Perfection is the enemy of progress.
- The longer it takes, the higher the expectation.
- The higher the expectation, the longer it takes.
My thoughts: I’ve seen this a lot. It is magnified when the leaders are detached from the process.
Process improvement is messy, and if the leaders aren’t comfortable with that messy process, they develop unrealistic expectations of what “progress” looks like.
The people getting the work done, meanwhile, end up working hard to manage those expectations. They actually conceal problems from the boss, for fear of him misinterpreting problems-that-must-be-solved with my-people-don’t-know-what-to-do.*
Trying to layer Toyota Kata over the wrong organizational structure will overwhelm people.
The organizational structure follows necessity. This lines up with Steven Spear’s research.
The organizational structure must match the needs of the process, and the target condition for learning.
If your supervisor has 20 direct reports, it is unlikely he will have the time to work on improvement in a productive way. Toyota’s team leader structure is specifically engineered for improvement, development, and getting a car off the line every 58 seconds.
Improvement takes time and people.
The End.
This isn’t free, nor can you calculate an ROI ahead of time. Get over it.
Start with what you MUST accomplish and look at what is required to get there. It doesn’t work the other way around.
If you don’t continually strive, you die.
If you aren’t striving to go forward, you are going backward.
My thoughts: I make the following analogy: Continuous improvement is like a freezer. There is never a time when you can say “OK, it’s cold enough, I can unplug it now.” You must keep striving to improve. Without the continuous addition of intellectual energy, entropy takes over, and you won’t like the equilibrium point.
All of our failures have come to good things.
My thoughts: By deliberately reflecting and deliberately asking “What did we learn?” you can extract value from any experience. The way I put it is “You have already paid the tuition. You might as well get the education.”
We had sponsorship challenges as the leaders caught up with the people.
My thoughts: Yet another instance of the leaders falling behind the capability of their people. When the people become clear about what must be done, and just start doing it, the only thing an uninformed leader can do is either get out of the way or destructively interfere.
People don’t like uncertainty. Kata deliberately creates uncertainty to drive learning. You have to be OK with that.
My thoughts: Another expression of the same point from yesterday.
“Learning only” has a short shelf life.
“Cool and Interesting” is not equal to Relevant.
Those are the words I wrote down, rather than the words I heard. The key point is that you can, for a very short time, select processes to improve based on the learning opportunities alone. But this is extra work for people. The sooner you can make the results important the quicker people get on board.
A business crisis should not stop improvement or coaching. Does it?
My thoughts: This is a good acid test of how well you have embedded. When a crisis comes up, do people use PDCA to solve the problem, or do they drop “this improvement stuff” because they “don’t have time for it.” ?
Inexperienced 2nd coaches coaching inexperienced coaches coaching inexperienced learners… doesn’t work.
A lot of companies try to do this in the interest of going faster. Don’t outrun your headlights. You can only go as fast as you can. Get help from someone experienced.
Just because you have gone a long way doesn’t mean you can’t slip back. You must continue to strive.
The “unplug the freezer” analogy applies here as well.
You don’t have to start doing this. But if you choose to start, you may not stop. You have to do it every day.
Don’t take this on as a casual commitment, and don’t think you can delegate getting your people “fixed.” (they aren’t broken)
Everybody gets it at the same level. Senior managers tend to lose it faster because there is no commitment to practice it every day at their level.
Awareness is a starting point, but not good enough. A 4 hour orientation, however, is not enough to make you an expert… any more than you can skim “Calculus and Analytic Geometry” and learn the subject.
Results do get attention.
“I’ll have what she’s having”
But don’t confuse results with method.
My challenges to the plant managers weren’t about P&L or service levels. They were about moving closer to 1:1 flow, immediate delivery, on demand.
Challenges must be in operational terms, not financial terms.
Move from “These are the measures, and oh by the way, here is the operational pattern” – to –> “This is the operational pattern I am striving for. and I predict it will deliver the performance we need.”
Gotta catch a plane. More later.
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*When I was in the Army, we got a new Battalion Commander who listened to the logistics radio net, where the staff officers discussed all of the issues and problems that had to be solved. He would jump to a conclusion, and issue orders that, if carried out, would interfere with getting those problems solved.
Although he spoke of initiative and taking action, his actions revealed he wasn’t willing to trust us to let him know if there was a problem we couldn’t handle, and expected perfection in execution in situations that were chaotic and ambiguous.
We ended up finding an unused frequency, and encrypting our traffic with a key that only we shared, so the commander couldn’t hear us. Yup… we were using crypto gear, designed to keep the Soviets from hearing us, to keep our boss from hearing us.
As the information channels to him slowly choked off, he was less and less informed about what was actually happening, and his orders became more and more counter-productive, which in turn drove people to hide even more from him.
This, I think, is a working example of “getting bucked off the horse.”