I share this often enough at client sites, so here it is for everyone – a little geek / kata-related humor from Randall Munroe of xkcd.com. Title: “The Difference” (between ‘scientists’ and ‘everyone else’)
Often Skipped: Understand the Challenge and Direction
I’ve been practicing, teaching (and learning) the Toyota Kata for about four years now, and I’m seeing some pervasive patterns that are getting in people’s way of making it work.
The one I’d like to address today is skipping over “Understand the Direction.”
As designed by Mike Rother, the Improvement Kata has four basic steps:
Graphic © Mike Rother (click on the graphic to download the Improvement Kata Handbook)
This fact (that there are four steps) is often lost on beginning practitioners. They tend to associate “Toyota Kata” only with the “Five Questions” of the Coaching Kata, which guide Step 4 (above). On the surface, that is understandable, because we hear the coaching cycles a lot more frequently, and they are a hallmark of the kata principle.
But we (hopefully) wouldn’t think of jumping right into the Five Questions until the answer to “What is your target condition?” is something more definitive than “To improve this process.” (We only used to do that, right? hmmm.)
One of the reasons to set a clear target condition is to get away from general “waste safari” improvement efforts, and focus the improver’s attention on what must be done to get to the next level.
Without a sense of direction, it is easy for the improver to see every improvement opportunity (or none of them), and get locked up trying to find a way to fix them all.
It’s frustrating for everyone, because little progress is made, and those improvements that are made have a tough time finding their way to any higher level meaning.
Someone, long ago, pointed out to me that the geometric figure “frustum” seems to have the same Latin root as “frustration.” This is the graphic that comes to mind:
Though the concept of a clear target condition is fairly easy to get across, organizations seem to get locked into a cycle of Steps 2, 3 and 4 without ever going back to Step 1, except in the most general terms.
Here’s what I think happens:
When an organization is just getting started, we’ve commonly told them to pick an area to practice, based on quick cycles and other practice criteria, and get to learning the improvement kata, striving toward a general challenge like one-by-one flow.
That pattern of seeking improvement opportunities gets engrained, and it is hard to shift off it and start to set clear direction and challenges. Further, it is very similar to the “old way” of planning kaizen events where the goal is to “implement lean tools” … like one-by-one flow.
Setting that direction also seems to run counter to the idea of empowered workers are in the best position to know what to work on. (It doesn’t, in fact direction is required for this to really take hold.)
In another sense, though, the Challenge for one level is, in reality, the Target Condition (or at least a major obstacle) for the level above. If I am asking the VP-Operations what his target condition is, I am going to hear things that sound a whole lot like a Challenge for the next level down.
And if the senior leaders don’t have a clear sense of where they are trying to take the organization next… what is their scope of their responsibility?
What to do differently?
(It might help if the leadership team themselves got a coach.)
1) Be clear that your initial sessions are practice drills. You are not yet playing the game, or even a scrimmage. You are flipping tires. Be conscious that this is a transitory learning stage.
2) Establish a target condition for proficiency you are striving for in your practice. Check it weekly against your current condition. This is the job of the advance / steering team.
Challenge Light
For the first pass, it isn’t necessary to dig headlong into hoshin planning, and in many cases, you can issue a compelling challenge with a theme.
Look at what is bugging your customers about your current operation, and challenge yourself to fix it.
For example, one client had lead times and response times that were getting longer and longer, so the challenges issued by the leadership team revolved around lead time and removing “sources of delay.”
Another company had rework and quality escapes going out of control. Their first step was to “grasp the current condition” and identify where these problems were happening.
Each dot represents the origin of a defect or rework. (The colors don’t mean anything, they ran out of red, then orange, then yellow dots.) (You can see exit cycle run charts taped up there as well.)
This gave them a quick picture of where to focus their attention, and which leaders they needed to challenge, and then coach, through the process of improving their quality.
Note that for these guys, integrating the flow of material and information though the plant isn’t a target condition, or even a challenge yet. It is in the vision, but the first priority is simply to ship what the customer ordered, and then to only make the product once to do so.
By the way, profit is measurably up, rework instances have been cut by about 3/4 from the starting point, and they are well on their way.
Oh No! Toyota is “Cutting the andon cord!”
WHAT DO WE DO!!
I’ve had three or four people forward various links to a story from Automotive News titled “Toyota Cutting the Fabled Andon Cord, Symbol of Toyota Way.”
Most of those people didn’t read past the headline.
I’ll quote from one paragraph into the article:
“In its place are yellow call buttons perched waist-high within easy reach along the line for workers to hit when a problem pops up requiring help or the line to be stopped.
Toyota switched to the buttons last year at its flagship Tsutsumi assembly plant in Toyota City, during a factory renovation. In Japan, the buttons were first used by a vehicle-assembling subsidiary, Toyota Motor East Japan Inc., at a Miyagi plant.”
