Thoughts and Insights from the Shop Floor
I have been touting Chip and Dan Heath’s book Switch for some time now, so it I thought I ought to actually write about why. If you are in the role of a “change agent” this book is your manual. Up to this point, the bible for “organizational change” has been John P. Kotter’s book …
Continue reading “Switch: How To Change Things When Change Is Hard”
A key point of Mike Rother’s book Toyota Kata is that the organization develops a very deep core-competency in problem solving. In order to develop competency at anything, there must first be a standard to strive for. What I am realizing is the precise method used doesn’t matter nearly as much as having a method …
Congratulations on your assumption of leadership at the Lean Enterprise Institute. The Lean Enterprise Institute has a deservedly unique place in the community of people working to learn and apply the Toyota Production System. The LEI, and the precursor work at M.I.T., by Jim Womack and others, has been largely responsible for moving the Toyota …
Here is an “ah-ha” or even one of those “oh s#!&” moments I had as Mike Rother was talking about his Toyota Kata research last week. Solution How Solution is Developed Toyota / “Lean” Left Open Very specific – guided and directed. Traditional Management Given / Directed Not specified, left to “empowered” employee. When …
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 …
Hopefully that title got some attention. In Toyota Kata, Mike Rother frames a PDCA coaching process around five questions. The first three questions are: What is the target condition? What is the current condition? What problems or obstacles are preventing you from reaching the target? Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we could build a machine …
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 …
This week I am coaching a kaizen team in the first phases of implementing a process to respond to problems on the shop floor. They clearly understand the objective, and are working hard. The key is to keep them focused on working out the problem response process vs. getting distracted by the production problems they …
I have seen this topic come up in forums many times, and seen wide ranging responses. If I were to summarize them all, it would be “I’ll know it when I see it.” A couple of weeks ago I heard a great quote from a co-worker that puts things into perspective. I’m always ready to …
In a recent blog post, Why C level executives don’t engage in ‘lean’…, Steven Spear makes a really interesting observation. He cites two main reasons. 1) “Lean” is regarded as a tool kit. There has already been a lot written here, and elsewhere, on this fallacy and how it continues to be propagated. Spear’s most …