Posts

Posted on

Simple Solutions

Carlos Villela’s blog lixo.org has a great story about simple solutions. I really have no idea if it is true or not – indeed, a couple of the details don’t hang together. On the other hand, I have seen for myself the kind of thinking that is described in this story.

Link to full story: Networks are smart at the edges.

The factory is having a quality issue. The response is pretty typical:

The project followed the usual process: budget and project sponsor allocated, RFP, third-parties selected, and six months (and $8 million) later they had a fantastic solution — on time, on budget, high quality and everyone in the project had a great time. They solved the problem by using some high-tech precision scales that would sound a bell and flash lights whenever a toothpaste box weighing less than it should. The line would stop, and someone had to walk over and yank the defective box out of it, pressing another button when done.

And a great solution. It stops the line and forces someone to pay attention to the problem. While I would usually add that these instances need to be followed up by problem solving to eliminate the issue, even if I were doing so, I wouldn’t eliminate the final verification check. Even Toyota performs a thorough and rigorous final inspection. But that’s not the point here.

It turns out, the number of defects picked up by the scales was 0 after three weeks of production use. It should’ve been picking up at least a dozen a day, so maybe there was something wrong with the report. He filed a bug against it, and after some investigation, the engineers come back saying the report was actually correct. The scales really weren’t picking up any defects, because all boxes that got to that point in the conveyor belt were good.

Puzzled, the CEO travels down to the factory, and walks up to the part of the line where the precision scales were installed. A few feet before it, there was a $20 desk fan, blowing the empty boxes out of the belt and into a bin.

“Oh, that — one of the guys put it there ’cause he was tired of walking over every time the bell rang”, says one of the workers.

Like the Dilbert cartoon about 25 critical focus areas, this is more funny because the original reaction is totally typical, especially in companies who are comfortable with technology, controls, automation, etc.

Cudos to the CEO who realized, at least, that “No problem is a problem” and went to investigate at the actual gemba.

Once the team had a challenge (in this case small-Peanut-MMsprovided by the annoying bell) they dealt with what they saw as the issue.

Oh – and this graphic? It is an inside joke for some of my readers. Maybe we should have put some fans on the conveyer.

Thanks to Hal for sending the original link to this article.

Posted on

The Structure Behind Leader Development

Chapter 3 of The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership is titled “Coach and Develop Others.”

Where in Chapter 2 the authors were outlining the individual leader’s responsibility for self-development, now they are describing the environment and the process of supporting and focusing that drive.

Rather than just outline the chapter, I want to dig into some key elements of the context that Toyota creates for their leaders.

First is the expectation that leaders lead.

Leading vs. Delegating

Chapter 3 has a great story that exemplifies the key differences in management styles that I alluded to in the post about Chapter 2.

In that story, NUMMI has equipment reliability problems in the body shop. Mr. Ito, the President has instructed Convis to have each engineer prepare and present a one page report for every breakdown lasting over 30 minutes. The telling moment is Convis behavior in the presentations:

While Ito was critiquing the [A3] presentations and reports, Gary [Convis] simply stood to one side, marveling at Ito’s insight and amused at the struggles of the engineers’ efforts to learn this way of thinking.

This quote nails the core issue we have to deal with in any company that wants to succeed with lean production.

Convis was newly hired from the U.S. automobile industry, and was acting exactly as he was trained as a manager. He was acting as every manager in the USA is trained.

He has delegated the process of training the engineers to Ito, who he sees as the technical expert. Convis viewed his presence here as overseeing how well his engineers are responding to that training.

Ito, though, had other ideas.

After a few sessions, Ito asked Gary how he was coaching the engineers through the process before the presentations. Ito pointed out that there was still a lot of red on the reports, and if Gary had been teaching the engineers properly, there would be less red ink. […] problems with the reports were a reflection of Gary’s leadership, and he was more responsible for any failures than the engineers were.

Zing.

You can’t even cite “If the student hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught” here because the delegation paradigm was so strong that Convis didn’t realize he had responsibility for being the teacher.

Convis, of course, “got it” and began seeing the red ink as his failure, rather than the engineers’. The drive for self-development kicked in and worked. And of course, in the process of struggling to coach the problem solving process, he had to struggle to learn it well enough to do so.