The implication?
They got tired of the overhead rope getting in the way of flexibility in how they arranged the line, material, work flows. They improved their system. It is easier for a worker to initiate a help call (which leads to a line stop if the issue isn’t resolved quickly).
They first saw an obstacle (rope in the way) to another improvement (flexibility). They ran an experiment (at the Miyagi plant), wrung out the details, then put it into place in Tsutsumi for a larger scale trial.
What is totally consistent here is the approach to improvement.
We, once again, have confused the artifacts (overhead ropes, work documented a certain way, a method for distributing parts, an approach to tracking quality issues) with the purpose: Making gaps between “what should be” and “what actual is” every more clear so the can work on getting to the next level.
I suppose a headline that read “Toyota Replaces Overhead Rope With Buttons for Improved Flexibility” wouldn’t garner the same number of hits, nor would it trigger blog posts across the lean community, so I guess that headline worked for its intended purpose.
Here is what the andon is all about:
If anyone is looking for evidence that Toyota is somehow abandoning the principle of “Stop the line before passing along bad quality… this isn’t it.”
Move along…
Competence and Clarity: Toyota Kata at Sea
A friend, and reader, Craig sent a really interesting email:
As I was practicing the coaching Kata with one of the First Mates on the factory trawler, whenever an issue arose (usually with the leader blaming an employee) he began asking factory and engineering leadership “what needed to be communicated?” or “what needed to be taught?” He found it encompassed every problem on the vessel and I loved that he made it his own and communicated in manner to which lifetime fishermen could relate.
What I found really cool about this is how it is exactly the same conclusion reached by David Marquet, both in the sketchcast video I posted earlier, and the titles of two chapters in his book. The reasons leaders feel they must withhold authority, remain “in control” ultimately come down to competence – what must people be taught, or clarity – what have we failed to adequately communicate. Maybe it’s being at sea.
In other words, if people know wh
at to do (clarity), and know how to do it (competence), then leaders generally have no issues trusting that the right people will do the right things the right way.
The Improvement Kata is a great structure for creating and carrying out development plans for leaders (or future leaders) in your organization.
The Coaching Kata is a great way to structure your next conversation to (1) ensure clarity of intent: Does their target condition align with the direction and challenge? and (2) develop their competence, both in improving / problem solving, but also in their understanding of the domain of work at hand.
Cruise Ship Cabins on an Assembly Line
Royal Caribbean Cruise Lines released a cool P.R. video showing the production of cruise ship cabins on an assembly line with a 14 minute(!) takt time.
The key point, for me at least, is that even “big one-off things” can often be broken down into sub-assemblies that have a meaningful takt time of some kind. We have to look for the opportunities for what can be set up to flow vs. reasons why we can’t.
Click Here for the direct link to the page on Royal Caribbean’s press page.
Discussing Challenge and Direction
A manager and his direct report were discussing the challenge and direction for the next round of improvement. The conversation was going around in circles.
The manager was concerned about the excessive overtime, and wanted to establish a challenge to reduce it significantly.
The improver was skipping directly to talking about the things he would have to change in the process – mainly trying to level his demand signal somehow… long before “current condition” had been established… this conversation was just about context.
The manager was frustrated because he knows people habitually jump to solutions instead of first digging into the problem, and he was getting that right now.
The manager was repeating his question “But how can we reduce the overtime.”
Each time the manager asked about the process performance, the improver was offering improvement solutions.
Then I realized… The manager was asking for an improvement solution.
“How can we reduce the overtime?”
I asked him to just ask what he wanted the process to achieve. He still reiterated the same question.
Finally I said “Don’t say ‘how can we.’
Start with “I want…”
“I want the overtime to be 10% or less.”
The tone of the conversation changed immediately, because we really didn’t know what factors were driving the overtime. NOW it is time for the improver to go grasp the current condition (with help from his coach) and establish the next target condition (with help from his coach).
Then he can come back with:
“To keep overtime under 10% , we will need the process to operate like this.”
“Today, it is working like this, and we are running overtime as high as 30% in the worst weeks.”
“As my first step, I intend to…”
And how we’re moving in the right direction.
When the manager was asking “How can we…?” he was asking for a proposed solution right now, even if he didn’t mean to. The answer to a “how can we?” question is “Well, we could…” and we are immediately grasping at possible changes.
Listen to the words you use.
Be clear about what you are actually asking people to do, because that is what you are going to get.
More about Knowing How
A couple of posts down, I reiterated the importance of understanding of how your product is made. If you are in the business of “making things” your ability to improve your product reaches its limit at your level of understanding how to make it. Lean Process and Product Development (below) addresses this same topic.
Now let’s apply this to the management of production.
In the west, it seems that one of the perks of success is increasing isolation from where the work is done. This may be because western management systems separate the role of “administration” as a generic process from the specialty roles that actually get stuff done. The assumption is that a skilled administrator can successfully administrate just about anything.
