The Basics – Page 5 – The Lean Thinker

October 22, 2012January 9, 2019

Obstacles vs. Lists of Tools

I have been noticing a significant linguistic difference between those who still embrace the “implement the tools” paradigm, and a much smaller (but growing) group are are adopting the PDCA thinking structure as a framework for everything else.

It comes down to how a problem is stated.

We were looking at an operation with a lot of variation from one team member to another, both in terms of performance, and actually, what precisely was being done.

When asked what the obstacle was, the immediate reply was “Lack of standard work.”

While this may have been true, it is not a statement of the problem. Rather, it is defining the problem as “lack of a specific solution.”

This may seem to be an semantic discussion, but consider what the responsible supervisor hears, and interprets, from these two statements:

“There isn’t any standard work.”

“There is a lot of variation from one operator to another.”

In the first case, we are telling the supervisor what she isn’t doing, hasn’t done, needs to do. It isn’t even teaching.

In the second case, we are pointing out something that we can both agree on. I haven’t even said it is a problem, and honestly, in some cases it might not be (yet). It is a simple observation.

If, then, we agree that this variation is leading to some undesirable effect, then we can talk about countermeasures. That might include trying to capture a baseline, teach it to a few of the team members, and see if that helps. We can name it later.

Which of those approaches is more likely to enlist the support of the supervisor, which is more likely to put her on the defensive?

Lean thinking is not a checklist of which tools are in place. It is a step-by-step convergence on smoother flow, dealing with observed obstacles and problems.

This isn’t to say that the coach doesn’t have intimate knowledge and experience with flow, with standard work, and everything else. But the approach must be respectful of the people who are struggling with the real world issues every day. Saying “You need to implement standard work” isn’t helpful no matter how much logical justification is wrapped around it.

Teaching someone to observe the impact of variation on the process might seem slower, but it will get them there much faster because it engages their curiosity.

October 20, 2012January 9, 2019

Some PDCA Cycles

We had five sequential operations. Although the lowest repeatable times for each were well within the planned / target cycle time, there was a lot of variation.

Though Operation 3 was working pretty continuously, Operations 4 and 5 (downstream) were getting starved on occasion, and the empty “bubble” was working its way to the output. The exit cycles, therefore, were irregular enough that they weren’t making rate.

The team set their target to stabilize Operation 3, with the expectation that doing so would smooth out the overall exit cycles.

To that end, they went back and started to study Operation 3 in a little more detail to better understand the obstacles that were impacting the Team Member’s ability to complete the work smoothly.

Then a wrinkle – a different team member was now doing the work, and his cycles were faster.

This actually was an opportunity. Why is one Team Member faster than another?

Their hypothesis was that the faster Team Member had some knack or technique, that enabled him to perform more consistently. And indeed, he did have a few tricks.

So the first experiment was to capture this work cycle in a Job Breakdown, then see if using Job Instruction and teaching it to the first Team Member they could duplicate the results of the second.

Then another wrinkle. The first team member was back on the job. Armed with the knowledge gained by breaking down the steps, key points and reasons for Team Member #2, they took more baseline data from Team Member #1 to set up their experiment.

…only to discover that Team Member #1 was also doing things that #2 didn’t do.

One of those things was unbending a part that was sometimes being bent by an upstream operation.

It seems that #2 was just passing those along as he got them. With that background, the conversation went something like this:

“What obstacle are you addressing?”

“The manual rework in Operation 3 is adding variation and extending his cycles.”

“What experiment are you running next?”

“We think the jig being used in Operation 1 is a bit undersize, allowing the part to deform. We are going to adjust the jig to the proper size.”

“What do you expect from that?”

“We expect to eliminate bent and deflected parts, and see more consistency in Operation #3’s cycles.”

Then they tried it. Skipping ahead a bit:

“What actually happened?”

“The parts are now more consistent, and there Operation #3 has a lot less variation, and is running closer to the planned cycle time… except that now he is waiting on parts from the upstream operation.”

“Huh. What is happening there? What did you just learn?”

“Well, it looks like Operation #3’s variation was masking inconsistent delivery from Operation #2. That team member is operating in small batches, then turning and delivering 3-5 parts at a time. When there was a lot of variation in Op #3, those parts were kind of buffering everything. Now he is working more consistently and faster, and ends up waiting on parts.”

