Category: Interesting Reading

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What Do You Teach and Practice Every Day?

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. If kaizen is only an occasional “special event” then it never becomes engrained as “the way we do things.”

From the article:

The truth is, when everybody practices status quo behavior almost every day,that is what is sustained. If employees are not practicing the new way every day, by default they are practicing the old. Practice makes permanent.

Mike illustrates this principle well in his presentation Introduction to the Improvement Kata.

batch-improvement

In reality, rather than days between events, the experience of the team members is more often like weeks or months. Some companies set a goal of getting every team member through one or two kaizen events in a year.

While this may spread the effect wide, it ensures that nobody has more than superficial experience. It is build on an expectation that once a process is “leaned out” that it should stay that way until there is an opportunity to come back around and “fix it again.”

Of course it actually begins to erode right away because the daily habits have not changed, and it is those daily habits that put the waste into the process to begin with.

The traditional model for kaizen is firmly anchored in Fredrick Taylor’s concept of separating experts from workers. Even though we solicit worker’s input during kaizen events, the process of kaizen itself is still largely the domain of technical experts. They are the ones who own the process.

Some companies go so far as to not allow kaizen to be done by people who are not “certified” in some way.

What we have to do is shift the role of those kaizen experts from one where they plan, conduct and lead special improvement events to one where they are on the shop floor every day teaching and coaching the line leaders. This is the only way (that we know of) that will actually transfer the knowledge.

Only when those line leaders are, themselves, teaching and coaching can the effort let up a bit and move on.

The “ship may be turning” because this idea is beginning to find its way into the mainstream discussion in the lean community. This will not happen overnight, however. There is huge inertia in the expert-as-implementer mode across all approaches to improvement. But if we (the lean practitioners) want to know why the results do not sustain, a large part of the answer is in the mirror.

“If the worker hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”

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Toyota Under Fire

Toyota Under FireSo many of us were wringing our hands a year ago. Our idealized vision of Toyota as the source of all perfection and example was tarnished and crumbling before our eyes. Prominent “names” in our field were talking about the need to go beyond Toyota. The vaunted TPS was clearly failing.

Or was it?

Like everyone else, I could only speculate based on a mix of the (mis) information emerging from regular press reports, the opinions of some insiders, and the insights I could glean from contacts with direct access into the company.

When McGraw-Hill offered an early copy of the book for review, I eagerly accepted because I, too, wanted to know the whole story. (<— smooth, seamless disclosure for the benefit of the FTC)

What really happened?

That is the question that Jeff Liker (with Timothy Ogden) set out to answer in the book Toyota Under Fire.

Losing Money

When I hear the term “Toyota under fire” I think of the “sudden uncontrolled acceleration” debacle from late 2009 through the spring and summer of 2010.

Perhaps that is because I didn’t consider that reporting three quarters of losses was the kind of adversity I would consider “under fire.” At least not for Toyota.

In retrospect, I probably glossed over that period because I felt I could predict Toyota’s response to the great recession and the economic problems it caused them – they would double down on what they have always done, and strive to do it even better than they had in the past.

They would first work to get the problem contained – and return to profitability without compromising their core values.

Then they would work to eliminate the root cause(s) of the problem by reducing their break even point.

The result would be the emergence of an even more formidable competitor that is capable of weathering an identical recession without incurring these losses.

And, according to Liker and Ogden, that is exactly what happened.

In the first half of the book, they tell the story of how Toyota responded to the recession in a rich detail that captures how this amazing corporate culture functions when it is under financial pressure it has not experienced since 1950.

What we see is the entire company mobilizing and carrying out its kata pretty much as described by Mike Rother in his book.

But there is also more. We see that this was only possible because the company had worked hard in the good times to be prepared for this kind of adversity, even as it was unthinkable. This enabled Toyota to do things that only Toyota could do.

No matter what other companies may say about their values around team members and suppliers, there are few that could (or would) continue to make payroll, support key suppliers, and continue to invest in R&D while reporting losses and facing a 30% drop in their top line, even if they wanted to.

And we see another side of the story – how an incredibly ignorant, uninformed and uncurious press force-fit the things they saw into their own management paradigms – turning a show of strength in the face of adversity into a negative story. It turns out this is a precursor for what was to follow.

Losing Faith

In August 2009, just as the financial crisis was coming under control, a tragedy set a series of events into motion that would test the company to its very core.

…Mark Saylor and his wife, daughter and brother-in-law were killed when their Lexus, on loan from a dealer who was servicing the family’s own vehicle, careened out of control at more than 100 mph, collided with another vehicle, and crashed into a ravine, setting the car ablaze.

Liker and Ogden offer a comprehensive account of the events that unfolded over the next year while this story spun out of control as the press, politicians, attorneys all fed on – and added to – the public’s fears about the safety of their automobiles.

The story is both fascinating and frustrating as Toyota’s technically oriented culture is focused on facts and data while it is confounded and overwhelmed by a political and litigation culture that focuses on sensationalizing rumors and innuendo.

Toyota learns a hard lesson – that reputation has less to do with the truth than about perception, and decades of work can be destroyed in weeks in the political-legal-press feeding frenzy.

In the end, though, the Toyota Way emerges. Just as they did in the recession, they accept responsibility for the things that affect them, regain focus on their customer’s needs – technical as well as emotional – and double down on what Toyota does best. This time, though, they learn to do that in a different context – the global / cultural one.

A great story in the classic mold of the protagonist emerging stronger from adversity while confronting his personal shortcomings.

Overall

I strongly recommend this book for anyone who wants to be able to articulate the story of how Toyota persevered through the most trying time in their history since they emerged as a global company. This was a transformative time for the company, possibly as significant as the losses and strike in the late 1940’s that set the path for the future.

That being said, there are two areas where I think Toyota Under Fire could have done better conveying this story.

The first is context. And context begins with background.

In the decades prior to all of this unfolding, Toyota had done little (in my opinion) to alter the public’s view of them as a “foreign” company even though they directly employed tens of thousands of people in the U.S. and sourced many millions of dollars of parts from U.S. companies. I believe they failed to put a human face on the American side of the company. They allowed the product to speak for them. In effect, they allowed their competitors to control a large part of Toyota’s cultural positioning.