As a result, perhaps some managers strive to detach themselves from the details of “getting stuff done” as an unconscious effort to increase their status. They shift to administration type tasks.
These tasks tend to relate to driving financial results. The focus and discussions tend to be around “earned hours” and which shipments to pull ahead to invoice for revenue. They involve skills like expediting (meaning queue jumping) the “hot” jobs, or the ones most likely to make an immediate impact on a financial metric.
The problem comes about when production alone tries to resolve revenue shortfalls with these actions. Pulling more work onto the shop floor – starting jobs earlier – might “keep people busy” but the overproduction just hides the fact that sales volume is below production capacity. Now sales not only has to close the initial shortfall (if you want REAL revenue to keep up), but they also have to double up their efforts to re-fill the pipeline. Otherwise, the “earned hours” or “absorption variance” shortfall is just postponed (and made worse) by this kind of action.
Back on the shop floor, there isn’t anyone looking after the system. It is generally assumed to require this continuous intervention to operate at all, the intervention in turn disrupts stability, which escalates the problem.
But even more, I am troubled, frankly, by how many times I have seen production managers have very poor production management skills.
First and foremost is simple systems thinking. By this I mean understanding the consequences of your decision on the overall stability of the process. In other words, if you break it, you are responsible for ensuring it gets fixed. And to be sure, jumping queues, telling workers to break the flow is breaking it. Note that mastery of how the accounting system keeps score is not systems thinking for the production process. And breaking the process to manipulate the cost accounting is… ?
Of course, if these things are “business as usual” then we are teaching people to do these things as a matter of routine, not exception. Chaos ensues, and there is no attempt at all to worry about the consequences. We’ll deal with that the same way tomorrow.
After understand how the system works, there are some very basic things that any manufacturing manager needs to know. Most of these things also apply to non-production processes, but that does take a little more thinking.
Though it is (hopefully) intuitively obvious that level production is more efficient than ramping things up and down every day (hour!), very few production managers make any effort to establish any kind of level pace.
The single most popular post on this site is “Takt Time – Cycle Time.” I initially wrote it to make the point that the term “cycle time” is ambiguous and we need to be clear about which definition we mean when we use the term, and that we need to understand the “Why?” behind takt time vs. taking a blind, rote approch. Take a look at the comments chain. It isn’t about the questions being asked so much as who is asking them. Whose job is it to understand production management in these organizations?
You may not have a “takt time” in the literal sense, but you do have a rate that things must be done in order to succeed by the end of the day.
Unless you have infinite flexibility, every process was designed around some level of capacity (which means a rate!), even if by accident. But, all too often, I see managers making decisions about hiring more people, buying more equipment, even putting on extra shifts, without doing the underlying math of what capacity is required, what capacity they have, defining the gap, identifying the obstacles, and then deciding on countermeasures. (with “more stuff” as an absolute last resort)
It isn’t about “how many we have to make.”
It is about “how fast should we be making them?”
This, I guess, is the nuance that gets lost.
Lean Process and Product Development: The Role of the Leader
The LEI was kind enough to send a review copy of their new book, the second edition of Lean Process and Product Development. I have just started it, and am already finding gems. (note to the LEI – the Kaizen Institute is not my address. Thanks to Jon for getting the book to me.)
The original edition was a cleaned up manuscript that was published well after the death of Allan Ward, and bore only his name on the cover.
This edition adds Durward Sobek to the author line. Sobek was a student of Ward and today stands on his own as someone whose views should be respected.
I am not going to try to compare the two editions, rather look at this new book as it stands on its own.
Rather than wait and write a big long review, I am going to publish short posts as I come across key points of note – hence the subtitle of this post.
I am already seeing a tight link to the leadership model outlined in Toyota Kata.
In the 2nd chapter, as the authors discuss Value and Performance of development projects (as in how efficiently they create profitable value streams and create usable knowledge for future projects), I came across a compelling quote:
A general manager of Toyota’s Advanced Vehicle Development department was asked how he spent his time.
He replied he spent about 2 hours a week doing administrative work, and the rest of the time “on technical problems.” Before I remark about the “technical problems” consider the first bit. How much time do your department heads spend administering vs. contributing to the development of the organization?
And that leads to the second part. He says:
“But every technical problem is also a personnel problem, because the problems don’t get to me if my people know how to solve them. So all of the time I’m working on technical problems, I’m also teaching someone.
To paraphrase the next paragraph in the book, the solution to personnel problems is to teach.
So I’ll digress from this book a bit here, and read between the lines a bit. If we go back to David Marquet’s sketchcast video he talks about the necessity of creating an environment where your people need to discover the answer, or “you’re always the answer man, and you can never go home and eat dinner.” (This is really hard when you know the answer, by the way.)
