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Simple Solution to Complex Problem

This video captures a crucial aspect of lean thinking – searching for the simple and elegant solution.

We can’t say this is an obvious idea, a lot of very smart people have been working on this problem for decades.

But it is a simple idea. Sometimes the search needs to be outside of the regular domain people are used to working in.

The web site is here:http://creativemachines.cornell.edu/jamming_gripper

The other aspect of lean thinking that is captured here is keep working to solve the problem. I run into so many technical people today who are so convinced that the problem is unsolvable with current technology that they either give up, or look to advance the state of the art in some (usually expensive) way.

One thing I am glad to see is a trend in engineering schools toward making things rather than just designing them.

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Organize, Standardize, Stabilize, Optimize

As I work in the field, I continue to encounter a desire to get right to optimal results – “Why aren’t we working to eliminate all of the waste?”

Once people start seeing opportunities, there is a great temptation to try to simply engineer a new process and implement it. This is especially true in value stream mapping processes. The future state map seems like an engineering specification – just make it look like this, and all of these issues will go away.

The “kaizen bursts” are supposed to represent the obstacles in the way, but they often show up as “action items” instead as people are tempted to make this into a project.

But the messy reality in the actual workplace (gemba) requires a far more methodical approach.

The title of this post is from four steps that a consultant friend shared with me years ago. As I converge my own practice toward guiding people through implementing the daily improvement culture vs. implementing the tools, I am finding these words a handy mantra. This is how I have found myself explaining it lately:

image

Organize includes all steps required to make the current condition apparent. This can include 5S activity, but is by no means limited to that.

You want to know enough about what is going on that you can tell the normal, intended, pattern from one which has been disrupted by an obstacle or issue.

In other words, you know how the process should operate if people don’t encounter any serious issues.

This allows you to standardize.

This is not a standard in terms of something you are trying to enforce.

Rather, it is a standard that you are striving to achieve each and every time the process is run.

“Did we make takt time with this work cycle?”

“Did this changeover go the way we intended?”

“Did we make a good part this time?”

(for Brian): “Did we get the quote out in two days?”

Once you know how the process is supposed to work, and what results you are supposed to get, you can clearly identify those times when it doesn’t work that way, or the results are not what you wanted.

imageStabilize: Now you can begin marching up the PDCA ramp toward the standard as you work to stabilize the process by systematically eliminating the issues.

Of course, for this to actually work, you must have a process to flag problems right away, pounce on them, clear them, and then feed them into a follow-on process that works to solve them.

As you apply countermeasures to sources of instability, you are adjusting the standard itself to include those countermeasures, making it more robust.

So Stabilize and Standardize play off one another in successive PDCA cycles.

imageNow… here is the trick part. “Optimize” can be indistinguishable from “Stabilize.” It is more of a semantics issue than anything else, and honestly, it isn’t worth arguing about.

Why?

Because as a process becomes stable, you are going to keep driving toward perfection, True North. You are going to have intermediate-term goals you are trying to reach that keep you moving forward. You are optimizing as long as you are moving in the right direction. So there isn’t really a distinctive point of shifting gears, there is only the most important issue to address right now to hit the next target condition.

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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.