Hal-9000Next is the aspect of technology. Liker and Ogden address the gap between engineering reliability of the electronic controls and the public’s emotional confidence in them.

However I am not sure they convey the cultural gap between that emotional confidence (or lack of it) in the USA vs. what would be felt in Japan or even Europe. Simply put, Americans are less trusting of technology in their cars. I am not certain the engineers in Japan fully grasped this gap. If they did, I am not certain they didn’t dismiss it.

With all of that as background, while the Saylor’s accident would have been tragic at any time, late August 2009 could not have been a worse moment for Toyota.

The accident was a scant two months after General Motors’ controlled immolation into government-owned bankruptcy, and the company was still breaking up. Chrysler was sold off to Fiat. Ford’s stock was selling for under $5.

And the day before the Saylor accident, Toyota had announced that the NUMMI joint venture was being closed after GM had pulled out.

With Toyota relatively healthy (compared to everyone else), still perceived as a “foreign” company, and seen by many as “responsible” for the demise of GM, they were operating in a public and political atmosphere that was fuel and oxygen rich. The Saylor accident was a spark.

Had Toyota grasped how precarious their political and cultural standing was, they might have acted much more aggressively and much sooner when this story started to unfold.

The fall of 2009 and spring of 2010 was slow for domestic U.S. news, so there was nothing to push the Toyota story out of the news cycle.

While Liker and Ogden correctly and accurately relate how Toyota managed to finally “get ahead of the story,” the precipitous drop in negative press reports about Toyota occurs in August 2010 – as the drama of the trapped miners in Chile begins to unfold.

I mention this context because it is not only important for the reader, but equally important for Toyota. They learned a hard lesson about the U.S. news cycle, especially how a story can get legs under it. This had to be tough for a company used to dealing in a world of verifiable facts and data.

To a company who values, above all, being in control of their own destiny, they had allowed much of the background to be written by others.

This story was as much about Toyota’s total lack of an emotional connection into the overall U.S. culture as it was about their cars and engineering. And while Liker and Ogden talk extensively about Toyota’s aggressive countermeasures to establish better connections to customer’s perceptions, I would like to have read about how Toyota addressed (or didn’t) this cultural positioning as well.

The only other quibble I have is I believe the book could have been a little more tightly edited. I am giving this a pass, though, because the final technical report from NASA came out in March 2011, and this book landed on my porch a scant couple of weeks later – the ink was still wet. So from that standpoint, I recognize the last minute frenzy of writing and editing that had to be done to include the latest relevant information.

In the end – buy the book but recognize it is still a bit insular – much as Toyota can be. That is perhaps something they still need to address.

Breaking News

Two stories of interest as I am writing this.

Toyota Wins Key Unintended Acceleration Case

(April 1) After deliberating for approximately 45 minutes, a jury reached a defense verdict in favor of Toyota Motor Sales, U.S.A., Inc. in an alleged unintended acceleration case brought by Dr. Amir Sitafalwalla, who claimed that an unsecured driver’s side floor mat was the primary cause of the crash of his Scion vehicle in August 2005.

During the course of the week-long trial, Dr. Sitafalwalla’s primary expert, Dr. Anthony Storace, withdrew his assertion that the Electronic Throttle Control System in the Scion could also have been a cause of the accident based on his acknowledgment that he had no basis to support that claim.

Of note is that the news reporting of this story is buried.

This story, however, was on the news tonight (April 4):

Toyota: N. American plant closures likely in April

By BRUCE SCHREINER, Associated Press – Mon Apr 4, 4:56 pm ET

LOUISVILLE, Ky. – Toyota Motor Corp. said Monday that it’s inevitable that the company will be forced to temporarily shut down all of its North American factories because of parts shortages due to the earthquake that hit Japan.

The temporary shutdowns are likely to take place later this month, affecting 25,000 workers, but no layoffs are expected, spokesman Mike Goss said. Just how long the shutdowns last or whether all 13 of Toyota’s factories will be affected at the same is unknown and depends on when parts production can restart in Japan, he said.

So far the North American plants have been using parts in their inventory or relying on those that were shipped before the earthquake, Goss noted. But those supplies are running low.

“We’re going to get to a point this month where that gap in the pipeline starts to show up. So we’ll have to suspend production for a while,” he said.

While interesting, this story buries the lead into the middle of the second paragraph: “… affecting 25,000 workers, but no layoffs are expected.”

This statement is ambiguous, but if it means “we are going to keep paying everyone and working on improving the work while the plant is shut down” that is the story here. Otherwise, this sounds like a routine shutdown-and-furlough-the-workers story.

What makes it more interesting is that Toyota’s press release site refutes the story altogether:

Toyota Statement Regarding Status of North American Production

NEW YORK, NY (April 4, 2011; Posted at 3:15 PM EDT) Contrary to recent headlines, nothing has changed from our update from March 23rd regarding our North American operations.

We continue to assess our supply base in Japan following the earthquake/tsunami. We have communicated to team members, associates and dealers here that some production interruptions in North America are likely. It’s too early to predict location or duration.

Currently, the greatest majority of parts for our North America-built vehicles come from approximately 500 suppliers in North America. Also, we continue to receive parts from Japan that were already in the pipeline, limiting the immediate impact. We will continue to work closely with suppliers in North America and Japan to minimize any disruptions to Toyota’s overall North American operations.

The reason I bring up this little chain of news stories is that it reinforces my notion that Toyota is still playing “business as usual” in how they manage the news cycle. In this case, no harm, but my questions for them are:

  • What is your target condition for public perception of these stories?
  • What is the current public perception?
  • If there is a gap, what is keeping it from being closed?
  • What is your plan to address that issue?
  • When can we see what you have learned from the first step?
because every process is subject to kaizen.
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The Flow of Improvement

Mike Rother shared an overview presentation on the “Improvement Kata.”

 

Introduction to the Improvement Kata

View more presentations from Mike Rother.

