Category: Learning Resources

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Back to Basics

The Lean Enterprise Institute is taking up a “Back to Basics” theme.

But what, exactly, are “the basics” of the Toyota Production System?

This is critically important. Permit me to cite an analogy.

Look at a house. What do you see? What would you say are “the basics?”

At first glance, all houses have walls, a roof. They have a door. They are divided into rooms for various activities and purposes. A “basic house” is going to have an entry, a living room, a kitchen, a couple of bedrooms, a bathroom. More complex houses will have more rooms, fancier architecture, higher grades of materials, be bigger, but the basics are all there.

OK, that is a basic house.

I make this point because when people talk about the basics of “lean manufacturing” they talk about the things you can see. If I open up Learning to See, and turn to the “Green Tab” the chapter’s title is “What Makes A Value Stream Lean.” That chapter is primarily (right after the talk about waste and overproduction) a list and description of “Characteristics of a Lean Value Stream.”

  1. Produce to your takt time.
  2. Develop continuous flow wherever possible.
  3. Use supermarkets to control production where continuous flow does not extend upstream.
  4. Try to send the customer schedule to only one production process.
  5. Distribute the production of different products over time at the pacemaker process (level the production mix).
  6. Create an “initial pull” by releasing and withdrawing small, consistent increments of work at the pacemaker process. (Level the production volume).
  7. Develop the ability to make “every part every day” (then every shirt, then every hour or pallet or pitch) in fabrication processes upstream of the pacemaker process.

Now I have to say right now that I have always loved this chapter. I cannot count the number of people I have referred to “The Green Tab” as a fundamental primer. It includes all of the basics, just like our house.

In their latest book, Kaizen Express, the LEI has brought out some more detail on these same points, and added a few “rooms” to the house. One critical aspect they add is various topics that add up to quality. (It’s kind of like leaving out the kitchen or the bathroom if you don’t mention that.) They talk about zone control, line stop, and countermeasures to quality problems. (I will do a full review on this book soon.)

Then on page 99 starts four pages on Employee Involvement where they talk about practical kaizen training (PKT), and suggestion programs.

Let’s go back to our house. The things we said were “the basics” were the things you see when you look at it from the street, and go inside and walk around in it. But in an industrialized country, the modern single family residence is a miracle of accumulated knowledge and technology. The basics are the things that keep it from sinking into the ground, from catching on fire, from leaking and rotting. They are the things you can’t see, but unless you understand them, your house may look like the one next door, but it won’t perform like the one next door.

I have been in dozens of factories that had takt time, some semblance of continuous flow, pull systems, supermarkets, all of that stuff. They had run hundreds, maybe thousands, of kaizen events, and had suggestion programs. All of these things were visible just by walking around.

Yet most of them were stuck. They had reached a point when all of their energy was being expended to re-implement the things that had slid back. Three steps forward, three steps back.

They had read Ohno’s book, they knew the history of the Toyota Production System. They understood all of the engineering aspects of the system, and could install very good working examples of all of it.

But something wasn’t there, and that something is the foundation that keeps the house from sinking into the ground. It is the real basics.

Kaizen Express hints at it on pages 99 – 102, it is true employee involvement. And here is a real basic: Employee involvement is created by leader involvement. Not just top leaders, all leaders, at all levels.

To be honest, a lot of technical specialists don’t like that very much for a couple of reasons. First, engaging the leaders, at all levels, is really hard. It is a lot easier to get things done by going straight to the gemba and doing it ourselves – we show people how to do it, we “engage” them in the initial implementation, and everything is wonderful for the Friday report-out.

But I contend that the foundation of the Toyota Production System is the leadership system. It is the system of leadership that holds up all of the walls that we call takt, flow and pull. Those things, in turn, enable the leadership system to function better. The “characteristics of a lean value stream” evolved in response to the leadership system, in order to strengthen it. It is a symbiosis, an ecosystem.

“But it didn’t start out as a leadership system.” No, it did not. The history of how the Toyota Production System evolved is well documented, and the leadership system was less designed than it evolved. But let’s go back to our house analogy.

