Tag: People Development

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People Kaizen

Tommy raised an interesting question in his comment to Internalizing Outside Knowledge. He said:

In my company we are working with the developing people concept. Our objective is to make ourselves redundant, but it is hard. What are the best ways of developing people? How do you do it?

How do you do it indeed?

I don’t know the specific situation he is facing, but I can ask some questions that are pretty universal.

What, exactly, are you striving to achieve with your people development? What do you want people to be able to do that they are not doing now? What would that look like if you were to observe it? How would they be interacting with the process, with each other?

If you observe today, what do you actually see? How does that differ from what you described above?

What is the gap between what you want and what you have?

I ask these questions because often we talk about “developing people” but we don’t get specific about what we expect as a result. It is easy to set objectives for kaizen of processes, quality, output, cycle time, etc. But when we talk about people, we get squishy about it.

But the process of improvement remains the same, no matter what (or who) you are trying to improve. And the first step is to know two things:

  • The direction you are trying to move – the ideal, the True North.
  • The next target you are trying to hit now which will move you in that direction.
  • When you expect to be there.

Once you have that, it is time to take a look at what you are actually doing and ask how, exactly, that effort is expected to advance you toward your target.

If the answer to that question is not crystal clear, it is time to step back and reassess your approach. Likely your approach is general and broad-brushed, rather than focused.

What never works is telling people about improvement and expecting them to get excited enough by that message to fill in the details on their own. The idea that “once they grasp the true vision they will engage on their own” is a common one.

But consider this analogy. We all know that mathematics is a wonderful tool. I can tell you all about the great discoveries and engineering feats that mastery of mathematics has enabled. I can show you dozens of examples, even take you through demonstrations of how others have used mathematics to solve problems.

At the end, you might be fired up about math, but you still can’t do it. I may have motivated, but I have not developed anyone.

If I want you to actually use mathematics, I have to assess where their current skills are, establish the next step for them, and construct a situation where they must practice and struggle a bit, but not too much, to “get” the next understanding.

That is called “practice.”

So – back to the original question.

You want to develop people.

What are you having them practice for a little while every day?

How are you providing them immediate feedback on success or failure, and coaching them?

How are you checking your results against the results you intend? What are you doing to develop and improve your own process of people development?

PDCA

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Rapid PDCA with 3P

“3P” is not a Toyota term. The workshop structure was taught by Shingijutsu and is now being propagated by people who learned it while working in their client companies.

The most visible characteristic of 3P, the Production Preparation Process, is the idea of creating quick and dirty mock-ups of the product and the process. These mockups are often constructed of wood, cardboard, PVC pipe – materials at hand.

600x3p-benches

The idea is to be able to quickly and cheaply try out, and experience, a process (or product) so that problems can be surfaced, opportunities for improvement can be seen, and the PDCA cycle can be turned far more rapidly than would otherwise be possible.

The purpose of the mockup is to create a gemba of sorts, where you would not otherwise have one. Now, rather than doing an abstract analysis, you have something that people can see, touch, and interact with. Doing so forces details to the surface that are simply invisible in abstract models in computers or on paper.

Some companies use the process to design their products as well as the processes that are used to manufacture them.

Last week one of my clients took their first steps into this process. The photo above has been pixelated so as not to reveal details about their product design.

They had done pretty extensive analysis using traditional industrial engineering methods, and had a CAD drawing of the proposed layout. That was the starting point.

The first step, then was to create that layout in real-size. That took the team about 90 minutes.

They assembled some tables, got some boxes and cardboard, and represented the machines, the work positions, the material and people flow.

Even as they were doing this, some of the team members saw things that they questioned, such as an ergonomically awkward operation. Others simply had questions. Why? Because in translating the drawing into the real world, even a superficial one, details already had to be resolved.

Once they had the starting condition mocked up, the team took prototype parts of the product and went through the motions of a team member trying to assemble it.

This felt a little awkward at first, but they began to see more opportunities, and resolve more detail.

We did a little coaching, pointing out motions that could be eliminated, others that could be consolidated. We talked about the smooth flow of people’s work, and looked for opportunities to better match the work flows to the takt time.

