Category: Interesting Reading

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Where Is “Culture” Created?

The idea of a continuous improvement culture, a problem solving culture, a kaizen culture, has been with us for decades. Ultimately it is what everyone says they want to create. Yet creating that culture remains elusive for all but a few.

I have noticed that, generally, when people describe the culture they are trying to create they do so in terms of what people do.

  • Leaders support the changes.
  • Team members take initiative.
  • People “see waste and eliminate it.”
  • People engage in problem solving.
  • Team members are fully engaged in improving their own work.

All of these things are true, but they miss the mark.

They are all the actions of individuals, sometimes interacting with a process.

But what is “culture?”

I would contend that “culture” is composed of the norms and rituals of how people interact with each other.

For example, prolonged direct eye contact (“staring”) is rude in some cultures, but not in others. Cultural norms define how subordinates interact with their bosses, where people sit, whether they bow or shake hands when they meet. Cultural norms define how problems are brought up – by whom and to whom – or if they are brought up at all. In some cultures, “losing face” is a disaster, in others, openly blunt honesty is highly prized.

Within a company, of course, there are additional layers. In addition to the social norms of the society at large, there are rituals and norms about how people interact at work.

Therefore, I would contend that “culture” is something which emerges from the pattern of interactions between people.

Why is it important to understand this?

Because if we are trying to change the culture, we should not be focusing so much on individual behaviors as we are coaching those interactions.

In “Toyota Kata,” Mike Rother describes structured, practiced behaviors that are the building blocks of a culture of continuous improvement. Like kata in martial arts, more sophisticated moves are built up from these fundamentals. But if you really look at it, the behaviors he describes are actually interactions.

What this means is that if we are trying to coach toward change, we need to be simultaneously coaching at least two people at once. In each of these interactions there is a request or stimulus, and there is a response. Each has a specifically defined “way to do it.”

Stepping back a bit, if I look at Steve Spear’s “rules-in-use” from “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” I see the same patterns. The rules actually define structure for how people and processes are interacting with one another in a way that drives continuous improvement.

Just a thought for the day.

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Taktzeit

Now and again someone wonders out loud why, in this lexicon of Japanese terms, we have the word “takt.”

I had always passed along what I had heard – that the word was German, short for taktzeit and used in their factories to represent the pace of production. During WWII, the Germans had helped the Japanese set up more efficient production lines, and the word migrated into Japanese usage.

All of this had been anecdotal.

factory_floor07But today I ran across Alan Hamby’s phenomenally in-depth reference site on the German WWII Tiger Tank. Alan has extensive detail on the Henschel Tiger Tank Factory, and in some of the photos are signs indicating the number of the “takt” or production position.

But don’t stop here. Take a look at Alan’s site, and look at how this factory is set up and operated. This plant was set up to produce a Tiger I tank every six hours, and built a total of 1375 of them between 1942 and early 1945. Yes, there is a lot of waste, but bluntly, I have seen 21st century factories making products of similar size and complexity that are far worse than this.

The idea of pacing and balancing production is not new. By the time these photos were taken around 1943, the concept had been proven for over 20 years. Yet when I visit factories today this is a seemingly novel concept. I always wonder why today’s operations managers are not insisting on at least the efficiencies that were achieved by 1935.

Thanks to Alan for his kind permission to bootstrap from his research and use these rare photos here.

Just to be clear, though, having a pace for production does not make a line “lean.” Far from it. But it is a foundational element. It may not be sufficient, but it is (in nearly all cases) necessary. What makes it foundational element for improvement, however, is not so much the pacing and balancing aspect. Rather, the concept of takt time can be used as a way to structure improvement goals and targets in a way that is meaningful to the people doing the work.

We talk a lot (all to much, in my view) about metrics, but tend to think of the things management is interested in – like labor productivity. But the way you get labor productivity is to focus on the takt time, the total cycle time, and the stability of that cycle time. Those are the things that determine how much gets done by how many people. You can measure “labor productivity” all you want, but you can’t change it unless you get down another couple of levels. Fortunately (for us) Reichsminister Speer didn’t figure that out.

By the way, just to put things into perspective:

In 1943, Boeing Plant 2 was producing one B-17 bomber an hour, sixteen planes a day, six days a week. They did it by using a paced assembly line and continuously working to simply and improve the flow.