The words on one graphic really jumped out at me:

batch-improvement

Aside from his intended point that you never get good at anything but “business as usual” if “business as usual” is what you do most of the time, there are some other implied questions.

First of all, if there were only 15 days between improvement events, that would be overwhelmingly better than what I normally see. Typically a particular area can see months go by between scheduled improvement events.

Most organizations (how about yours?) seem to believe that once an improvement event (or a “belt project”) is concluded, that people should just “follow the new process” to hold the gains.

No wonder we see the advice to “fix it again!” We have to fix it again just to restore it to where it was after it erodes.

But there is a deeper question here.

What kind of “improvement processing” is this? Are we moving toward “one by one flow of improvements” or are we running improvements in batches?

This is batch improvement. We are doing a changeover, running the improvement process, then doing another changeover, and running business as usual.

Unless business as usual includes a robust and reliable process for detecting small problems, responding immediately, clearing them, and solving them, nobody but the event facilitators are learning how to do improvements. People may be learning about improving, but unless they are doing it every day, they are not getting particularly good at it.

Want to see evidence of this? What happens between the events? Do things get better or worse? If “business as usual” includes improvement, things will get progressively better, and you can stop reading this because your organization gets it.

So here are a few questions for you.

Assuming you want to strive for true, daily, continuous improvement, what is the next step you plan to take in that direction?

How will your “business as usual” operate when you take that step?

How is it operating now? What is the gap?

What is stopping you from doing that now? If nothing, then do it now, and cycle back to the first question.

Which of those problems are you working on next?

When are you going to be able to check your results and learn what the next incremental target is?

Now – head down to your work area and ask yourself how you expect problems to be handled. Then watch and see what is actually happening when problems are encountered.

In other words, let’s manage improvements the same way we are asking everyone else to manage production.

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Biggest ERP Failures of 2010

pc pointed out a great little article in a post on the discussion forum.

The article touches lightly on why ERP implementations are so hazard prone, and then lists the “Biggest Failures” of 2010.

Of note is that the majority of the listed failures are governments. I can see why. Governments, by their nature, have a harder time concealing the budget over runs, process breakdowns and other failures that are endemic with these implementations.

A corporation can have the same, or even a worse, experience, but we are unlikely to know. They are going to make the best of it, work around it, and make benign sounding declarations such as “the ERP implementation is six months behind schedule” if for no other reason than to protect themselves from shareholders questioning their competence.

Does anybody have any of their own stories to share?

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He Should Have Seen It

In many processes, we ask people to notice things. Often we do this implicitly by blaming people when something is missed. This is easy to do in hindsight, and easy to do when we are investigating and knowing what to look for. But in the real world, a lot of important information gets lost in the clutter.

We talk about 5S, separating the necessary from the unnecessary, a lot, but usually apply it to things.

What about information?

How is critical information presented?

How easy is it for people to see, quickly, what they must?

This is a huge field of study in aviation safety where people get hyper focused on something in an emergency, and totally miss the bigger picture.

This site has a really interesting example of how subtle changes in the way information is presented can make a huge difference for someone trying to pull out what is important. The context is totally different, so our challenge is to think about what is revealed here, and see if we can see the same things in the clutter of information we are presenting to our people.

The purpose of good visual controls is to tell us, immediately, what we must pay attention to. Too many of them, or too much detail – trying to present everything to everyone – has the opposite effect.

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Trusting the Process

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 confronted with a problem, “traditional” managers have been taught to direct a solution, and leave details of putting it into place unspecified – “empowering” people to find the best way to work the details, solve the problems, and get it done.

“Toyota” or “Lean” managers, on the other hand, (if they are following the kata model – rare outside of Toyota I think), are going to be quite open about the solution, but very specific about the method used to develop and deploy that solution.

The result?

The two populations learn quite different things.

One learns to bypass obstacles, put the directed solution into place quickly.. git-r-done.

The other learns, through repetition, a thorough, adaptable, reliable and universal process for diagnosing a situation, seeing the root cause, and developing countermeasures that sustain.

The line I circled in my notes is “Kata must be content free.” meaning that if the method is carried out correctly, the solution will work to deal with the issue at hand. It is not necessary to specify a solution, only to hold the “true north” of what constitutes improvement and ensure that the process to develop the solution is carried out correctly.

An unworkable solution is a sign that the problem solving process was not applied correctly, not a flaw in the process itself.

OK – that all sounds good. What is the “ah-ha?”

How have many of us been “implementing lean” and “engaging people” by giving them targets in the form of specific tools to implement, and then leaving it to the “engaged team” to work out the details of how it will function in their situation? Which of the above two models am I using if I do that?

If I were to set an appropriate target, that takes the process closer to one-by-one, etc. and then to correctly guide the team through the process of understanding the current state, evaluating what problem(s) are blocking progress in that position, and methodically solve them they might or might not arrive at the tool I have in mind as the answer. Just to be clear – this approach is a lot tougher because there is another skill involved than just knowing how to make kanban work, or set up a u-shaped work cell.

There is a fine line as well between giving the team the solution and advising them on some things to try that will help them reveal more issues.

But in the end, if their solution works to close the gap, but uses a totally different approach, I have to be open to that possibility.

We lean “experts” have to play by our own rulebook.

Otherwise I am simply holding a wrench and looking for a screw to pound.

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Pull as Kaizen

Michael Ballé’s recent Gemba Coach column drives home the importance of understanding that all of the so-called “tools of lean” are really there to drive problem solving.

A well designed kanban system is (or at least should be) built to not simply provide a pull signal, but more importantly, to continuously ask, and answer:

  • “What is supposed to be happening?” (what is the target condition?)
  • “What is actually happening” (what is the current condition?)

and give at least a hint of the problem that needs to be addressed right now when there is an issue. As a minimum, what condition must be addressed right now, and the first “Why? to be investigated.

A couple of months ago I posed a hypothetical question about a team’s effort to put in a kanban process and asked for your thoughts and comments.