“Because of the layout, the Operation #2 Team Member has to turn to his left and pass the parts behind him. He said he batches so he doesn’t have to turn so often. So what we are thinking is we want to…”

“Hang on, I want to stick to the structure so you guys can practice hearing and responding to it… So – what is your next step?”

“We talked to the team members, and they all agree that if we straighten out that bend in the layout, this will be a lot easier on them, so we are going to do that during the lunch break.”

“And what do you expect from that?”

“Operation #3 will get his parts one-by-one, as they are ready, and won’t have to wait on them.

“Great, so when can we see what you have learned?”

“Give us about 30 minutes after lunch break is over.”

You can probably surmise that things smoothed out a bit.

Then they went back to capturing a hybrid of the best practices of both operators in a job breakdown. At this point, the Team Members were genuinely interested in how they were doing, and both were quite open to learning the “tricks” of the other, so “Get the worker interested in learning the job” had pretty much been done.

A lot was learned over a few hours.

Reflection:

The “real world” is often quite a bit messier than the real world. There was actually a lot more dialog than I reconstructed here to keep the “learners” on track and focused on their stated target vs. resorting to an action of “improvements.”

In addition, merely beginning to work on one obstacle revealed enough information that they were dealing with a different underlying problem.

At another point in the week, they also believed they saw a need for more consistent part presentation. I happened to agree with them, but…

when pressed for what result they expected, the initial response was “The parts will be consistently presented.”… but what does that have to do with your target?

That was tough because, at the time, they were looking at the cycles of the 2nd operator that were, actually, pretty consistent, and lost sight of the fact that they were working on reducing the overall variation of output from that position.

They had a very hard time articulating why consistent part presentation would address the issue, even though they knew it should.

I think this is the result of years of conditioning that the “tools” – such as consistent part presentation – are good for their own sake, without really examining the underlying problems and causes that are being addressed.

If we lean practitioners are scratching our heads wondering why people don’t see this stuff helps, it would be a lot easier to deal with if we could point to the issue being addressed at the moment.

More tomorrow.

September 13, 2012January 9, 2019

High-Speed Automation

While we lean practitioners seem to have earned a reputation of distain for high-speed automation, industries like mass production consumables, and the food and beverage industry, would not be viable without that approach.

These plants are capital intensive, and the main focus of the people is to keep the equipment running. I hinted at some of these things a couple of years ago from the Czech Republic.

Here are some more recent thoughts.

Even though it is about equipment, it is still about people.

This is not a paradox at all. People are the ones who are getting cranky equipment to run, scurrying about clearing jams, clearing product that got mangled. Until you have a “lights out” plant, people are critical to keeping things running.

Robust problem solving and improvement skills are more critical.

In a purely manual world, you can get away with burying issues under more people and more inventory.

With interconnected automated equipment, not so much. The hardware has to run. It all has to run or there is no output.

How the organization responds to a technical problem makes the difference between quickly clearing the issue, or struggling with it for a couple of hours while everything else backs up.

This is where standard processes are critical, not only to short-term success, but also to capture new information as it is learned. This is the “chatter as signal” issue I have written about a couple of times.

Quoting from the above link:

Most organizations accept that they cannot possibly think of everything, that some degree of chatter is going to occur, and that people on the spot are paid to deal with it. That is, after all, their job. And the ones that are good at dealing with it are usually the ones who are spotlighted as the star performers.

The underlying assumptions here are:

Our processes and systems are complex.

We can’t possibly think of and plan for anything that might go wrong.

It is not realistic to expect perfection.

“Chatter is noise” and an inevitable part of the way things are in our business.

Those underlying assumptions say “Our equipment is complicated and difficult to get adjusted. All we can do is try stuff until it runs.”

That assumption actually lets people off the hook of actually understanding the nuances of the equipment; as well as letting them off the hook of a disciplined approach to troubleshooting. The assumption essentially says “We can’t do anything about it.”

A dark side of this designed ignorance is that the only thing leaders are really able to do is hover about and apply psychological pressure to “do something” or, at best, contribute to the noise of “things to try.”