Personally, I see the idea of delegating and then passively overseeing improvement and people development is a cancer that is difficult to excise from even the most well intentioned organization.

I have seen this with my own eyes – senior executives struggling with how to “implement lean.” What was their concern? What metrics they could use to gage everyone’s progress through reports to corporate headquarters. They simply saw no need to get personally involved in learning, much less going to see, and certainly not teaching, the messy details. Not surprisingly, that company still struggles with the concepts.

Of course it cascades down from there. The various sites’ leaders follow the example, and delegate to their professional staff people. The staff’s job? To come up with “the lean plan” and “drive improvement” while the leaders watch. At some point, someone in charge of the operation actually has to do something different, but that, it seems, is always the next level down.

I am not going to get into what stops leaders from stepping up to this responsibility or what do to about it because that would be a book in itself.

It doesn’t help that, with the revolving-door of leadership we often encounter, each new leader comes in with the old mindset. OK </rant> and back to the book. Smile

The Technical Support

This expectation of leaders leading does not operate in a vacuum. Toyota processes are deliberately set up to remove any ambiguity about what the next challenge is by surfacing problems immediately

In the words of Lean Leadership, these problems are framed as challenges for leader development.

In a much earlier post, I objected to our western euphemism of “opportunity” when we meant “problem.” My objection was treating this “opportunity” as an something that could be taken on, or not.

A challenge, especially in the context of leader development, isn’t optional. A top level athlete grasps the meaning of a challenge. He is driven to take it on and push himself to meet it. He improves in the process. It isn’t about the record, per se, it is about what he must develop and pull from within himself to get there.

Just as the world-class athlete has a stopwatch on every lap, the assembly line is set up to verify the timing of every cycle. Any discrepancy is immediately apparent to both the team member and the leaders. If the work can’t be done, the line is stopped and things are made right. Then we figure out why. And everyone learns.

TPS […] creates a never-ending stream of opportunities for on-the-job development and increased challenges. Toyota sensei do not need to create artificial training situations […]. The daily process of producing cars generates all the development opportunities and challenges that are needed.

If your organization has trouble finding problems, it isn’t because they aren’t there. It is because your processes are blind to them. That is why “No problem is a big problem.”

The key is that when we talk about “implementing the tools of lean” we are doing nothing more than setting up the baseline process to present the challenges for leadership development. That’s it. It is the difference between playing a casual game and deciding to keep score.

You can’t improve without keeping score, to be sure. But keeping score alone doesn’t cause things to get better. If anything, it increases people’s frustration because they see they are coming up short, but don’t have the support or opportunity to do anything about it.

What happens then? They start seeing problems as “normal” and start blinding the system. They add padding to cycle times to “allow for variation.” They decouple processes and put in extra inventory. They start running two at a time, then four, and return to batching.

If a problem remains hidden below the surface long enough, it can stop being perceived as a problem and become part of normal operating procedure.

OK, so I’ve beaten that to death yet again. It is critical to structure the work so that we can see whether things are going as planned or not.

But it is just as critical to have the problem solving processes engaged immediately. If those processes don’t yet exist, you have no hope of your so-called improvements sustaining for long.

That’s not all. There is another standard that is just as critical – if not more: A standard for problem solving.

The A3

We just got done exploring how critical it is to have a process that is totally transparent. Why? So we can clearly see any difference between how it is and how it should be.

The purpose of the A3 is to provide that level of visual control to the problem solving process itself.

And yes, problem solving is a process. It follows standard work. It is perhaps the most critical thing to standardize. The only way to gain skill at something is to practice against a clear standard. It really helps to have a coach watching your every move and calling out small adjustments, things you need to pay more attention to the next time you do it (which should be immediately).

The A3 is the game film, the slow motion camera, the visual control of how problem solving is being done. It is not sufficient to find the solution. It is more important to develop a consistent approach to problem solving across the entire organization.

But outside of Toyota and a few companies that are starting to grasp what this is about, the A3 is, sadly, one of the more recent fads in the lean community.

An A3 isn’t something you tell someone else to do. It is a visual control, just like the moving line, that works only in the context of direct observation and participation by all parties involved. In the above story, Ito was setting an example, and expecting Convis to follow it. Once that started happening, Ito’s participation shifted from coaching the engineers to coaching Convis as he coached them.

