Category: Interesting Reading

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Shifting the Learning Zone

A client and fellow lean learner today shared a cool extension of the Toyota Kata model for establishing target conditions.

Mike Rother’s Improvement Kata Handbook establishes a couple of key concepts about where a target condition should be set. The key is that the target should be somewhere beyond the learner’s knowledge threshold:

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The knowledge threshold marks the point where the process is not yet fully understood. Setting a target inside that boundary is simply a matter of executing a plan, no learning is required.

A target beyond the knowledge threshold is true improvement, because we don’t know how to do it yet. We just have a reasonable belief we can get there.

This is the concept of challenging the learner, depicted here:

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Here is another way to look at it – thanks to Matt – though I have altered the geometry a bit here.

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In the “Comfort Zone” we are, well, comfortable. This is the daily routine, things are predictable. As our brains are wired to seek predictability, most people seek out activities they already know how to perform.

Beyond the knowledge threshold is the “Learning Zone.”

We know from the principle of Deep Practice that skill only develops when we are striving to perform just beyond the limit of our capability – on the edge of failure.

It a zone where small mistakes can be made, realized quickly, and corrected immediately for another try.

If, though, we ask someone to do something that he perceives carries a high risk of failure, he enters the “Fear Zone.”

The boundaries for these zones are individual, and are a mix of the person’s skill and knowledge base + his tolerance for risk.

What I like about this model, though, is that can be extended.

Our brains are incredible simulation machines. We can imagine an activity or event, and feel the same emotional response we would have if it were real.

But we have a heavy, survival based, bias for loss avoidance. Simply put, we have a stronger drive to avoid loss than we do to seek reward. This is why people hold on to investments that are tanking, and remain in bad jobs and unhealthy relationships. The predicted sense of loss is actually stronger than what would actually be felt.

This explains the seemingly backward effect of high stakes incentives that Dan Pink talks about in his book Drive and in this TED Talk. (Skip ahead to 1:50 to get to the main points.)

If the leadership climate sets up fear of loss as a consequence of failure, we have a very strong force pushing the boundary of the fear zone to the left:

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But what we want to do is, over time, shift the learning zone to the right. That is, the team member is comfortable in increasingly complex situations – her skill levels for dealing with the unexpected are much higher.

So how do we get there?

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We can look at the highest performing people, and look at the social support networks that nearly all of them have.

If you want performance, you have to (1) remove fear and (2) provide safety for experimentation and learning.

One final note – changing the culture of an organization is not easy, and the appropriate tools to do so are highly situational. You can’t just say “You’re empowered” and expect a transition. More about that in a few days.

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Policy Deployment and the Coaching Chain

Gosh, I guess it is a couple of weeks ago now (I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work), Gerd Aulinger posted this presentation up on the Lean Enterprise Institute’s “Kata” page:

I’m obviously interested in your comments as I had some amount of input into the final product.

For that, I would ask that you actually download the SlideShare, print it out, parse it, discuss it with others, and really pick apart what it means.

There is a lot in here, more than you find in a typical LEI workbook.

But I’d also like to discuss what I think are important points made here.

Continuous Improvement is a Line Leader Job

Though it isn’t stated explicitly, the very structure of this example only shows the roles of line leaders. You don’t see anything about kaizen events or rapid improvement workshops led by staff specialists here. Each leader is directly responsible for getting the process to the next required level of performance.

Improvement isn’t “What Can We Do?” It is “What Must We Do?”

There is a business imperative underlying this entire effort. They didn’t just make a value stream map and ask “Hmmm… how much better could we make this by taking out some waste?” Nope, this is driven by a need to get a level of performance that, today, they cannot achieve.

As a sidebar, please note that the “kaizen bursts” are on the FUTURE state map (slide 28) … they represent the OBSTACLES in the way of getting there, not “opportunities” on the current state map.

If you look at the target condition for the changeover, it is 14 minutes. There is nothing sacrosanct about a 10 minute changeover, that is just from the name of a book. They need to get changeovers to 14 minutes to get the process performance they want. It’s math.