The scenario I described was, with one or two trivial changes, copied directly from pages 48 and 49 of the Lean Enterprise Institute’s latest workbook, Creating a Lean Fulfillment Stream.

Although the process as described would likely work (at least for a few items), I was really surprised to see an LEI book describe a process that explicitly and deliberately breaks the “rules of kanban” that they have published elsewhere, particularly in Lean Lexicon. The LEI did not make up the rules of kanban, they have been well established for decades. Thus, I have to admit that my first response was to question the credibility of the entire book (Lean Fulfillment Stream), even though there are many things in it that are worthwhile.

Many of you correctly called out issues with the mechanics. Now, in light of this new information, I would again like to invite comment.

If a good process should be set up to continuously ask, and reveal the answers to, those two questions, where does this kanban scheme come up short?

How would those issues cause problems with the processes that Ballé is describing in his column?

 

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Toyota Kata : the “how” of “engaged leadership”

Anyone who is following this blog knows my view of “engaged leadership.” As I read this book, I had two experiences.

  1. I found it validating. There were a lot of times I said “oh yeah!”
  2. I found it clarifying. Rother turns up the contrast on a couple of crucial points and I liked that.

This is not to say I don’t have a couple of quibbles, but I’ll get to those at the end.

The bottom line is that I am pushing this book, hard, internally in my company right now as a way to get a focused conversation going about what we mean when we say “engaged leadership.”

A Caveat

Before I get into this, I want to be clear about something. There have always been individuals and small groups out there that have had a deep, intimate understanding of how the Toyota Production System works and how to teach it. What I will be commenting on here is our community’s success at getting that deep understanding into the mainstream of thought. For example, “The Machine That Changed The World” revealed nothing new to anyone who had been teaching and practicing this stuff for a decade. What it did accomplish, however, was moving the discussion into the mainstream.

Thousands of people inside, and outside, of Toyota have been following some form of the practices Rother outlines for many decades. I have seen for myself the results of just trying to follow these practices. (The results from doing it badly are vastly superior to those gained from not trying.) Toyota Kata is an opportunity for at least a fundamental understanding of these practices to spread and hopefully generate a bit of a shift.

So, this review is not intended to say to anyone who has been successfully applying these skills that you didn’t know what you were doing. Quite the opposite. It is a validation of what you have been doing. The mainstream press is finally saying “ah-ha!” and understanding just how critical this is for sustaining and success.

Rother’s book describes a crucial piece that is simply not addressed well in any of the “lean industry” publications. That is the good news. The bad news is that it is going to be enormously difficult to get this piece into place in most companies. I’ll get into why later on.

History

The Toyota Production System was never designed. There are no specifications or blueprints. It grew, and continues to grow, organically. We learn about how it works by studying it. Therefore, our knowledge and understanding should be continuing to evolve and grow, as indeed, the TPS itself continues to evolve. Anyone who says “We get it now” has stopped learning.

In the early days we looked at the TPS through the eyes of engineers. We regarded it as a machine. If we could just see all of the parts and pieces, and understand how they work, we could reverse engineer the machine. That is where we get the emphasis on the tools, like one-piece-flow, pull, “looking for waste vs. value-add,” standard work and such.

In his doctoral research, however, Steven Spear took a different look. He went in with social science eyes rather than engineering eyes. His doctorial research findings have been cited as “potentially the most significant research ever to come out of the Harvard Business School.” Spear discovered the connections that make the mechanics into a living thing that engages people in improvement. His work is summarized in “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” published in 1999.

That was 11 years ago.

Unfortunately, in the meantime, other publications of the “lean industry” have continued to imply that “all you have to do is…” and describe sequences of using and implementing the tools. This has been at best misleading, and resulted in a graveyard of failed efforts to adopt the TPS.

Everybody, though, has been clear that “engaged leaders” are crucial for success. But up to this point, nobody has really said what the term “engaged leaders” means in terms of what they actually do. There have been hints – John Shook’s Managing to Learn does a great job describing the process of mentoring, but does not set the context as well as Rother does.

So my first key point is that I believe Toyota Kata is a significant contribution to the popular body of theory – it is the first book that really describes, in detail, the mechanics of “engaged leadership” in a continuous improvement environment.

Kata

The term kata is found mostly in the study of Asian martial arts. Kata are the basic motions, “wax on, wax off,” that are foundational building blocks. Once those foundations are embedded into subconscious memory, it is no longer necessary to focus on them. Though they are not called kata, the basic drills that any athlete learns are foundational in the same way.

Rother contends that Toyota’s improvement processes are build upon two fundamental kata.

  • A kata for improvement or problem solving.
  • A kata for coaching.

This does bring up my first quibble about the book. I wish it had a different title. While it is a great metaphor, I have found that the word “kata” is foreign to many people and I end up having to spell it and explain it as I tout the book. I ran into he same thing with Spear’s book Chasing the Rabbit – having to explain what the rabbit is and why we are chasing it – and note that his book has been re-issued with a title that better explains what the book is actually about.

Context

A “kata” is just a practice – in effect, yet another tool. There are lots of books and materials out there for problem solving methods, and John Shook’s Managing to Learn does a decent job describing the coaching process. So what is new here? In my opinion, Rother does the best job so far of setting the context – describing the improvement culture and environment if you will – of any popular press publication so far. It is this context that I find lacking in so many of the publications coming out of the “lean press.”

The book covers five interlocking topics.

  1. The role of vision and direction in continuous improvement.
  2. Critical context for the “classic lean tools” as target conditions.
  3. The problem solving kata, and how it differs from what most of us do.
  4. The coaching kata, really describing how management engages.
  5. A proposal for teaching the problem solving and coaching kata to a management team.

In addition, there is an overarching theme which compares this style of management with what is traditional taught and practiced in most business.

I would like to discuss these in detail, and offer my thoughts on each of them.

Vision and Direction

Maybe you’ve been there. “Top management” makes a “commitment” to “use lean principles” or some such. But nobody ever really defines what that means. The implementation is delegated to staff specialists, and it is up to them to provide “management education” and, ultimately, make the case for each and every improvement step.