So already, in the first couple of chapters, we are establishing an environment that doesn’t simply produce engineering designs. Those, I suspect, are an outcome of deliberate processes to build the organizational competence and clarity.
We’ll see. More to come.
Reviving How To Make Things
Almost three years ago I wrote “Don’t Lose How To Make Things.”
In that post, I wanted to emphasize the risks of losing your expertise in the technology and skill required to make your product. Too many companies today seem to be bent on replacing those skills with financial ones.
Today I came across a fascinating article on Bloomberg’s site about how Toyota has come to the same conclusion.
You can read it here: ‘Gods’ Make Comeback at Toyota as Humans Steal Jobs From Robots.
In short, they have established workshops where workers manually produce parts that are normally made by automated processes.
The idea is to maintain understanding of how things are made so they do not lose the skill required to improve their production processes.
“Fully automated machines don’t evolve on their own,” said Takahiro Fujimoto, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Manufacturing Management Research Center. “Mechanization itself doesn’t harm, but sticking to a specific mechanization may lead to omission of kaizen and improvement.”
One result?
In an area Kawai directly supervises at the forging division of Toyota’s Honsha plant, workers twist, turn and hammer metal into crankshafts instead of using the typically automated process. Experiences there have led to innovations in reducing levels of scrap and shortening the production line 96 percent from its length three years ago.
Toyota has eliminated about 10 percent of material-related waste from building crankshafts at Honsha. Kawai said the aim is to apply those savings to the next-generation Prius hybrid.
Today’s financially driven managers are unlikely to allow the space to experiment and learn. Instead, they want a deterministic process so next quarter’s results can be forecast accurately. It isn’t good to surprise the analysts.
At the same time, though, companies are pressing for things like “innovation.” That doesn’t happen in a breakthrough. It happens through the rigorous application of the skill of expanding knowledge. Once enough knowledge is accumulated, expertise develops and innovation follows.
Years ago, when I was working for a company making heavy equipment, one of our Japanese consultants (who had worked many years directly for Taiichi Ohno) urged our engineers to hand-form sheet metal parts – with hammers(!). We didn’t do it. But now I understand what he was trying to get us to do.
What Is “Lean?”
I did a Google search on the terms [ lean manufacturing definition ] . Here is a smattering of what I found on the first page of results. (I did not go on to the second page.)
On a consultant’s web page we get a list of principles and terminology definitions.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says “Lean manufacturing is a business model and collection of tactical methods that emphasize eliminating non-value added activities (waste) while delivering quality products on time at least cost with greater efficiency.”
Tooling U defines “lean manufacturing” like this: “An approach to manufacturing that seeks to reduce the cycle time of processes, increase flexibility, and improve quality. Lean approaches help to eliminate waste in all its forms.”
Another consultancy has a PDF of “Lean Sigma Definitions” that includes Lean Manufacturing or Lean Production: “the philosophy of continually reducing waste in all areas and in all forms; an English phrase coined to summarize Japanese manufacturing techniques (specifically, the Toyota Production
System).”
Let’s Rewind a Bit
What all of these definitions have in common is they are attempting to describe some kind of end state.
Over the last 10 years or so we (meaning those of us who are doing top drawer research) have put together a pretty comprehensive picture of how Toyota’s management systems are intended to work. (I say “intended to” because we are always dealing with an idealized Toyota. They have issues as well, just like everyone.)
What we seem to try to do is try to create a generic context-free definition of what Toyota is doing today.
But they didn’t start out that way. Everything they are, and do, evolved out of necessity as they struggled to figure out how to take the next step.
Toyota didn’t engineer it, so I don’t think it is something we can reverse engineer. Toyota evolved it organically. They applied a common mindset (a dedication to figuring things out) to a specific goal (ideal flow to the customer) in a specific set of conditions.
So What is “Lean?”
Mike Rother makes a really interesting attempt at resetting the definition of “lean” as being about the drive and the mindset that resulted in Toyota’s management system.
Give it a read, then let’s discuss below. (Since you are going to see it – when he sent it around for input, I passed along a thought which he has added verbatim in the last slide. Maybe that will spark a little more discussion.)
OK, are you back?
I like this because I think anyone who adopts the mindset that they (and I mean “they” as a true plural here) must take it upon themselves to figure out what they do not know, figure out how to learn it, figure out how to apply it, all in a relentless pursuit of perfect flow will end up with a nimble, empowering, relentlessly improving, formidably competitive team of people.
Focus on the process of learning, focus on the people, and keep them focused on the customer, and you’ll get there.
In my experience, the differentiator between organizations that “get there” and those who don’t comes down to the willingness to work hard to learn it themselves vs. wait for someone to tell them the answers.
Thoughts? Maybe we can take the “most comments” record away from the “Takt Time Cycle Time” post. *smile*