Category: People Development

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When Can I see?

One of the issues Mike Rother says he has had with the coaching questions in Toyota Kata is question #5 “When can we go see what you have learned?”

In the west, inevitably it seems, once the word “When” is uttered, everyone in the conversation leaps to hear “When will you be done?” no matter how the question is actually framed.

As I am understanding it right now, the actual intent is for the coach to establish two things:

  1. The PDCA cycle needs to be turned rapidly. “When…”? is meant to establish a time fame that might be measured in hours, or even minutes, rather than days or weeks. The more quickly the PDCA cycle is turned, the more thoroughly the problem is understood and the more robust the countermeasure.
  2. “What we have learned…” means “What surprises did you encounter?” “What went differently than you expected?” “What didn’t work the way you thought it would?” this part of the question is intended to drive home the point that it is these things, not the success, that drive deeper understanding plus give clues about the next problem that must be addressed.

Based on Rother’s experience with this question, I am tinkering with how to re-frame it so I can use it more effectively. Ultimately the behavior I want is an invitation to jointly observe how the proposed countermeasure has changed the process. We want to understand the actual effect vs the intended effect.

That, of course, requires that the intended effect is understood and explicitly stated before trying. That does NOT mean that every little step is documented on paper such as an A3. That is far too cumbersome at this level of granularity. We want this process to cycle faster than the time required to write this stuff down. It does mean that I would have evidence that it has been thought through rather than just blindly trying something.

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If The Student Hasn’t Learned…

The teacher hasn’t taught.

This article, titled “Why China is Not Ready for Lean Manufacturing” presents an account of trying to teach “lean manufacturing” in a Chinese factory. The experience is summed up in a couple of key paragraphs:

The team arrived in Dongguan and went to work giving an overview class on Lean techniques. The factory workers seemed attentive and interested in learning. The next day, the Silicon Valley Lean team gathered the people from the assembly line to begin the process of working on the quality problem. After 3 hours, the Lean team ended the session in utter frustration. No one participated. No one would identify problems on the line. No one knew how to approach gathering or analyzing data. No one volunteered.

So what happened? The training was adequate and the Lean principles and methods are sound and easily understood. Why weren’t the Chinese factory workers participating?

Why indeed?

The author’s conclusion is that Chinese worker’s culture and values conflict with the idea of collaboration and contributing ideas to improve production quality and efficiency.

But the article brought up two separate thoughts.

First, there is nothing magic about Western culture. These concepts can, and do, fall just as flat in the USA and Europe as they did in this factory. The problem in these cases has less to do with the national culture, and more to do with attempting to apply a rote approach to teaching.

Second, the result cited here was exactly the opposite of my own experience in a Chinese factory.

It took some persistence, and it took some deliberate steps to remove fear from the factory floor, but in the end we had these Chinese workers making some very innovative contributions.

400ArmBoringMock01 This photo is an old boring mill. It was a slow old boring mill. We needed to squeeze cycle time out of the process to make the projected takt time. We showed the workers some photos of other teams’ efforts to mock-up fixtures so they could quickly try out ideas. The workers, after a few false starts, constructed what you see here, and ended up with a pretty good set of fixtures that could be loaded and unloaded quickly. After some trials, they figured out on their own that they could fit two fixtures on the platform, which allowed them to be unloading and loading one while boring on the other.

400BucketBoring

One of the machinists complained that the machine could run faster if it had a liquid cooling system. With encouragement, he designed and built a simple, but working, cooling system for the cutting tools. (The steel box in the foreground with a pump on it.) The clever part was the chip filter made from a bottle cap and a nail.

400BucketCellMock01 Another team was working on a welding cell. They ended up designing and fabricating more efficient fixtures than had been provided by the engineers. Then they set out to develop the most efficient way to get parts positioned, to load them quickly into the fixture, and weld up the part.

 

 

What was different?400CellWorkDesign

First, we didn’t do any classroom education. Not quite true. We showed them photos of really good welding fixtures that had been designed by a sister company. That took about 30 minutes. We explained what features made those fixtures good. Then we continuously encouraged them to try things so they could learn on their own. And try they did.

