • OM courses–heavily pervaded by analytical tools (in support of decisions).

Largely absent: scientific method, experimentation, exploration, learning methods, teaching methods, etc.

Therefore, even for those who have seen TPS et al as management systems rooted in organizational learning and broad based, non stop, high velocity discovery are ill prepared to switch from decision mode to discovery.

Each of these two factors – regarding “lean” as a tool kit and being trained to make decision – would, alone, bias an executive toward “deciding to implement lean” and then delegating it to staff technical specialists. And when we say “management support” here in the USA, we often come from the same paradigm. While we feel that a decision to do it is nice, but not enough, we often have a tough time putting our finger on exactly what we want when we say “we need more management engagement.”

To make it worse, even if we have management engagement, they still don’t have the skill sets to actually engage the way they need to.

So we end up implementing the tools, and wondering why the leadership doesn’t grab the ball and run with it. The reason? Because they decided to give you (the technical practitioner) the ball.

What to do?

There is a great trend out there right now. All of this is starting to come together.

Taking the pieces that are out there and putting them together we have identified a problem, we have likely arrived at a couple of good causes, and we have a proposed countermeasure on the table.

If you have been reading along over the last few weeks, you know I have been reading (and like, a lot) Mike Rother’s book Toyota Kata. In his last chapters, Rother puts forth an approach that just might work for teaching leaders the skills that Spear points out they simply do not have. I found it affirming because I was starting to advocate, and follow, a similar approach. Toyota Kata will help a lot because it gives me not only a little more structure, but also some credible backing that I might not be nuts for thinking this.

Watch for a full review of Toyota Kata in the next week or so, but in the meantime, know that though I have some minor quibbles, I am going to advocate buying it, reading it, and doing what it says.

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Cenek Report: Litmus Test for Commitment

Robert Cenek offers up a succinct “check” for the level of a leader’s commitment to a change initiative on his blog.

The element that resonates with my own experience is the first on on his list: Intellectual curiosity. I cannot say enough how much core difference there is between a leadership team who says they “want to be lean” (or “world class” or any other buzz word) and a leadership team who digs in and does book studies, discussions, and generally works to learn about what they are supposed to do in the work environment they propose.

In the later case, they are acknowledging two critical things:

  • They must play a different role than they have been in the past.
  • They have to learn how to play that role.

Acknowledging that they have to learn how to play the role acknowledges, further, that they aren’t doing it today.

While this seems all touchy-feely, if it is done with the true intent to change, it is actually application of improvement methodology.

  • They are working to develop an understanding of the target condition.
  • They are working to understand the gap between their current behavior and that target.
  • They are working systematically to close that gap.

But I added the italics around “if it is done with the true intent to change” for a reason. I have also run into leaders who had a deep intellectual understanding of how the process works, but that understanding for some reason never translated into actions and directives that pulled the rest of the organization along. At a further extreme, resources are expended to make sure everyone in the organization is educated – sometimes extensively – yet nothing actually changes.

There is a commonly held misconception out there that education alone will precipitate change in the way people behave on a daily basis. Truthfully, it will cause that change, but traditional classroom education, and even participation in kaizen traditional kaizen events, is not going to do it.

Education, by itself, does nothing other than cause frustration as a few bright people “get it” and then see that it is business as usual as the “change initiative” fades into the background noise.

Changing a culture is about changing how small groups of people interact with one another. Getting this into place at the operational levels of the business was the topic of my talk in Prague yesterday. But at the leadership team level, they are usually left to their own devices, and have to make a conscious effort to take awkward and incompetent steps among themselves before they are any good at it. Without those first steps, there is no reflection, and without reflection there is no learning.

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The TPS vs. Toyota’s Production System

Up to this point I have resisted weighing in on the Toyota quality story largely because:

  1. I don’t have anymore insight than anyone else.
  2. The signal-to-noise ratio in the story seems really low, and I didn’t feel I would contribute much.

But there is another story in the back channels of the “lean” community.

Many of us (myself included) have been holding up Toyota as an example of “doing it right,” with good reason.

Toyota, of course, has never publicly claimed to be an icon of perfection, but we have held it up as one.

