Month: December 2011

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Once Again: What Doesn’t Work

The introduction of The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership covers ground that:

  1. Has been covered before – we know all of this.
  2. Needs to be covered again, because most people act as though we don’t know it.

Simply put, Liker and Convis (legitimately) feel the need, once again, to let us know the things which reliably fail when trying to build a sustaining culture of continuous improvement.

“So let’s train some Lean Six Sigma experts to grab the tools and start hacking away at the variability and waste that stretch out lead time; this will make us more successful, both for our customers and for our business. What could be simpler?”

What indeed.

I am, once again, reminded of a saying that “People will exhaust every easy thing that doesn’t work before they try something difficult that will.”

The authors cite some of the same things that we have heard before:

  • Trying to determine ROI for each individual process step, or each individual improvement, doesn’t work.
  • Trying to motivate the right behavior with metrics and rewards doesn’t work.
  • Trying to copy the mechanics doesn’t work.
  • Trying to benchmark, and copy, a “lean company” in your business doesn’t work.

Yet, even though we have been hearing these messages for at least a decade, actually longer, I continue to encounter managers who try to work this way.

The authors assert, and I agree, that this is the result of people trying to fit Toyota’s system into a traditionally taught management paradigm that is so strong people aren’t even aware that there is a paradigm, or can’t conceive there is anything else.

They are stuck inside their threshold of knowledge when the answer is beyond it.

This reminds me of the Edwin Abbot’s 1884 story of Flatland, a two-dimensional world populated by creatures who cannot conceive of “above” and “below” their planer existence.

Although his story is often read by students struggling to grasp models with four, five and more dimensions to them, it is really a story of social change and paradigms.

Our management systems are a “flatland” with Toyota’s system existing in a space that we have to work hard to grasp. We can see pieces of it where it touches ours, but like the creatures in Flatland who only see two dimensions of three dimensional objects, we only see the pieces of TPS that we can recognize.

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The Boundary of “We Don’t Know”

One of the graphics in Bill Costantino’s presentation really struck me, but my thought was out of context so I wanted to make a separate post about it.

It was the concept of the “current knowledge threshold” illustrated here:

current-knowledge-threshold

As I interpret it, the red line depicts the “we know how to do this” area. It is the domain where the team is comfortable working, they have a good grasp of cause and effect.

For problems which are outside the red line, the organization needs to engage in deliberate activity to gain understanding, to push the boundary of knowledge until the problem is enclosed by it. I tried to illustrate that process at the end of the original post.

Sadly, this doesn’t happen often enough.

Instead what happens is the organization develops a comfort zone inside the red line. Things that are outside the red line come labeled with “That doesn’t work here” and “We have reached the limit of what we can improve.”

Organizations, even sub-organizations within the same company that out-perform the baseline knowledge – who have cracked problems outside the red line – get dismissed as “no different” or “nothing special” or are attributed with special, unrepeatable, circumstances to account for their different performance. (I have seen this up close.)

If you are serious about kaizen, it is important to be operating right at the edge of the red line.

“What have we done today that, yesterday, we didn’t know how to do?”

“What will we try tomorrow that, today, we don’t know how to do?”

Those are questions that push learning.

By the way – if you are spending all of your time inside the red line, and solving the same problems again and again, your performance is likely flat lined. This is the “improvement plateau.” That is another topic for later.

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Leadership: Deal With The True Constraint

I am starting to read a review copy (courtesy of McGraw-Hill) of Jeff Liker and Gary Convis’ new book, The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership. (The hot link goes to my Amazon page.)

In the spirit of one-piece-flow, I am to share key thoughts as I go rather than save everything for a thousand word review at the end.

One of the first points that comes out – in the prologue no less – is the acknowledgement that people development is a constraint to growth that you ignore at your peril.

One of the results of Toyota’s breakneck pace of growth in the first half of the last decade was that they were still making North American decisions in Japan.

They were doing this because, in the authors’ words, “…Toyota did not develop enough leaders, or did not develop leaders that it trusted sufficiently, in the North American operation to allow decisions making and problem solving to be as close to the gemba as they should have been.”

But rather than say “we grew too fast,” the President, Akio Toyoda sees the limits and the relationship:

“The problem was that the pace of growth was faster than the pace of human resource development… It is not the growth pace itself, but it is the relationship between the pace of grown and the pace of [people development].”

When traditionally trained managers think about constraints to growth, they typically think about things they can buy. “People” as a constraint comes in only as a hiring problem.

But it takes time to develop “people” into a team that thinks and moves in unison. Today’s leaders, up to this point Toyota included, underestimate both the time and the effort it takes to do that.

Any good sports team knows what it takes to build a team. So does the military. We understand the science, the psychology. But perhaps because it is difficult and sometimes messy to deal with people (and it is certainly impossible to reduce the effect of good teamwork to a stoplight report and a spreadsheet), “people development” gets delegated to HR, or people are sent to classroom training and given “certifications.” Doesn’t work, never has.

Akio Toyoda was acknowledging an uncomfortable truth – that they had fallen behind on people development and they had continued anyway, without pulling the metaphorical andon and addressing the issue as soon as it came up.

This simple insight hits at the very core of what we, as a community, need to address, and what the flag-bearing institutions in our community still need to fully embrace.

“Continuous Improvement” means “continuously improving people.”

While just about every “lean overview” I have ever seen uses some form of lip service to the concept of “people based system” everything then goes straight into describing the technical characteristics of everything but how people are developed.

What I like is that in the last couple of years the mainstream books are starting to address this topic in a meaningful way. This, of course, isn’t the first of Jeff Liker’s books to hit here. And Toyota Kata is really the first to address the mechanics of people development as thoroughly as we have addressed the mechanics of kanban.

I am liking what I am reading in this book so far, and I’ll be working to correlate what I read with other works out there plus my own experiences. This should also tie in nicely with points I want to continue to make on Bill Constintino’s presentation.

Stay tuned.