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Why Don’t They See This Is Better?

“Resistance to change” is a common theme of discussion among practitioners on various online forums, as well as in emails I get from readers.

One thing I see fairly often is that a practitioner will be suggesting a visual control or a specific application of a “lean tool” as a “better way” in the process being examined.

“They can just look it up on the computer,” say those holding on to the status quo, “why do we need to put up a board?”

Why indeed?

So the practitioner tries to make a logical case, and often comes away frustrated. “Leaders aren’t supporting the changes” is a common lament at this point.

But let’s break down the problem and see if there is more we can do.

We are often debating whether or not a particular solution is better than the current way.

But in our “implement the tools” approach, we tend to make “lack of a specific solution” into a problem.

Whoa. Let’s back up a bit and see if we can head this off.

Do you have agreement on a clear target objective, one that all parties can describe? Do you know how the process should be performing?

Note I said “should” not “could.”

“Could” is potential.

“Should” is an unmet expectation. Big psychological difference there.

If everyone agrees that the status quo isn’t getting it done, and also agrees on what they want to achieve instead, then the next question is “OK, what is stopping us from taking the next step?”

This shouldn’t be an abstract exercise. As you watch the people in the process try to reach a higher performance level, look for “What just got in our way?”

You need to help the leaders, and your other constituents see it with their own eyes. Don’t expect them to take your word for it. You wouldn’t take theirs without your own observation.

If everyone can see, for example, that a team member gets too far behind to recover before anyone else notices, or that a machine is experiencing stoppages or excessive changeovers, for example, then you can start discussing solutions.

Perhaps the team leader needs to make quick status checks periodically, in a way that is not intrusive.

What is stopping him?

Well, that’s difficult right now, because everything is buried in the computer, and often updated in batches after the work is done.

Hmmm.. What could we do to make things more visible, in real time? Is there a way we can set up the work area so the team leader (and the worker, and anyone else just happening by) could readily see there is an issue here?

Now, and not before, is the time to start discussing solutions. But you can’t just make the logical argument. You have to get agreement each step of the way.

That might very well take longer than you want it to. People are funny that way.

But the bottom line is this: “Lack of your pet solution,” no matter how many books and name-brand authors refer to it, “is not a problem.”

We create a lot of our own resistance by running into things, and leaving fires behind us.

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Lego Moonshine

In the Production Preparation Process (3P) we use the term “moonshine” to refer to process of rapid prototyping and iteration. The team creates concepts and tries them out quickly and cheaply in order to learn more.

Today we have some really powerful tools available to do this. One of them is Lego Technic. It is versatile and modular, and you can make machines that actually work.

But the spirit of moonshine means you don’t just think up a complete machine and build it.

Moonshine is a progressive process of adding automation step by step. The final characteristics of the equipment emerge from the process rather than everything being designed from the get-go and just built.

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5S in Three Bullets

I was in a conversation today and we ended up boiling 5S down to three key points:

  • You have everything you need.
  • You need everything you have.
  • You can see everything clearly belongs where it is.

Of course at the next level, these statements are the standards you are continuously checking against.

Presumably we have cleared out everything else, leaving only what we thought was needed, and established visual controls to verify we have those things, and only those things, in the work area.

Then, as the work is done, the moment someone discovers something else is needed, THAT is the time to deal with the issue.

– Ask “Is this something we should need in the normal course of the work?”

If so, then you learned something that you didn’t know or didn’t remember when you first organized the area. Add that item, find a place for it, and establish a visual control. Right now.

If not, then “Why did we need it this time?”

What broke the normal pattern of work?

This is where 5S breaks down – when we don’t discriminate between something that is needed in the normal course of work, and something that is needed as an exception.

If we just “get it” and add it to the work area, then we normalize deviance and incrementally erode the process. If we ignore the issue, we add “getting this when it is needed” to the work cycle.

If, on the other hand, we seek to understand what broke the normal pattern and deal with the core issue, we have a shot at real kaizen. (It is perfectly OK to get what you need and keep it around as a temporary countermeasure. Just put it someplace where you will KNOW when you used it.)

The worst thing you can do is allow these small problems to accumulate and try to correct them en-mass as some kind of “corrective action.”

Kanban

Likewise, kanban can be expressed the same way. It is more dynamic, but is really answering the same questions in the context of materials.

 

Standard Work

If you paraphrase these key points to just about any other “tool of lean” then the purpose of surfacing problems and driving solution becomes apparent.

  • You are doing everything that is required.
  • Everything being done is required.
  • Everything being done clearly is part of the sequence.

Take a look at the other classic “tools of lean.” How would they fit into the same pattern?