I suppose there might be cases where this approach has worked and sustained. I just don’t know of any.

In the Toyota that Rother describes, there is an an overarching sense of direction, the true north that is used to unify the organization’s understanding of what “improvement” means.

Although Rother describes Toyota’s concept of being a perfect supplier much the same way that Spear does, (zero defects; 100% value added; one-by-one, in sequence, on demand; security for people) the concept comes through in other companies in other forms.

In “Made to Stick,” for example, Heath and Heath cite a story about Herb Kehler, then chairman of Southwest Airlines, as he describes how he uses a simple concept of the ideal to make decisions. In his case it is “We are the low-fare airline.” Thus, any “improvement” that does not consistently move Southwest in that direction is considered off track. (I should point out that “…without compromising safety or consistent performance in any way” are likely unspoken “givens” in this example.)

In The High Velocity Edge (formerly titled Chasing the Rabbit), Steven Spear points out several examples, including Toyota, where there is a strong explicit, or implicit, sense of an uncompromising direction. And Jim Collins’ book, Good to Great talks about defining what “we will be the best in the world at” as one of the key factors to sustainable breakout.

So, again, while this is not a new concept, Rother turns up the contrast and elevates it to a prominent position in decision making and direction setting.

Why is this important?

Because it focuses the debate away from “should we do it” to “what problems are in our way?” Rother gives a great example on page 50 and 51:

… we pointed out the potential for smaller batch sizes to the management team.  … closer to 1×1 flow, less inventory and waste, faster response to different customer requirements, less hidden defects and rework, kanban systems become workable and so on.

Almost immediately the assembly manager responded and said “We can’t do that,” and went on to explain why. [… the usual excuses here …] “Those extra non-value-added activities would be waste and would increase our cost. We know that lean means eliminate waste, so reducing the lot size is not a good idea.”

The plant manager concurred, and therein lies a significant difference from Toyota.

A Toyota plant manager would likely say something like this to the assembly manager.

“You are correct that the extra paperwork and first-piece inspection requirements are obstacles to achieving smaller lot size. Thank you for pointing that out. However the fact that we want to reduce lot sizes is not optional nor open for discussion because it moves us closer to our vision of a one-by-one flow. Rather than losing time discussing whether or not we should reduce the lot size, please turn your attention to those two obstacles standing in the way of our progress.”

By clearly defining what “progress” is – outside of the scope of the daily debate – the debate is shifted away from whether or not there is a problem to a discussion on how best to solve it.  This, in my view, is one of the most important policy decisions a management team can make. It gives people a foundation of consistency. But for this to work, there must be no caveat such as “when it makes sense to do so.” Adding one provides an “out” that allows people to accept the status quo rather than focusing people’s attention in solving the problems so it does make sense.

Rother goes on to point out how this sense of direction re-shapes cost-benefit analysis. The question being answered is now not whether we will make this decision, but rather whether the solution is adequate, or we must keep looking for a better one.

Step by Step

A common source of confusion in organizations trying to adopt these principles is the tension between the theoretical ideal or vision (as defined above) and the “what we can do now.” This is made worse when there is no clear sense of the ideal vision or direction because it reduces each step to a choice of “do we take it?” rather than “what must we do to get there?”

What happens in that case is some people are talking about the vision, others dismiss it as “unrealistic” and a lot of energy gets expended because people think the vision is something that must be achieved with a single comprehensive plan..

In reality, though, no one has any idea what the clear path is. Trying to build a detailed plan to “implement lean” is destructive because there is no way to predict what problems will need to be solved until they are encountered. If you think about it a comprehensive project plan assumes that we have such a clear grasp of the current condition and already know what must be done to get us to the desired end state. In reality, we are driving on a winding road in the dark. We can only see as far as our headlights.

“We’ll just solve the problems before we discover them”

– Dilbert

Rother describes a series of target conditions as the true objectives of improvement.

Because there is a strong sense of direction, it makes sense to set an immediate target just beyond what we can achieve today. While there is no clear path to the notional end state, the target condition is much closer, so the immediate issues that must be overcome are plainly visible.

While this is somewhat understood in general principle, Rother takes it down a couple of layers. He points out that each of the common “tools and techniques of lean” are actually targets to strive for. Only by setting an objective, and then trying to hit it can we learn why we cannot. That, in turn, becomes the focus for kaizen.

The example that will most challenge a lot of practitioners out there is takt time as a target condition. This is one of the few mainstream books that gets beyond the overly-simplistic notion of takt time only as the rate of customer demand. Rother acknowledges that, internally, there is an intentional overspeed built into the system as a target. And here is the key point: You rarely hit the target. At least not at first. It is established as something to strive for, step by step, each day. The system is set up so people can both succeed in meeting the customer’s needs every day and have a challenge for the next level of performance.

From this foundation, Rother expands the concept across the other “tools of lean” – not as things you implement, but devices to focus your attention on the next problem. The common excuses and obstacles we are used to hearing are turned around into those challenges. The work cycle is too unbalanced to achieve one-by-one flow? OK – then that is the focus or our kaizen activity until we break down that problem. The kanban discipline broke down? Great! What didn’t we understand when we set it up?

In each case the questions are:

Can we run this way? (smooth, level pulls; one-by-one; cycle time = takt time; etc)

If no, then “What is preventing us… now… from doing so?” Crutch the system while you work on the problem, but work on the problem. Rather than using the problem as a barrier, it become the next challenge.

Rother goes into quite a bit of detail for each of the common tools, and resets the commonly held idea that they are something to implement. I am glad for this chapter because it clarifies (or contradicts?) the idea that these tools are “what makes a value stream lean.” That idea has been firmly entrenched by the middle chapter of Rother and Shook’s book Learning to See which, in turn, is the cornerstone of the LEI’s publications and doctrine. We are finally starting to move beyond that anchor and understand that these tools are not the fundamentals of lean.

The entire concept of a target condition, that describes not simply the performance but the operating characteristics of the system, is a critical one. The vision of ideal sets the general direction for forward progress, the target condition issues a clear done-or-not-done challenge for the next step.