Now, when their imperfections are exposed, I am seeing a backlash of sorts, questioning whether the Toyota Production System is flawed somehow. This raises some really interesting questions cutting across the principles themselves; the psychology of various groups of practitioners; and of course Toyota’s practice of “The Toyota Production System.”

Are the principles themselves flawed?

We have a whole industry built on extolling the perfection of Toyota. Now we are seeing a bit of a boomerang effect. Say it ain’t so, but believe it or not, there is a population of people out there who are pretty sick of hearing “Toyota this..” and “Toyota that…” and having themselves held up to Toyota and being told they are coming up short.

Shame on us, the lean manufacturing community, for setting that situation up, but now we have to defend the principles on merit and establish credibility for ourselves rather than using Toyota as a crutch. Hopefully the adversity will sort out some of the practitioners who are still advocating rote copy of the tools and artifacts.

So, no, the principles are not flawed, not unless you didn’t believe in scientific thinking to begin with. It is a fallacy to confuse failure to adhere to the principles with failure of the principles themselves. The truth has always been that the Toyota Production System defines an ideal, and Toyota’s practice, like everyone else’s, comes up short sometimes.

So what will happen?

I can imagine that consultants the world over are figuring out how to re-brand their offerings to show how they “close the gaps” in the Toyota Production System to go “beyond lean.”

Meanwhile, though, those who are grounded are going to have to get more grounded. Stay focused on the process, the objectives, what is happening right in front of you. Ask the same questions. Tighten up on your teaching skills because the concepts are going to have to make sense in the here and now. No longer will they be blindly accepted because “That is how Toyota does it.”

 

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Values Checklists

I am in the process of going through a lot of old files and filling up recycle bins. Most of this stuff was collected back in first half of the 1990’s when the world wide web was just gaining critical mass, and a half day on Alta Vista, or the brand new search engine, Google, turned up new stuff all of the time. It disappeared just as fast, so the rule was “if you want it, copy it.”

A lot of this material comes from the TQM community. But what struck me enough to sit down for a minute and write about is checklists that include values like “respect for people,” “openness and honesty” and “teamwork.”

This was an era when companies were creating “values statements” and publishing them.

Many of them followed by trying to measure compliance with those values, putting them in performance management reviews, etc.

Of course since the mid 1990’s we know better. . . don’t we?

Values are tricky things. Certainly if a company is sincerely trying to change its culture, the values are going to have to shift. The question I have is not whether this is true, but whether writing them down and trying to enforce them is an effective way to go about it.

Consider how a company with a long, entrenched culture of conflict avoidance is going to transition itself into one which truly respects people?

In a conflict avoidance culture, the people who are truly open and honest tend to ruffle feathers and find themselves in the “out” crowd, isolated in the eddies, and often are never told why.

The people who have flourished in that culture now are saying they want to change it.

Let’s assume that the handful of people at the top – whose behavior has likely been rewarded by promotion throughout their careers and possibly even molded the rest of the organization, can even see that they have not been respectful of people.

If they truly want to change the values of the organization, the only way I can see for this to happen is if they, personally, are totally open and honest that (1) What they have been doing is holding the company back, and is disrespectful of people; (2) They intend to change it starting today; and (3) Ask for help and support from others around them to make a personal change.

If these things don’e happen, then it really doesn’t matter what they put on the wall or say they want everyone else to do.

This is a tough one. It is what Peter Senge calls “personal mastery” and what Jim Collins talks about in “Level 5 Leadership.”

Honestly, I don’t think it is a hard prerequisite for a fair degree of success. I know a few companies who have done pretty will without ever addressing this issue.

But I also know they are hitting the limits of what they can accomplish. As I am someone who sees things in terms of their potential I just wanted to take a couple of minutes and toss this one out there for everyone to think about while we (in the USA at least) stuff ourselves with turkey.

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Grassroots Innovation: The 3rd Way

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 a solution.

There is a great example of what Greg describes as “flight” starting in page 73 of John Shook’s book “Managing to Learn.”

Shook summarizes “The 3rd Way”:

. . . making good decisions required everyone’s complete commitment to dealing with harsh reality.

This produced yet another counter-intuitive aspect of A3 management: respect through conflict.

Organizations that confuse “nice-nice” with teamwork end up paralyzed and frozen in place the moment there is disagreement. No further intellectual growth appears, and they had better hope they are far enough ahead that their competitors won’t catch on.

