Category: Consistency

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Active Control

Imagine you are driving an automobile with a high-performance suspension. You are on a perfectly straight stretch of road, with smooth pavement. Get yourself up to, say, 65 miles per hour (100 km/h). Got it pointed down the middle of the road?

OK, close your eyes, let go of the steering wheel and wait. (Actually closing your eyes is optional.)

Can you predict what will happen, more likely sooner than later?

It doesn’t matter how “stable” your car is.

There are small, random things that are eventually going to cause your car to drift away from the centerline and off the road, into the ditch on one side, or over the cliff on the other. (Didn’t I mention those?)

I often see people set up a well performing process and treat it the same way – as though it will continue to work the same way forever, without any intervention.

But your process is going to encounter random chatter, and when it does, what typically happens?

In most cases, the team members can find a way to work around the issue, and likely continue to get things done, though they will have added a bit of friction, requiring a bit more effort, to do so. They will add a redundant check to make sure no mistake got made. They will add some inventory under the work bench, in case something runs out. They will carry the product over to the other machine because the one they are supposed to use isn’t working as it should be.

They will clean up the spilled coolant, catch the leaking oil.

They will head up-line to borrow a team member’s grease bucket.

They’ll tap out paint clogged or unthreaded holes, cut wires that are delivered too long to length, even drill new holes to mount the part that doesn’t fit.

In the office, they get one more signature, send an email to back-up the “unreliable” ERP messages, and make screen prints so they can enter the data into another system.

“Waste is often disguised as useful work.”

All of this easily goes unnoticed, and eventually (maybe) the process becomes cumbersome enough that someone decides to address it with an improvement activity. And the cycle starts again.

How do we stop the cycle?

The point of intervention is in the last paragraph… “All of this goes unnoticed.”

It isn’t a matter of standing and watching for problems. Sakichi Toyoda figured that out almost 100 years ago. It is about designing your process to detect anomalies in either execution (how it is done, how long it takes) or results immediately, signal, and trigger some kind of response.

Here are some fundamental questions to ask yourself:

Before the process even begins, does the team member have everything he needs to succeed? How does he know? I’m talking about parts, information, tools, air pressure, assistance… whatever you know is needed to get the job done.

If the team member doesn’t have everything needed exactly what do you want him to do?

Is the team member carrying out the process in a way that gets the desired result? How does she know? Is there a sequence of steps that you know will give her the result you want? What alerts her if one of them is skipped?

If the team member, for whatever reason, isn’t able to carry out those steps in sequence, exactly what do you want her to do? Go find a grease bucket? Or let you know?

How long do you want to allow your team member to try to fix something or make it work before letting you know there is a problem? Related to this – how far behind can you allow him to get before he can’t catch up, even with help?

Once the team member has completed the process, how does he know the result is what was expected? If the team member doesn’t have a way to positively verify a good outcome, who does detect the problem, when, where and how? It might be your customer!

An Active Control System

Even if you have all of those checks in place, however, you still need to answer a few more questions starting with “Once the team member detects a problem, what do you what exactly do you want them to do?”

I alluded a little to this above, but let’s go a bit deeper.andon-pull

On a production line, a typical way for a team member to signal a problem is with some kind of andon. This might, for example, take the form of a rope along the line that the team member can pull in order to trigger a signal of some kind.

But that is the easy part. Lots of factories have copied the mechanics of Toyota’s andon only to see them fall into disuse following a period of cynicism.

The hard part is what is supposed to happen next?

Now we are back to the original questions because the andon is nothing more than a trigger for another process.

Who is the designated first responder? (Remember, if it is everybody’s problem, it is nobody’s problem.) Does that person know who he is?

What is the standard for the response? What is the first responder supposed to do, and how long does she have to do it?

When we had takt times on the order of dozens of minutes, our standard for the first response making face-to-face contact with the team member who signaled was 30 seconds.

How much intervention can the first responder make before being required to escalate the problem to the next level?

As a minimum

As a minimum, the first responder’s primary goal is to restore the normal pattern of work. This might be as simple as pitching in and helping because something minor tripped up the team member’s timing.