Neither of those is particularly helpful for an operator who is trying to get the machine running. Both of those actually have a built-in implication that the operator (1) Does not know how to do his job or (2) Is somehow withholding his expertise from the situation.

But we get a different result from the alternative assumptions:

On the other hand, the organizations that are pulling further and further ahead take a different view.

Their underlying assumptions start out the same, then take a significant turn.

Our processes and systems are complex.

We can’t possibly think of and plan for anything that might go wrong.

But we believe perfection is possible.

“Chatter is signal” and it tells us where we need to address something we missed.

What does this look like in practice?

A known starting condition for all settings, that is verified.

A fixed troubleshooting checklist for common problems (that starts with “Verify the correct initial settings).

What things should be verified, in what sequence? (Understand the dependencies).

If a check reveals an issue, what immediate corrective action should be taken?

I would also strongly recommend using the format of a Job Breakdown (from TWI Job Instruction) for all of this. It is much easier to teach, but more importantly, it really forces you to think things through.

Of course, the checklist is unlikely to cover everything, at least at first. But it does establish a common baseline, and documents the limit of your knowledge.

The end of the operator checklist then defines the escalation point – when the operator must involve the next level of help.

It takes robust problem solving skills (and willingness to take the time to use them) to develop these processes; but doing so can save a mountain of time that pays back many times over.

The alternative is taking the time to mess with things until it sort of works, and never really understanding what was done or what had an effect – every single time there is an issue.

Cry once, or cry every day.

What does this have to do with improvement?

The obvious answer is that, if done well, it will save time.

The more subtle effect is that it sharpens the organization’s knowledge base, as well as their ability to really understand the nuances of the equipment. But this must be done on purpose. It isn’t going to happen on its own.

By getting things up and running sooner; and reducing the time of stoppages; it increases equipment capacity.

But more importantly, all of this increases people capacity.

It gives people time to think about the next level of problems rather than being constantly focused on simply surviving the workday. Of course you need the right organizational and leadership structure to support that.

June 20, 2012January 9, 2019

5S With Purpose

The team was driving toward a consistently executed changeover process as a target condition.

In the last iteration, the process was disrupted by a scrapped first-run part. The initial level cause was an oversize bit in the NC router resulting in an out-of-spec trim and oversize holes.

This occurred in spite of the fact that there are standard tools that are supposed to be in standard locations in the tool holders on the back of the work pallet.

Upon investigation, the team found:

The previous part had a programming error calling out the oversize tool from the wrong location.
All of the operators were aware of this, and routinely replaced the “standard” tool with the one the program required.
After that part was run, the standard condition had not been restored.
There was likely a break in continuity between operators here, but that was less clear.
The two bits are only 1/8 different, and hard to distinguish from one another across the 10 feet or so of the work pallet.

The team addressed the programming error, but among the thousands of other programs out there, they were reasonably certain that there were other cases where the same situation could be set up.

They wanted to ensure that it was very clear when there were non-standard tools in the standard locations.

Their initial approach was to create a large chart that called out which tools were to be in which holders. Their next experiment was to be to put that chart up in the work area.

“What do you expect to happen?”

That turned out to be a very powerful question. After a bit of questioning, they implied that the operator was to verify that the correct tools were in the standard positions before proceeding.

“How does this chart help them do that?”

They can see what the standard is.

“Don’t they all already know what the standard is?”

Yes…..

“So how does this chart help them do that?”

Now, to be clear, the conversation was not quite this scripted, but you are getting the idea. The point was to get them to be specific about what they expected the operator to do, and to be specific about how they expected their countermeasure to help the operator do it.

One team member offered up that maybe they could color-code the standard tools and their holders so it would be easy to check and easy to see if something was off-standard. That way, even IF the situation came up where the operator needed to deviate from the standard, anyone could easily see what was happening.

(I should add that they have already put an escalation process into place that should trap, and correct, these programming errors as they come up as well.)

The tools were color-coded over night, and in place the next day.

This wasn’t a “5S campaign,” nor is there an audit sheet that tries to measure the “level” of visual control in the work space.

Rather, this is using a visual control to visually control something, and reduce the likelihood of another scrapped part (and therefore, disrupted changeover).

Over the last week, the work cell has been improving. When things are flowing as they are supposed to, changeovers are routinely being done within the expected time.