I have already used more words talking about Greg’s post than he spent making it.

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Joe Friel’s Blog: Excellence

Joe Friel’s Blog: Excellence.

I’m a couple of months late picking this up (it was published in September, and reported by Greg Eisenbach with the observation that “nothing is listed about talent.” ). But I think it is relevant here because Joe Freil’s predictors of excellence in an athlete translate directly to business performance. Only the context is different.

Motivation – do you want it? The key words are:

This goes well beyond lip service to goals.

Yet, all too often in business, lip service goals are what we get. But organizations that are truly successful and it it for the long haul are motivated by something intrinsic, something more than the platitudes of “creating shareholder value” or other committee-created “vision statements.”

Discipline – a rare commodity in business. The discipline to understand the long-term vision and work incrementally to get there vs. chasing after the short-term gains is the first thing I think of. Even tougher is to demonstrate discipline when times are good. It is easy to hire like mad and sacrifice sustainable margins for short-term sales. It takes discipline to develop a long-term steady growth plan and stick to it.

Confidence – Although this is speculation on my part, I have developed a sense over the years that what we deem “management resistance to change” is actually a lack of confidence. Leaders, and the organization, are simply not capable of performing any better than they believe they can. When I really listen to the language of resistance, the things I hear most often are how “we are different” (or how the examples of excellence are different) in some way that justifies not doing any better than they are now. I have even seen this internally when one part of the company starts to out-perform the others. Even more incredible is the response to turn against the outlier and tear it down.

Focus – I am going to quote Joe Friel here, because I can’t think of a better way to say it.

This could also be called purpose; the athlete knows where he or she wants to go in the sport. Daily training is a purposeful activity that will lead to excellence. Each workout (and accompanying recovery) is a small building block that eventually results in excellence. But you have to take it one step at a time, which brings us to the last predictor, patience.

There are a number of analogies here. Purpose is the obvious one. “Daily training” to the athlete is the process of building, and sustaining, capability. At the pinnacle of “lean” are companies that look at everything they do as training to do it better the next time. They evaluate how they carry out their activities, and evaluate the results. They focus on excellence and, more importantly, they do it on purpose and with purpose.

When there are changes, there are recovery periods which are required for the organization to adjust. Unlike athletes, however, organizations are not limited by the physiology of the human body for adjustment. They can improve on it since their adjustment is mostly psychological and learning, not recovery of damaged tissue.

Patience – Our kaizen blitz culture has created an expectation of instant results. But the purpose of the kaizen event is practice – it is a workout so that people can get better at making improvements as part of their daily work. Impatience is a symptom of poor focus and lack of discipline.

Though this list is great, I want to add one more thing:

Accountability. This word, unfortunately, has a negative “blame and punishment” connotation today as in “hold them accountable.” But I don’t mean it in that way at all. When I say “accountability” I mean that people take personal, internal ownership of their own results. It is actually impossible to impose accountability on someone else. Rewards and punishments may influence behavior a little bit (though I think they just improve people’s skills at concealing things), but they have nothing at all to do with accountability.

You can see accountability when things have gone to hell in a handcart. One organization blames external forces beyond their control, and expects someone else to rescue them since “it wasn’t their fault.”

The accountable organization says “Obviously we need to improve more” and embraces their results, even if they were they were caused by events outside their control.

The difference is between an organization that chooses to be in control of its destiny vs. one which relies on luck, and entitlement to survive.

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A “Problems First” Culture

I will be the first to tell you that this is probably repetition of a fairly narrow theme you have seen here before. But I think of different ways to frame it, or get different thoughts, so I share them.

“Problems first” is one of the mantras used by Phil Jenkinson, the CEO character in The Lean Manager by Michael and Freddy Ballé. Now that I have had a few weeks to let it sink in and synthesize with my mental models, I am seeing a concept that is so fundamental I would think it would be hammered into students in every management and leadership course taught in the world.

Of course, though, it isn’t.

Instead it seems alien in most company cultures.

Yet without a “problems first” culture, the leaders really have no idea – none at all – what they should be focusing their attention on. How could they? They don’t know what their people are struggling with until it is too late. By that point, a small unresolved problem has grown to the point where it cannot possibly be ignored, and now it must be dealt with. Task teams are formed, initiatives are launched. Action item lists are made and presented every week, and after enormous expense and effort, the illusion of control is returned. And so many companies are run just like this.