 

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New Forum Area: Outside the Factory

Zoe owns Grassroots Books in Reno, NV and is exploring how to make these concepts work in a small retail operation. They are just getting started, but are finding lots of opportunities.

When talking to her last night, she mentioned she would like to network with other people who are trying to apply these concepts in non-traditional arenas.

In response, I created a new forum on The Lean Thinker’s Community. It is called “Outside the Factory” and is intended as a gathering place for practitioners and others who want to discuss how to apply TPS in non-manufacturing environments.

I would love to see some synergy develop there, and intend to fully participate as well. Stop in and say “Hello.”

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3P Works

I am in another 3P type of event this week.
One of the cool things is how the act of physical simulation, even a crude one, drives out ideas and insights.

Limitations are challenged, possibilities are expanded.

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Outsourcing Competence

Continuing on a supply-chain theme from Doing Outsourcing Right and Don’t Lose How To Make Things, I found this Reuters article carried on MSNBC interesting.

Surging China costs forces some U.S. manufacturing companies back home

 

Like a lot of popular press articles, the title and even the lead kind of miss the point. They are focusing on simplistic factors such as costs and whether or not the high automation type solutions are going to create more jobs or not.

This isn’t to say that costs aren’t important. Of course they are. And the article correctly points out (as we have said here as well) that many times the full costs of outsourcing are not understood.

As for the automation – though I can’t speak for the solutions cited in the article, what I often see is overboard with high-tech / high-maintenance solutions. That is a subject for another day when we really start digging into “right sized automation” and 3P.

With all of that, what caught my eye was the last three paragraphs, and in my mind, they are the true lead here:

"If you’re going to go into the high-tech electronics business here in the States, most likely a big portion of your high-tech electronic components are going to be sourced from China," said Cort Jacoby, a principal in the supply-chain group at Archstone Consulting, a unit of the Hackett Group Inc . "Then the question becomes, what is the true value-add that’s going to take place in the United States?"

Beyond that, a company that has outsourced most or all of its manufacturing may find that it no longer has a pool of engineers, plant managers or other workers with the experience to resume production.

"There was always this notion that if you controlled the design and the brand, you could park your production somewhere else," said GE’s Campbell. "I’m not sure that’s completely true anymore. Because what happens over time is you lose competency."

[Emphasis added]

The key point is that you can always outsource what you do today, but what remains is what are you going to do tomorrow?

Today’s markets and technology change so fast that unless you are SO good at supply chain management, AND retain the knowledge so you know how to manage production – like Apple – you end up outsourcing your entire future for a short-term cost “savings” that might not even show up.

Bottom line: You can’t outsource basic business competence. What are you striving to be best in the world at doing? If you don’t know, you are in trouble.

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Doing Outsourcing Right

In a previous post, “Don’t Lose How To Make Things,” I discussed some of the perils of outsourcing either your production or your production technology.

Yet there are many successful companies that manage to do just that. One of the most successful is Apple.

We all know Apple as a cutting-edge innovator. Their products have created, and destroyed, entire industries and changed social paradigms.

What is behind that cutting-edge innovation, though, is one of the best (if not the best) supply chain management systems on Earth. Lets look at a couple of key characteristics of how they do this, and you can compare them to the more common mindsets about outsourcing.

First, Apple understands intimately how an iPhone works and how to make one. While they may outsource actual production, they do not outsource their core knowledge. They know their product and their process.

But what really got my attention (and inspired me to write this) was a fascinating anonymous response to a question about a logical strategic investment for Apple.

The comment describes how Apple uses their resources and supply chain knowledge to stay on top of the cutting edge and maintain competitive advantage.

When new component technologies (touchscreens, chips, LED displays) first come out, they are very expensive to produce, and building a factory that can produce them in mass quantities is even more expensive. Oftentimes, the upfront capital expenditure can be so huge and the margins are small enough (and shrink over time as the component is rapidly commoditized) that the companies who would build these factories cannot raise sufficient investment capital to cover the costs.

What Apple does is use its cash hoard to pay for the construction cost (or a significant fraction of it) of the factory in exchange for exclusive rights to the output production of the factory for a set period of time (maybe 6 – 36 months), and then for a discounted rate afterwards.

He goes on to describe how Apple first has exclusive access to the latest technology, then as it becomes commoditized, maintains cost advantage as they are searching for the next paradigm shift.

What I think this does is allow Apple to use their supply chain savvy to change things up faster than their competitors can respond.

Apple is not just crushing its rivals through superiority in design, Steve Jobs’s deep experience in hardware mass production (early Apple, NeXT) has been brought to bear in creating an unrivaled exclusive supply chain of advanced technology literally years ahead of anyone else on the planet. If it feels like new Apple products appear futuristic, it is because Apple really is sending back technology from the future.