In the next couple of hours the team went through dozens of small PDCA cycles, each time adding a little more detail, adding a physical control, or a visual control. They found “knacks” that enabled quicker assembly with less adjustment.

They identified exactly how and where parts should be presented to the assembler.

They discovered small design and packaging changes that could make a big difference in the assembly time and quality. It did not hurt that the design engineer was trying to work out the details of one of the more awkward elements of the assembly.

They found key points that were critical to quality, examined the vulnerability to simple mistakes, and worked on how to make those more clear.

3pAndon

They identified characteristics that would help the machines better support the work flow. How do parts move in, move out? Where do the hands go to start the machine? How does the location of the controls support (or hinder) the work steps that come before and after?

As they looked at test operations, they started working out what they wanted to happen when there was a problem. They started to work out a line stop protocol and added andons to those machines, so they could signal an abnormal result.

Curious visitors, some senior managers, others just happening by and wondering what was going on, were enlisted as test subjects. Is the work cycle simple and clear? Is it easy to teach? Is the layout intuitive?

What can we do to make the visuals more clear, and to lay things out to guide the correct process sequence? Which “knacks” have to be taught? How quickly can a “new operator” be brought up to speed and make the takt time?

Over three days, the details came into sharper and sharper focus.

In the end, the team had constructed a full size model of their target condition. They are clear how the process needs to operate to give them the performance they want; and they are equally clear about the next problems that must be solved to get there.

They can specify their equipment with far more insight, and many of the details of how to guide the product and people through the process are now much better understood.

And, as a side benefit, this cross functional team has communicated far more than they would have otherwise with meetings and email. They have spent three days embedded in a joint project to envision what they want this to look like.

To be clear, a lot of work remains, and many more details remain to be worked out. But over three days this team now has a much more clearly aligned concept of what they are striving to achieve.

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What Do You Teach and Practice Every Day?

Mike Rother forwarded this link to an article by Bruce Hamilton in Quality Digest with the observation that “the lean ship may be turning.”

The key point is that people learn what they practice. And if you practice kaizen every day, you learn kaizen. But if you practice something else every day, you learn that. If kaizen is only an occasional “special event” then it never becomes engrained as “the way we do things.”

From the article:

The truth is, when everybody practices status quo behavior almost every day,that is what is sustained. If employees are not practicing the new way every day, by default they are practicing the old. Practice makes permanent.

Mike illustrates this principle well in his presentation Introduction to the Improvement Kata.

batch-improvement

In reality, rather than days between events, the experience of the team members is more often like weeks or months. Some companies set a goal of getting every team member through one or two kaizen events in a year.

While this may spread the effect wide, it ensures that nobody has more than superficial experience. It is build on an expectation that once a process is “leaned out” that it should stay that way until there is an opportunity to come back around and “fix it again.”

Of course it actually begins to erode right away because the daily habits have not changed, and it is those daily habits that put the waste into the process to begin with.

The traditional model for kaizen is firmly anchored in Fredrick Taylor’s concept of separating experts from workers. Even though we solicit worker’s input during kaizen events, the process of kaizen itself is still largely the domain of technical experts. They are the ones who own the process.

Some companies go so far as to not allow kaizen to be done by people who are not “certified” in some way.

What we have to do is shift the role of those kaizen experts from one where they plan, conduct and lead special improvement events to one where they are on the shop floor every day teaching and coaching the line leaders. This is the only way (that we know of) that will actually transfer the knowledge.

Only when those line leaders are, themselves, teaching and coaching can the effort let up a bit and move on.

The “ship may be turning” because this idea is beginning to find its way into the mainstream discussion in the lean community. This will not happen overnight, however. There is huge inertia in the expert-as-implementer mode across all approaches to improvement. But if we (the lean practitioners) want to know why the results do not sustain, a large part of the answer is in the mirror.

“If the worker hasn’t learned, the teacher hasn’t taught.”

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Standard Problem Solving

A key point of Mike Rother’s book Toyota Kata is that the organization develops a very deep core-competency in problem solving.