I am pretty sure that anyone reading this knows exactly what this feels like. Let me call it a “hidden problems” culture for now. Maybe I will think of a better term later.

Enough about what it isn’t.

Ironically, a lot of companies in the pursuit of “being lean” actually go blindly through the motions of “problems first,” but so in a way that raises questions about their understanding of this concept.

Let’s look at a simple action item review at a staff meeting.

Typically it looks like this:

For each action, the responsible person reports on the status, whether or not it is “on time” (usually against an arbitrarily assigned due date), and any “problems.” The manager asks if any help is needed, and perhaps assigns more actions to someone else to assist.

One common management tool for these things is a “Stoplight Chart” where actions are assigned color codes of Green, Yellow, or Red, usually depending on progress against the deadline (how late they are).

Red items get the most attention in the meeting (as they should, more about that in a minute), but that attention is usually in the framework of review and reporting.

At the end of the meeting, the senior leader has a good feel for what is happening (or what is not happening).

Contrast this with a world-class automobile assembly line.

Just like the actions items, every task has a deadline. Only in this case, the timing is much tighter – measured in seconds, not days. The assembler knows that if he gets more than 3-4 seconds behind, for any reason at all, he cannot possibly catch up and complete the work cycle on time. He is going to be late.

He pulls the andon cord, to let the team leader know there is a problem.

Key Point: This is not a report of a problem. This is transfer of the problem. The assembler is responsible for carrying out the work as it is designed. If he can’t, for any reason, then exceptions are transferred to the team leader.

The team leader can deviate from the standard work sequence to complete the job, but not the timing. If he cannot clear the problem by the end of the takt cycle, that section of the line will stop, and the andon will go red.

This is not a report of a problem, this is transfer of the problem. The team leader is responsible for assuring the work can be completed within the takt time. If he can’t, for any reason, then exceptions are transferred to the supervisor.

The supervisor is now responsible for clearing the problem and getting things moving again. If he can’t, then within a few minutes, another section of the line will be stopped and the responsibility for clearing the problem transfers to the next level in the chain.

And so it continues.

Of course this increasing level of responsibility does not mean that the others walk away. They are clearly working very hard to get the problem cleared. But each level of escalation brings more resources to bear on the issue.

Note that I haven’t talked about root cause and problem solving yet. Although the escalation procedures are designed to help gain better understanding of the underlying cause, the first priority is to get the problem cleared so that production can resume without compromising safety or quality in any way.

There may be a temporary countermeasure put into place to do this – some short term action that, while it might introduce some extra resources into the process, allows safe, quality production to proceed long enough to get to the underlying cause. One test of understanding that cause can be to remove this temporary crutch and see what happens.

OK, back to the staff meeting.

What is different about that?

The main thing is that typically the problems are being reported, but not escalated. The responsible person may have to come with an action plan to clear the issue, but it is still Management by PowerPoint, and the senior leader’s role is approval vs. involvement. If the senior leader does become involved, it is often driven by a perception that the responsible person is incapable rather than a process of professional development.

What would this look like if it were managed exactly the same way as the assembly line?

What if that monthly review were treated the same as the fixed stop position?

A couple of ideas come to mind.

“Green” means “on track, as originally scheduled.”

“Yellow” means “behind, but we have a plan to get back to green.”

“Red” means behind, and we don’t know how we are going to recover.”

How would those meanings change the tenor of these meetings?

“Problems first” is more than just a discussion about problems. It is a culture that is focused on finding them, clearing them, and solving them, and doing so with the same priority that comes with production.

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An Exchange with Michael Ballé

Click image for Amazon.com listing

Background –
In my original comments on The Lean Manager, I compared The Lean Manager‘s story structure to that of Eli Goldratt’s classic The Goal.

This started a rather deep email exchange with Michael Ballé that goes far deeper into the book and the thoughts behind it than any review I could ever write.

With Michael’s permission, here is that exchange, with minor editing mostly for readability and flow.

My words are in blue.

Michael Ballé is in black.

Text [in brackets] are my additions to help context.