This is active control – a system or process that detects something going outside the established parameters, and applying an adjustment to get it back. Active control requires a process to detect abnormalities, a trigger, and a response that restores things. It is no different than maintaining thickness in a rolling operation – the machine measures the output, and adjusts the pressure accordingly – or an autopilot that keeps an airplane on course.

Without some kind of active control system, your process will erode over time as the team members do the only things they can do in an effort to keep things moving: They can overproduce and build inventory to compensate, they can add extra process steps, they can add just about any of the things we call “waste.”

The only question is what do you want them to do?

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Applying 5S to Processes

The idea that “you always start with 5S”, for better or worse, has been deeply ingrained in the “lean culture” since the late 1980’s. A lot of companies start their improvement efforts by launching a big 5S campaign.

Often, however, these 5S efforts are focused on striving for an audit score rather than focusing on a tangible operational objective.

It is, though, very possible to help bridge the gap by putting the process improvement in 5S terms. By using a language the team already understands, and building an analogy, I have taken a few teams through a level of insight.

For example –

We are trying to develop a consistent and stable work process.

Sort

Rather than introduce something totally new, we looked at the process steps and identified those that were truly necessary to advance the work – the necessary. The team then worked to avoid doing as many of the unnecessary steps as possible. In their version of 5S, this mapped well to “Sort.”

Now we know the necessary content of the work that must be done.

Set in Order

Once they knew what steps they needed to perform, it was then a matter of working out the best sequence to perform them. “Set in order.”

Now we’ve got a standard work sequence.

Sweep or Shine

The next S is typically translated as something like “Sweep” or “Shine” and interpreted as having a process to continuously check, and restore the intended 5S condition.

Here is where a lot of pure 5S efforts stall, and become “shop cleanup” times at the end of the shift, for example. And it is where supervisors become frustrated that team members “don’t clean up after themselves or “won’t work to the standard.”

In the case of process, this means having enough visual controls in place to guide the work content and sequence, and ideally you can tell if the actual work matches the intended work. A deviation from the intended process is the same as something being “out of place.” Then, analogous to cleaning up the mess, you restore the intended pattern of work.

One powerful indicator is how long the task takes. Knowing the planned cycle time, and pacing the job somehow tells you very quickly if the work isn’t proceeding according to plan. This is one of the reasons a moving assembly line is so effective at spotting problems.

Now we have work content, sequence and maybe timing, or at the very least a way to check if the work is progressing as intended. Plan, Do and Check.

I believe it is difficult or impossible to get past this point unless your cleanup or correction activities become diagnostic.

Standardize

The 4th S is typically “Standardize”

Interesting that it comes fourth. After all, haven’t we already defined a standard?

Kind of. But a “standard” in our world is different. It isn’t a static definition that you audit to. Rather, it is what you are striving to achieve.

Now, rather than simply correcting the situation, you are getting to the root cause of WHY the mess, or the process deviation happened.

In pure 5S terms, you start asking “How did this unintended stuff show up here?”

The most extreme example I can recall was during a visit to an aerospace machine shop in Korea many, many years ago. The floors were spotless. As we were walking with the plant manager, he suddenly took several strides ahead of us, bent down, and picked up….. a chip.

One tiny chip of aluminum.

He started looking around to try to see if he could tell how it got there.

They didn’t do daily cleanup, because every time a chip landed on the floor, they sought to understand what about their chip containment had failed.

Think about that 15 or 20 minutes a day, adding up to over an hour per week, per employee, doing routine cleanup.

If you see a departure from the intended work sequence, you want to understand why it happened. What compelled the team member to do something else?

Likely there was something about what had to be done that was not completely understood. Or, in the case of many companies, the supervisor, for his own reasons, directed some other work content or sequence.

That is actually OK when the circumstances demand it, but the moment the specified process is overridden, the person who did the override now OWNS getting the normal pattern restored. What doesn’t work is making an ad-hoc decision, and not acknowledging that this was an exception.

