Thoughts and Insights from the Shop Floor
A while back, Mike Rother sent around a link to a sketchcast video of a U.S. Navy submarine skipper talking about the culture change aboard his submarine, the USS Santa Fe. I posted and commented on it below, in “Creating an Empowered Team.” If you haven’t watched it, do so now so you have context …
With the publication of Learning to See in 1999, Mike Rother and John Shook introduced a new genre of book to us – a mix of theory, example, and practical application. The story invites the readers to follow along and actually do for themselves. This is one of those books that gives a bit more …
EDIT: There is a follow-on post here: David Marquet: Turn the Ship Around In the past couple of decades, we went through an “empower your people” fad. We saw work teams in world class companies that were largely self directing, surprisingly well aligned with the overall goals of the organization, and getting things done. “Well,” …
Warning: Arcane esoteria follows. A while back, Steve Spear put on a webinar about problem solving. A key theme in the early part of Spear’s presentation was about a company that realized a need to be able to cope with ever accelerating changes. My notes captured this as: We no longer do high volume manufacturing.. …
Earlier this year, Sir Ken Robinson gave a great TED talk about the state of education in the USA. While his talk was about K12, nearly everything he says applies to how we grow and develop leaders. Or stifle their growth. He makes it clear that no teaching is taking place unless learning is taking …
A client and fellow lean learner today shared a cool extension of the Toyota Kata model for establishing target conditions. Mike Rother’s Improvement Kata Handbook establishes a couple of key concepts about where a target condition should be set. The key is that the target should be somewhere beyond the learner’s knowledge threshold: The knowledge …
Over the years, I have been party to at least three corporate-level efforts to bring “A3” or “Practical Problem Solving” into their toolbox. Sometimes it has other names, such as “Management by Fact” or such, but the approaches are all similar. Typically these efforts, if they catch on at all, become exercises in filling out …
Past Due Hours This area was picked for the initial focus because they were way, way behind, and it was getting worse. The initial work was done in mid-April. The target was consistent output at takt time. As the team looked at the process, and identified the sources of disruption and variation, “changeovers” surfaced pretty …
One of the factors common to organizations that maintain a continuous improvement culture is leadership alignment on an overall direction for improvement – a “True North” – that defines the perfection you are striving for. Steve Spear describes Toyota’s “Ideal” as: An activity or a system of activities is IDEAL if it always produces and …
When we did the first “Toyota Kata” based kaizen event here a second shift lead came up and told me “I’ve been working here 34 years and this week I learned what my job is.” In most companies leads are expediters charged with forcing product out of the process when the system breaks down. As …