Added, thanks to a comment from Kris:

“Catchball” is More About “How” than “What”

You will notice there is some back and forth – what is commonly called “catchball” in the dialog between the various levels of coaching. But they are not discussing the overall business imperative. They are discussing the obstacles, targets, and approach that will be taken to get there.

This is an important point because, in the early days, “catchball” was taught by many consultants as a negotiation of the objectives.

But Nancy’s objective isn’t negotiable. What might be negotiable is how much of her lead time objective gets carried by gear machining vs. the unseen conversation with assembly, a cap-and-trade of sorts, but in the end, her group is on the hook to hit her target.

The Entire Chain is Fractal

When Nancy asks Steve “Which obstacle are you addressing now?” he responds with the long changeover… while that changeover is the target condition between Steve and Roger.

Steve is working with Roger to break that obstacle, to hit the 14 minute changeover, thus this is what he tells Nancy he is working on now. The presentation doesn’t go into the further details of their discussion (heck, it is already up to 80 slides…), but I’d venture to say that conversation is going to be as much about how well Roger is doing figuring it out and his learning conditions as it is the process itself. Why? If Steve did it himself, Roger wouldn’t learn anything.

Continuous improvement is about continuously improving people.

At the next level down, Roger is addressing obstacles one by one.

Roger’s target condition of a 14 minute changeover breaks down to obstacles that he thinks are in the way of getting there. Each of them has an unknown solution, and so must be broken down systematically. The terms change, but the process is just getting finer grained. We finally get down to individual experiments to test an idea and learn more about the process.

Improvement is a Team Sport

There are a lot of sports analogies, heck, “kata” itself is a sports analogy of sorts. But the key is that this isn’t just giving someone an objective and having them report progress. Though the “coaching kata” seems ritualized, there is a lot of nuance.

As I mentioned earlier, a lot of novice coaches, especially those whose normal work patterns are to delegate the details, fall into the trap of thinking they can just recite the coaching questions and they are coaching. It actually takes a lot of practice reading how far you can push your learner today, what he is struggling with, knowing when to give direction, vs. give a hint, vs. let her try something that the coach is pretty sure won’t work but will be a learning opportunity.

That means the coach has to be able to see things the learner or improver might miss. Sometimes those things can only be seen from an outside perspective. That is why expert Olympic-class athletes have coaches. There are some details that cannot be seen from inside.

Being with people in a supportive but challenging way so they can learn and develop is one of the key elements of respect for people.

 

 

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Mike Rother Overview of Toyota Kata

This is a 5 minute edit of the presentation Mike Rother made at the UK Lean summit.

It is a succinct summary of interaction between a coach (leader) and learner (someone working on improving a process).

My thoughts are below the video…

OK – here are some things I have learned with these methods “in the wild.”

Most organizations I have been working with can’t take on 1-3 year challenges and stay the course for that duration. The horizons are too far for them to see what is possible within that kind of time frame and stay the course.

I have been trying 3-4 month time horizons for initial challenges in organizations where everyone is learning the basics at all levels. That gives them an opportunity to practice with a horizon that is less likely to be derailed by a sudden change in direction during that time. Eventually, as they develop capability, they can extend the time horizon and morph these practice challenges into something more formal, linked to the business plan.

Middle managers like to leap onto the coaching questions much too early – before they are capable of actually coaching. The coaching questions are seductive because they are written down and structured.

The PDCA process is much more nuanced, but it must be mastered before attempting to coach. Why? Because the coaching process is application of PDCA toward the learner’s development.

While it is OK to round-robin coaching and actual process improvement, everyone has to work together to reflect and learn.

In addition, those middle managers tend to try to leap into coaching before they have an internally set non-negotiable sense of “True North” – driving toward better and better flow.

When a middle manager is taking on the role of the “learner” there is a great temptation for him to delegate tasks to others, and get reports. This is status quo, and does nothing at all to develop capability.