Once you are actively seeking to understand the reasons behind departure from your specification, and actively dealing with the causes of those departures, then, and only then, are you standardizing. Until that point, you are making lists of what you would like people to do.

This is the “Act” in Plan-Do-Check-Act.

Self Discipline or Sustaining

One thing I find interesting is that early stuff out of Toyota talks about four S. They didn’t explicitly call out discipline or sustaining. If you think about it, there isn’t any need if you are actively seeking to understand, and addressing, causes in the previous step.

The discipline, then, isn’t about the worker’s discipline. It is about management and leadership discipline to stick with their own standards, and use them as a baseline for their own self-development and learning more about how things really work where the work is done.

That is when the big mirror drops out of the ceiling to let them know who is responsible for how the shop actually runs.

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“True North” – Explicit or Intrinsic?

compassOne of the factors common to organizations that maintain a continuous improvement culture is leadership alignment on an overall direction for improvement – a “True North” – that defines the perfection you are striving for.

Steve Spear describes Toyota’s “Ideal” as:

An activity or a system of activities is IDEAL if it always produces and delivers:

(a) defect-free responses (those that meet the customer’s expectations),

(b) on-demand (only when triggered by the customer’s request),

(c) in batches of one,

(d) with immediate response times,

(e) without waste, and

(f) with physical, emotional, and professional safety for the supplier.

(From The Toyota Production System: An Example of Managing Complex Social / Technical Systems, Steven Spear’s PhD dissertation, 1999, Harvard University)

You (and I) can quibble about some of the semantics, but overall, this is a pretty good list.

Mike Rother (not coincidently, I am sure) puts up something quite similar in Toyota Kata:

…Toyota has for several decades been pursuing a long-term vision that consists of:

  • Zero defects
  • 100% value added
  • One-piece-flow, in sequence, on demand
  • Security for people

Toyota sees this particular ideal-state condition – if it were achieved through an entire value stream – as the way of manufacturing with the highest quality, at the lowest cost, with the shortest lead time. In recent years, Toyota began referring to this as its “true north” for production.

As I have tried to emphasize the importance of a leadership team having a clear sense of “True North” I have noticed that many of them get bogged down in trying to develop and articulate a concrete statement. (This is partly my fault, and I am revising my training materials to reflect what I am writing here.)

What I am realizing is that this is more of an “attractor” than a rule set. Let me explain through a bit of digression.

When we see something, we have an immediate emotional response. Generally it is attraction toward something we see as good (or are curious about); or avoidance of something we see as fearful or dangerous.

We construct a logical reason for that emotional reaction several tenths of a second after that emotional reaction is firmly anchored. Thus, our logic follows, rather than driving, our responses to things. This happens so fast that we are not usually aware, but two people seeing the same thing can respond very differently based on their individual background and experience. I don’t want to dive too deeply into psychology here, so I’ll pull back out of this.

“True North” sets the direction of process improvement because there is high alignment on what kinds of process changes are attractive vs. those which should be avoided. When I say “attractive” I mean “we want to actively move toward them” meaning the organization will expend energy, ingenuity, and resources to do so. This is how continuous improvement is driven.

If I am right, then “True North” is more of an “I know it when I see it” kind of thing than it is a carefully articulated statement.

If I look at other businesses who are (or have been) pretty well aligned with their efforts, I can see the same kind of thing.

For example, though I doubt that it is articulated internally in this way, it has been pretty clear to me “Windows Everywhere” has been something that sets (or set) overall direction within Microsoft. (I’ll admit I don’t have as strong a sense of this as I did in the late 1990’s when my social circles included a number of people who worked there.)

A local hospital does articulate theirs, but it also makes sense: “No wait, no harm.”

Most organizations I have dealt with, though, don’t have a good sense of long-range perfection. They are mired in the details of today, tomorrow, this quarter.

They might have some kind of “vision” or “mission” statement, but often those are paragraphs that are carefully constructed to address constituencies (“Satisfying our customers while delivering maximum shareholder value and being a great place to work, blah, blah”)

Those “visions” though are rarely actively used to guide conversations or decisions, much less continuous improvement.