Just as the tools of takt time, standard work, pull systems, etc. do not stand alone and “make you lean,” neither does filling out A3 forms. Even if you have “the tools” and a problem solving process, it doesn’t help if they are not intimately linked together.

All of these things are designed for 1:1 interaction. They are messy testaments to the fact that problem solving often loops back to previous steps as more is learned.

The Big Picture

This chapter provoked a lot of thought for me, and I have tried to share some of that. When / if you choose to read the book, I hope you have your own thoughts, and even share them here or in the forum (that could use some life right now).

Fundamentally, Chapter 3 is about the phenomenal support Toyota provides those leaders who have the self-motivation to learn.

  • Every operation is structured to provide challenges and opportunities for them to develop their skills. There is no shortage of things that obviously need improving.
  • Every leader is positioned to teach and mentor those who are willing to step up to the challenges that are there.
  • The problem solving process itself is structured as standard work so that a prospective leader can practice against a standard and improve skill through repetition and coaching.

Aside from a couple of case studies and examples, this chapter is a bit of a synopsis of Toyota Kata. I continue to bring Kata into this discussion because there is obvious overlap in topics, and I see these two books complimenting each other. Kata gets into the nitty-gritty of how problem solving and coaching happens. Lean Leadership is providing a context and case examples of the entire ecosystem.

More to follow.

Posted on

Will Kodak Be Here in 2013?

This is of no particular interest to anyone but those of us who spent time working “in the yellow box.”

Tonight the Megamillions jackpot is $206 million dollars.

Eastman Kodak’s (at $0.69 / share) market cap is $186 million.

Though Kodak is mostly known as a (former) consumer products brand, today most, if not all, of its strength is in commercial graphics and printing where it is a clear leader.

The question is whether or not they have (or can raise) enough cash to downsize the company to fit its market, and whether or not their management realizes that is what they (in my opinion at least) have to do.

Lest you think about winning the lottery and buying the company, consider these two tidbits:

  • There is a recently enacted “poison pill” clause in Kodak’s corporate charter that lets them issue stock faster than you can buy it.
  • The above is wholly unnecessary because anyone who buys the current company also inherits the Kodak Park site in Rochester which, for all intents and purposes, has been an industrial chemical facility for the last 120 years or so.

I learned a lot during my time at Kodak. I had pretty decent access to the highest levels in the company, and experienced the process of some really tough decisions that were being made. To be known by face and name to top level corporate executives and people working on the shop floor is a rather unique perspective. Going back, knowing what I know now, would I take the job again? Without a doubt.

When I first interviewed there in December 2002, I grasped the implications of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma immediately when I asked a simple question: “How much are you feeling the impact of cell phone cameras on your business?” The people I asked didn’t grok the question, much less the answer. Two years later, cell phone cameras were listed as the #1 displacer of one-time-use cameras. Today they are displacing consumer grade digital cameras in general.

There is no doubt with anyone that events in the next 4-6 months are going to answer the question in the headline of this post.

Posted on

A Customer Experience Story

This has nothing to do with lean production except at the touch point of the customer experience.

Mrs. LeanThinker was looking for a replacement for her well-worn 5 quart stock pot. We were in Macy’s home department browsing.

She found one she really liked, a Circulon Symmetry model, full retail $140, sale priced at $69.95. Only this one was a brown color, and she wants black to match everything else she already has.

“Does this come in black?” A reasonable question.

“Yes” was the answer.

“Can you get it?”

“Let me check.”

The answer was that, yes, they can get it but because Macy’s didn’t stock it, they would “have to” sell it at full price. They do, it was offered, match online prices except Costco and Amazon.

We fired up the Droid, got online, and found this (click the image for full size):

pricematch

See the second line there?

That’s right. Macys.com has the same item at the “sale” price.

So Macy’s ended up price matching to their own web site. Oh – and they are shipping it to our door for no extra charge. Go figure.

Some things I just leave in the “perplexing” column. Yes, I know, they are two separate business streams and all, but really?