Like everything else we do in the West, or at least in the USA, we try to get there fast by skipping the basics.

Make no mistake – you don’t “implement Toyota Kata.”

You use it as a structure to build foundational capability and new thinking patterns.

Those patterns are only developed through practice, and deliberate reflection on the management process itself.

I have also seen an organization that is “getting it” pretty quickly. The difference is that they are all overtly in “we are just learning this” mode, and willing to make mistakes and learn from them vs. trying to appear to be competent from the get-go.

Mike Rother has other videos on YouTube as 734Mike.

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Constraints Push Innovation

This Ted Talk by Amos Winter is about a fantastic project to develop an inexpensive, rugged, rough-terrain wheelchair for people in countries with much less infrastructure than we take for granted in the U.S. and Europe.

Though they didn’t follow the traditional “3P” approach, their project did reveal a few key elements. More below the video.

What Winter talks about as constraints:

  • Cost < $200
  • Parts readily available
  • Repairable by local trades (bicycle shops)

we could also talk about as a “target condition.”

Winter describes an iterative design process where the first two attempts failed once they got them into the hands of actual users. A valuable lesson – the only true “voice of the customer” is the customer!

The “Marshmallow Challenge” (in the link back above) describes the power of an iterative process within a constrained design space as well – though the most rapid learning occurs in a group that may surprise you.

A company I worked for got a challenge from Mr. Nakao of Shingijutsu: “Make your next year of aggressive growth with:

  • No more people.
  • No more space.
  • No more money (capital).

In other words, squeeze it out of the waste that is all around you. That was a year of intense learning for all of us, but even today that company has one of the highest value-add per unit of area I have seen in any plant, with operations reaching inventory turns in mid-to-high double digits.

The experience of “constraints driving innovation” also plays out in a client project I have been involved with. They set out a challenge for themselves that was very aggressive – an order of magnitude difference from their current baseline. Then they set out to meet that challenge.

Past history (they tell me) has been to routinely break the “constraints” in these projects, but this time around they are sticking to their own rules.

What has emerged a large wall covered with major sub-goals, each with its criteria (the target condition), the current level of performance, the gap, the next trial they expect to run, the expected result.

They have been working hard to try to reduce the cycle time of those experiments: What can we do with what we have; What can we do for free or cheap rather than waiting until everything is here?

The key point here is that a well focused challenge can align people’s efforts and keep them focused on the objective.

The best challenges are the ones that come from within.

What are you striving for?

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What is the ROI for That Log?

I still see companies struggle to apply a financial return on every improvement proposed.

PC has made an excellent analogy in a post on the forum. Rather than repeat it here, I’ll give you the link, maybe we can get a conversation started.

http://forums.theleanthinker.com/viewtopic.php?f=9&p=903#p903

(Sidebar: I am pretty aggressive about deleting accounts that look like spammers. If I got yours by mistake, write to me at “Contact Mark” on the right sidebar, and I’ll fix it.)

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One-by-one, As Requested, When Requested

The world continues to move toward meeting customer’s true demand of one of something, when they want it, where they want it.

3D printing is one area where we can see the beginnings of a disruptive technology curve.

Laser printing has been around even longer.

Books are an area where the traditional mass-printing model is under assault from a number of directions.

Now On Demand Books is offering their Espresso Book Machine, fully automated production technology for a copy of a traditional paperback book. Check out the video.

Yes, the costs are higher for now, but in a niche market (which is where disruptive technology matures), that is less of an issue.

The trend is inevitable – it isn’t how fast you can go, it is how slow can you go while preserving the economy of scale. That is the challenge.

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The Power of Challenge

Reflecting today on the death of Neil Armstrong, I am recalling growing up in an era defined by “challenge.”

Armstrong walked on the moon a few weeks after my 13th birthday. My room was full of model rockets, and I knew everything published about the Saturn V by heart. It was an exciting time for me, and I felt a part of it.  (So today’s news did tear something out of my insides, even though I knew it had to come someday soon.)