Since I believe this is a gap these teams need to close if they are to shift toward a continuous improvement culture, I need to improve how I am getting this across to them.

So… the next thing I am going to try is to rework my “True North” instruction and do a better job of framing it as something to actively move toward rather than something to try to logically articulate.

“True North” may be more of a feeling rather than a logical test.

This means that the job of the teacher / practitioner / change agent is to hold on to that “True North” during your coaching until the leaner “gets it” and starts actively seeking solutions that move in that direction.

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Some PDCA Cycles

We had five sequential operations. Although the lowest repeatable times for each were well within the planned / target cycle time, there was a lot of variation.

Though Operation 3 was working pretty continuously, Operations 4 and 5 (downstream) were getting starved on occasion, and the empty “bubble” was working its way to the output. The exit cycles, therefore, were irregular enough that they weren’t making rate.

The team set their target to stabilize Operation 3, with the expectation that doing so would smooth out the overall exit cycles.

To that end, they went back and started to study Operation 3 in a little more detail to better understand the obstacles that were impacting the Team Member’s ability to complete the work smoothly.

Then a wrinkle – a different team member was now doing the work, and his cycles were faster.

This actually was an opportunity. Why is one Team Member faster than another?

Their hypothesis was that the faster Team Member had some knack or technique, that enabled him to perform more consistently. And indeed, he did have a few tricks.

So the first experiment was to capture this work cycle in a Job Breakdown, then see if using Job Instruction and teaching it to the first Team Member they could duplicate the results of the second.

Then another wrinkle. The first team member was back on the job. Armed with the knowledge gained by breaking down the steps, key points and reasons for Team Member #2, they took more baseline data from Team Member #1 to set up their experiment.

…only to discover that Team Member #1 was also doing things that #2 didn’t do.

One of those things was unbending a part that was sometimes being bent by an upstream operation.

It seems that #2 was just passing those along as he got them. With that background, the conversation went something like this:

“What obstacle are you addressing?”

“The manual rework in Operation 3 is adding variation and extending his cycles.”

“What experiment are you running next?”

“We think the jig being used in Operation 1 is a bit undersize, allowing the part to deform. We are going to adjust the jig to the proper size.”

“What do you expect from that?”

“We expect to eliminate bent and deflected parts, and see more consistency in Operation #3’s cycles.”

Then they tried it. Skipping ahead a bit:

“What actually happened?”

“The parts are now more consistent, and there Operation #3 has a lot less variation, and is running closer to the planned cycle time… except that now he is waiting on parts from the upstream operation.”

“Huh. What is happening there? What did you just learn?”

“Well, it looks like Operation #3’s variation was masking inconsistent delivery from Operation #2. That team member is operating in small batches, then turning and delivering 3-5 parts at a time. When there was a lot of variation in Op #3, those parts were kind of buffering everything. Now he is working more consistently and faster, and ends up waiting on parts.”

“Because of the layout, the Operation #2 Team Member has to turn to his left and pass the parts behind him. He said he batches so he doesn’t have to turn so often. So what we are thinking is we want to…”

“Hang on, I want to stick to the structure so you guys can practice hearing and responding to it… So – what is your next step?”

“We talked to the team members, and they all agree that if we straighten out that bend in the layout, this will be a lot easier on them, so we are going to do that during the lunch break.”

“And what do you expect from that?”

“Operation #3 will get his parts one-by-one, as they are ready, and won’t have to wait on them.

“Great, so when can we see what you have learned?”

“Give us about 30 minutes after lunch break is over.”

You can probably surmise that things smoothed out a bit.

Then they went back to capturing a hybrid of the best practices of both operators in a job breakdown. At this point, the Team Members were genuinely interested in how they were doing, and both were quite open to learning the “tricks” of the other, so “Get the worker interested in learning the job” had pretty much been done.

A lot was learned over a few hours.