Michael:

Mark,

Here’s the acid test:
Would you agree that Jenkinson play a different role from Jonah [in “The Goal”] ?
(hint: he is the lean manager :))

Michael

Mark:

Michael –

Actually, no, I don’t think Jenkinson plays a dramatically different role than “Jonah.”

Perhaps if the story had been written from Jenkinson’s viewpoint, with insight into his thoughts and worries about Andy, rather than a third-person view of his actions and words, I would agree. Then it would be about Jenkinson AS a lean manager.

But what we have is Andy Ward’s experience of Jenkinson. Thus, I don’t get any particular insight into what Jenkinson is actually thinking about how to get his message across to Andy except in the moments when he shares his thinking in conversation with Andy.

For example, Jenkinson (and Amy and Bob) are driving the concept of the problem solving culture from the very beginning. But Andy isn’t “getting it” until late in the story.

What was Jenkinson’s internal response to Andy’s misguided approach? What mental PDCA did Jenkinson apply when he saw the right results being gained at the expense of the social structure in the plant?

Thus, this comes across as a story about Andy Ward learning through his interactions with Jenkinson (and Amy and Bob Wood), and his experiences in trying to apply what they were telling him, rather than a story about Jenkinson’s approach to leading and teaching.

So the story is (to me) much more about Andy *becoming* the lean manager than Jenkinson “being one.”

The real difference between Andy Ward’s experience and that of Alex Rogo (his counterpart from The Goal) is that Andy’s boss is participating directly in Andy’s success vs. just issuing an ultimatum. Thus, Jenkinson embraces the role of the teacher as well as the boss.

Yes – that is exactly the message – that “leading” in the TPS is teaching. But I think [The Lean Manager] is much more about Andy learning it than Jenkinson teaching it.

The characters of Amy and Bob Woods seem to be there to add credibility since a CEO really doesn’t have this amount of time to spend with a single plant manager in a large global company. But they are so well aligned with Jenkinson’s approach that they are surrogates for him.

Thus, Jenkinson is the “teacher” in a story about Andy’s insights and development as a leader.

THANKS for asking the question.
It really made me think.

Mark

Michael:

Good debate.

One of the writing issues we’ve had was that Freddy and one of his CEO friends felt Jenkinson was underdeveloped whereas Tom [the editor] and I felt he was already far too omnipresent compared to Andy Ward. The basic challenge for the book was to share the experience of what it feels like to be a plant manager stuck between the hammer (CEO) and the anvil (real life in the plant).

Jenkinson was conceived to be this Batman-like scary character. He is a teacher, but not a very good one. Basically, his one redeeming teaching feature is his patience, but, hey, the guy is a CEO. I’ve worked with several, and then I’ve spent most of my time working with the plant managers so its the latter’s pain I wanted to share. Having said that, all your points are correct, and indeed, Freddy would agree with you.

More seriously, and I hope I can convince you …that [Jenkinson’s character is not a “Jonah”] because it’s a fundamental point I’m trying to get across. As you say, the fact that Jenkinson is Andy’s boss makes it TOTALLY different from the Jonah situation. Obviously I didn’t manage to get this across well enough, but having to learn from someone who holds the sword over your head is a vastly different issue than having found a great teacher (I’d agree with Woods/Jonah), no matter how cantankerous.

This learning-from-boss issue has to be my top of the list reason why lean is spreading so slowly. So I’d argue that beyond literary devices (how many lean novel plots can there be?) this is indeed a core point of the book.

Where I’ve obviously not written this well enough is that Jenkinson IS teaching, but in a boss kind of way, which is a very different position. In particular, I’ve been very mindful (maybe even heavy handed) of the fundamental asymmetry between roles, and the whole issue of how to deal with a boss’ comments.

By the way, Jenkinson is also doing what he can with the people he’s got (can’t replace them all, right?) For instance, you’ll notice that he gets very different responses from each of his plant managers. Jenkinson’s modus operandi is to show a lean problem to the plant manager, draw a line in the sand about where he wants him next, and push him/support him to get there; As people are different, each plant takes a very different path to lean its operations and requires a different mix or arm-twisting and lecturing.

