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Another Customer Story

I was in a newly opened store of a large big-box outdoor sports store, and saw an item on display that I had already decided to buy this summer. The displayed price was actually a bit less than what I had been encountering online, so I went ahead.

Unfortunately the one “in stock” on the shelf turned out to be a different model (in the wrong slot), and I didn’t complete the transaction. (A retail nightmare, where the customer clearly wants to buy a big-ticket item you thought you had, but actually didn’t.)

The salesperson behind the counter offered that I could order the item from their web site, have it shipped to the store, and I could pick it up without incurring any shipping charges. Seemed fair enough.

I went online, but the online price was higher than the in-store price. In a sort of reverse from the story I told in December, I emailed customer service and asked if they would match the in-store price for the item.

In a few minutes I got a reply, with an “Incident Number” that said they would, but I would have to call in the order to the 800 number.

All well and good.

I called, and of course “catalog sales” had to refer me to customer service.

Customer service, in turn, had no way to look up the “Incident Number” on the email. “I don’t have any way of referring to that…” (Yeah, go ahead and tell the customer what you can’t do.)

I was referred to someone else (in email? I don’t know). He could not look up the number either, so I read the email exchange back to him. He honored the price, took the order, and it is on the way.

But really?

What is the “incident number” even for if nobody can reference it? In this day and age of networked and cross-linked everything…. what can I say? Perhaps my old I.T. background showing here.

Bottom line:

Turn around and face your systems from the customer’s perspective. Spend some time in the chalk circle. Think through how your process responds to unusual situations.

If a customer refers to something that you should know about your own process, but don’t, there is a kaizen opportunity here. You have an obstacle in the way of smooth seamless customer service. What concrete steps(s) will move you toward eliminating that barrier and smoothing things out?

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“No Question…Sketch!”

One of the more famous tools taught by Chihiro Nakao of Shingijutsu fame is to direct the learner to observe an operation and “sketch the flows.”

Another Time Ideas article by Anne Murphy Paul, How to Increase Your Powers of Observation, validates Nakao’s instinct.

She makes the distinction between casual observation that we all do, and scientific observation.

[…]scientists train their attention, learning to focus on relevant features and disregard those that are less salient. One of the best ways to do this is through the old-fashioned practice of taking field notes: writing descriptions and drawing pictures of what you see. “When you’re sketching something, you have to choose which marks to make on the page,” says Michael Canfield, a Harvard University entomologist[…]  (bold emphasis added)

The common factor here is that, like scientists, we don’t want to simply watch a process, we want to observe it. We want to predict what we think will happen, and then observe to confirm or refute our predictions.

While casual observers simply sit back and watch what unfolds, scientific observers come up with hypotheses that they can test. What happens if a salesperson invites a potential customer to try out a product for herself? How does the tone of the weekly meeting change when it’s held in a different room?

The next time you are in your work area, rather than simply watching, bring a bad and pencil, and sketch out what is happening.

How does the material actually flow through the process? Where does it pause, stop, get diverted?

How to people flow, move into, and out of, the process?

Where does the information come from?

Does the layout support, or get in the way of, smooth flow?

How about the tools, equipment, machines? Do they help the worker get the job done, or make it awkward?

And finally, what actually happens when there is a problem of some kind? How does the team member indicate this? What is the response?

By sketching, you force your eye to see the details that you might have missed. You force yourself to actually see, and might be surprised when that is different from what you assumed was happening.

Sharpen your eye – learn to observe like a scientist.

No question… sketch!

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Struggling to Learn

One of the challenges of teaching and consulting is resisting the temptation to give people the answers. Honestly, I like giving people the answers. It feels genuinely helpful, and it provides a nice ego boost.

But according to this article on Time’s “Time Ideas” site by Anne Murphy Paul titled “Why Floundering is Good,” that isn’t the best way to teach.

In fact, it can hinder learning.

The key point is summarized at the end:

… we need to “design [teaching] for productive failure” by building it into the learning process. Kapur has identified three conditions that promote this kind of beneficial struggle. First, choose problems to work on that “challenge but do not frustrate.” Second, provide learners with opportunities to explain and elaborate on what they’re doing. Third, give learners the chance to compare and contrast good and bad solutions to the problems.

Right now we are (hopefully) in the midst of a paradigm shift in how lean practitioners and teachers go about what we do.

Traditionally, a lot of us have simply given people the answers, or at least strong suggestions. Given the time constraints and overly ambitious targets of a typical 5 day event, that is understandable.

But now we are starting to see these events as skill building, which means learning, which means the teams need time to muddle through.

I have been structuring my approach quite differently for about a year now. I’ll be the first to admit that I, too, am figuring it out, reinforcing what works well, altering what needs to work better. These days I am far more comfortable letting things move through this struggle in order to set up deeper understanding once the light does come on.

The trick is to let them fail small, and not let them fail big. The problem has to have a solution that is within reach, or they will only come away frustrated.

Thus, teaching is becoming a matter of judging the knowledge and skill threshold and making sure they don’t take on too much at once. That is part of respect for people.

One problem at a time. Single factor experiments.

A great deal of the power in the “Coaching Kata” is turning out to be the question “Which *one* [obstacle] are you addressing now?” as it rules out working on everything at once.