Primitive houses only have the “basics” I described above. They don’t have sophisticated foundations, some are just built on skids (if that). But because they lack the basics, most of those primitive houses don’t last.

And there is the paradox. When we say “back to the basics” we cannot only refer to the chronological history of how the system developed. We have to take the most successful, most robust example in front of us today, and we have to look at what fundamental thing holds this thing up and lets it grow more robust every day.

So let’s take a look at what Toyota teaches when they teach someone the basics.

The article Learning to Lead at Toyota was written back in 2004, but I still feels it offers a lot of un-captured insight into the contrast between what Toyota thinks are “the basics” and what most others do. I want to encourage everyone to get a copy, and not just read it, but to parse it, study it, and use it as an “ideal condition” or a benchmark. Compare your “lean manufacturing” and your leadership systems to what is described in here. Ask yourself the question:

Do we really understand the basics?

Note: There are now links to my study guides for Learning to Lead at Toyota on the Resources page.

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Learning To Sensei: LEAN.org

John Shook’s latest column on LEI’s site is about coaching and whether it is better to give them the answers or just ask questions.

Asking questions in a way that actually teaches is a skill that we, as a “lean” community do not foster very well. Certainly in U.S. corporate culture, we are expected to be the experts, and to have the answers. John’s post is summed up well by his last paragraph:

Learning to Sensei: A prerequisite for the apprentice sensei who is learning to not give solutions is to grasp for himself the fact that he doesn’t actually know the solution. Once you grasped that, then it’s very easy to not give “the answer” you simply don’t really have an answer to give. But, while it is not necessary for you to give or even possess “the solution”, you do have an important obligation, which is to give the question or learning assignment in a way that will lead to the learning, with learning as the goal. Once that is accomplished, all sorts of “solutions” will fall out. Then you can experience the joy, liberation, and humility that come with admitting you don’t know.

You can read the whole thing here:

LEAN.org – Lean Enterprise Institute: Coaching and Questions; Questions and Coaching

Now, as an additional value-add…

This really falls under the general notion of “Socratic teaching.” One of the best overviews of what this is really about is Rick Garlikov’s classic piece where he recounts his experiment with teaching through questions. If you don’t think this can work for difficult topics, then I suggest you read his account of using only questions to teach binary arithmetic to a typical class of third graders. If he can teach 8 year olds to understand that 0110 + 0011 = 1001, then surely we can get adults through understanding why takt time is important for management.

“What are you trying to do?”

“How will you know you have done it?”

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Article: Teaching Smart People How To Learn

Greg Eisenbach, in his Grassroots Innovation blog, cites a article that gets to the very root of organizational learning, respect for people, and a myriad of other issues.

The article, Teaching Smart people How To Learn was written by Chris Argyris back in 1991. What struck me about it is that it packs a double-whammy to our “lean” community. Most of us are change agents in some form or fashion, whether with direct operational control, or as either internal or external consultants. The hit comes from the fact that the example dysfunctional organization are consultants themselves.

So in that aspect, we all need to read this and take a long, hard look in the mirror.

The other aspect, though, is that everything here extrapolates to the very organizations we are trying to influence. A couple of key points jumped out at me.

Change has to start at the top because otherwise defensive senior managers are likely to disown any transformation in reasoning patterns coming from below. If professionals or middle managers begin to change the way they reason and act, such changes are likely to appear strange—if not actually dangerous—to those at the top. The result is an unstable situation where senior managers still believe that it is a sign of caring and sensitivity to bypass and cover up difficult issues, while their subordinates see the very same actions as defensive.

I can certainly relate the above from personal experience. It is damned difficult to be open and honest in an environment which does not value openness and honesty!

But then the dilemma hits, because there I am “blaming the client” for my own lack of effectiveness. Instead, it is my responsibility to look at what what I actually did, vs. what I wanted to do; look at my actual results vs. my planned results, and apply scientific thinking. To paraphrase back to 1944, “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”

The good news is that in the article, Chris Argyris not only points out the problem, he gives an example or two of managers leaders who have overcome it. But they did so only through hard introspection and challenging their only assumptions about themselves, their organizations, and their leadership style.

