I was in a conversation today and we ended up boiling 5S down to three key points: You have everything you need. You need everything you have. You can see everything clearly belongs where it is. Of course at the next level, these statements are the standards you are continuously checking against. Presumably we have [...]
The term “continuous improvement” has been around a long time. The truth is most companies don’t do continuous improvement at all, rather they schedule improvements in batches and projects. The effect of batch improvements is that “improvement” is not “business as usual” and people learn what they do every day, not what they do intermittently. [...]
Tommy raised an interesting question in his comment to Internalizing Outside Knowledge. He said: In my company we are working with the developing people concept. Our objective is to make ourselves redundant, but it is hard. What are the best ways of developing people? How do you do it? How do you do it indeed? [...]
“3P” is not a Toyota term. The workshop structure was taught by Shingijutsu and is now being propagated by people who learned it while working in their client companies. The most visible characteristic of 3P, the Production Preparation Process, is the idea of creating quick and dirty mock-ups of the product and the process. These [...]
Mike Rother forwarded this link to an article by Bruce Hamilton in Quality Digest with the observation that “the lean ship may be turning.” The key point is that people learn what they practice. And if you practice kaizen every day, you learn kaizen. But if you practice something else every day, you learn that. [...]
A key point of Mike Rother’s book Toyota Kata is that the organization develops a very deep core-competency in problem solving. In order to develop competency at anything, there must first be a standard to strive for. What I am realizing is the precise method used doesn’t matter nearly as much as having a method [...]
What is the role of your lean facilitator? This question comes up now and again, was recently posed on the LEI forums by someone looking for help with a job description. I extrapolated from his question that he was looking to the job description as a line of defense against dilution of the facilitator’s focus [...]
This sketchcast from Dan Pink covers the same ground as his TED talk that I posted a few weeks ago, but it is more succinct and direct so I wanted to share it. When we look at what drives kaizen and continuous improvement, it is important to understand what motivates people to find a better [...]
27 months ago I wrote a piece about a “ firefighting culture” where I described the actual process used to fight fires – following PDCA. I have learned a few things since then, and I want to tighten my analogy a bit. What is the core thinking behind true firefighting? This is actually closer to [...]
Here is an “ah-ha” or even one of those “oh s#!&” moments I had as Mike Rother was talking about his Toyota Kata research last week. Solution How Solution is Developed Toyota / “Lean” Left Open Very specific – guided and directed. Traditional Management Given / Directed Not specified, left to “empowered” employee. When [...]