But there are times when their standard WIP goes low; there are times when someone gets called away; when the flow doesn’t go as planned. When those things happen, they get off their standard.

The next countermeasure is to document, clearly, the normal pattern for who works where, for what inventory is where. Then the next question is “How can anyone verify, at a glance, whether or not the flow is running to the normal pattern?”

More visual controls. Ah.

Now we are seeing the reason behind 5S. It will come in to that work area, step by step, as the necessity to make things more clear arises.

May 6, 2012January 9, 2019

Toyota Kata at lean.org

Mike Rother sent out an email today pointing out that the Lean Enterprise Institute’s web site now has a Toyota Kata page.

I believe this is a significant event for the lean community as a whole, as well as for the LEI.

As many of my regular readers know, I have maintained the view that the LEI had not kept up with the current state of knowledge about what makes “lean” work.

Back to Basics

An Open Letter to John Shook

When the LEI published Kaizen Express in 2009, I wrote a review that addressed this topic. The review had two parts. One part about the book itself, and the other about the context of the community’s knowledge at the time.

I think it is a great book, for 1991.

But this is 2009. So while Kaizen Express is a welcome refresher of the mechanics, those mechanics are, according to the current standing theory, built upon a foundation of something that Kaizen Express, and for that matter, the LEI has not, to date, addressed. What is missing, in my view, is how the tools and practices outlined in Kaizen Express and its predecessors actually drive daily continuous improvement that engages every team member in the process. [bolding added for emphasis here]

When Toyota Kata was published, I believe it closed that gap for the community at large. But I felt a bit of irony that while Mike Rother had co-authored the LEI’s flagship workbook Learning to See, Toyota Kata was not only outside the LEI’s community at the time, it was hardly acknowledged to exist.

The purpose of this post is to acknowledge that a significant step has been taken: For the first time in many years, the LEI is embracing material that they did not originally publish.

From my perspective, this looks like a turning point away from the path of irrelevance.

April 26, 2012January 9, 2019

Failure as Success

A great insight from a client today.

The target condition at this point is simply to establish some degree of transparency of the current condition on a status board without having to resort to probing questions to elicit what is working, and what is not.

The observation was:

“We’ll know we are succeeding when we see a failure.”

In other words, “no problem is a big problem” but I think this says it just as well.

April 11, 2012January 9, 2019

Learning vs Teaching

Coincidently my experience this week ties in nicely to the last post.

I have a couple of teams working to develop pull systems through their respective work areas.

The conventional approach (I suppose) is a lot of PowerPoint about kanban, some exercises, developing a future state value stream map, then devising an implementation plan.

An alternative approach is to have a small group of experts design the system.

Most of the time this results in a fairly arduous process of wringing out the issues once the system goes live. If the team isn’t prepared for that, it is likely the system will come apart as people bypass it out of necessity to get the work done.

What I am watching this week is more organic.

First, we covered a few fundamentals about flow and pull signals in a simple demonstration of “build and push” vs. one-piece-flow with a visual limiter on work-in-process inventory. They saw the throughput, productivity, stability, visibility all increase while lead time dropped by an order of magnitude. That took about an hour.

The team then set up a tabletop simulation of their existing work flow, and exercised it a few times to confirm that it is a fair representation of the way things actually work today. In doing so, they gain more understanding of the current condition because they have to replicate it.

They then set out to make their far more complex real-world situation work more like what they saw in the demonstration. To help them get started, they were given some suggestions about a few things to try, and some basic principles and rules.

Some of that advice included restricting changes to a single factor at a time, and predicting what would happen, then trying it. If you find yourself speculating, or discussing alternative speculations, try it and see.

Two days into it, the teams have full-blown multi-loop kanban working, and are devising experiments to learn how the system responds to things like machines going down, unpredicted shifts in product mix, and other things they normally need to respond to.

They are exploring not only the mechanics and the rules, but the dynamics of the process in operation. They are learning what “normal” looks like in the face of abnormal conditions. They are testing the boundaries – where and when does it break, and what does “broken” look like vs. something that will recover on its own.

They are figuring out how to make it more robust, without making it cumbersome or too complicated.

They are gaining confidence and a deep understanding by iterating through ever more complex scenarios.