My last challenge here is this: When we talk about “respect for people” are we talking about behavior which avoids the issues so nobody’s feelings are hurt… or are we talking about being truly respectful and getting the truth out into the open so we can all deal with it?

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Managing To Learn (the book) – my first impressions

Managing to Learn bookManaging to Learn by John Shook is the latest in the classic series of books published by the Lean Enterprise Institute.

It is subtitled “Using the A3 management process to solve problems, gain agreement, mentor, and lead” and that pretty well sums it up.

Like many of the previous LEI books, it is built around a straightforward working example as a vehicle to demonstrate the basic principles. As such, it shares all of the strengths and shortcomings of its predecessors.

In my admittedly limited experience, I have seen a couple of companies try to embrace similar processes without real success. The main issue has been that the process quickly became “filling out a form.” Soon the form itself became (if you will pardon the term) a pro-forma exercise. Leadership did not directly engage in the process; and no one challenged a shortcut, jumping to a pet solution, or verified actual results (much less predicted them). Frankly, in these cases, it was either taught badly from the beginning, or (probably worse) the fad spread more quickly than the organization could learn how to do it well.

I must admit that with the recent flood of books and articles about the “A3” as the management and problem solving tool of lean, that we will see a macro- case of the same though throughout industry.

Managing to Learn tries to address this by devoting most of its emphasis on how the leader teaches by guiding and mentoring a team member through the problem solving process. The reader learns the process by following along with this experience, vs. just being told what to put in each block of the paper.

To illustrate this in action, the narrative is written in two tracks. One column describes the story from the problem solver’s viewpoint as he is guided through the process. He jumps to a conclusion, is pulled away from it, and gently but firmly directed through the process of truly understanding the situation; the underlying causes; developing possible countermeasures and implementing them.

Running parallel to that is another column which describes the thoughts of his teacher / manager.

Personally, found this difficult to follow and would prefer a linear narrative. I am perfectly fine with text that intersperses the thoughts and viewpoints of the characters with the shared actions. But given this alternative choice of format, I would have found it a lot easier to track if there had been clear synchronization points between the two story lines. I found myself flipping back and forth between pages, where sentences break from one page to the next in one column, but not the other, and it was difficult to tell at what point I was losing pace with the other column.

To be clear, Shook says in the introduction that the reader can read both at once (as I attempted to do), read one, then the other, or any other way that works. I tried, without personal success, to turn it into a linear narrative by reading a bit of one, then the other.

The presentation format not withstanding, Shook drives home a few crucially important points about this process.

  • It is not about filling out the form. It is a thought process. Trying to impose a structured form inevitably drives people’s focus toward filling out the form “correctly” rather than solving the problem with good thinking.
  • He emphasizes the leadership aspect of true problem solving. The leader / teacher may even have a good idea what the problem and solution are, but does not simply direct actions. Instead, the leader guides his team member through the process of discovering the situation for himself. This gets the problem solved, but also develops the people in the organization.

There are also a few real gems buried in the text – a few words, or a phrase in a paragraph on a page – that deserve to have attention called out to them. I am going to address those in separate posts over the next few days.

In the end this book can provide a glimpse of a future state for leadership in a true learning and problem solving culture. But if I were asked if the message is driven home in a way that passes the “sticky test” then I have to say, no. I wish it did, we need this kind of thinking throughout industry and the public and government sectors.

Thus, while this book is very worthwhile reading for the engaged practitioner to add to his insight and skill set, it is not a book I would give someone who was not otherwise enlightened and expect that he would have a major shift in his approach as a result of reading it.

The bottom line: If you are reading this in my site, you will probably find this book worthwhile, but don’t expect that having everyone read it will cause a change in the way your organization thinks and learns.

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Researching “Lean”

It is fall, and with fall comes the annual spate of postings on various discussion boards by advanced degree students working on papers and dissertations about “lean.”