In order to develop competency at anything, there must first be a standard to strive for. What I am realizing is the precise method used doesn’t matter nearly as much as having a method (that works) and rigorously striving to follow it.

Why is this important?

Consider the opposite. Let’s say, hypothetically, that we have a team of very good problem solvers and they are trying to tackle a tough problem. However each of these people brings a different method to the table.

As they discuss the problem, each will be trying to frame it in his or her paradigm for how to go about arriving at the root cause and finding a countermeasure. Indeed, even those words (root cause, countermeasure) might be different.

Some of them might not even call it a “problem.” A team member steeped in Theory of Constraints is going to be referring to a “constraint” – what is constraining the system from advancing to the next level of performance.

Someone else will insist on calling it an “opportunity.”

No matter how competent each individual team member, the group is going to expend a lot of time and energy with how to go about even defining the problem. This is time and energy that is not spent actually solving it.

Things get worse if there are weak problem solving skills to begin with. Someone might have heard of “5 Why’s” for example, and try simply asking “Why?” repeatedly, and writing down the answers on the flip chart in a mistaken belief that this effort leads the team to the root cause of the problem. (it doesn’t, as the room is hermetically sealed to information flow).

So if the organization has a structure, a method, for problem solving there are at least steps that should be consistently followed.

Introduce a good facilitator / teacher / mentor into the mix, and they get an opportunity to practice with coaching, and develop skill.

But “without a standard, there can be no improvement” and the same thing applies to problem solving and improvement itself. If you want to get better at it, you need to start with a standard you are striving to achieve, and then study what keeps you from achieving it.

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Lean Facilitators are Countermeasures

What is the role of your lean facilitator?

This question comes up now and again, was recently posed on the LEI forums by someone looking for help with a job description.

I extrapolated from his question that he was looking to the job description as a line of defense against dilution of the facilitator’s focus and effort by projects that might not be going in the appropriate direction.

In effect, this is putting the lean facilitator in the role of a weakened zampolit with the role of educating the “correct view” and challenging decisions that run counter to it. Except that more often he has to sell the “correct view” rather than impose it.

The fact that the question is being asked at all indicates that the organization has not really thought through what their operational vision is. How will the company work, what are the responsibilities and roles of the leaders?

What are the leaders’ job descriptions in this new world?

Those job descriptions become a target condition for each of them.

What is the gap?

If there are gaps in skills and knowledge, then we need countermeasures.

At this point, the role and responsibility of a lean facilitator might begin to emerge as one of those countermeasures. Don’t have the expertise? Import it.

What doesn’t work, though, is to use the lean facilitator to substitute for the leader’s full and direct participation in the process of improvement. And no job description, no matter how carefully crafted, can fix that.

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More From Dan Pink on Motivation

This sketchcast from Dan Pink covers the same ground as his TED talk that I posted a few weeks ago, but it is more succinct and direct so I wanted to share it.

When we look at what drives kaizen and continuous improvement, it is important to understand what motivates people to find a better way to do the work.

As we try to alter the dynamics of the way an organization functions (a.k.a. “change”) it is equally important to understand that tying people’s bonuses to their willingness to adopt “the new way” may get compliance, but it is unlikely to motivate true commitment.

What we call “performance management” in its various guises seems to be the worst possible way to get the most from people.

HR professionals – especially the ones who are pushing these networked web-based “performance management systems” – I have a question. What is the intended purpose of these systems? Is it developing people or driving compliance?

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Firefighting Kata

27 months ago I wrote a piece about a “firefighting culture” where I described the actual process used to fight fires – following PDCA.

I have learned a few things since then, and I want to tighten my analogy a bit.

What is the core thinking behind true firefighting? This is actually closer to home than you may think. Many companies have situations that are on fire – in that they are destructively out of control.

I recall Mr. Iwata lecturing a group of managers in a large aerospace company in Seattle. He listened patiently to their grand plans about how the transformed operation would look. Then his remarks cut to the chase.

“Your house is on fire. This is not the time to be thinking about how you will decorate it.”

The question is – does urgency force a change in the thinking or approach?