We didn’t ask them to go beyond mock-up. We fully expected to take their ideas, turn them over to engineers to get them finalized and drawn up, then have the fixtures fabricated. But the workers took it on their own initiative to dig through the (embarrassingly large) amount of scrap metal out back, bring in what they needed, machine parts, scrounge others, and built their fixtures in steel.

A number of ideas were things I could clearly see would not work. I knew that heat distortion from welding would make a particular fixture design difficult (impossible!) to unload after welding. I could tell them it wouldn’t work, or I could let them try it on their own. I chose the path that would engage their curiosity and let them learn through experience. They became better welders for it.

Honestly – this was a slow time while we were working out other issues with market positioning, sales, design and sourcing decisions, and most of this activity was intended to keep people busy and engaged. But what we ended up with was production-ready work cells, all built upon ideas from the workers.

So why did I tell this little story?

First, I will admit that I was pretty proud of these guys. This was a few years ago now, but it was fun blowing away everyone’s stereotypes about Chinese factories and Chinese workers.

But I wanted to make a key point.

Instead of looking for cultural reasons why “this won’t work here” we kept faith that, if the initial response was silence and non-participation, there was something that we needed to address in the way we taught, and in the environment we were creating.

Indeed, what the Chinese culture brings to kaizen is a centuries-old tradition of improvising with what you have to get something done. This is a great strength that can be hard to find in cultures with longer traditions of wealth.

Just as we were encouraging these workers to try things so they could learn what did work, we had to do the same thing. We didn’t give up after three hours. Eventually we managed to remove the fear and bring out the best these people had to offer.

Classroom education is actually a very poor way to teach people how to study a process, understand it and improve it. Sometimes it kind of works, but I think that is because it is marginally effective if all of the other conditions are right. Perhaps in some cultures that starting point is past the limit of what classroom education can handle. That isn’t a problem with the culture, it is revealing the inherent weakness in the approach.

There is no cookbook. There is only a clear objective, and good faith effort to keep trying until a solution is found.

Epiloge: Yes, this factory got into production. However the parent company could never get traction in this market with this product and recently made a decision to close this plant and pursue a different strategic direction. That is not a reflection at all on the people who did the work in these photos.

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What you can, Where you can

In my review of Toyota Kata by Mike Rother, I suggested that the staff-level practitioners who are embedded in almost every company that is “implementing lean” could put those practices to work immediately, even if it was not an ideal “top down” teaching process.

This week I gave that a try.

I was coaching a workshop leader who was, in turn, leading the team I mentioned earlier. He was simultaneously reading the book, I referred him to “the coaching questions” on page 247 and we worked together to keep asking them as the team was doing its work.

Since the team was working to solve problems that were blocking the problem solving process, it got a little complicated to keep them focused on the right “immediate problem.” However what I observed, for sure, was that my workshop leader’s skills improved significantly as the week went on, as did the team’s understanding of the issues and countermeasures.

My working theory was that just asking the questions puts someone into “teaching mode” and, as I have said earlier, the best way to learn is to try to teach.

Was this the ideal approach advocated by Mike Rother? Nope. I will have to loop back and catch some of the foundational elements. But as I have experienced in the past, these practices are so powerful that even trying and awkward application gets significantly better results than following no structure at all.

Start asking the questions, and see what you can learn as you try to teach.

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“Opportunities” vs “Problems”

Over the decades, I have observed that it is quite common for organizational leaders to try to use the word “opportunity” when talking about a problem.

I can understand the desire to do this – we typically think of “problems” as something to do with people.

But I find the emphamistic language… problematic.

 

 

Mr. Opportunity

 

There is a Honda marketing campaign in the USA that features a cartoon character named “Mr. Opportunity.” His tag-line is “I’m Mr. Opportunity, and I’m knocking.” The opportunity is an invitation to take advantage of discounted prices for Honda cars.

Words mean things.

An opportunity is something that I may, or may not, decide to pursue.

But in lean thinking, no problem can go unaddressed.

Rather than a friendly cartoon character knocking on your door, a problem has kicked your door in and is standing in your living room. It must be dealt with, and dealt with quickly.