This concept links back to Learning to See in that the “future state map” can define an overall target condition rather than some long-term end state. Perhaps that was the intention all along. But Learning to See and its publishers are vague about that, and many companies have tried to reach too far into the ideal with their future state with the idea that it describes an end game rather than the next challenge.

Kata 1: Problem Solving

Of course if the target could be achieved today, it is a poorly set target. There are likely problems to solve.

Where we commonly fall short in problem solving is trying to take on too much at once. We try to take on complex problems, create elaborate dependencies, and work on multiple things at the same time. As a result, we never really gain a clear understanding of what worked (or didn’t) or why because we are manipulating all of the variables at once.

Unfortunately most “problem solving” courses teach us to do it just this way.

Rother, on the other hand, points out that rapid, linear solution of small problems, focusing on single issues and single countermeasures, lets us gain that process understanding – and increase our profound knowledge in the process.

A really telling chart on the crucial difference between a problem solving culture and a problem avoiding culture is in the section titled What Toyota Emphasizes in Problem Solving.

 

Toyota “Us”
Focus Learn about the work system.Understand the situation. Stop the problem!
Typical Behavior Observe and study the situation.Apply only one countermeasure at a time in order to see cause and effect. Hide the problem.Quickly move into countermeasures. 

Apply several countermeasures at once.

This little chart covers a lot of ground. Where “we” are primarily interested in eliminating the effects of the problem so we can move on to something else, the Toyota approach, according to Rother, is to learn and understand more about the process. So while solving the problem is the goal, it is only acceptable to solve it in a way that improves understanding. A blind solution is no solution.

Logically, of course, this makes sense. But in real life it is extraordinarily difficult in the heat of the moment, with people demanding a quick fix, to exercise this kind of discipline. This is driven by a fear that thorough = slow, which is simply not true.

And as each countermeasure is applied, the next problem becomes apparent – and that problem is the next barrier to better performance. Progress can be made very quickly in this way because there is a much reduced risk of leaving problems behind us as we move forward.

In contrast, I find two main issues with most “problem solving” approaches.

First, they spend an inordinate amount of time deciding which problem to work on. While that may feel like working on solving problems, no actual progress is being made. The countermeasure for this waste is to have a clear sense of direction, and a clear target objective that makes “which problem to work on” painfully clear – it is the obstacle between the current state and where you want to go.

Second, and perhaps worse, is that we like to think we are working on “important” problems, which seems to mean difficult ones. Maybe this is because if feels like a waste of time to work on the simple issues. “Problem solving” is often taught as a complex, drawn out process (which often begins with deciding which problem to solve…). We learn about designed experiments, statistical analysis, stratification techniques. Some problems require this kind of work, but not very many. Worse, learning to solve those problems well requires a thorough grounding in the fundamental logic which is best learned by solving lots of problems.

The only way to solve lots of problems is to start with the simple ones, but apply rigorous methods in doing so. But we skip that part, and then wonder why “problem solving” doesn’t take hold. We are trying to teach multivariate calculus before we learn algebra.

Toyota avoids this issue because they develop these skills from the basics, at the very start of their employment. Teaching the fundamentals – the entry level stuff – to senior people with advanced career positions can be problematic. More about that later.

Kata 2: Developing People (Coaching)

Even in the rare organizations that have fantastic problem solving and kaizen skills, the development of people often a very weak process. There is no systematic approach to doing it.

Let me be specific about this, just to be clear.

Most companies have some kind of “performance management” system that is built around some form of “management by objectives.” The team member is supposed to develop a set of goals with his boss. Those goals may even include “developmental goals.” They might even be specific things like taking a class or performing an assignment. Then, at the end of the rating period, the team member is evaluated on his performance against those goals.

This is not developing people. Not by a long shot.

“Coaching” is often a euphemism for the boss telling the team member that something in his behavior or performance is seriously inadequate. It is the first step in the “steps of accountability” which, in itself, is a euphemism for escalating punitive actions on a path to termination for cause.

This is not coaching. Not by a long shot.

And both of these functions are usually delegated to Human Resources rather than being clearly owned and adminstered by line leaders.

Rother, on the other hand, describes a process of mentoring. The boss has skin in the game because he is accountable to his boss for the results. Yet he does not direct solutions. He guides the subordinate through the process of solving the problem in the correct way. In fact, upon study, it becomes clear that the process of coaching (the “coaching kata”) is simply an instance of the problem solving kata. There is a target condition for the team member’s capability. The current condition is understood, gaps are assessed, and at each step of the way, countermeasures are applied in the form of direction that will build the team member’s problem solving skills. In the end, it is the team member, not the boss, who comes up with the solution, and the boss has to live with whatever it is as long as it works.

What is critical to understand here is a difference in who carries out improvements. In most of our companies, improvements are the domain of skilled staff specialists. These are the people who plan and lead kaizen events, or carry out black belt projects, or whatever improvement process is used. Those people are probably quite good at what they do, but they are the only ones who do it. The attention is always on solving the problem. Yes, they go through the motions of developing people – they teach them the principles, they guide them to the correct solution, but in the end, the process of how to improve is the domain of the specialists.

This is, in reality, a very traditional approach – a slight evolution from the practices outlined by Fredrick Taylor in 1911. Yes, they do a better job of “engaging the workers” vs. just telling them what to do, but when that engagement is limited to specially planned events, we are really not developing anyone, nor are we truly engaging them.

In a Toyota Kata type environment, most improvements are led by lower level line leaders, and they do so in way that is designed to develop people’s depth of knowledge. Yes there are staff specialists, but they are pulled in when a problem requires technical help rather than being pushed in to “fix things.”

The other key point is that in the Toyota-type environment, the entire operation is built around flagging problems immediately. Spear describes how work, information flows, material flows, and indeed the flow of problem solving itself is deliberately structured to always be testing against an explicit intent.

In this environment, the vast majority of problems are discovered and handled while they are relatively small and manageable. In contrast, “traditional” organizations deal with problems only when they can no longer be tolerated. Where Toyota deliberately stops the process at the first hint of trouble, other organizations run it until it is so overwhelmed that it is brought to its knees.