Here is the bottom line: If you want to outsource, that is actually OK. But only if you are using that as an opportunity to continuously improve your process of supply chain management while striving to become the best in the world.

If it is a short term ROI problem, rather than working hard to develop a key strategic advantage, well, good luck with that.

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Continuously Improving

The term “continuous improvement” has been around a long time. The truth is most companies don’t do continuous improvement at all, rather they schedule improvements in batches and projects.

The effect of batch improvements is that “improvement” is not “business as usual” and people learn what they do every day, not what they do intermittently. That is one reason why it is usually necessary to precede a kaizen event with a training session.

But there is a deeper ramification here that challenges the very goal of the process.

We all assume (myself included up to this point) that the goal is continuous process improvement.

Maybe it is.

But we also say it is about developing people.

Processes come and go with new technology, new products, reorganizations, etc. The people are the only constant.

Let me float this idea out there –

How would your continuous improvement process change if you thought of its  primary objective as continuously improving the capability of your people?

Process improvement would be a vehicle for people development. In effect, your success at process improvement would be an indicator of how well you were developing people.

To paraphrase a common expression, process improvement is the shadow of how well you develop your people.

That would mean if your process of continuous improvement is targeted at anything other than the capability of people, you are trying to move a shadow by pushing on it.

Its about the people.

hmmmm.

Thoughts?

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Pushing Innovation

3P – the Production Preparation Process – is often used to develop a complete “reboot” of a process. The term kaikaku is often applied.

Like many of the lean tools, subtle points sometimes get lost in rote application.

Here are a couple of thoughts from some experience:

Developing and Exploring Target Conditions

One of the obvious characteristics of 3P in its early stages is mock-ups of the product and processes. The purpose of these mock-ups is to explore various concepts, gain understanding, surface and propose solutions to problems before anything expensive is actually built.

The result of this process is a fairly well defined target condition.

That is, we understand the performance the product, and the process, must deliver in order to meet the goal. And we know what they need to look like in order to meet those goals.

The mock-ups give much more definition to “how the process needs to work” than any sketch or CAD drawing can provide. They give the team confidence that, at the minimum, they understand what problems must be solved to turn this proposal into reality.

As the 3P continues, these mock-ups should be morphing into functioning prototypes, and finally into full-scale production. At each step there should be a verification that the team is converging onto the goal.

Any time there is divergence from the goal is time to symbolically pull the andon, huddle, reset to a known point, and reestablish a track to success.

Keeping the Solution Space as Wide as Possible

One common mistake that teams make is to focus too quickly on a single solution. This is a result of trying to quickly solve the “big problem” rather than seeking first to gain much deeper understanding.

The evaluation process is not about picking winners. The goal in 3P is to keep as many viable solutions in play for as long as possible.

At each iteration of exploration the team learns what problem must be solved next to keep this solution alive. If that problem seems too big and overwhelming, you are likely working on more than one thing. Time to decompose the process to its basic elements (again) and tackle things one-by-one.

Plan B

While you are exploring alternatives, you always want to have something in your hip pocket that will, as a minimum, work. It might not be elegant, as cheap as you want, but it delivers. Having a viable Plan B in play gives the rest of the team much more freedom to push the envelope and explore.

The Plan B team is working continuously to improve from the baseline. Often they can develop some quite radical improvements. But they always start from something that works.

The beauty of this approach is that elements of the true innovation teams’ work can often be incorporated back into the baseline for even higher performance of the baseline.

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Nancy Bruner: “Do They Really Want a Change Agent?”

Nancy Bruner blogs on Word | Rap. Her first (and as of this writing, only) post is titled Do They Really Want a Change Agent. Since most lean practitioners are, rightly or wrongly, expected to be change agents, the points she makes caught my eye.

The harsh reality of this is summed up in her second key point:

2. You will spend more time convincing the very people who hired you to make the changes they hired you to make than you will spend competing in the market.

I recall visiting a company a couple of years ago. As I spoke with a number of people, they all had the same question: “How can we go faster?” Yet they already had (have) a world-class expert on staff. “All you need to do,” I told them, “is listen to him and do what he says.”

And there was the rub. The company, while wanting to alter their results, was (is) struggling with the idea that the leaders themselves must change the way they manage and lead if they want a different outcome.

This is a common problem.

The other common problem is that the practitioners, while clear on the tools and methods of “lean” are far less clear on exactly what leaders need to do differently other than a vague notion of “support the changes.”

The literature, until recently, has not done much to help with this problem. The practice of leaders is starting to get more definition, but the lean community itself still has a huge inertia behind implementation methods that have been proven, again and again, to fail.

There are change agents within the lean community as well. Not surprisingly, they are finding the same resistance that the practitioners in the field complain about.