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Press release – New LEI Book: “Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream”

I wanted to pass along this press release from the Lean Enterprise Institute.

I will be getting a copy and post a review after I actually read it.

[Edit: I read it, and decided not to post my review.]

One thing I am going to be looking for is how the proposed model implements PDCA to drive continuous improvement. There are lots of good schemes for building a fulfillment system out there. In the past, I have used a few pages in Chapter 4 of “Lean Thinking” as a solid, workable starting point for fulfillment streams that did just that. So I will be curious whether this book builds on that foundation. [Edit: It doesn’t.] Anyway – here is the LEI’s release for the book:

New Workbook Demonstrates Use of Lean Management to Rethink Supply Chains and Logistics

Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream, the latest workbook from the nonprofit Lean Enterprise Institute, shows how lean thinking converts “supply chains” into swift, smoothly flowing “fulfillment streams” while reducing the total cost of fulfillment.

Cambridge, MA, May 11, 2010 — Despite the substantial progress many organizations have made using lean management techniques to improve internal operations, they have paid little attention to launching lean transformations in their external links to downstream customers and upstream suppliers.

Now, in the pioneering new workbook, Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream, (Lean Enterprise Institute, May 12, 2010, $50.00) lean logistics veterans Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe describe a proven approach for applying lean principles to supply chains and logistics.

Using the example company ABE Corp. as their model, the authors illustrate both the implementation process and the benefits to ABE’s bottom line from applying lean principles. Plus, they show how the conversion process is a win-win for every company along the supply chain. The narrative is supported by 41 charts and illustrations, including value-stream maps, calculation details, and financial analyses.

Readers will learn:

  • How to calculate the critical total cost of fulfillment so you make decisions that meet customer expectations at the lowest possible total cost, no matter where costs occur in the supply stream.
  • How to apply the eight guiding principles for implementing lean fulfillment, even when all the data and variables are not known.
  • The seven major types of waste in logistics and supply chains.
  • How a fulfillment stream council comprised of representatives from internal departments, customers, suppliers, and transportation providers critical guidance and support.
  • The “eight rights” used to measure perfect order execution.
  • What lean metrics to use to measure progress, such as why average days on hand of inventory is a better measure than inventory turns.
  • A method for collaborating effectively with customers.
  • How to identify waste in shipping, receiving, and yard management.

Building a Lean Fulfillment Stream: rethinking your supply chain and logistics to create maximum value at minimum total cost

– By Robert Martichenko and Kevin von Grabe

– Published May 12, 2010, Lean Enterprise Institute

– 111 pages; 41 charts and illustrations

– ISBN: 978-1-934109-19-9

– $50.00 (hardcover)

– Excerpts, author Q & A, bios, more: http://budurl.com/vamd

– Media: Chet Marchwinski, LEI, cmarchwinski@lean.org, 617-871-2930

Based on the workbook, the workshop Building the Lean Fulfillment Stream: Supply Chain and Logistics Management teaches supply chain and logistics managers the “must know” lean concepts and applications.

Robert Martichenko
Robert is an LEI faculty member and CEO of LeanCor, a third-party logistics provider dedicated to the application of lean principles throughout supply chain functions. He learned about lean working at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana and has over 15 years of lean supply chain and third-party logistics experience. He is co-author of the business management book Lean Six Sigma Logisticsand the lean primer Everything I Know about Lean I Learned in First Grade. Robert also teaches global business at Saint Louis University’s John Cook School of Business.

Kevin von Grabe
Kevin is vice president of lean deployment LeanCor. His experience in materials management, transportation, and third-party logistics includes a greenfield start up at Toyota Motor Manufacturing Indiana. Kevin’s international experience includes operational start ups for Jabil Circuit at plants in Hungary and China.

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Toyota Kata: Avoid Pareto Paralysis

A great key point comes out on page 124 of Toyota Kata by Mike Rother.

…a Toyota person once told me to focus on the biggest problem. However, when I tried to do this I noticed a negative effect: We got lost in hunting for and discussing what was the biggest problem. When we tried gathering data and making Pareto charts, it took a lot of time and the biggest problem in the Pareto chart was usually “other” which put us back into debating options. By the time we decided what the biggest problem was, the situation at the process had changed. This effect is called Pareto paralysis, and I encourage you to avoid it. Pareto paralysis delays your progress as people try to determine the “right” first step to take.