I say it does not. However urgency does stress people’s skills and capabilities to deal with the situation to the limit – and beyond. Thus, it is best if those skills are thoroughly developed before there is a crisis, when the stakes are not so high. This is how high-risk professions train. They work to develop ingrained habits and skills for handling chaos before it is real.

So let’s go to our hypothetical burning building and look at what happens – as a matter of routine – even though every situation is different.

The target condition is a generally a given: The fire is extinguished, things are cooled down enough that there will be no re-ignition.

What is the current condition? Yes, the building is on fire. (doh!) But there is more to it than that.

What is stopping us from putting this fire out right now?

What is the layout of the building? Its construction? Where are the air shafts, sources of fuel, oxygen? Are there hazards in the building? Is there a basement under the main floor? Is there anyone inside?

Because they are (hopefully) skilled and practiced, gaining this information is routine, and hopefully they are getting most of it on the way.

The fire chief on site is going to develop an overall strategy for attacking the fire, and deploy his forces accordingly.

One thing they do not do – they don’t go creating action item lists, they don’t go hunting for fires, and they don’t just go into reaction mode.

Neither do they have a detailed “action plan” that they can blindly follow. Simply put, they are in an vague situation with many things that are still not known. These things will only be revealed as they progress.

What is the first problem?

The initial actions will be more or less routine things that help the effort, and gain more information. They are going to ventilate the roof to clear smoke, and they are going to first work to rescue any people who are trapped.

This is their initial tactical target condition.

As they move toward that target, they will simultaneously gain more knowledge about the situation, decide the next objective, and the actions required to achieve it.

Cycle PDCA

As they carry out those actions, either things will work as predicted, and the objective will be achieved or (more likely) there will be surprises. Those surprises are not failures, rather they are additional information, things that were not previously understood.

Because this is dangerous work, if things get totally strange, they are going to back-out and reassess, and possibly start over.

As they go, they will work methodically but quickly, step by step, never leaving fire (unsolved problems) behind them, always having an escape path.

And, at some point along the way, what must be done to accomplish the original objective, put out the last of the fire will be come apparent.

Why are they so good at this?

Simple. They practice these things all of the time, under constant critical eyes of trainers. Every error and mistake is called out, corrected, and the action is repeated until they routinely get it right. Even though they are very good at what they do, they know two things:

  1. They can get better.
  2. Their skills are perishable.

So, although each fire is different, they have kata that they practice, continuously – from basic drills to training in more complex scenarios. They are putting these things to use now that there is real urgency.

What about the rest of us?

In business, we tend to assume that crisis will either not occur, or when it does will be within our domain of being able to handle it… but we often get surprised and our problem solving skills are stretched to the breaking point.

Why?

Because we have never really practiced those skills, and if we have, we have not been critical enough of how we went about solving routine problems, and we are sloppy.

When there is no urgency, we can get away with being sloppy. When method is not critical, anything more or less works. But when things are complicated, messy, and right now, there isn’t time to practice. “You go to war with what you’ve got.” What that really means is that, however ill-prepared you are, you now have to deal with reality.

Problem solving is as important to a business (and I include any human enterprise, profit or not in this) as it is to the firefighters. Business has technical skills, as firefighters have handling hoses, operating their equipment, etc. But no matter how competent firefighters are at their technical tools, they are lousy firefighters if they have not practiced quickly solving problems related to putting out fires.

Likewise, no matter how good you are at keeping your books straight, managing your order base, scheduling production, whatever routine things you do, if you have not practiced problem solving skills on a daily basis, you are likely not very good at it. Daily kaizen is practice solving problems. The side-benefit is your business gets better as a result.

The difference is that firefighters know it is important, so they practice, subject themselves to the critical eye of professional trainers and coaches. In business, nobody teaches “problem solving” except in the most vague way.

 

“All we do is fight fires.”

Hopefully you wish you were that good.

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Trusting the Process

Here is an “ah-ha” or even one of those “oh s#!&” moments I had as Mike Rother was talking about his Toyota Kata research last week.

  Solution How Solution is Developed
Toyota / “Lean” Left Open Very specific – guided and directed.
Traditional Management Given / Directed Not specified, left to “empowered” employee.

