Tag: People Development

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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.

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What you can, Where you can

In my review of Toyota Kata by Mike Rother, I suggested that the staff-level practitioners who are embedded in almost every company that is “implementing lean” could put those practices to work immediately, even if it was not an ideal “top down” teaching process.

This week I gave that a try.

I was coaching a workshop leader who was, in turn, leading the team I mentioned earlier. He was simultaneously reading the book, I referred him to “the coaching questions” on page 247 and we worked together to keep asking them as the team was doing its work.

Since the team was working to solve problems that were blocking the problem solving process, it got a little complicated to keep them focused on the right “immediate problem.” However what I observed, for sure, was that my workshop leader’s skills improved significantly as the week went on, as did the team’s understanding of the issues and countermeasures.

My working theory was that just asking the questions puts someone into “teaching mode” and, as I have said earlier, the best way to learn is to try to teach.

Was this the ideal approach advocated by Mike Rother? Nope. I will have to loop back and catch some of the foundational elements. But as I have experienced in the past, these practices are so powerful that even trying and awkward application gets significantly better results than following no structure at all.

Start asking the questions, and see what you can learn as you try to teach.

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“Opportunities” vs “Problems”

Over the decades, I have observed that it is quite common for organizational leaders to try to use the word “opportunity” when talking about a problem.

I can understand the desire to do this – we typically think of “problems” as something to do with people.

But I find the emphamistic language… problematic.

 

 

Mr. Opportunity

 

There is a Honda marketing campaign in the USA that features a cartoon character named “Mr. Opportunity.” His tag-line is “I’m Mr. Opportunity, and I’m knocking.” The opportunity is an invitation to take advantage of discounted prices for Honda cars.

Words mean things.

An opportunity is something that I may, or may not, decide to pursue.

But in lean thinking, no problem can go unaddressed.

Rather than a friendly cartoon character knocking on your door, a problem has kicked your door in and is standing in your living room. It must be dealt with, and dealt with quickly.

It has to be contained, pushed back, and finally resolved to keep it from getting back in.

IF the process for doing these things is carried out correctly, there are opportunities for the organization to learn along the way. But in the vast majority of cases, the only way those opportunites get exploited is if the leaders insist on hearing what was learned. So even those “opportunities” shift to imperatives.

Friendly euphemism that soften the urgency do not help us. If we are to have a true problem solving culture, we have to be willing to call things what they actually are.

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5S Audits – Part III

I would like to thank everybody for a really engaging dialog in the previous two posts about 5S audits.

Now I would like to dig in and look at what an “audit” is actually finding, and how we are responding to those issues.

Our hypothetical production area is getting an audit. The checklist says things like “There are no unnecessary items in the work area” and “There is a location indicated for all items.”

If there are unnecessary things in the work area, or things are not in their designated locations, what happens?

Of course, the checklist is filled out and a score is assigned.

But what has been learned about the process?

In one of the comments, I asked something like “When was the problem first noticed?”

The core purpose of 5S is to establish a testable condition that asks the question: “Does the team member have everything he needs, and nothing he doesn’t, where he needs it, when he needs it, to carry out his process as we understand it?”

One of the primary purposes of marking out the locations is to indicate the standard so that someone can notice right away that the standard has been broken. What should happen right then and there?

Since we define a “problem” as “any departure from the standard or specification,” and we have taken the first step of removing ambiguity from the situation (by deciding what should be here, and marking it out), we want an immediate response to the problem.

Ideally this means that the team member would indicate trouble (andon call, or other means) as soon as he discovered that his air gun was missing, or didn’t work.

The back-up to this is the team leader’s standard work. His eyes should be scanning for situations where there is a problem that the team member hasn’t called out. This is why the standards are marked out, posted, etc. To make this job easy for him. His immediate response would be to (1) Seek to understand the situation – what pulled the team member off his standard work, where did the problem originate, (2) Correct the situation. Sometimes that’s it. Other times, there is another problem to dig into.

It could be that something about the work process or conditions has changed and the team member is improvising a bit. That would bring extra stuff into the area, for example. I recall a great example where we pulled all of the thread cutting tools out of assembly so we could better detect when assembly was getting defective fabricated parts. It worked by forcing the process to stop and an andon call since assembly could not proceed if the threads were not cut.

At the same time, if a thread cutter found its way back into the assembly area, we would know we had two problems. First, we had defective parts. But more important, the process of telling us about that problem had been bypassed.

The back-up to the team leader’s standard work is the supervisor’s standard work. She is looking two levels down, but her response is going to be different. Unless safety or quality is jeopardized, the supervisor is going to find the team leader and (1) Seek to understand what pulled the team leader off of his standard work, and (2) correct the situation.

If the next level up is spending any time at all out on the shop floor, it is the same thing – maybe once a day – seeking out verifiable evidence that things are working as they should be. In the lack of positive evidence of control, we must assume there are hidden problems.

Now, if the audit finds something like this (click on the image for a bigger one):

Then it isn’t about the tape being out of place, nor is it a question about where the screwdriver is. What we have discovered is that none of the checks have been made, or if they have, no one has done anything about them.

Someone said “If we don’t do audits then 5S deteriorates.” OK – but why does 5S deteriorate?

Simply put, it is going to deteriorate, just as your process does, a little bit every day. Disorder is always being injected into everything. Your process will never, ever be stable on its own. No matter how good you are, the next level of granularity will show up as deterioration.

This is the “chatter” that Steven Spear talks about.

The question comes down to your core intention for the audit.

If you are assessing how well the area manager is coaching and teaching his people to see and respond to problems so that you can establish a target condition for his learning, and then develop his capabilities accordingly… there are better ways (in my opinion) to do that.