[…] it matters more that you take the first step than what the first step is.

I have seen this many times with my own eyes. It is a common problem when “problem solving” is taught as “application of the seven tools” and “correct” use of the tools becomes more important than understanding the problem or making actual progress.

Hirano, I believe, has been quoted as saying:

Waste often comes disguised as useful work.

That is what is happening here. The team thinks they are working to solve the problem when, in reality, they are still trying to decide what problem to work on. The gridlock may be driven by fear of working on the wrong problem. But in reality, there is no wrong problem, there is only the one that is in your way.

Here is something else I commonly see. When they discover “problem solving” many organizations want to immediately undertake large projects that involve “stretch goals” and breaking down complex issues. They look at operational metrics that are actually aggregated – total inventory, total lead time, productivity of the entire factory, total defect rates, total lead time through the system. While those metrics are nice to gage progress, they do not give you any actionable information.

Even worse is using averages. Averages aggregate even more, and “bad” tends to be countered by “good” in many average calculations. What is important is to look at each instance vs. an external, discrete, and objective standard or specification. Average defect rates tell you nothing at all about what to work on. But this unit had this defect, or this part dimension was this amount out of specification DOES.

Put another way, there are very few big problems. Big “problems” are the aggregated symptoms of many small problems.

This is good news and bad news.

The good news is that small problems can usually be understood, cleared and sometimes solved fairly quickly. The bad news is that it takes work to do this. The other bad news is that there isn’t any other way that actually works.

Doing a good job working on large complex issues requires engaging across the organization, time, and a high level of skill at understanding the situation, framing the problem, getting to causes, working on solutions, testing understanding, etc. Doing it well requires a mentor who is intimately familiar with the thinking behind problem solving.

This skill can not be gained in a “problem solving” or “A3” class, at least not one that simply walks the team members through the process once or twice. Skill comes from practice, and effective practice comes from starting simple, working in an environment where it is safe to experiment and to be wrong. This means working on shop floor issues that can be isolated from one another, the effect of a test or simulation can be seen immediately. The factory and production organization that Steven Spear describes in his research about Toyota is actually designed deliberately to facilitate this kind of work.

Another common mistake is setting up performance targets too early. If the processes are inherently unstable – if there is no sense of takt time, you are having problems with consistent quality or delivery, the first goal is simply to get to the point where you actually know how things are performing against an indicator of stability. Again, this is usually much simpler than setting a high level target and then trying to break down and stratify all of the issues out there. Set that stability target, study the process, and take on the disruptions as you see them. If there is a debate about which one to start with, then start with the simplest one so you can improve your capabilities.

In the end, it is about taking on problems as they come up, where they come up. That thinking is facilitated by the way you structure the flow, the work, and the organization itself. Get to the shop floor, stand in the chalk circle, and ask “What is stopping this team member from being successful right now.”

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What Follows “Yes, but…”

I am in the process of (finally!) reading Mike Rother’s great book Toyota Kata. The book has already gotten great reviews out there, and I am not going to contribute a lot more to that dialog except to say I think it is the first substantial addition to community knowledge about TPS since Steven Spear published his dissertation in 1999.

As I go, I am taking notes of thoughts that are provoked, and I will share a few of them as they come up.

Early in the book, Rother makes a clear distinction between managerial systems that try to cost justify each and every activity, and those which have their focus on an ideal future state.

He cites a number of examples of how the dialog in these companies is shaped by this vision, or lack of it. This is one:

Almost immediately the assembly manager responded and said, “We can’t do that,” and went on to explain why. “Our cable product is a component of an automobile safety system and because of that each time we change over to assembling a different cable we have to fill out lot traceability paperwork. We also have to take to the quality department the first new piece produced and delay production until the quality department gives us an approval. If we were to reduce the assembly lot size from five days to one day we would increase that paperwork and those production delays by a factor of five. Those extra none-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 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. Please go observe the current paperwork and inspection process and report back what you learn. After that I will ask you to make a proposal for how we can move to a one day lot size without increasing our cost.” [emphasis added]

To this hypothetical Toyota manager, the ideal state is achieving one-by-one flow, on demand, in sequence, as requested, without waste. He sees the drive toward this ideal state as the method to drive the next problems to the surface which, when solved, will remove a round of waste from the process.