Then there is the Best Buy debacle that is brewing. Cancelling Black Friday orders on people three days before Christmas, but offering the item they ordered at full price in the store? I’m guessing there are lawyers involved faster than you can say “class action.” Where were the lawyers when the decision was made? What were they thinking?

Posted on

The Annual Operating Wish

As we approach the end of the calendar year, many companies are starting to work on their Annual Operating Plans Wishes for next year.

Why do I say wish? Because all too often these plans dictate what they wish would happen. Throughout the year, performance is “measured” against the plan. Positive variances are rewarded. Negative variances are, well, not rewarded.

To make things more interesting, each department: Sales, Production, Purchasing, etc., is responsible to meet the plan independently of the others. That makes sense, it is the only way they can be “held accountable.”

So when sales fall short in 1st quarter, production keeps producing. They have to. Otherwise they wouldn’t meet their AOP numbers.

To make things more interesting, if the sales mix changes from the original plan, and there is a raw material shortage that prevents shifting the production to match sales, production just makes whatever the can, whether it is selling or not.

It is pretty easy to think this through to a process of running overtime on weekends to build a product that was sold at a discount to “make the numbers” in the AOP.

The hilarious thing is that I have yet to meet a manager, at any level, who does not agree that this is exactly what happens, and that it is a poor way to run the business.

Yet we keep doing it over and over.

OK, so what to do about it?

The most important thing to grasp is that “the plan” is just that. It is not a fact. It is a working hypothesis, a prediction. It is wrong the day it is made. (If you can perfectly predict the future, why are you reading this?)

The purpose of making a plan is to identify the unexpected. If the sales mix and numbers start to depart from the plan, the entire system responds. This isn’t every department for themselves. (or shouldn’t be) This is about running the company to maximize total margins.

That means working together as a team with one plan, not a separate one for everyone.

Posted on

Lean Leadership Begins With Self Development

In Chapter 2 of The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership, Jeff Liker and Gary Convis describe one of the most important, and least emphasized, aspect of developing leaders – the necessity for intrinsic motivation. In simple terms, the desire has to come from within. This theme ties together everything else in the chapter, and I suspect, through the rest of the book.

On the other hand, this isn’t about the typical western “everyone fend for themselves” environment that develops unhealthy (and unethical) cutthroat competition.

They describe a nurturing environment that will allow and support anyone with the desire to take on ever increasing responsibility and challenges, and learn through a process of developing mastery.

The Role of Sensei

Not surprisingly, the role of the sensei described in Lean Leadership is quite consistent with the process that Jeff Liker and Mike Hoseus describe in Toyota Culture.

While the work environment itself is built around opportunities for learning, it is far different from out western ideas.

Lean Leadership sums it up quite well as they discuss the role of the sensei.

  • In the west, the teacher’s role is to show you the shortcuts.
  • At Toyota, his role is to make sure you don’t take shortcuts.

The teaching process is one of challenge and struggle – but not abandonment. It is guidance through discrete learning stages on the way to mastery.

Mastery

“Standard work” has always been regarded as a core element of the Toyota system. Liker and Convis build on the concept as far more pervasive than simple work procedures. We have known there is more to it for a long time, but like the list of what doesn’t work, authors, consultants and practitioners continue to emphasize the work procedure model.

In Lean Leadership, we see standard work as a path to mastery, and we see the reason behind the emphasis.

Liker and Convis describe a three stage process of learning and developing:

  • Shu – being taught. In this stage, the teacher says “do this” and the struggle is to get it right.
  • Ha – competent, but following by rote. In this stage, the teacher asks questions to cause reflection, and the struggle is to understand.
  • Ri – mastery, the point where the team member has enough depth to improve upon and teach the task.

The point of standardizing and stabilizing a process is to allow the team member the chance to master it. Why is this important? Because then the team member can pay attention to solving problems to improve the work vs. solving problems to simply get it done.

Even this is fairly easy to grasp in the context of bolting a suspension together, or welding a scissor lift. But the same principles apply to leadership itself.

Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata is about application of this principle in the core processes of leadership: Problem solving and coaching. By standardizing problem solving, we give team members the opportunity to master it so they can focus on solving the problem rather than trying to figure out how to go about solving it. It sounds like subtle semantics, but it is a huge difference.