The reason we never get any direct “look” into what Jenkinson really thinks (although we do many other characters) is that I wanted to reproduce this “boss” aura – no one ever actually knows what the boss thinks. We’ve discussed this quite a bit at the time of the writing, and your comments are spot on so I’m really interested in your opinion.

[a follow-on note]

Jenkinson was actually built on what I saw my dad do when he was CEO (I was helping him at the time with expliciting the “System” – I’m a sociologist). So Jenkinson does five [six, actually] things:

1) He forces. At several points in the book, he tells people: that’s the way it’s going to be. In the German plant, in the French plant with the impromptu kaizen, with the strike, etc. Basically, he forces his managers to commit and/or do something right away IN FRONT OF THEIR TROOPS. This is a specific technique – and not an easy one.

2) He gets them to go further in their thinking. At several points, Jenkinson works with Andy to push his questioning further (not always explicitly “why?”, but it does happen. Freddy, who used to be feared because of 1), was surprisingly in the HOURS he spent doing just that. It’s equally terrifying when you’re on the receiving end because, at first, subordinates are fishing for the answer they think the CEO wants to hear, and not thinking – which makes for a lot of frustration both ways.

3) He forces people to work together, particularly when they don’t want to. Actually, Amy does this in Andy’s plant at first with the production plan issue, but Phil forces the Neville/Andy link, and later the Engineering teamwork.

4) Phil encourages “problems first” at several occasions, which is trying to tell his guys that they come to him with problems rather than let them fester, and that if he learns of the problem from someone else first, that’s bad.

5) He lectures – although this is against his own expressed principles – as he states in the car at the beginning of the book. Phil is not so enamored with the sound of his own voice as the author, but we’re still all human, right?

One more thing Jenkinson does on several occasion:

6) “Stay on target, stay on target” – Andy keeps being distracted by all sorts of things, internal politics, problems in his plant, etc. Jenkinson realigns him at almost every conversation 🙂

The two insights we have in Phil’s thinking are:
– when do I pull the plug (close the plant, fire the plant manager/regional manager/sales VP, etc.)
– dealing with the politics of senior management

In writing the [business novel] genre You’re stuck between expliciting the thinking (the lecturettes, love the word), and sharing the experience through an action scene. Then there are the limits of the author’s writing talent – I had to really sweat it before trying work within the plant as opposed to out of it (The Gold Mine), because trying to describe a working plant environment is something of a writing challenge.

Michael

Mark:

Michael –

A couple of questions –
Who is the “ideal reader” – the target audience – for “The Lean Manager?”

What are the explicit teaching points the story is intended to present to the reader? What does this ideal reader take away?

What should the target reader do differently after reading the story?

What aspect of the story gives him that insight?

Did you have those things in mind as you wrote it? Or did the emerge with the story development?

I see Andy as the central character of the story. It is he who undergoes the personal transformation, and the storyline revolves around his interaction with the other characters. As you intended, is a sympathetic character that many people the in the same position will identify with.

Thus the learning from the book is transmitted through Andy, based on his experiences.

I see Jenkinson as a (primary) supporting character, who in combination with the others, shapes Andy’s experience, and through that, shapes the reader’s experience. But in the end, he is mainly a teaching character.

Yes, he is also the boss and needs the results. He leads by example. He teaches “forcing teamwork” by doing it. He makes his intentions crystal clear, does not do hollow posturing, and can play the political resistance against itself. But to Andy, he is sensei.

A good student will be motivated by wanting to please the teacher. In this case, it is also an economic / career imperative, but in the end, it is about a motivated student.

The key points of what to teach certainly come out in the process, including the fact that Andy learns a few things the hard way in spite of being told (like the teamwork thing).

But overall, it seems to be about “How to be taught” by a true lean manager more than it is “how to teach like one.”

If the key point is to teach a senior executive HOW to be a “lean manager” then I guess I’d have written it from the teacher’s perspective rather than the student’s.

If I were a CEO or senior executive, I’d like to know what Jenkinson was thinking when Andy was getting bogged down in distractions. If the target audience for the story is a senior executive or CEO, then I would think the CEO character has to be the sympathetic character, with the frustrations and problems that these guys can relate to. Then they can see he isn’t “Batman” in a comic-book city, but he is dealing with the same problems they are.

John Shook made an attempt at that in “Managing to Learn” but the scenario was too limited to really create any dramatic “ah-ha” moments.