In these postings, most of them are using some kind of survey instrument, and many of them are multiple choice. The latest one I have asks questions around which tools have been implemented, what kind of results they have achieved, etc, etc. It is fairly typical.

What I find a little disconcerting is that it is evident from the survey content that many of these people have no idea at all what they are researching. They haven’t done a literature search. They aren’t up to speed on breakthrough material – even the stuff that is 10 years old. The research topics themselves are often “old stuff” that is well understood and well established out there.

More disconcerting, I suppose, is that it also seems that there is a large body of people who think that having a survey filled out by a population of unknown self-selecting people who happen to read an online forum with the world “lean” in it somehow equates to surveying experienced experts.

I don’t want to get too down on academia. We practitioners need them. Academics take their very capable and sharp tools, ask tough questions, and publish all kinds of great reference material that helps the rest of us understand things we wouldn’t otherwise.

BUT the meaningful research all has one thing in common – it is based on actual boots-on-the-ground field work. The data is gathered by physical observation, not just asking people what they think.

This is true to the spirit of genchi genbutsu – “Go and see for yourself” which, in the Toyota culture at least, is the only way to have credibility that you know what you are talking about.

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Dealing With High Turnover

Jim left a great post on The Whiteboard way too long ago.

His problems seem to sum up to these statements:

Every valve is hand made one by one in batches through several processes.

…about a 10% turnover rate…Consequently we are always training new people…the supervisor needs to make sure the worker understands the job

My inclination is to somehow explain to the owners how their employee turnover rate is hurting their production and quality.

He titled his post  Hitting The Moving Train which seems appropriate on a number of levels.

Keeping in mind that I have not done my own "go and see" so I don’t have facts from the ground, only what is reported, a couple of immediate things come to mind. Other readers (especially the couple of dozen of you who never leave comments!), feel free to chime in here.

Short term: Stop the batching. Or, more specifically, flow the batches. The key point here is that just because you run batches doesn’t mean you can’t run one-piece-flow. (Pardon the double negative.)

What does that look like here? For each batch of valves, understand all of the assembly operations, set up an ad-hoc flow line that sequences all of the steps, then run them all through.

This does a couple of things, first and foremost, it gets them off the shop floor and shipped a hell of a lot quicker because now they are DONE. The downside is the supervisor needs to teach more than one person his particular sequence steps, but it eliminates all of the routing, traveler paperwork, tracking, prioritizing, and other stuff associated with having those 50 incomplete valves sitting out there. Scheduling becomes "Which jobs are we going to set up and assemble today?"

What about the parts? Don’t start assembling until you have all of the parts.

"Wait a minute, what about just-in-time?" One thing at a time. Let’s not launch a job until we have the capacity and capability of actually doing it for now.

Next, (Intermediate Term): is make the supervisor’s job a bit easier. I am assuming that, since he is training the workers, that he understands the tasks. But does he have formal training on how to break down work into steps and instruct in a way that someone remembers how to do it? Rather than reading a book about it, I would strongly suggest contacting the TWI Institute and getting, first, a handle on Job Instruction. This is, essentially, standard work on how to break down a job and teach someone to do it. The method has been taught unchanged since mid-1944. Not surprisingly, it is bread-and-butter at Toyota… and their material is pretty much verbatim from the 1944 material.. and it is the origin of standard work as we know it.

As jobs are broken down, the inherently critical tasks should emerge. These are the things which must be done a certain way or the thing just won’t go together (bad) or will go together, but won’t work (very, very bad). Those key points are where to start instituting mistake-proofing, successive checks, etc. This will start driving toward stomping out the quality issues.

For each quality issue that comes back to bite, take the time to really understand how it was even possible to make that mistake, and focus a problem solving effort on that key point to (1) incorporate it into the teaching and (2) mistake-proof and successive-check that particular attribute. Defects discovered in the plant are bad enough. Defects discovered by your customers are another story. Do what you must to keep the defects from escaping, then work on preventing them. Don’t cut out inspection just because it is muda.. unless you are 110% certain that your process is totally robust, and any problem that does occur will be caught and corrected immediately. Anyone who thinks Toyota "doesn’t do inspection" has never seen the last 60 or so positions on their assembly line… nor have they seen the checks that are continuously being made during assembly.