There are a number of key points to take away from this.

Avoiding waste vs. removing waste. The assembly manager is confusing the avoidance of wasteful activity from removing wasteful activity from the process. The large lot sizes are avoiding wasteful activity, but it is still there, lurking under the surface as a barrier to further improvement.

One-by-one flow as a crucial goal. In this example, the concept of one-by-one (or one piece) flow worked exactly as it should. The discussion, or attempt, to implement the next step in that direction revealed the next barrier that must be addressed on the way. Without the imperative to reduce lot size toward that ideal, these reasons, justifications, barriers, excuses prevail and the wasteful activity remains. Yes, its effect can be mitigated by larger batches, but applying that logic, why not make the batches even larger?

It isn’t about what waste you can remove. It is about what wastes must be removed to achieve the next target condition. Having this sense of the ideal to define the direction of progress focuses the team on removing the next barrier to higher performance. This keeps things on a path toward higher system performance. Contrast this to the classic “drive by kaizen” approach where we go on waste safari and then look for opportunities where waste we can remove the most easily. This results in a patchwork of improvements that rarely find their way to the bottom line.

Cost justification would say leave the waste there. The cost justification for reducing lot sizes comes primarily from the reduction of inventory holding costs. Unfortunately, unless the inventory is insanely expensive (like jet engines), that alone rarely justifies the effort. But this thinking also stops any further opportunities for improvement in their tracks.

On the other hand, if the goal is to drive toward the ideal of one-by-one in a way that does not increase cost, then once this single-day lot size is achieved, they would be asking “What will it take to get to half a day?” Eventually they will be asking about every part every day. And then true mixed one-item-flow.

At each juncture an important thing happens. They must confront the next problem, and the next waste in the system. They must find a way to remove that wasteful activity without increasing cost. Eventually they will be making one cable each takt time, and following that, making the cables and installing them immediately.

To get there all of the inspections and traceability paperwork requirements will either be removed as no longer necessary or will be built in to the process itself. How will that be done? I don’t know. Nobody knows. That is the point. We can’t solve all of the problems ahead of time, nor can we solve them before they are discovered. The path to the ideal state is vague and unknowable when you begin. It is revealed step by step, as you take those steps.

The key is to have faith that, among all of the people in your operation, someone will find a way to crack that next problem.

This is how you harness people’s creativity.

In his classic JIT Implementation Handbook, Hirano says to force one piece flow to reveal the waste in the system. That was in 1988. Rother introduces the critical human element into the equation. One piece flow is not an abstract concept, it is a critical guide for management decision making.

Rother goes on to make other examples. In each case, the tool or technique – such as takt time or leveling – specifies how we want things to work. That provides a baseline for comparison so we can see the problems we need to work on next.

Here is another example. Ironically, while Rother uses it in his book, I have experienced it in real life. The factory is trying to introduce leveling. They set up a stock of finished goods. They set up a kanban leveling box, and they set up a fairly well thought out process of leveling the demand on the production stock, allowing the inventory to absorb the ups and downs. Their rule is that if the inventory hits a high or low limit, they will take action and assess what is happening.

Then the email arrives – “A big order arrived, and flushed out our inventory, we had to catch up, what do we do?”

After doing what is necessary to recover the system, this was a great opportunity to look at why orders arrive in big batches. In this case, I suspect it was an artifact of the company’s distribution network. The plant is at a critical crossroads.

Each of these examples leads me to the same thought.

The “Yes, but…” and the “Now what?” situations are going to happen. They prove the system is working to surface the next problem to be worked on. The reply that follows decides the fate of your improvement process.

You can reply the way the Toyota manager did in Rother’s example, and work hard to improve your process.

Or you can buy the Basic Story that is presented, and in effect agree that no further improvement is possible on this process, or that “lean doesn’t work for us because [put your “unique situation” here]”.

Which do you do?

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The Human in the Loop

W. Edwards Deming espouses a “system of profound knowledge” as the way to manage complex systems. The key points are:

  1. Appreciation for a system. (Systems thinking)
  2. Knowledge about variation. (Knowing the difference between variation inherent in the system and variation with an attributable cause.)
  3. Theory of knowledge. (Understanding how the organization learns – summarized as PDCA)
  4. Psychology.