It has to be contained, pushed back, and finally resolved to keep it from getting back in.

IF the process for doing these things is carried out correctly, there are opportunities for the organization to learn along the way. But in the vast majority of cases, the only way those opportunites get exploited is if the leaders insist on hearing what was learned. So even those “opportunities” shift to imperatives.

Friendly euphemism that soften the urgency do not help us. If we are to have a true problem solving culture, we have to be willing to call things what they actually are.

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5S Audits – Part III

I would like to thank everybody for a really engaging dialog in the previous two posts about 5S audits.

Now I would like to dig in and look at what an “audit” is actually finding, and how we are responding to those issues.

Our hypothetical production area is getting an audit. The checklist says things like “There are no unnecessary items in the work area” and “There is a location indicated for all items.”

If there are unnecessary things in the work area, or things are not in their designated locations, what happens?

Of course, the checklist is filled out and a score is assigned.

But what has been learned about the process?

In one of the comments, I asked something like “When was the problem first noticed?”

The core purpose of 5S is to establish a testable condition that asks the question: “Does the team member have everything he needs, and nothing he doesn’t, where he needs it, when he needs it, to carry out his process as we understand it?”

One of the primary purposes of marking out the locations is to indicate the standard so that someone can notice right away that the standard has been broken. What should happen right then and there?

Since we define a “problem” as “any departure from the standard or specification,” and we have taken the first step of removing ambiguity from the situation (by deciding what should be here, and marking it out), we want an immediate response to the problem.

Ideally this means that the team member would indicate trouble (andon call, or other means) as soon as he discovered that his air gun was missing, or didn’t work.

The back-up to this is the team leader’s standard work. His eyes should be scanning for situations where there is a problem that the team member hasn’t called out. This is why the standards are marked out, posted, etc. To make this job easy for him. His immediate response would be to (1) Seek to understand the situation – what pulled the team member off his standard work, where did the problem originate, (2) Correct the situation. Sometimes that’s it. Other times, there is another problem to dig into.

It could be that something about the work process or conditions has changed and the team member is improvising a bit. That would bring extra stuff into the area, for example. I recall a great example where we pulled all of the thread cutting tools out of assembly so we could better detect when assembly was getting defective fabricated parts. It worked by forcing the process to stop and an andon call since assembly could not proceed if the threads were not cut.

At the same time, if a thread cutter found its way back into the assembly area, we would know we had two problems. First, we had defective parts. But more important, the process of telling us about that problem had been bypassed.

The back-up to the team leader’s standard work is the supervisor’s standard work. She is looking two levels down, but her response is going to be different. Unless safety or quality is jeopardized, the supervisor is going to find the team leader and (1) Seek to understand what pulled the team leader off of his standard work, and (2) correct the situation.

If the next level up is spending any time at all out on the shop floor, it is the same thing – maybe once a day – seeking out verifiable evidence that things are working as they should be. In the lack of positive evidence of control, we must assume there are hidden problems.

Now, if the audit finds something like this (click on the image for a bigger one):

Then it isn’t about the tape being out of place, nor is it a question about where the screwdriver is. What we have discovered is that none of the checks have been made, or if they have, no one has done anything about them.

Someone said “If we don’t do audits then 5S deteriorates.” OK – but why does 5S deteriorate?

Simply put, it is going to deteriorate, just as your process does, a little bit every day. Disorder is always being injected into everything. Your process will never, ever be stable on its own. No matter how good you are, the next level of granularity will show up as deterioration.

This is the “chatter” that Steven Spear talks about.

The question comes down to your core intention for the audit.

If you are assessing how well the area manager is coaching and teaching his people to see and respond to problems so that you can establish a target condition for his learning, and then develop his capabilities accordingly… there are better ways (in my opinion) to do that.

If you are assigning a numeric score in the hope that, by measuring something you can influence behavior, it might work, but people can come up with ingeniously destructive ways to achieve the numeric goals. As a thought experiment – how might an area manager get a high score on his 5S audit in ways that run completely counter to the goals of 5S, people development or “lean?”