But, again, this is about demonstrated capability rather than classroom hours Compare this process with how we typically “certify” practitioners in the west.

At Toyota the learner’s capability is judged by direct observation, just like any other process. While there must be an internal drive to learn, the challenges and struggles are tailored for the learner’s next stage of development.

Self Development vs. Mandated Development

All of this brings us to one of the core differences in the Toyota described by Liker and Convis.

Throughout my career as an internal “lean guy” in companies large and small, our “lean skill development” (or whatever you want to call it) process for leaders was largely driven by establishing requirements.

We wanted to require leaders to participate in kaizen events. We wanted to require them to attend the Lean 101 class. At one company, managers and supervisors were required to teach the “World Class Competitiveness” course. We want to include classes and educational events on their performance goals. We wanted to make them learn it.

To get back to an earlier post it doesn’t work.

The Toyota process is reversed. There is no requirement for anyone to master anything other than their current job. But if you want to get more responsibility, it is incumbent on you to demonstrate the drive to develop your own capability.

One purpose for universal team member involvement in kaizen is for leaders to directly observe who has the right motivation to learn and take on more. That is the beginning of the leadership development process.

In our companies today, of course, we have the situation of an existing hierarchy. Leaders have gotten into senior positions without having any of these skills. Our western management process is one of detached decision making from summaries presented by staff on PowerPoint. If a new initiative comes along, the senior leaders delegate it and “support” it by not shutting it down.

That doesn’t work if you want to change the status-quo.

What does? A drive to master something new and a realization that personal development is a continuous life-long process. That is the key message I get from this chapter. More to follow.

Posted on

‘Tis The Season for Management by Measurement

It must be that time of the year. I see traffic in the online forums asking about how to set key performance indicators for lean staff people so their performance incentives can be set.

If anyone were to ask my advice here, it comes down to one word:

Don’t.

Two reasons.

First, we have overwhelming evidence that these incentives not only don’t work, but they actually make performance worse in the kinds of work you are asking these people to do.

The Overjustification Effect

Dan Pink on motivation

All of this is consistent with what Deming told us decades ago, yet we keep doing it.

The second reason is inconsistency and misalignment.

Having the continuous improvement staff operating to separate metrics disconnects their efforts from line management’s. They become responsible for improving the operation while the line management processes are… what?

The message to the shop floor team is pretty clear here. They can read an organization chart. Do what the boss says, then, if we have time, and if the improvement guys can make the case, then maybe listen to what they have to say.

If you must have management-by-KPI, then the performance measurement for continuous improvement must be exactly the same as the line manager being supported. Why?

The question I would ask is “Who is responsible for the performance of the organization?” If it isn’t the line leader, then why does that position exist?

It makes no sense whatsoever to have the lean implementer working to a different agenda.

Our management traditions of de-aggregating and delegating are not serving us well. We need to take a systems view and realize that everything is inter-related. Further, we need to grasp that B.F. Skinner’s (dubious) research on rewards-based-behavior simply does not apply to management. Never has. Wishing otherwise isn’t going to change it.

Posted on

Decisions, Decisions

How many “If-Then” steps do your team members have to deal with in the course of their routine work?

Every one of those branch points is a decision. It is a point where the team member must memorize decision criteria and the correct choice(s).

Each “If-Then” in the process flow potentially doubles the number of possible paths the process can take.

Each decision is an opportunity to make a mistake.

The more complex a process, the more time and experience the team member requires to master it.

Mental bandwidth is limited.

The more attention they must expend to do it right, the less they can devote to thinking about how it could be done better.

How complicated a world do you create for people trying to do the work?

The more “flexible” your human interface with the process, the more complicated it is for the person who has to use it.

Do they have to enter ad-hoc query criteria into computers to pull information they routinely need every day?

How many decision criteria are things that people “just know?”

How often does someone encounter a problem or new situation and get a verbal instruction from the supervisor on how to handle it? What happens then? Maybe a general announcement at the next team meeting, if you’re lucky?

Go down to your work area.

Watch how people interact with the routine work.

Each of those decision points is an opportunity to simplify your process flow and make life a little less stressful for all of you.