The challenge that this nation issued to itself in May 1961 was one of those rare events that galvanized an effort in ways that could never be predicted. No one knows for sure what challenge will trigger that kind of mobilization. There was certainly nothing imperative other than “Let’s prove we can do this, and do it in front of the whole world.”

“Challenge” is a core tenet of “The Toyota Way 2001” and, at least according to authors who are in a position to know, defines a huge piece of that company’s culture.

To be effective, though, a challenge cannot be a hollow directive. It has to be “I think you can do this, and I’m going to support you along the way.” Anything less is fear based motivation where the person or team is working to avoid a negative consequence (losing a bonus, a bad review, etc) rather than pursuing something exciting for its own sake. (That is why I am not a big fan of “setting the platform on fire.”)

In other words, if people recoil instead of stepping up, then either they aren’t ready, the challenge is too big, or the person issuing the challenge lacks credibility that the course will be held in the face of inevitable setbacks.

While Project Apollo was certainly much more than Neil Armstrong, he was the guy literally on the pointy end of the program, and so he represents all of people who stepped up to do something truly extraordinary.

“One small step…”

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Kodak Selling its Film Business

August 24, 2012 Wall Street Journal:

Kodak to Sell Film Business That Made It a Blue Chip

Since I was a lean director there, this bears reporting on.

The fact that there is a film business to sell is a testament to years of hard work by some talented lean implementers, including Tom, a regular reader here.  The challenge, as the collapse kicked into exponential rates, was to hold the margins as long as possible to generate cash for the transition plan.

We all have opinions on how well that transition is being executed, whether it ever had a chance, or the motivations behind some of the strategies, but I really don’t want to get into that here.

What is germane, though, is that we are witnessing an entirely predictable process that was described many years ago in Clayton Christensen’s book The Innovator’s Dilemma.

Kodak was not slow to grasp digital photography… they invented it.

Nor were they slow to understand its implications.

As in Christensen’s model, the problem was that film was too profitable. The problem for Kodak, and other companies who have suffered a similar fate, was that the core business model simply could not easily adapt to a completely different profit engine.

Though Kodak has largely exited the consumer products industry (except for their consumer inkjet printers, which never disrupted the market like Kodak intended them to), they remain a market leader in commercial graphics and printing, thanks to a couple of key acquisitions back around 2004-05.

Because they have a dominant market share, however, the only avenue for growth is through growth of that market, as there isn’t much headroom for capturing market share. As even large-scale graphics transition to “soft” display, the open question is whether or not they are continuing to chase shrinking markets with the latest obsolete technology. (They sold off their OLED business a couple of years ago.)

Kodak was traditionally a chemical company specializing in light-sensitive coatings, and the technology to manufacture them into useful products. They saw themselves, though, as being in the  imaging business. When  imaging separated from their actual core competency, these troubles began.

What business are you in? How well you answer that question is more important than you think.

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Job Instruction for Risk Reduction

I stumbled across this PDF file on The Hanover Group’s web site:

“Job Instruction Training (JIT): Controlling Your Workers’ Compensation Costs Through a Better Work Environment.”

The page essentially summarizes the contents of the TWI Job Instruction pocket card.

There is a reference at the bottom saying to “Access our policyholder education safety series online at www.hanover.com” but I can’t find the link on the main site. It might be buried in a section only available to policy holders, or this PDF might be an orphan page that the Google bot found.

Regardless of the backstory on the Hannover site, it indicates that at least someone in the insurance industry understands the importance of consistent training as a prerequisite to consistent job performance, as a prerequisite to consistent job results.

Remember: Your front line leaders are teaching every day. If you want to know what they are teaching, go look at what their people are doing.

Also remember that your managers are teaching the front line leaders what is important. If you want to know what the manages consider important, go look at what the front line leaders emphasize.

If you don’t like what you see, consider changing what, and how, YOU are teaching. But we discussed that a while ago.