The people doing this are the ones who will be working IN the system in the future. We are seeing who emerges as thought leaders.

What they have right now – mid week – is a crystal clear view of their target condition, and they are very confident that they can make it work in their real world. Are there unknown issues? Sure. There always are. Translating this to the real world will involve more cycles of iteration. Only now they know exactly how to do those iterations because they have practiced dozens of times already.

This is actually less about kanban than it is about learning how to gain knowledge about something previously unknown.

It is pretty cool to watch, and a lot more fun (for everyone) than just implementing a process designed by someone else. Even the skeptics get drawn in when people are working hands-on to try to make something work.

Oh – and I’m really glad this process works because that saves me from having to know the answers.

February 9, 2012January 9, 2019

Leadership and Challenges

This post rambles a bit, and wraps up a few concepts. It was, however, inspired by a recent interview of Mike Rother on Lean Nation. (See below)

One of the many good points that struck me was that you can’t rally around an ROI.

Yet companies try to do just that. They set something ROI or margin objectives, and wonder why everyone doesn’t pick them up and run with them.

Even companies that do issue a good challenge often come up wondering why the organization doesn’t align around it. Rother mentions one good reason: Nobody is there to coach them through meeting their part of the challenge.

A similar fallacy is trying to rally people around an abstract vision. I have experienced this a couple of times. A company tries to apply general education to people – lots of it – in the (vain) hope that once people “understand” then they will pick up the ball and run. But without consistent direction toward a limited objective that is easily articulated, people freeze up. “What do we work on?” There are too many choices.

Chip and Dan Heath discuss the importance of a rallying point in their book about culture change, Switch. They talk about “Pointing to the Destination” and “Scripting the Critical Moves.” When we talk about an aligning challenge, we are saying the same thing. Remember – in these initial stages you are trying to infuse a fundamental behavior and culture change. You can’t just tell people what it is and expect things to change tomorrow.

Classroom training may teach people the words, but it does little to accelerate the process of learning on the shop floor. That takes leadership.

The Process of Caring

Vance left a really good comment on the recent Travel Tales post. He said, in part:

Having worked in the airline business, it’s really a matter of having employees that CARE (most due to their own pride, not by management) We many times had weather and mis-connected passengers to deal with. It only took a few minutes of extra time to send a message to the destination station and let them know what to expect or which passenger was going to be disappointed to not get their bag. Today’s situation is exacerbated by under-staffing, stressed employees, passengers with sometimes unrealistic expectations, checked bag fees, etc it’s ugly and very little relief in sight.

He brings up some really interesting points. In most of the airline industry, like most industry in general, “caring” is thought of as something the people have to do.

“The employees don’t care” or even “management doesn’t care” are pretty common statements.

Let’s turn it around.

How was the original process designed?

Continuing on the theme from the original post, I would speculate that most players in the airline industry see themselves as providing transportation to people and their stuff.

The process design is, logically, going to center on what things have to happen to get people and their stuff from their point of entry into the system through to their point of exit at baggage claim. (the fact that the trip doesn’t actually end at baggage claim is another topic – one which has been discussed by Jim Womack in Lean Thinking, among other places.)

In traditional thinking, improvements in that process will involve making those things happen cheaper, usually by doing less.

What if, though, we start with a different question:

“What experience do we want the customer to have?”

Describe, first and foremost, the things the customer has to do to get herself and her stuff from the point of departure to (sadly) baggage claim. (Bonus points if beyond, but let’s not stretch the fantasy too far.)

Even better, act it out. Simulate it. Try it on. Work out the kinks, from the customer’s perspective.

Next, design the interface between your customer and your process. What does the customer-touching part of your process have to look like to deliver that experience?

(I often wonder if airline executives ever see their own web reservation systems.)

Now, only when you know what the “on stage” part of your process looks like can you design the rest of it – the back stage parts that make it all happen.

Economics come into play at this last stage. This is where you have to get creative. If the solution is too expensive, work on the back-stage part to make it cleaner and more streamlined. The customer facing part of the process is the target condition. Your problem solving works to deliver that experience in continuously better ways.

What does this have to do with “caring?”

Remember, this is from the customer’s perspective. When we say “our employees care” do we not really mean “our customer’s feel cared-about?” Since we started with the customer’s experience, if that is what is desired, it was built into the process specification from the beginning.