The bottom line is that “Audit 5S” is not something that you should accept as a given. Rather, it is a proposed countermeasure to some problem. But if you start with a clear problem statement like “Team members are bringing thread taps into the assembly line,” and start asking “Why” five times, get to a root cause to that problem, you are unlikely to arrive at a monthly or periodic 5S audit as a countermeasure – nor are you ever going to need one.

The problem?

I think we feel the need to do audits because we have no process to immediately detect, correct and solve the little problems that happen every day. These little issues are the ones that cause the 5S erosion. Because we don’t have a process to deal with them one-by-one, we have to have an elaborate process that disrupts our normal work flow and takes them on in big batches.

Does that sound like a “lean” process to you?

How might we relentlessly drive the “audit” process closer to the ideal of one-by-one confirmation?

That would be “lean thinking.”

 

 

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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.

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Understanding the Solution

Another great insight from “Toyota Kata” by Mike Rother.

We often think great problem solving means solving the problem, that is applying countermeasures, and we may even propose and apply several countermeasures in the hope that one of them will stop the problem. In contrast, in Toyota’s way of thinking, if the solution is not obvious, it means we have not yet understood the situation sufficiently. Time to go and see again.

So here I am, in the beginning stages of trying to figure out how to get this problem solving culture anchored – not in a single site, but in about a dozen – spanning at least 16 time zones, with six or seven languages involved. I have to keep the message very focused, direct, and simple. I have spent the last couple of months in “go and see” mode.

One of the things I am beginning to emphasize to these management teams is that their problem solving is typically far to broad in scope. They are trying to find general solutions to broad ranges of problems, like part shortages. But “Why do we have part shortages” is the wrong question. Asking that question requires studying a huge population of part shortages, and quickly entering into “Pareto paralysis.”

Jamie’s comment to the Pareto Paralysis” post was a good one. Pareto charts are a powerful analysis tool, but in my view, they are best used when breaking down which cause to work on, rather than trying to break down which problem to work on. There is a huge difference.

What I see is that teams spend too much time time deciding what problem is most important, to the detriment of actually spending time solving problems. But I digress.

Rather than spend a lot of time breaking down “part shortages,” how about taking one part shortage. Instead of asking “Why do we have part shortages” I want to know “Why was that part late today.?”

Taking a look at a single instance, rather than a whole class of problems, does a couple of things.

First, it lets the management team do something that is critically important in these beginning stages: They learn to dig in and gain solid understanding of the situation of a single problem. They have to look at how the process was supposed to work, and understand when, where and why it broke down. Frankly, until they can explain that to me, in detail, I am not the least bit interested in proposed solutions. They first have to teach me well enough that I can understand what they understand.

Going back to the quote, at that point, if the system level solution is not obvious, then it is likely that I don’t yet understand the situation. That means that they have not yet understood it enough to explain it to me, which means they need to go back and dig some more.

The other thing, though, is that the way to learn good problem solving is to:

  1. Start with single instances, rather than classes of problems.
  2. Practice, practice, practice.

Why is it important for senior leaders to get good at this kind of problem solving? After all, aren’t they paid to manage others to do this? Yup, they are. But until they have mastered the game, they are not good coaches.

What I need is senior leaders who are going to insist on the same level of understanding from their people. Leaders need to understand what questions to ask, and how to re-focus people from “We have too many part shortages” to “Why was that part late today?” If each person can teach two more how to think that way, we’ll get there pretty fast.

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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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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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WSJ: Yes, Everybody Hates Performance Reviews

This article, carried by Yahoo News from the Wall Street Journal succinctly  says something that usually goes unsaid. It goes unsaid for the same reason that “Only Nixon could go to China” – only someone who is heavily invested in the performance review system can dare to criticize it. This, in itself, is an indictment of a process built built around control and fear.

Deming called out the same message decades ago. And even managers who purport to agree immediately start making excuses and justifications for why performance reviews are necessary.

If the question to be answered was “How does this Team Member know he is succeeding each day?” rather than “How do we rank and compare the Team Members against one another?” what would be different about this process?