When confronted with a problem, “traditional” managers have been taught to direct a solution, and leave details of putting it into place unspecified – “empowering” people to find the best way to work the details, solve the problems, and get it done.

“Toyota” or “Lean” managers, on the other hand, (if they are following the kata model – rare outside of Toyota I think), are going to be quite open about the solution, but very specific about the method used to develop and deploy that solution.

The result?

The two populations learn quite different things.

One learns to bypass obstacles, put the directed solution into place quickly.. git-r-done.

The other learns, through repetition, a thorough, adaptable, reliable and universal process for diagnosing a situation, seeing the root cause, and developing countermeasures that sustain.

The line I circled in my notes is “Kata must be content free.” meaning that if the method is carried out correctly, the solution will work to deal with the issue at hand. It is not necessary to specify a solution, only to hold the “true north” of what constitutes improvement and ensure that the process to develop the solution is carried out correctly.

An unworkable solution is a sign that the problem solving process was not applied correctly, not a flaw in the process itself.

OK – that all sounds good. What is the “ah-ha?”

How have many of us been “implementing lean” and “engaging people” by giving them targets in the form of specific tools to implement, and then leaving it to the “engaged team” to work out the details of how it will function in their situation? Which of the above two models am I using if I do that?

If I were to set an appropriate target, that takes the process closer to one-by-one, etc. and then to correctly guide the team through the process of understanding the current state, evaluating what problem(s) are blocking progress in that position, and methodically solve them they might or might not arrive at the tool I have in mind as the answer. Just to be clear – this approach is a lot tougher because there is another skill involved than just knowing how to make kanban work, or set up a u-shaped work cell.

There is a fine line as well between giving the team the solution and advising them on some things to try that will help them reveal more issues.

But in the end, if their solution works to close the gap, but uses a totally different approach, I have to be open to that possibility.

We lean “experts” have to play by our own rulebook.

Otherwise I am simply holding a wrench and looking for a screw to pound.

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When Can I see?

One of the issues Mike Rother says he has had with the coaching questions in Toyota Kata is question #5 “When can we go see what you have learned?”

In the west, inevitably it seems, once the word “When” is uttered, everyone in the conversation leaps to hear “When will you be done?” no matter how the question is actually framed.

As I am understanding it right now, the actual intent is for the coach to establish two things:

  1. The PDCA cycle needs to be turned rapidly. “When…”? is meant to establish a time fame that might be measured in hours, or even minutes, rather than days or weeks. The more quickly the PDCA cycle is turned, the more thoroughly the problem is understood and the more robust the countermeasure.
  2. “What we have learned…” means “What surprises did you encounter?” “What went differently than you expected?” “What didn’t work the way you thought it would?” this part of the question is intended to drive home the point that it is these things, not the success, that drive deeper understanding plus give clues about the next problem that must be addressed.

Based on Rother’s experience with this question, I am tinkering with how to re-frame it so I can use it more effectively. Ultimately the behavior I want is an invitation to jointly observe how the proposed countermeasure has changed the process. We want to understand the actual effect vs the intended effect.

That, of course, requires that the intended effect is understood and explicitly stated before trying. That does NOT mean that every little step is documented on paper such as an A3. That is far too cumbersome at this level of granularity. We want this process to cycle faster than the time required to write this stuff down. It does mean that I would have evidence that it has been thought through rather than just blindly trying something.

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If The Student Hasn’t Learned…

The teacher hasn’t taught.

This article, titled “Why China is Not Ready for Lean Manufacturing” presents an account of trying to teach “lean manufacturing” in a Chinese factory. The experience is summed up in a couple of key paragraphs:

The team arrived in Dongguan and went to work giving an overview class on Lean techniques. The factory workers seemed attentive and interested in learning. The next day, the Silicon Valley Lean team gathered the people from the assembly line to begin the process of working on the quality problem. After 3 hours, the Lean team ended the session in utter frustration. No one participated. No one would identify problems on the line. No one knew how to approach gathering or analyzing data. No one volunteered.

So what happened? The training was adequate and the Lean principles and methods are sound and easily understood. Why weren’t the Chinese factory workers participating?