Once there is a process that we predict will result in customer’s feeling that people care about them, then your market surveys make sense. You are not soliciting complaints about things to fix, you are validating (or refuting) your design assumptions. Every bit of customer feedback will be a learning experience.

Don’t forget Murphy.

In a complex business like airline travel, sometimes luggage doesn’t get to baggage claim at the same time as the customer. It happens. But this is the time to really apply the above process design. What do you want the customer to experience when things go wrong?

Ironically, in the customer satisfaction world, a spectacular and surprising recovery actually generates more loyalty than flawless delivery of service. This is the moment for your company to shine.

Whatever happens, though, make sure it is something you would do on purpose rather than relying on chance or a random team member’s disposition. Build “caring” into the process itself, and you will embed it into the culture.

December 30, 2011January 9, 2019

The Structure Behind Leader Development

Chapter 3 of The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership is titled “Coach and Develop Others.”

Where in Chapter 2 the authors were outlining the individual leader’s responsibility for self-development, now they are describing the environment and the process of supporting and focusing that drive.

Rather than just outline the chapter, I want to dig into some key elements of the context that Toyota creates for their leaders.

First is the expectation that leaders lead.

Leading vs. Delegating

Chapter 3 has a great story that exemplifies the key differences in management styles that I alluded to in the post about Chapter 2.

In that story, NUMMI has equipment reliability problems in the body shop. Mr. Ito, the President has instructed Convis to have each engineer prepare and present a one page report for every breakdown lasting over 30 minutes. The telling moment is Convis behavior in the presentations:

While Ito was critiquing the [A3] presentations and reports, Gary [Convis] simply stood to one side, marveling at Ito’s insight and amused at the struggles of the engineers’ efforts to learn this way of thinking.

This quote nails the core issue we have to deal with in any company that wants to succeed with lean production.

Convis was newly hired from the U.S. automobile industry, and was acting exactly as he was trained as a manager. He was acting as every manager in the USA is trained.

He has delegated the process of training the engineers to Ito, who he sees as the technical expert. Convis viewed his presence here as overseeing how well his engineers are responding to that training.

Ito, though, had other ideas.

After a few sessions, Ito asked Gary how he was coaching the engineers through the process before the presentations. Ito pointed out that there was still a lot of red on the reports, and if Gary had been teaching the engineers properly, there would be less red ink. […] problems with the reports were a reflection of Gary’s leadership, and he was more responsible for any failures than the engineers were.

Zing.

You can’t even cite “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught” here because the delegation paradigm was so strong that Convis didn’t realize he had responsibility for being the teacher.

Convis, of course, “got it” and began seeing the red ink as his failure, rather than the engineers’. The drive for self-development kicked in and worked. And of course, in the process of struggling to coach the problem solving process, he had to struggle to learn it well enough to do so.

Personally, I see the idea of delegating and then passively overseeing improvement and people development is a cancer that is difficult to excise from even the most well intentioned organization.

I have seen this with my own eyes – senior executives struggling with how to “implement lean.” What was their concern? What metrics they could use to gage everyone’s progress through reports to corporate headquarters. They simply saw no need to get personally involved in learning, much less going to see, and certainly not teaching, the messy details. Not surprisingly, that company still struggles with the concepts.

Of course it cascades down from there. The various sites’ leaders follow the example, and delegate to their professional staff people. The staff’s job? To come up with “the lean plan” and “drive improvement” while the leaders watch. At some point, someone in charge of the operation actually has to do something different, but that, it seems, is always the next level down.

I am not going to get into what stops leaders from stepping up to this responsibility or what do to about it because that would be a book in itself.

It doesn’t help that, with the revolving-door of leadership we often encounter, each new leader comes in with the old mindset. OK </rant> and back to the book. Smile

The Technical Support

This expectation of leaders leading does not operate in a vacuum. Toyota processes are deliberately set up to remove any ambiguity about what the next challenge is by surfacing problems immediately

In the words of Lean Leadership, these problems are framed as challenges for leader development.

In a much earlier post, I objected to our western euphemism of “opportunity” when we meant “problem.” My objection was treating this “opportunity” as an something that could be taken on, or not.