And finally – the turnover issue. A couple of things come to mind. First, with the right attitude and approach, the things described above can make this a lot more interesting place to work… especially if the Team Members are involved in finding the solutions to escaping quality issues, etc.

The same goes if supervisors continue to hone their leadership skills. Employee turnover is typically caused as much by the relationship with the first line supervisor and working conditions in general as it is by wages, etc. Southwest Airlines would not exist were that not true. Neither would a couple of other companies I can think of. Go look at "The 100 Best Places to Work" and see that relatively few of them cite "the highest pay and best benefits in the area." This isn’t to say that they do not offer fair, competitive compensation. But compensation, in general, is a relatively poor indicator of job satisfaction. Far more important is a daily demonstration that someone cares and is committed to the Team Member’s success.

If they really like TWI Job Instruction, they might be attracted to Job Relations – standard work for supervisors (first line leaders) for people issues. The TWI Institute has also just launched a new program called Job Safety. This isn’t one of the original TWI classes, but it was put together by experts I know and trust, and from what I have read, it follows the same reliable method format.

With all of that, perhaps the owners will be convinced that a competitive compensation program is a way to say "Thank you" to a great team that busts their butts to keep the customers happy.

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Beyond the Value Stream

As I mentioned a long time ago, Art Smalley’s web site, http://artoflean.com, is an excellent resource for learning. His thinking is cutting edge – he has kept up in the field.

I am mentioning it here because he has a couple of really good resources available.

Learning From Toyota is a presentation that challenges some of the conventional thinking about what “lean” is… or better, contrasts the current “lean industry” from Toyota’s thinking and approach.

The Eight Basic Questions of TPS is a longer article on the same topic.

In both cases, Art emphasizes that the classic approach of mapping value streams and implementing flow cover only a very small fraction of what makes up the system. Indeed, in my opinion, those steps will uncover (e.g. confront) many more previously buried problems than they resolve. Yet so many practitioners, many of them even taking your money as consultants, never go beyond these basic steps.

Look at the “classic” questions and Art’s questions, and see for yourself how different the path is.

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Jim Collins: “Good to Great” Website

Jim Collins book “Good to Great” has been a best selling business book for several years. But I am not so sure everyone knows about Jim Collins web site. It as on-line mini-lectures, and much more material that reinforces the concepts outlined in the book.

As for how the concepts in the book relate to “lean thinking” – I believe they are 100% congruent. Examining Toyota in the context of the model outlined in the book shows everything Collins calls out as the crucial factors that separate sustainable improvement from the flash-in-the-pan unsustainable variety.

The only difference I can see between Toyota and the companies that were profiled is that Toyota has had these ingredients pretty much from the beginning, and Collins’ research was looking at companies that acquired them well into their existence.

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Made To Stick

Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath have addressed head-on one of the biggest problems with implementing change in people’s thinking and behavior — crafting the concept in a way that makes it compelling.. “sticky” in their words.

The book is an extension of the concept described in Gladwell’s The Tipping Point which outlines “stickiness” as one of the things required for an idea to catch on and spread.

Read this book, then take a look at your presentations and training materials, and compare the messages with the examples in the book. Make an honest assessment:

Is your message:

Simple? Is the core concept immediately apparent?

Unexpected? Does it come across in a way that compels retention?

Concrete? Do analogies and examples make the concept something people can see, touch, feel in their minds (or even better, physically)?

Credible? Does it just make sense?

Emotional? Does it appeal to people’s feelings, or is it “just the facts” with cold analytical presentation.

Have stories? Does the presentation include experiences people can visualize?

Other books on organizational transformation, like John Kotter’s Leading Change talk about the critical importance of creating a sense of urgency, creating a vision, communicating that vision, but Made to Stick goes further and gives you tools to actually make sure your message gets across in a way that compels people to act differently.