Reflection:

The “real world” is often quite a bit messier than the real world. There was actually a lot more dialog than I reconstructed here to keep the “learners” on track and focused on their stated target vs. resorting to an action of “improvements.”

In addition, merely beginning to work on one obstacle revealed enough information that they were dealing with a different underlying problem.

At another point in the week, they also believed they saw a need for more consistent part presentation. I happened to agree with them, but…

when pressed for what result they expected, the initial response was “The parts will be consistently presented.”… but what does that have to do with your target?

That was tough because, at the time, they were looking at the cycles of the 2nd operator that were, actually, pretty consistent, and lost sight of the fact that they were working on reducing the overall variation of output from that position.

They had a very hard time articulating why consistent part presentation would address the issue, even though they knew it should.

I think this is the result of years of conditioning that the “tools” – such as consistent part presentation – are good for their own sake, without really examining the underlying problems and causes that are being addressed.

If we lean practitioners are scratching our heads wondering why people don’t see this stuff helps, it would be a lot easier to deal with if we could point to the issue being addressed at the moment.

More tomorrow.

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High-Speed Automation

While we lean practitioners seem to have earned a reputation of distain for high-speed automation, industries like mass production consumables, and the food and beverage industry, would not be viable without that approach.

These plants are capital intensive, and the main focus of the people is to keep the equipment running. I hinted at some of these things a couple of years ago from the Czech Republic.

Here are some more recent thoughts.

 

Even though it is about equipment, it is still about people.

This is not a paradox at all. People are the ones who are getting cranky equipment to run, scurrying about clearing jams, clearing product that got mangled. Until you have a “lights out” plant, people are critical to keeping things running.

Robust problem solving and improvement skills are more critical.

In a purely manual world, you can get away with burying issues under more people and more inventory.

With interconnected automated equipment, not so much. The hardware has to run. It all has to run or there is no output.

How the organization responds to a technical problem makes the difference between quickly clearing the issue, or struggling with it for a couple of hours while everything else backs up.

This is where standard processes are critical, not only to short-term success, but also to capture new information as it is learned. This is the “chatter as signal” issue I have written about a couple of times.

Quoting from the above link:

Most organizations accept that they cannot possibly think of everything, that some degree of chatter is going to occur, and that people on the spot are paid to deal with it. That is, after all, their job. And the ones that are good at dealing with it are usually the ones who are spotlighted as the star performers.

The underlying assumptions here are:

  • Our processes and systems are complex.
  • We can’t possibly think of and plan for anything that might go wrong.
  • It is not realistic to expect perfection.
  • “Chatter is noise” and an inevitable part of the way things are in our business.

Those underlying assumptions say “Our equipment is complicated and difficult to get adjusted. All we can do is try stuff until it runs.”

That assumption actually lets people off the hook of actually understanding the nuances of the equipment; as well as letting them off the hook of a disciplined approach to troubleshooting. The assumption essentially says “We can’t do anything about it.”

A dark side of this designed ignorance is that the only thing leaders are really able to do is hover about and apply psychological pressure to “do something” or, at best, contribute to the noise of “things to try.”

Neither of those is particularly helpful for an operator who is trying to get the machine running. Both of those actually have a built-in implication that the operator (1) Does not know how to do his job or (2) Is somehow withholding his expertise from the situation.

But we get a different result from the alternative assumptions:

On the other hand, the organizations that are pulling further and further ahead take a different view.

Their underlying assumptions start out the same, then take a significant turn.

  • Our processes and systems are complex.
  • We can’t possibly think of and plan for anything that might go wrong.
  • But we believe perfection is possible.
  • “Chatter is signal” and it tells us where we need to address something we missed.

What does this look like in practice?

A known starting condition for all settings, that is verified.

A fixed troubleshooting checklist for common problems (that starts with “Verify the correct initial settings).

What things should be verified, in what sequence? (Understand the dependencies).

If a check reveals an issue, what immediate corrective action should be taken?

I would also strongly recommend using the format of a Job Breakdown (from TWI Job Instruction) for all of this. It is much easier to teach, but more importantly, it really forces you to think things through.