I think Dr. Bahri’s self-experience (Follow the Learner) was a unique perspective of learning-by-doing, but, again, the scenario is too limited for most people to see beyond a medical or dental practice.

So – after re-reading my own note above, and going back to your earlier note regarding your debate about Jenkinson’s character development vs. his “omnipresent” relationship with Andy
– I guess I’d say that:

With Andy as the point-of-view character, then Jenkinson’s development is appropriate.

But if Jenkinson is actually the title character, then I can see where Freddy and his CEO friend felt that he should be more developed. The difference is that, to get that development, the perspective of the story has to shift from Andy to Jenkinson as well. Then the “omnipresence” drops away as an issue because it is about Jenkinson teaching rather than Andy being taught.

One possible follow-on story could be this shift to the teacher’s perspective. Perhaps there is a new acquisition and Jenkinson assigns Andy to mentor the manager there through a turn-around as Andy’s next development assignment. Now Andy is the teacher, (with Amy’s help, or through the A3 process with Jenkinson), and we see the teacher’s perspective as he is trying to keep the student focused on the right things in spite of the noise and chaos that, perhaps, Jenkinson is throwing at it with his demands for performance.

Andy must simultaneously understand “the main problem” in the plant, and get his student to understand it without just telling him the answers. Maybe he sees the guy as a hopeless concrete head, and Jenkinson has to force him to be patient and stick with it.

What does a competent operations manager need to learn to be able to teach someone else? How does he learn it? What is the development process for that?

Then we would have a story of not only how to BE a lean manager, but how to teach one to teach another.

Thoughts?

Mark

Michael:

The books are about 1) teaching and 2) sharing an experience. It all flows from here – I never had a target audience in mind.

The Gold Mine was all about describing TPS from the point of view of a smart guy, who’s got the power to affect changes, but has got to learn all this stuff – that was Jenkinson then. The experience I tried to share then was “The Curse Of Knowledge”.

To Jenkinson most of TPS is new and counterintuitive and every time he’s picked something up, there’s more to it (and I still experience this fifteen years later), because you don’t know what you don’t know.

And for Bob Woods, the impossibility of expressing what you’ve figured out over years to someone, hence the annoyance and grumpiness (not “Jonah” 😉 ). Add Amy, who thinks she’s getting it because the tools make sense to her, but she doesn’t understand the wider business picture nor why older people have trouble thinking that way and you’ve got The Gold Mine. Now, the trick is in

1) sharing an experience and
2) conveying the concepts, so sometimes I get it right sometimes not.

Pat Lancaster of Lantech fame, made the same type of comment [about The Gold Mine] you did: “Why didn’t you write it from the plant manager’s perspective?” To convey the absolute panic of the moment you’re about to pull the plug on the MRP. The comment stuck, and eventually that became The Lean Manager.

The gimmick in [The Lean Manager] is that BOTH Jenkinson and Andy are “the lean manager” – Jenkinson is the closest I can make it to a lean boss outside Toyota (those I’ve known anyway) and Andy is learning that stuff – with the added twist of the asymmetry of relationship that defines authority relationships.

The Gold Mine was about TPS, and this one is about Toyota Way.

My overriding problem as a consultant on the shop floor when I talk to senior execs is: “Are we on the RIGHT problems?” The problem with consultants (me included) is that they seldom understand enough of the business to focus on the right things (not a problem to Toyota consultants with suppliers, because, well, auto is auto).

So I like the idea of Amy consulting with some company and getting them to fix the shop floor and yet having no results on the business because the real problem is in engineering – where she’s got everything to learn (enter Woods & Jenkinson). If I do that, definitely “teaching the stuff” becomes an issue (since this is my specific expertise, I’ve resisted going there so far not to pollute the message too much with my socio-techno stuff)

Will have to let this one simmer for a while.

In any case, the one main point of the entire book is that you can’t do lean to someone else, and you can’t have someone else to it for you – TPS is a line management method, and a problem solving attitude.

I strongly believe that this misunderstanding is at the root of the slow progress of lean – we keep preaching to the choir, but really it’s the hard nosed finance-driven managers we need to interest (more for the next book).