A challenge, especially in the context of leader development, isn’t optional. A top level athlete grasps the meaning of a challenge. He is driven to take it on and push himself to meet it. He improves in the process. It isn’t about the record, per se, it is about what he must develop and pull from within himself to get there.

Just as the world-class athlete has a stopwatch on every lap, the assembly line is set up to verify the timing of every cycle. Any discrepancy is immediately apparent to both the team member and the leaders. If the work can’t be done, the line is stopped and things are made right. Then we figure out why. And everyone learns.

TPS […] creates a never-ending stream of opportunities for on-the-job development and increased challenges. Toyota sensei do not need to create artificial training situations […]. The daily process of producing cars generates all the development opportunities and challenges that are needed.

If your organization has trouble finding problems, it isn’t because they aren’t there. It is because your processes are blind to them. That is why “No problem is a big problem.”

The key is that when we talk about “implementing the tools of lean” we are doing nothing more than setting up the baseline process to present the challenges for leadership development. That’s it. It is the difference between playing a casual game and deciding to keep score.

You can’t improve without keeping score, to be sure. But keeping score alone doesn’t cause things to get better. If anything, it increases people’s frustration because they see they are coming up short, but don’t have the support or opportunity to do anything about it.

What happens then? They start seeing problems as “normal” and start blinding the system. They add padding to cycle times to “allow for variation.” They decouple processes and put in extra inventory. They start running two at a time, then four, and return to batching.

If a problem remains hidden below the surface long enough, it can stop being perceived as a problem and become part of normal operating procedure.

OK, so I’ve beaten that to death yet again. It is critical to structure the work so that we can see whether things are going as planned or not.

But it is just as critical to have the problem solving processes engaged immediately. If those processes don’t yet exist, you have no hope of your so-called improvements sustaining for long.

That’s not all. There is another standard that is just as critical – if not more: A standard for problem solving.

The A3

We just got done exploring how critical it is to have a process that is totally transparent. Why? So we can clearly see any difference between how it is and how it should be.

The purpose of the A3 is to provide that level of visual control to the problem solving process itself.

And yes, problem solving is a process. It follows standard work. It is perhaps the most critical thing to standardize. The only way to gain skill at something is to practice against a clear standard. It really helps to have a coach watching your every move and calling out small adjustments, things you need to pay more attention to the next time you do it (which should be immediately).

The A3 is the game film, the slow motion camera, the visual control of how problem solving is being done. It is not sufficient to find the solution. It is more important to develop a consistent approach to problem solving across the entire organization.

But outside of Toyota and a few companies that are starting to grasp what this is about, the A3 is, sadly, one of the more recent fads in the lean community.

An A3 isn’t something you tell someone else to do. It is a visual control, just like the moving line, that works only in the context of direct observation and participation by all parties involved. In the above story, Ito was setting an example, and expecting Convis to follow it. Once that started happening, Ito’s participation shifted from coaching the engineers to coaching Convis as he coached them.

Just as the tools of takt time, standard work, pull systems, etc. do not stand alone and “make you lean,” neither does filling out A3 forms. Even if you have “the tools” and a problem solving process, it doesn’t help if they are not intimately linked together.

All of these things are designed for 1:1 interaction. They are messy testaments to the fact that problem solving often loops back to previous steps as more is learned.

The Big Picture

This chapter provoked a lot of thought for me, and I have tried to share some of that. When / if you choose to read the book, I hope you have your own thoughts, and even share them here or in the forum (that could use some life right now).

Fundamentally, Chapter 3 is about the phenomenal support Toyota provides those leaders who have the self-motivation to learn.

Every operation is structured to provide challenges and opportunities for them to develop their skills. There is no shortage of things that obviously need improving.
Every leader is positioned to teach and mentor those who are willing to step up to the challenges that are there.
The problem solving process itself is structured as standard work so that a prospective leader can practice against a standard and improve skill through repetition and coaching.

Aside from a couple of case studies and examples, this chapter is a bit of a synopsis of Toyota Kata. I continue to bring Kata into this discussion because there is obvious overlap in topics, and I see these two books complimenting each other. Kata gets into the nitty-gritty of how problem solving and coaching happens. Lean Leadership is providing a context and case examples of the entire ecosystem.

More to follow.