This last point – psychology – is the one I want to discuss.

The common view of business and production systems is a technical one. We look at things that can be easily disaggregated and analyzed – production processes, financial models, defect rates. Even when we consider the role of people it is in terms of “heads” and labor hours; absenteeism, payroll, labor costs.

Then we turn around and talk about “corporate culture” as though it is an abstract thing that can be analyzed as well, and that conversation all too often turns into commiseration and a blame game where things would be great “if only they….”

Reality, however, is even messier than that. The culture of a company emerges from how people interact with each other, and with the work environment. The work environment itself is also the product of interactions between people. People also interact with the processes themselves. Every second of every day, it is the people who are sensing, assessing, and deciding how to respond to what they see, hear, feel, perceive, believe.

If we truly want to construct a work environment where people make the best possible decisions, it behooves us to rid ourselves of decades old stereotypes and convenient beliefs about why people decide what they do.

Those stereotypes were largely established in the 1930’s and 1940’s. Since then, however, we have learned a great deal about psychology. Further, we are now (finally) beginning to make the connections between what happens in the mind – how people think, feel, perceive, behave – and what happens in the brain – the neuroscience behind the feelings.

How We Decide is a layman’s overview of those linkages.

As I was reading it, I found many topics that link directly to business and the workplace, and stuffed my book full of sticky notes.

Learning

Deming famously said “Management is prediction.” We also know this in the context of PDCA and the scientific method. We make observations, collect facts, and make a prediction. “Given what I know, if I do x I should see y.” Or “… if I observe x happening then y should follow.” These are predictions. By making them, we set ourselves up to either be proven correct, or confront something that surprises us. In either of those situations, we learn either by reinforcing the prediction for next time, or by examining what was not understood and trying to understand it better.

Well – as much as we like to imagine this is a logical process, it isn’t. This is pure emotion, which in turn is driven by changes in the level of dopamine in the brain as we have these experiences. In fact, our emotions learn to predict a vague situation before our logical brains catch on. “I don’t know why, but this feels right” – except that if you think through it that much, you will likely get it wrong.

Lehrer cites a number of scientific studies, but what they all have in common is immediate positive or negative consequences. Without those consequences, the emotional mind is never engaged, and the people never develop that “gut feel” for the situation.

Now before anyone jumps all over the word “consequences” let me be really clear on this point. This has nothing to do with punishment or “accountability.” Indeed, neither of those is immediate enough for this kind of learning to occur. Rather, it means that there is a situation where the person has immediate feedback and knows whether he made a good or bad choice.

What is more interesting is when these experiments were conducted with people who were neurologically impaired to the point where they could only engage in logical thought – they experienced little or no emotion. They failed, totally, at detecting the subtle patterns of success and failure in the experiments. The dopamine driven emotional part of the brain “gets it” and the logic part follows.

So – if we want a person to learn to correctly carry out a subtle process, and develop a good feel for how it is going:

  • They need practice.
  • They need immediate feedback.
  • They need safe opportunities to get it wrong.
  • They need emotional support for continuing to try. (More about that later.)

Now think about this in the context of how your people are trained to perform tasks that require skill or developing a “knack.” How well does your work environment provide a safe place to practice?

Another factor that plays a huge role in learning is reflection. Again, this is something that we all know at a logical level, but do we structure our situations to actually do it… or rely on happenstance? Worse yet, do we try to avoid focusing on things that went less than perfectly in our desire to focus on the positive?

Leher’s next key point is that, except in trivial cases, practice is not simply repetition. It is equally important to be good at it – to know how to practice. Reflection plays a huge role in this. He uses the example of a master game player – chess, poker, backgammon. Bill Robertie plays these radically different games at a world class level.

Leher describes how Robertie learned to play backgammon.

Robertie bought a book on backgammon strategy, memorized a few opening moves, and then started to play. And play. And play. “You’ve got to get obsessed,” he says. […]

After a few years of intense practice, Robertie had turned himself into one of the best backgammon players in the world. “I knew I was getting good when I could just glance at a board and know what I should do…The game started to become..a matter of aesthetics.”