Of course, the checklist is unlikely to cover everything, at least at first. But it does establish a common baseline, and documents the limit of your knowledge.

The end of the operator checklist then defines the escalation point – when the operator must involve the next level of help.

It takes robust problem solving skills (and willingness to take the time to use them) to develop these processes; but doing so can save a mountain of time that pays back many times over.

The alternative is taking the time to mess with things until it sort of works, and never really understanding what was done or what had an effect – every single time there is an issue.

Cry once, or cry every day.

What does this have to do with improvement?

The obvious answer is that, if done well, it will save time.

The more subtle effect is that it sharpens the organization’s knowledge base, as well as their ability to really understand the nuances of the equipment. But this must be done on purpose. It isn’t going to happen on its own.

By getting things up and running sooner; and reducing the time of stoppages; it increases equipment capacity.

But more importantly, all of this increases people capacity.

It gives people time to think about the next  level of problems rather than being constantly focused on simply surviving the workday. Of course you need the right organizational and leadership structure to support that.

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Visual Key Points

(Apologies for this post being “Password Protected” – I posted it from my smart phone, and obviously need to mistake-proof  something in the interface.) – MR

A key element of TWI Job Instruction is breaking down the job into important steps, key points, and reasons why.

An important step advances the work.
A key point is a critical aspect of the work that would:

  • injure the worker (or anyone else).
  • make or break the job.
  • make the job easier to do (a knack or technique that an experienced operator knows).

If it is worth making a key point over, it is worth putting a visual cue in the workplace.

If the key point is about something that would injure the worker, or make or break the job, you have a rich opportunity for mistake proofing.

In other words, a key point is something you are asking the team member to remember.

Help him out by reminding him or even better, engineering the work so that he doesn’t have to remember.

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5S With Purpose

The team was driving toward a consistently executed changeover process as a target condition.

In the last iteration, the process was disrupted by a scrapped first-run part. The initial level cause was an oversize bit in the NC router resulting in an out-of-spec trim and oversize holes.

This occurred in spite of the fact that there are standard tools that are supposed to be in standard locations in the tool holders on the back of the work pallet.

Upon investigation, the team found:

  • The previous part had a programming error calling out the oversize tool from the wrong location.
  • All of the operators were aware of this, and routinely replaced the “standard” tool with the one the program required.
  • After that part was run, the standard condition had not been restored.
  • There was likely a break in continuity between operators here, but that was less clear.
  • The two bits are only 1/8 different, and hard to distinguish from one another across the 10 feet or so of the work pallet.

The team addressed the programming error, but among the thousands of other programs out there, they were reasonably certain that there were other cases where the same situation could be set up.

They wanted to ensure that it was very clear when there were non-standard tools in the standard locations.

Their initial approach was to create a large chart that called out which tools were to be in which holders. Their next experiment was to be to put that chart up in the work area.

 

“What do you expect to happen?”

That turned out to be a very powerful question. After a bit of questioning, they implied that the operator was to verify that the correct tools were in the standard positions before proceeding.

“How does this chart help them do that?”

They can see what the standard is.

“Don’t they all already know what the standard is?”

Yes…..

“So how does this chart help them do that?”

Now, to be clear, the conversation was not quite this scripted, but you are getting the idea. The point was to get them to be specific about what they expected the operator to do, and to be specific about how they expected their countermeasure to help the operator do it.

One team member offered up that maybe they could color-code the standard tools and their holders so it would be easy to check and easy to see if something was off-standard. That way, even IF the situation came up where the operator needed to deviate from the standard, anyone could easily see what was happening.

(I should add that they have already put an escalation process into place that should trap, and correct, these programming errors as they come up as well.)

The tools were color-coded over night, and in place the next day.

Color coded tool holders.

This wasn’t a “5S campaign,” nor is there an audit sheet that tries to measure the “level” of visual control in the work space.

Rather, this is using a visual control to visually control something, and reduce the likelihood of another scrapped part (and therefore, disrupted changeover).