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Scrap Bin Kaizen

If you are in a production operation, be it a factory or even administration, take a look in your scrap bins (or trash cans). What you find there can be very informative.

Is all scrap treated the same? In a lot of metal working operations, I see routine drop scrap mixed in with scrapped parts and products – things that were not intended to end up there.

If that is the case, what does it tell you about the attitude around scrapping a part? Is it routine, just part of getting the job done, like drop scrap?

If you find a scrapped part, can you find the defect or flaw that caused it to be unusable? How much work (and cost) was added after that defect was created? All of that is additional cost that added no value.

Was it painted? Partly assembled? Did it go through a bottleneck operation and consume capacity of the entire factory?

What about your trash cans or recycle bins in the office?

Do you see signs of frequent paper jams in printers and copiers? These events suck time away, and more than just the time to clear them. They cause a mental shifting of thought pattern away from the productive work that takes additional time to recover.

Here are a couple of thoughts.

Separate the routine drop scrap from bad parts that were supposed to be good parts. If you sacrifice parts to adjust in changeovers, separate those out into their own category.

Each of these is a different line of inquiry starting with the question “Why?”

Consider taking your bad parts from the last 24 hours and bringing them to a central location (or a location in the department). Conduct a “morning market” and get to the bottom of at least a couple of the root causes. You don’t have to solve all of them at once, just pick one and drive it to ground. Then another.

Scrap is not simply a material and time waste. It is a reflection of how well you really understand your processes.

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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.

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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.

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Make a Rule / Keep a Rule

I was driving home today and saw a construction sign on the sidewalk. It read: “Sidewalk Closed, Use Other Side.” Ahead was a section of the sidewalk which was, indeed, closed off and impassible.

By the time a pedestrian encounters this sign, he is well into the middle of a long block.

The sign is at least implying that the pedestrian should cross the street in the middle of the block to get around the construction. The alternatives are:

  • Ignore the sign, and walk on the street around the torn up sidewalk.
  • Backtrack to a legal crosswalk, and cross the street where it is legal to do so.

This situation is actually fairly common in a lot of companies. There is a rule “Don’t cross the street in the middle of the block.” Then there is an expectation that is incompatible with following the rule.

  • “Be careful, but hurry.”
  • “Stop and fix problems, but don’t lose production.”
  • Stop for quality, but make the numbers.”
  • Get 90 minutes of work done in an hour.

The team member has the same alternatives as above – ignore the expectation, or ignore the rule.

This is a slightly higher level than Hirano’s observation that “the words ‘just for now’ are the origin of all waste.” Here we are putting the team member in an untenable situation because there is no action available that is clearly OK.

Take a look at the rules you have. Take a look at the actual behaviors. Remember that what people actually do is generally what they sincerely believe you expect of them.

If it is impossible to follow a rule, consider why the rule exists.

The words “Do the best you can.” are a warning that you are in this kind of situation.

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Changing Routines

This video by Charles Duhigg is promoting his book The Power of Habit . I haven’t read the book but there is a lot of study that draws the same basic model.

A habit is based on an urge to do something that triggers a reward (dopamine shot) in your brain. Every time it happens, the connection between the action and the reward gets stronger.

The urge itself is usually triggered by some outside condition or stimulus.

Take a look at the video, and then the flowchart beneath it (click on the flowchart for the full size version), then we will discuss what this has to do with lean thinking.

How to Break Habits

Here is the flowchart – click for the full size version:

 

Why this is important to lean practitioners:

When we talk about “change” we are talking about replacing one set of habitual responses with a different set of responses. Thus, it is important to understand that simply applying willpower is not enough for anyone (no matter how well intentioned) to change their fundamental behaviors.

As you may recall, I am a big fan of the book Switch by Chip and Dan Heath. One of their key points is “Build Habits” and they discuss linking the desired response to a specific trigger.

What we have to keep in mind is that the old responses also have triggers, and many of those triggers are subtle and below the level of awareness.

Duhigg’s model is replacing one habit that does not get the results you want with a different habit that does get the results you want.

The less dramatic this change, the better. That is why it is critical to “find the bright spots” (also from Switch), and even if they are not working perfectly, to structure your future state behaviors around them. For that matter, if you can find even a hint of the behavior you want, it is far easier to shape existing actions than to try to tell people they are “doing it wrong” and getting them to pick up something else.

One of the elements of Deming’s model of “profound knowledge” is “knowledge of psychology.” Take a look at these tools and see if they help you be a more effective change agent.

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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.

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Learning vs. Knowing (or not)

PC once again left a provocative post in the Lean Thinker’s Community, and gave us a link to this Tim Harford TED talk that drives home the point that learning and improvement is more about rapidly discovering things that don’t work than about designing things that do.

Trial and Error

Tom Wujec makes the same point in the Marshmallow Challenge. In that video, Tom talks about how 5 year old kids out perform most adult groups in a problem solving / learning game. While the adults engage in a single cycle of “know-build-fail” the kids engage in multiple cycles of “try-fail-learn-try again.” In the improvement world, we call this process PDCA.

Harford’s key point is that learning only happens through a process of trial of large numbers of ideas, followed by the selection and further trials on the best ones.

Hmmm… that sounds a lot like the 3P process of “Seven Ideas” as well as “Set Based Design.”