Leher is describing the process of training the dopamine receptors in the brain to give a positive emotional response to thoughts of the right move, and a negative emotional response to thoughts of a bad move. That is what happens in the brain of someone who is playing by instinct.

But, he goes on:

But Robertie didn’t become a world champion just by playing a lot of backgammon. “It’s not the quantity of practice, it’s the quality,” he says. According to Robertie, the most effective way to get better is to focus on your mistakes. In other words you need to consciously consider the errors being internalized by your dopamine neurons. After Robertie plays a chess match, or a poker hand, or a backgammon game, he painstakingly reviews what happened. Every decision is critiqued and analyzed.

Actually this kind of reflection can be found behind pretty much any world-class performance you might see. Professional sports teams review the films. The U.S. Army does “after action reviews” in training. The opposing force commanders and the unit being trained first discuss and reconstruct what really happened, and then drill in on cues that might have revealed missed opportunities. By consciously learning from their mistakes in a practice environment – with blanks and lasers – they make far fewer mistakes when the bullets are real.

What about business? If you are a regular reader (meaning you are interested in this stuff), you likely know that “reflection” is a critical part of policy deployment, otherwise known as hoshin kanri. That reflection is the same process – examining the original intention and prediction, and then seeking to understand why things went differently (better or worse) than anticipated. By understanding the why behind the deltas, the leaders are better able to make better and better plans. That might look like they are leading by instinct, but just like Robertie’s backgammon game, that instinct is honed deliberately by a process of learning.

Likewise, when organizations try to learn “problem solving” and “A3” I see them start with big, complicated problems. But in my experience, it is far better to start off on small ones that are easy to solve. There are a couple of good reasons for this. First, it gets leaders down to the place where the work is done and shows that they actually care. This is all well and good, but it isn’t the primary reason.

The main reason is so they have an opportunity to practice seeing and solving problems in an environment where they can do it a lot, get immediate feedback, and contain the effects of their mistakes. In other words, it is an environment where:

  • They get practice.
  • They get immediate feedback.
  • They have safe opportunities to get it wrong.

    Unfortunately, what many senior leaders fail to give to themselves or to each other is that last point – an emotionally safe environment to make mistakes. And that links to the next key point that Leher makes.

    He describes research by Carol Dweck, a Stanford psychologist, on the role of making mistakes in learning. In her classic research, she gave groups of school children puzzle tests that were relatively simple for them. All of the kids did well. Two groups, selected at random (the total population was over 1000) were alternatively praised for their intelligence (“You must be very smart”) or their effort (“You must have worked really hard.”)

    • To cut to the chase, in follow-up tests, the group that was initially praised for their intelligence avoided subsequent challenges, gave up on tough puzzles more easily, and sought out opportunities to see that they had done better than others.

    The group that was praised for their effort, on the other hand, sought out tougher challenges, worked harder on those tougher puzzles, and sought out opportunities to understand why others had done better than they had. In other words, they were driven to learn.

    To be clear, the only difference between the groups was the initial praise. Throughout the remainder of the experiment, each group sought to self-validate the single compliment they had been given – one group by selecting tasks that allowed them to look smart, the other group by selecting tasks that allowed them to work hard.

    At the end, they were all given a final set of puzzles. Guess which group had learned more about how to tackle them? In short, the kids who were praised for their efforts got better results because they worked hard to learn how to learn.

    Now, this is with little kids. But what we all learn as kids are the things which drive us throughout our lives. Each of us seeks to renew the conditions that got us the most acceptance and praise.

    Application

    Let’s look at how to apply all of this when we are trying to transform an organizational culture.

    First, what are we trying to achieve?

    If we are trying to instill a culture of problem solving and kaizen, then we want people to try hard to solve the problems they are confronting, are willing to experiment (and make mistakes), realize they have to discover (rather than already know) the answers, and support others in doing the same.

    So what are the best conditions to learn how to do that, and do it well?

    • Practice.
    • Immediate feedback.
    • Safe opportunities to experiment.
    • Emotional support for continuing to try.

    If I go back and look at the learning environment described in Learning to Lead at Toyota by Steven Spear, I actually see these characteristics being deliberately put into play. And not simply for the benefit of the senior executive who is the main character, but for the team leaders in training as well.