Over the last week, the work cell has been improving. When things are flowing as they are supposed to, changeovers are routinely being done within the expected time.

But there are times when their standard WIP goes low; there are times when someone gets called away; when the flow doesn’t go as planned. When those things happen, they get off their standard.

The next countermeasure is to document, clearly, the normal pattern for who works where, for what inventory is where. Then the next question is “How can anyone verify, at a glance, whether or not the flow is running to the normal pattern?”

More visual controls. Ah.

Now we are seeing the reason behind 5S. It will come in to that work area, step by step, as the necessity to make things more clear arises.

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Make a Rule / Keep a Rule

I was driving home today and saw a construction sign on the sidewalk. It read: “Sidewalk Closed, Use Other Side.” Ahead was a section of the sidewalk which was, indeed, closed off and impassible.

By the time a pedestrian encounters this sign, he is well into the middle of a long block.

The sign is at least implying that the pedestrian should cross the street in the middle of the block to get around the construction. The alternatives are:

  • Ignore the sign, and walk on the street around the torn up sidewalk.
  • Backtrack to a legal crosswalk, and cross the street where it is legal to do so.

This situation is actually fairly common in a lot of companies. There is a rule “Don’t cross the street in the middle of the block.” Then there is an expectation that is incompatible with following the rule.

  • “Be careful, but hurry.”
  • “Stop and fix problems, but don’t lose production.”
  • Stop for quality, but make the numbers.”
  • Get 90 minutes of work done in an hour.

The team member has the same alternatives as above – ignore the expectation, or ignore the rule.

This is a slightly higher level than Hirano’s observation that “the words ‘just for now’ are the origin of all waste.” Here we are putting the team member in an untenable situation because there is no action available that is clearly OK.

Take a look at the rules you have. Take a look at the actual behaviors. Remember that what people actually do is generally what they sincerely believe you expect of them.

If it is impossible to follow a rule, consider why the rule exists.

The words “Do the best you can.” are a warning that you are in this kind of situation.

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Don’t Outrun Your Headlights

I am finding good resonance with my management training sessions. Rather than doing an overview of the “tools of lean” I go in depth into the fundamental things that the leaders need to

  1. Learn to do, and do.
  2. Ensure are done.

in order to build this on a solid foundation.

But “resonance” seems to mean “in a hurry to get to the good stuff” and a temptation to skip some of the foundational work.

We need to start off in learning mode, working to build a foundation of stability and consistent execution.

Without consistent execution, all of the great plans are nothing but ideas. The first hoshin to work on is establishing a stable process of daily improvement. Once you have that, your improvement management process becomes an exercise in priorities and direction setting.

Without consistent execution, your improvement plan is application of brute force against the momentum of business as usual.

That isn’t “resistance to change” at work. It is “we barely have time to survive down here, so we’ll get to your improvements when we have time.”

You have to create that headroom first. Honestly, it is mostly about instilling confidence, both in themselves, and in you. They have to believe they can carry out the plan. They have to trust you to be consistent with your purpose and not cut their legs out by asking them to change course in the middle.

All of this takes practice. With the right kind of practice comes teambuilding. (That shouldn’t be a separate activity.)

Step by step. You can move quickly, but only if you embrace “smooth is fast.”

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Steve Spear on Creative Experimentation

On Monday MIT hosted a webinar with Steven Spear on the topic of “Creative Experimentation.”

A key theme woven throughout Spear’s work is the world today is orders of magnitude more complex than it was even 10 or 15 years ago. Where, in the past, it was feasible for a single person or small group to oversee every aspect of a system, today that simply isn’t possible except in trivial cases. Where, in 1965 it was possible for one person to understand every detail of how an automobile worked, today it is not.

My interpretation goes something like this:

Systems are composed of nodes, each acting on inputs and triggering outputs. In the past, most systems were largely linear. The output of upstream nodes was the input of those immediately downstream. You can see this in the Ford Mustang example that Spear discusses in the webinar.

Today nodes are far more interconnected. Cause and effect is not clear. There are feed-back and feed-forward connections and loop-backs. Interactions between processes impact the results as much as the processes themselves.