Following that, in the Toyota-environment, someone other than the production operator responds to the problem. This, again, is a huge contrast. But if you think about it, the only thing the production worker can do is work around the problem enough to keep moving. He doesn’t have time to solve it and continue production. So when we say “We want out workers to see problems and solve them” that may be well intentioned, but it isn’t going to happen without the rest of the structure in place.

What this means is that there is no such thing as an entirely autonomous worker, nor can there be a “self directed team” that operates completely independently. Trying to do so is leaving people on their own, without support from the rest of the organization. That doesn’t mean we micro manage, but it does mean that there is a clear delineation between “normal” and “abnormal” and, further, “abnormal” demands that someone gets notified right away, and responds in a specified, standard way.

The role of leaders in this world is two fold.

  1. Respond immediately at the first hint of a problem. Take ownership of the issue. Get the problem cleared – that is, establish a temporary countermeasure which allows safe, defect-free production to resume.
  2. The problem has revealed something that was not previously understood about the process. Work together with the people in the trenches to develop that understanding and guide them through the process of implementing a workable solution.

The coaching kata is how this is done.

In the end, not only is the problem fixed, but the profound knowledge of the entire organization has improved.

A couple of things that make this different.

The initial temporary countermeasure will likely “bust the system.” By that I mean it takes things away from the ideal. But that happens all of the time, everywhere, doesn’t it? True, but what happens next is critical. The leader is responsible for the issue until the system is not only restored, but improved. Where “the rest of us” willingly accept that we have to compromise and make things a little less than ideal to get the product out the door, the Toyota Kata mindset accepts this only as a scaffold to hold up the process until it can be repaired… and strengthened so it won’t break again. With one mindset, things get a little worse. With the other, they get better. “Chatter is signal.”

Rother describes this process with a few stories and examples that make the point very well. So does John Shook in Managing to Learn.

Adopting the Kata

One thing I like about this book over many others is that Rother goes beyond just describing an ideal environment. In Chapter 9 Developing Improvement Kata Behavior in Your Organization he openly discusses the very real barriers that an organization must surmount to get this thinking and practice into place.

He says the challenge is:

“Not to implement or add on some new techniques, practices or even principles”

rather it is

“To develop consistent behavior patterns across the organization.”

He is, of course, talking about a fundamental change in culture. Let’s talk about that a bit. “Culture” is really defined, not so much by the behavior of individuals, but rather, it is something that emerges from the norms and rituals people follow when they interact with one another. This is true of a national or ethnic culture as much as a corporate culture.

The coaching kata describes a specific way that people interact with one another when solving a problem. It is not individual behavior – what we commonly teach in “problem solving” – it is group behavior. Therefore, this is not something that can be taught to individuals.

Rother is clear about a couple of things. First is that nobody has succeeded in doing this as well as Toyota yet. We are cutting new ground here. There is no clear path to the end state. There is a clear vision for what the end state looks like, and each of us should know (or be able to assess) the current state in our individual organizations. If this sounds familiar, it is. Rother is describing a process of using the very principles discussed in the book to put these patterns into place. Why? Because when the practices are applied correctly, they work. If they don’t work, we must look at the quality of our application, not the validity of the approach. “If the student hadn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”

He is equally clear in a section titled What will not work.

  • Classroom training does not work any better here than it would to teach you to swim or ride a bicycle.
  • “Workshops” do not work – especially if they are focused on making improvements vs. developing behaviors. I’ll talk more about that in the next post.
  • Hiring consultants to lead improvements for you, does not work.
  • Using metrics to alter people’s behavior. Management by measurement does not work.
  • Reorganizing, “re-engineering,” whatever you call altering the lines on the org chart, does not work.

What does work?

Continuous and conscious practice with the oversight of a coach. Every world-class athlete in the world has a coach. Only the coach can observe her performance objectively and see what must be adjusted to improve it. I always wonder why it is that, in business or operations, we believe that once some level is reached there is no need for this.

In this section Rother outlines what seems to be a pretty good plan for applying the improvement kata to the problem of developing the organization’s skills.

A couple of keys.

  • Learn to do before learning to coach.

While this makes sense when we write it, again, in business organizations it seems that people’s capabilities to do something they have never done before are not questioned once they reach some level of seniority. This is, of course, silly. Rother proposes to start at the top with the basics – not because they end up as the primary coaches. No, that is primarily the domain of the middle managers and below. But because someone has to coach those middle managers, and it has to come from above. Rother’s point is around classic change management. I would add that starting in the middle puts those people in an untenable position because they are being taught to behave in ways that their bosses do not understand. Getting the top level team not only involved, but embedded, in the process is a countermeasure.

I am not going to go into a lot of detail and spoil the book. Get it and read it. Form your own view on this. Just understand that getting this thinking into place is a big deal.

Final Thoughts

This book is a good one, but I want to add a little reality here.

Like every book before it, Toyota Kata is targeted primarily at senior leaders. I would like to say that it will take off like The Goal or The Machine that Changed the World. It is probably too early to tell, but I don’t see it happening yet. Like most books of these books, its primary readers are going to be technical practitioners.

Those technical practitioners are the ones leading the classroom training, leading the kaizen workshops or black belt projects. They are the ones who are doing most of the things that do not work. They are doing those things because that is what their bosses expect (or allow) them to do since, rightly or wrongly, “improvement” is largely delegated to them.

Odds are you are one of those people if you are reading this blog, and odds are you are the only one who will be reading this book. It is a great book, but you will find it frustrating because you bosses aren’t reading it.

Here is what you can do.

First, practice this stuff on your own. Coach each other. It will feel awkward. Get as good at this as you can.

Then start altering how you run your events. Shift them to changing the behavior of team leaders and supervisors. Teach them to see, clear, and solve problems quickly. Set more clear target objectives. Hold yourself to a higher bar. At the end of an event, where you have traditionally focused on clearing newspaper action items, focus instead on ensuring that this behavior is embedded. Coach and support those front line leaders until they are habitually employing the kata every single day. That is the only way your results will sustain. Then, and only then, move to the next “event.” Your objective is not so much to make change in the way things flow as it is to systematically transfer this behavior to those critical first two or three levels in the organization.