    Think about how much more effective this gradually building hands-on practice and experience is than sitting people through a three day classroom based “Lean Overview?” Just like you can’t learn backgammon (or infantry tactics) in a lecture, neither is it possible to really understand what kaizen is about. You have to play, and play, and play. You have to reflect, which means you have to know what you expected, know what actually happened, and study the differences.

    No matter what you think people’s motivations should be, let go of your judgments, and look at what we know about how people really learn. Use that information to create the best possible space to do it in.

    The next section covers the neurological and psychological aspects of what Deming calls “tampering” – why we are tempted to do it – and the psychology behind relying on hope and luck as a risk management plan. Pretty interesting stuff.

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    leanblog.org “10 Lean Things Not to Say”

    Fellow blogger Mark Grabon recently posted “10 Things I Wish Lean Practitioners Wouldn’t Say in 2010” on his leanblog.org.

    I like it enough that my thoughts won’t fit in an appropriate comment on his blog, so I’ll write them here. Go back and read his post first, though, or you won’t make sense of this one.

    Added last: This turned into a stream of consciousness that ranges on a variety of topics. You are getting a bit of insight into how my mind works here.  🙂

    “Lean them out” — “Get them lean” — “What would lean say?” — “Is that lean?”

    In the context of “lean production” or “lean manufacturing,” the word “lean” is an adjective. It is not a noun, it is not a verb. I would argue that you can’t even get agreement about what it means in a room of “experts.” Today we have spliced other words to it, like “Sigma” that dilute it even more – implying that it needs something else to be complete without every saying what was missing in the first place.

    The word “lean” has taken on a life of its own. As Mark points out, it even issues judgments as in “What would lean say about…” as though phrasing the question this way somehow quotes an objective source instead of someone’s opinion.

    Sensei says…

    Aside from introducing the word “lean” into the vernacular, Womack and Jones also made having a “Sensei” an imperative. Now I am seeing consultants, even non-Japanese ones, brand themselves as “Sensei.” Worse, there are consultants and other agencies who preport to “certify you” as a “Sensei.”

    As Mark points out, the Western use of the term differs from the everyday use in Japan. Our meaning likely comes from martial arts classes. When I was at a previous company, people I worked with tried to apply the term to me. Like Mark, I objected. As they were insisting, I “allowed” them to use the word “sempai” and told them that was just someone who had been in the martial arts class a week longer. In reality, the only thing that differentiates teachers and students in the business is a bit of experience and something to say. But, as I said previously, what sets apart a master is that he has mastered learning.

    Counting kaizen events.

    Bluntly, this is one of the most effective ways I know to derail a journey of continuous improvement. The behaviors that are driven by counting kaizen events are counter to the very things we are trying to accomplish. If you aren’t sure why, ask yourself if a team member taking his own initiative and drilling some holes in a block of wood so that he can hold his bolts is a kaizen event or not.

    Variations on the theme of Buy In / Resistance to Change are pervasive in the forums and in real life. And professional kaizen practitioners are not immune to denying that someone has found a breakthrough that they hadn’t.

    But, sorry folks, there is nowhere on Earth where you can avoid the necessity to understand other people’s needs and feelings and take them into account. Not, at least, where you are dealing with other people. So, even if you are in a company that totally “gets it,” you had best develop the skills to do this.

    Why? Because you aren’t going to “lean anybody out” without their total, complete and enthusiastic cooperation. The reason is simple. Until they are doing it themselves, without prompting, without being pushed, without being boxed in by coercive approaches, it simply isn’t working. You can’t force people to be creative problem solvers. They have to like doing it.

    This is the challenge of the true change agent. Like what I said in the previous post about job shops, if you aren’t getting clear answers about how to get people involved, you are talking to the wrong person. Try someone else.

    And finally is the jargon of our community. Some of it is Japanese, other terms are inherited from other disciplines like organizational development.

    Jargon has two purposes. One is it provides people in a specific field or organization a clear means of communicating with one another. The legal profession, for example, is full of Latin terms that require paragraphs to define. So are military organizations. And an organization will often have a language of its own that members use internally. You won’t know the difference between a blueline, a greenline or an IW unless you have worked in Boeing Commercial Airplanes.