Traditional management still tries to manage what is inside the nodes. Performance, and problems, come from the interconnections between nodes more than from within them.

The other key point is that traditional management seeks to first define, then develop a system with the goal of eventually reaching a steady state. Today, though, the steady state simply does not exist.

Product development cycles are quickening. Before one product is stable, the next one is launched. There is no plateau anymore in most industries.

From my notes – “The right answer is not the answer for very long. It changes continuously.”

Therefore, it is vital that organizations be able to handle rapid shifts quickly.

With that, here is the recorded webinar.

(Edit: The original flies have been deleted from the MIT server.)

A couple of things struck me as I participated in this.

Acknowledging that Spear has a bias here (as do I), the fact that Toyota’s inherent structure and management system is set up to deal with the world this way is probably one of the greatest advantages ever created by happenstance.

I say that because I don’t believe Toyota ever set out to design a system to manage complexity. It just emerged from necessity.

We have an advantage of being able to study it and try to grasp how it works, but we won’t be able to replicate it by decomposing its pieces and putting it back together.

Like all complex systems, this one works because of the connections, and those connections are ever changing and adapting. You can’t take a snapshot and say “this is it” any more than you can create a static neural net and say you have a brain.

Local Capability

One thing that emerges as critical is developing a local capability for this creative experimentation.

I think, what Spear calls “creative experimentation” is not that different from what Rother calls the “improvement kata.” Rother brings more structure to the process, but they are describing essentially the same thing.

Why is local capability critical? Processes today are too complex to have a single point of influence. One small team cannot see the entire picture. Neither can that small team go from node to node and fix everything. (This is the model that is used in operations that have dedicated staff improvement specialists, and this is why improvements plateau.)

The only way to respond as quickly as change is happening is to have the response system embedded throughout the network.

How do you develop local capability? That is the crux of the problem in most organizations. I was in an online coaching session on Tuesday discussing a similar problem. But, in reality, you develop the capability the way you develop any skill: practice. And this brings us back to the key point in Kata.

Practice goes no good unless you are striving against an ideal standard. It is, therefore, crucial to have a standardized problem solving approach that people are trying to master.

To be clear, after they have mastered it, they earn a license to push the boundaries a bit. But I am referring to true mastery here, not simple proficiency. My advice is  to focus on establishing the standard. That is difficult enough.

An Example: Decoding Mary – Find the Bright Spots

Spear’s story of “Decoding Mary” where the re-admission rate of patients to a hospital directly correlated with the particular nurse handled their transfer reminded me of Heath & Heath’s stories from Switch. One of the nine levers for change that they cite is “find the bright spots.”

In this case the creative experimentation was the process of trying to figure out exactly what Mary did differently so it could be codified and replicated for a more consistent result independent of who did it.

The key, in both of these cases, is to find success and study it, trying to capture what is different – and capture it in a way that can be easily replicated. That is exactly what happened here.

A lot of organizations do this backwards. They study what (or who) is not performing to determine what is wrong.

Sometimes it is far easier to try to extract the essence what works. Where are your bright spots for superb quality? Does one shift, or one crew, perform better than the others? Do you even know? It took some real digging to reveal that “Mary” was even the correlating factor here.

Continuous Improvement Means Continuous Change

Since “continuous improvement” really means “continuously improving the capability of your people,” now perhaps we have “to do what.” I have said (and still say) that the “what” is problem solving.

What you get for that, though, is a deep capability to deal with accelerating change at an accelerating rate without losing your orientation or balance.

It is the means to allow the pieces of the organization to continue to operate in harmony while everything is changing. That brings us back to another dilemma: What is the ROI on learning to become very, very good? You don’t know what the future is going to throw at you, only that you need the capability to deal with it at an ever quicker pace.

But none of this works unless you make a concerted effort to get good at it.

Here is the original link to the MIT page with the video, and a download link for PDFs of the slides:

http://sdm.mit.edu/news/news_articles/webinar_010912/webinar-spear-complex-operating-systems.html