If you are assigning a numeric score in the hope that, by measuring something you can influence behavior, it might work, but people can come up with ingeniously destructive ways to achieve the numeric goals. As a thought experiment – how might an area manager get a high score on his 5S audit in ways that run completely counter to the goals of 5S, people development or “lean?”

The bottom line is that “Audit 5S” is not something that you should accept as a given. Rather, it is a proposed countermeasure to some problem. But if you start with a clear problem statement like “Team members are bringing thread taps into the assembly line,” and start asking “Why” five times, get to a root cause to that problem, you are unlikely to arrive at a monthly or periodic 5S audit as a countermeasure – nor are you ever going to need one.

The problem?

I think we feel the need to do audits because we have no process to immediately detect, correct and solve the little problems that happen every day. These little issues are the ones that cause the 5S erosion. Because we don’t have a process to deal with them one-by-one, we have to have an elaborate process that disrupts our normal work flow and takes them on in big batches.

Does that sound like a “lean” process to you?

How might we relentlessly drive the “audit” process closer to the ideal of one-by-one confirmation?

That would be “lean thinking.”

 

 

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Cenek Report: Litmus Test for Commitment

Robert Cenek offers up a succinct “check” for the level of a leader’s commitment to a change initiative on his blog.

The element that resonates with my own experience is the first on on his list: Intellectual curiosity. I cannot say enough how much core difference there is between a leadership team who says they “want to be lean” (or “world class” or any other buzz word) and a leadership team who digs in and does book studies, discussions, and generally works to learn about what they are supposed to do in the work environment they propose.

In the later case, they are acknowledging two critical things:

  • They must play a different role than they have been in the past.
  • They have to learn how to play that role.

Acknowledging that they have to learn how to play the role acknowledges, further, that they aren’t doing it today.

While this seems all touchy-feely, if it is done with the true intent to change, it is actually application of improvement methodology.

  • They are working to develop an understanding of the target condition.
  • They are working to understand the gap between their current behavior and that target.
  • They are working systematically to close that gap.

But I added the italics around “if it is done with the true intent to change” for a reason. I have also run into leaders who had a deep intellectual understanding of how the process works, but that understanding for some reason never translated into actions and directives that pulled the rest of the organization along. At a further extreme, resources are expended to make sure everyone in the organization is educated – sometimes extensively – yet nothing actually changes.

There is a commonly held misconception out there that education alone will precipitate change in the way people behave on a daily basis. Truthfully, it will cause that change, but traditional classroom education, and even participation in kaizen traditional kaizen events, is not going to do it.

Education, by itself, does nothing other than cause frustration as a few bright people “get it” and then see that it is business as usual as the “change initiative” fades into the background noise.

Changing a culture is about changing how small groups of people interact with one another. Getting this into place at the operational levels of the business was the topic of my talk in Prague yesterday. But at the leadership team level, they are usually left to their own devices, and have to make a conscious effort to take awkward and incompetent steps among themselves before they are any good at it. Without those first steps, there is no reflection, and without reflection there is no learning.

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Understanding the Solution

Another great insight from “Toyota Kata” by Mike Rother.

We often think great problem solving means solving the problem, that is applying countermeasures, and we may even propose and apply several countermeasures in the hope that one of them will stop the problem. In contrast, in Toyota’s way of thinking, if the solution is not obvious, it means we have not yet understood the situation sufficiently. Time to go and see again.

So here I am, in the beginning stages of trying to figure out how to get this problem solving culture anchored – not in a single site, but in about a dozen – spanning at least 16 time zones, with six or seven languages involved. I have to keep the message very focused, direct, and simple. I have spent the last couple of months in “go and see” mode.

One of the things I am beginning to emphasize to these management teams is that their problem solving is typically far to broad in scope. They are trying to find general solutions to broad ranges of problems, like part shortages. But “Why do we have part shortages” is the wrong question. Asking that question requires studying a huge population of part shortages, and quickly entering into “Pareto paralysis.”

Jamie’s comment to the Pareto Paralysis” post was a good one. Pareto charts are a powerful analysis tool, but in my view, they are best used when breaking down which cause to work on, rather than trying to break down which problem to work on. There is a huge difference.

What I see is that teams spend too much time time deciding what problem is most important, to the detriment of actually spending time solving problems. But I digress.

Rather than spend a lot of time breaking down “part shortages,” how about taking one part shortage. Instead of asking “Why do we have part shortages” I want to know “Why was that part late today.?”

Taking a look at a single instance, rather than a whole class of problems, does a couple of things.

First, it lets the management team do something that is critically important in these beginning stages: They learn to dig in and gain solid understanding of the situation of a single problem. They have to look at how the process was supposed to work, and understand when, where and why it broke down. Frankly, until they can explain that to me, in detail, I am not the least bit interested in proposed solutions. They first have to teach me well enough that I can understand what they understand.

Going back to the quote, at that point, if the system level solution is not obvious, then it is likely that I don’t yet understand the situation. That means that they have not yet understood it enough to explain it to me, which means they need to go back and dig some more.

The other thing, though, is that the way to learn good problem solving is to:

  1. Start with single instances, rather than classes of problems.
  2. Practice, practice, practice.

Why is it important for senior leaders to get good at this kind of problem solving? After all, aren’t they paid to manage others to do this? Yup, they are. But until they have mastered the game, they are not good coaches.

What I need is senior leaders who are going to insist on the same level of understanding from their people. Leaders need to understand what questions to ask, and how to re-focus people from “We have too many part shortages” to “Why was that part late today?” If each person can teach two more how to think that way, we’ll get there pretty fast.