    Toyota has this corporate jargon. They have redefined a fair number of common Japanese terms that, today, carry very specific meanings within the Toyota context. Kanban, jidoka, yamazumi and even kaizen are some of those words. That is all well and fine for Toyota. It gives them a common shorthand so they can communicate more efficiently.

    The more insidious use of jargon, though, is for a group to use it to exclude others from the “in” circle. Rather than being a shorthand to enable communication within the group, jargon becomes an obfuscation to disable communication, establish a sense of mystery, and differentiate those who “know” from those who are not yet enlightened.

    So how do I feel about Japanese jargon in this context? Only you know. Look in the mirror. Check your purpose. Why do you feel the need to use it? How do you feel when you use it? Do you feel that it shows you know more than someone who does not use it? Do you take pride in making elaborate explanations of these terms? If so, I feel you are doing it for the wrong reasons. I don’t say not to use it. I do say to check your intentions. Are you doing so out of respect for people, or to elevate your own status? Then act according to your own conscience.

    I have gone a lot deeper into this stuff than Mark did, and I am not nearly as well organized. Ah well. You get the benefit of seeing one of my raw brain dumps.

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    Developing Products to Create Value

    I am reading Malcom Gladwell’s somewhat new book What the Dog Saw. It is an anthology of articles he has written for New Yorker magazine over the last few years.

    The first chapter is about Ron Popeil, the icon of infomercials and “Set it… and Forget it.” Gladwell describes a fascinating product development slant – make the product easy to demonstrate. In making it easy to demonstrate, its benefits must be obvious. Its features must make it easy to use and simple. Complexity just does not cut it. And it must work, right out there in the open.

    The chapter spends a lot of time on the Showtime Rotisserie. In the sales presentation, it is the product, not the salesman, who is made the center of attention. What it can do for you, how easy it is to use, and how it functions. The front is transparent, and angled so the customer can see the product work, in use (and during a demonstration on TV). The controls are simple enough that he can say “Set it… and forget it.” It is engineered (and was re-engineered in development) to prepare visually appealing perfectly cooked food. As it was being designed, it was continuously being used as it would be in a demonstration – the pitch and the product were developed simultaneously.

    Because I love examples of opposites, this is the part that really drove the difference home for me:

    If Ron [Popeil] had been the one to introduce the VCR, in other words he would not simply have sold it… He would have changed the VCR itself, so that it made sense in an infomercial. The clock, for example, wouldn’t be digital. (The haplessly blinking unset clock has, of course, become a symbol of frustration.) The tape wouldn’t be inserted behind a hidden door – it would be out in plan view, just like the chicken in the rotisserie, so that if it was recording you could see the spools turn. The controls wouldn’t be discrete buttons; they would be large, and they would make a reassuring click as they were pushed up and down, and each step in the taping process would be identified with a big, obvious numeral so that you could set it and forget it. And would it be a slender black, low profile box? Of course not. Ours is a culture in which the term “black box” is synonymous with incomprehensibility. Ron’s VCR would be in red-and-white plastic, both opaque and transparent, or maybe 364 Alcoa aluminum, painted in some bold primary color, and it would sit on top of the television, not below it, so that when your neighbor or your friend came over he would spot it immediately and say “Wow, you have on of those Ronco Tape-O-Matics!”

    All of this is about creating value for the customer – value that, in the customer’s mind, exceeds “four easy payments of $39.95.” When that happens, the customer buys the product.

    We spend a lot of time thinking about how well manufacturing and supply chain issues are taken into account during product development. But just as important is he customer interface.

    Take a look at your product development process. How involved are the people who have to sell it? How involved are customers and users who have to use it, maintain it? Do they get to try out their processes on your prototypes as you go? Or are specifications just tossed over the fence for engineers to figure out and turn into what they think is the ideal product?

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    TheLeanEdge.org

    Michael Ballé made me aware of a new site, http://theleanedge.org, that he has started.

    Its tagline is “a site for lean dialogue with the authors.”

    He has assembled a panel of some of the most prominent names in the field including:

    • Michael Ballé
    • Art Smalley
    • Jeff Liker
    • Mike Rother
    • Robert Austin

    where they are discussing issues and answering questions.

    It is just getting started, but I think it is going to be a great resource for the community. You can’t go wrong reading what these people have to say.