Then comes the hard part.

The leadership above is going to say and do things that introduce problems. You have to intervene, but use it as a coaching opportunity. Apply the kata, just like you would for any other issue. Now, though, you are coaching those leaders – gently – through the process of understanding what is really happening, what they truly want to achieve, and understanding what is truly in their way. Maybe, just maybe a few of them will listen.

And maybe you can lead them through a study of this book so they can begin to understand what you are doing.

Just to be clear, Rother says that everything I have just said is the wrong way to go about this. It has to start from the top. Perhaps he is right. But sometimes you do what you can, where you can.

In the end, these concepts have to overcome huge momentum. Our business leaders today are firmly entrenched in a management paradigm that was developed, ironically, in General Motors. It is taught by every major business school in the world. Now we are beginning to see that there is a better way. But the better way is very different from anything they understand, and it is a lot of work. Its focus on developing people, first and foremost, runs counter to the paradigm of an objective, numbers-based analytical “business decision.” Ironically Toyota’s approach is based in far deeper understanding of objective facts than the financial-decision paradigm, but it does not feel that way when you are doing it.

Thus – this is a great book. Read it. Do what it says. But it isn’t going to move the Earth for us. There is still a lot of work we have to do ourselves.

I welcome your thoughts and comments.

Posted on

Deciding vs. Discovering and Developing

In a recent blog post, Why C level executives don’t engage in ‘lean’…, Steven Spear makes a really interesting observation. He cites two main reasons.

1) “Lean” is regarded as a tool kit. There has already been a lot written here, and elsewhere, on this fallacy and how it continues to be propagated. Spear’s most interesting observation is his second point.

2) Business leaders are trained to make decisions. They are not trained to engage in discovery and development of the organization.

This really hit home for me. Synchronicity being what it is, last week in Prague this very topic was the subject of more than one conversation over a glass some glasses of Pilsner Urquell.

Spear sums it up here:

The thing is, business managers are not trained to learn/discover.  Rather they are trained to decide about transactions.  Consider the MBA curriculum core:

  • Finance–how to value transactions
  • Accounting–how to track transactions
  • Strategy–taught as a transactional discipline of entering or exiting markets based on relative strength and weakness.
  • OM courses–heavily pervaded by analytical tools (in support of decisions).

Largely absent: scientific method, experimentation, exploration, learning methods, teaching methods, etc.

Therefore, even for those who have seen TPS et al as management systems rooted in organizational learning and broad based, non stop, high velocity discovery are ill prepared to switch from decision mode to discovery.

Each of these two factors – regarding “lean” as a tool kit and being trained to make decision – would, alone, bias an executive toward “deciding to implement lean” and then delegating it to staff technical specialists. And when we say “management support” here in the USA, we often come from the same paradigm. While we feel that a decision to do it is nice, but not enough, we often have a tough time putting our finger on exactly what we want when we say “we need more management engagement.”

To make it worse, even if we have management engagement, they still don’t have the skill sets to actually engage the way they need to.

So we end up implementing the tools, and wondering why the leadership doesn’t grab the ball and run with it. The reason? Because they decided to give you (the technical practitioner) the ball.

What to do?

There is a great trend out there right now. All of this is starting to come together.

Taking the pieces that are out there and putting them together we have identified a problem, we have likely arrived at a couple of good causes, and we have a proposed countermeasure on the table.

If you have been reading along over the last few weeks, you know I have been reading (and like, a lot) Mike Rother’s book Toyota Kata. In his last chapters, Rother puts forth an approach that just might work for teaching leaders the skills that Spear points out they simply do not have. I found it affirming because I was starting to advocate, and follow, a similar approach. Toyota Kata will help a lot because it gives me not only a little more structure, but also some credible backing that I might not be nuts for thinking this.

Watch for a full review of Toyota Kata in the next week or so, but in the meantime, know that though I have some minor quibbles, I am going to advocate buying it, reading it, and doing what it says.

Posted on

Cenek Report: Litmus Test for Commitment

Robert Cenek offers up a succinct “check” for the level of a leader’s commitment to a change initiative on his blog.

The element that resonates with my own experience is the first on on his list: Intellectual curiosity. I cannot say enough how much core difference there is between a leadership team who says they “want to be lean” (or “world class” or any other buzz word) and a leadership team who digs in and does book studies, discussions, and generally works to learn about what they are supposed to do in the work environment they propose.

In the later case, they are acknowledging two critical things:

  • They must play a different role than they have been in the past.
  • They have to learn how to play that role.

Acknowledging that they have to learn how to play the role acknowledges, further, that they aren’t doing it today.

While this seems all touchy-feely, if it is done with the true intent to change, it is actually application of improvement methodology.

  • They are working to develop an understanding of the target condition.
  • They are working to understand the gap between their current behavior and that target.
  • They are working systematically to close that gap.

But I added the italics around “if it is done with the true intent to change” for a reason. I have also run into leaders who had a deep intellectual understanding of how the process works, but that understanding for some reason never translated into actions and directives that pulled the rest of the organization along. At a further extreme, resources are expended to make sure everyone in the organization is educated – sometimes extensively – yet nothing actually changes.

There is a commonly held misconception out there that education alone will precipitate change in the way people behave on a daily basis. Truthfully, it will cause that change, but traditional classroom education, and even participation in kaizen traditional kaizen events, is not going to do it.

Education, by itself, does nothing other than cause frustration as a few bright people “get it” and then see that it is business as usual as the “change initiative” fades into the background noise.

Changing a culture is about changing how small groups of people interact with one another. Getting this into place at the operational levels of the business was the topic of my talk in Prague yesterday. But at the leadership team level, they are usually left to their own devices, and have to make a conscious effort to take awkward and incompetent steps among themselves before they are any good at it. Without those first steps, there is no reflection, and without reflection there is no learning.