Posted on

The Tough Decision: What Not To Do

Today’s Dilbert strip highlights a situation that is only funny because it happens so often:

The idea that a company can focus on 25 key areas, or 125 key performance indicators (yes, I said 125 because I have seen it myself) is obviously ludicrous.

Of course a manager has a legitimate concern to ensure people don’t take their eyes off things that are important to focus on something else.

But the leader’s role here is to ensure there are processes and systems in place that anchor the routine things. Further, those processes and systems need to be designed to alert the appropriate people when something goes out of control, or past a boundary.

Without having any routines the manager has no choice but to make everything something to focus on.

Because there is no standard process, everything must be managed as an exception.

This stresses the organization because in reality they can only micro-manage a few things at a time. It is left up to the people to decide what isn’t going to get done. The bosses response at that point is going to be negative no matter what they accomplish. “Respect for people” does not play here.

Leader’s toughest job is deciding what we are not going to work on right now. It isn’t as tough as it seems because if a focus or challenge is selected well, it actually organizes the problem solving effort to pull just about everything else in behind it.

Let’s take an example from a previous post: On time delivery.

If we say “We are going to emphasize “on time delivery” as a theme or challenge this year, what kind of things might people end up working on?

  • Having every operation start on time.
  • Sources of delay.
  • Quality issues (which cause delays)
  • Safety issues (also cause delays)
  • Visual controls and good response to problems (to get on top of problems quickly)
  • Equipment reliability.
  • Setting a good operational takt time.

The list goes on. But by having a decent challenge, the local area can focus on the things that are impacting their ability to deliver on time. It isn’t necessary to make a laundry list of everything that could cause a delay and measure it from the top of the organization. If you do, everyone’s energy is dissipated working on problems that they don’t necessarily have.

Of course this is all based on having a leadership process that gets down to the work area, grasps what people are actually working on, and coaches them through the process of aligning their efforts and solving the right problems in the right way.

Hmmmm… so does that mean that the #1 thing to focus on if you want consistent on-time delivery might be leadership development?

I guess I need to get back to the Liker and Convis book.

Posted on

Defining Leadership

Chapter 1 of The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership is titled “Leading in the Toyota Way: A Lifelong Journey.”

It seeks to draw a sharp contrast between Toyota’s leadership model and the model that is taught and practiced in a more “traditional” Western company.

Where the “teaching” process in a traditional company tends to be tacit – reinforcing some behaviors and discouraging others, in the Toyota described by Liker and Convis, the process is far more deliberate.

It is a process of aligning to explicitly stated core values that have been in practice since the inception of the company, but only written down in 2001 as The Toyota Way 2001.

Then, because the word “leadership” often carries one of those “I know it when I see it” kinds of definitions, the authors use examples and construct a model to describe what they have observed. That model then structures the next few chapters (Yes, I peeked ahead).

Across the chapter they are describing leadership, not as something practiced by individuals, but as an interdependent ecosystem that links tightly to every aspect of the company. Certainly individuals each have their own style, but it is expressed within a context defined by commonly held beliefs and norms of behavior that combine to form what we call a “culture.”

Someone from outside that culture (such as Gary Convis coming from Ford, and other Toyota managers I have known personally), has to work hard to assimilate into it.

Outside the context of the book, I have also seen the opposite: Take someone who knows nothing but the Toyota culture and put them into a “traditional” company and many of them have a hard time adapting to a completely alien environment. The support structures they are used to are simply not there, and it can be psychologically very isolating.

One example of this contrast is in how these two systems see “Challenge.”

In a traditional company, a “challenge” is issued as a “stretch goal” and it is up to the individual to figure out on their own how to meet it. In the most extreme case of an “only results matter” environment, they may disregard their fellow team members, rules, ethics, even the law to get there. While we have spectacular examples such as Enron, there are lots of companies where “inventory targets” are met by starving off production at the end of the quarter and pulling in orders from the next.

“Challenge” is one of the explicit values in The Toyota Way 2001 but it looks quite different. Yes, there are challenges issued. But behind that challenge is a support structure. The leaders, at all levels are expected to stretch their own personal development, but to do so within the context of kaizen, deep understanding gained by genchi genbutsu, team work and most important of all, respect.

The leader’s development level is gauged by how the challenge is met even more than whether it is met. Just “get-r-done” doesn’t work here.