The only way I know how to fight on the field of ideas is by writing books and then getting them into people’s hands. So now that it’s out, I’d like to get it in the hands as as many people as I can to try and change the zeitgeist… Not my favourite activity!

Best,
Michael

I really wanted to share this exchange with you because it highlights a couple of the main problems that are encountered in any attempt to implement real change.

To quote again from Michael’s note:

“In any case, the one main point of the entire book is that you can’t do lean to someone else, and you can’t have someone else to it for you – TPS is a line management method, and a problem solving attitude.

I strongly believe that this misunderstanding is at the root of the slow progress of lean – we keep preaching to the choir, but really it’s the hard nosed finance-driven managers we need to interest.”

And, in the end, there it is.
Ironically, if you are even reading this, you already know it.

The Lean Manager is a success story, driven by the people who are actually responsible to deliver the results. While Michael and I may quibble about whether or not Phil Jenkinson is a “Jonah” character in the sense of The Goal is a discussion about literary structure rather than the core message here. What all of these books have in common is that it is the leaders who drive successful change.

The “slow progress of lean” comes in situations where the implementation is delegated to staff with the charter to “do it to someone else.” And, in my experience (having spent a painful amount of time as that staff), that situation is far more common out there.

I have more to go on this, but I am going to leave it for another day.

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The Lean Manager: Part 3 – People, Purpose, Problems, Process vs. “Systems”

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This is Part 3 of a multi-part review. Part 1 is here.

Before I get into it, I will break the rules of blogging and acknowledge a time gap here. I did finish the book shortly after I wrote part 2, in fact, I didn’t want to put it down. So now I am going back through and bringing out some key points, intermixed with some other stuff that has caught my interest lately. Anyway – back to what you came for…

Steve Spear has described the TPS as a “socio-technical system.” Put in less formidable terms, it is a system that uses the structure of the work, the work environment and the support systems (the technical part) to create an organizational culture of problem solving.

Jenkinson, Andy’s boss in the book, describes it:

“You need to organize a clear flow of problem solving, explained Jenkinson one more time. “Operators need to have a complete understanding of normal conditions, so that whenever there is a gap, they know it’s a problem. Go and see is not just for the top management, It’s for everybody. This means operators as well, in particular how they learn to see parts and see the equipment they use. How can all operators recognize they have a problem? [emphasis added]

The simple statement, and following question posed by Jenkinson sums up a great deal that is left out of lean implementations. I see it everywhere, and will be commenting on it more shortly.

We talk about “go and see” (or “genchi genbutsu“) as something leaders do. I think this is because traditional leaders aren’t naturally out in the work areas, on the shop floor, in the hangars, etc. We don’t think about the workers because they are there all of the time.

Yes, they are. But what do they see? Do they see disruptions and issues as things they are expected to somehow work around and deal with? Or do they see these things as something to call out, and fully participate in solving?

And if they do see a problem, what is the process for engaging it?

Just saying “you are empowered to fix the problem” does not make it so. When are they supposed to do it? Do they have the skills they need? How do you know? Is there a time-based process to escalate to another level if they get stuck? (Or do they just have to give up?)

And indeed, as the story in the book develops, Andy turns out to be taking a brute-force approach. He is directing staff to implement the tools and to solve problems. But in spite of nearly continuous admonitions from his boss and other experts, he is not checking how they are doing it. He has put a “get-r-done” operations manager into place, and while the guy is getting “results,” in the long haul it doesn’t work very well. Yes, they end making some improvements, but at the expense of alienating the work force.

It is only late in the story (and I won’t get into the details to avoid playing the spoiler to a pretty good plot twist) that Andy finally learns the importance of having a process that is deliberately designed to engage people.

Commentary – it is amazing to me just how much we (in the “lean community”) talk about engaging people, but never really work through the deliberate processes to do it. There are explicit processes for everything involving production, administration, etc. but somehow we expect “engaging people” to happen spontaneously just because we believe it is a good thing.

The message in this book is loud and clear. This is about leadership. The tools are important, yes, but only (in my opinion) because they are proven techniques that allow people to become engaged with the process.

But the tools alone do not require people to get engaged.

Permission to make input is necessary, but not sufficient. If you want people to be engaged, you have to deliberately engage them. Otherwise you are just asking them to become nameless cogs in “the system.”