Why indeed?

The author’s conclusion is that Chinese worker’s culture and values conflict with the idea of collaboration and contributing ideas to improve production quality and efficiency.

But the article brought up two separate thoughts.

First, there is nothing magic about Western culture. These concepts can, and do, fall just as flat in the USA and Europe as they did in this factory. The problem in these cases has less to do with the national culture, and more to do with attempting to apply a rote approach to teaching.

Second, the result cited here was exactly the opposite of my own experience in a Chinese factory.

It took some persistence, and it took some deliberate steps to remove fear from the factory floor, but in the end we had these Chinese workers making some very innovative contributions.

400ArmBoringMock01 This photo is an old boring mill. It was a slow old boring mill. We needed to squeeze cycle time out of the process to make the projected takt time. We showed the workers some photos of other teams’ efforts to mock-up fixtures so they could quickly try out ideas. The workers, after a few false starts, constructed what you see here, and ended up with a pretty good set of fixtures that could be loaded and unloaded quickly. After some trials, they figured out on their own that they could fit two fixtures on the platform, which allowed them to be unloading and loading one while boring on the other.

400BucketBoring

One of the machinists complained that the machine could run faster if it had a liquid cooling system. With encouragement, he designed and built a simple, but working, cooling system for the cutting tools. (The steel box in the foreground with a pump on it.) The clever part was the chip filter made from a bottle cap and a nail.

400BucketCellMock01 Another team was working on a welding cell. They ended up designing and fabricating more efficient fixtures than had been provided by the engineers. Then they set out to develop the most efficient way to get parts positioned, to load them quickly into the fixture, and weld up the part.

 

 

What was different?400CellWorkDesign

First, we didn’t do any classroom education. Not quite true. We showed them photos of really good welding fixtures that had been designed by a sister company. That took about 30 minutes. We explained what features made those fixtures good. Then we continuously encouraged them to try things so they could learn on their own. And try they did.

We didn’t ask them to go beyond mock-up. We fully expected to take their ideas, turn them over to engineers to get them finalized and drawn up, then have the fixtures fabricated. But the workers took it on their own initiative to dig through the (embarrassingly large) amount of scrap metal out back, bring in what they needed, machine parts, scrounge others, and built their fixtures in steel.

A number of ideas were things I could clearly see would not work. I knew that heat distortion from welding would make a particular fixture design difficult (impossible!) to unload after welding. I could tell them it wouldn’t work, or I could let them try it on their own. I chose the path that would engage their curiosity and let them learn through experience. They became better welders for it.

Honestly – this was a slow time while we were working out other issues with market positioning, sales, design and sourcing decisions, and most of this activity was intended to keep people busy and engaged. But what we ended up with was production-ready work cells, all built upon ideas from the workers.

So why did I tell this little story?

First, I will admit that I was pretty proud of these guys. This was a few years ago now, but it was fun blowing away everyone’s stereotypes about Chinese factories and Chinese workers.

But I wanted to make a key point.

Instead of looking for cultural reasons why “this won’t work here” we kept faith that, if the initial response was silence and non-participation, there was something that we needed to address in the way we taught, and in the environment we were creating.

Indeed, what the Chinese culture brings to kaizen is a centuries-old tradition of improvising with what you have to get something done. This is a great strength that can be hard to find in cultures with longer traditions of wealth.

Just as we were encouraging these workers to try things so they could learn what did work, we had to do the same thing. We didn’t give up after three hours. Eventually we managed to remove the fear and bring out the best these people had to offer.

Classroom education is actually a very poor way to teach people how to study a process, understand it and improve it. Sometimes it kind of works, but I think that is because it is marginally effective if all of the other conditions are right. Perhaps in some cultures that starting point is past the limit of what classroom education can handle. That isn’t a problem with the culture, it is revealing the inherent weakness in the approach.

There is no cookbook. There is only a clear objective, and good faith effort to keep trying until a solution is found.

Epiloge: Yes, this factory got into production. However the parent company could never get traction in this market with this product and recently made a decision to close this plant and pursue a different strategic direction. That is not a reflection at all on the people who did the work in these photos.