Tag: People Development

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Coaching: Getting Specific, Finding the Knowledge Threshold

When coaching, I often find improvers / learners who tend to be superficial or vague about target conditions, current conditions, the experiments they intend to run, the results they expect, what they learned.  Huh… I guess I should have said “vague about everything.”

As several of my clients would tell you, one of my themes is “drive out ambiguity.”

Recently I’ve been trying a simple follow-up question that seems to be working to help people dig a little deeper without pushing them back as much as other questions might.

“Could you be more specific?”

I will plead completely guilty to stealing this from an unlikely source.

In his book “The Cuckoo’s Egg“, Clifford Stoll describes a line of questioning during his oral defense of his PhD thesis in astronomy:

I remember it vividly. Across a table, five profs. I’m frightened, trying to look casual as sweat drips down my face. But I’m keeping afloat; I’ve managed to babble superficially, giving the illusion that I know something. Just a few more questions, I think, and they’ll set me free. Then the examiner over at the end of the table – the guy with the twisted little smile – starts sharpening his pencil with a penknife.

“I’ve got just one question, Cliff,” he says, carving his way through the Eberhard-Faber. “Why is the sky blue?”

My mind is absolutely, profoundly blank. I have no idea. I look out the window at the sky with the primitive, uncomprehending wonder of a Neanderthal contemplating fire. I force myself to say something—anything. “Scattered light,” I reply. “Uh, yeah, scattered sunlight.”

“Could you be more specific?”

Well, words came from somewhere, out of some deep instinct of self-preservation. I babbled about the spectrum of sunlight, the upper atmosphere, and how light interacts with molecules of air.

“Could you be more specific?”

I’m describing how air molecules have dipole moments, the wave-particle duality of light, scribbling equations on the blackboard, and . . .

“Could you be more specific?”

An hour later, I’m sweating hard. His simple question—a five-year-old’s question—has drawn together oscillator theory, electricity and magnetism, thermodynamics, even quantum mechanics. Even in my miserable writhing, I admired the guy…

[Emphasis added]

As you can see from Stoll’s experience, his professor was seeking to find his knowledge threshold – something a kata coach should be doing as well.

Now, I’m not going to push the “5 Whys” quite as deep as quantum effects (except, perhaps, at one client who DOES deal with things at that level…), but I find this is a far more effective question than “Why?” or asking leading questions. It, obviously isn’t universal, but it has been working reasonably well with a client whose corporate culture drives indirect assertions and vague predictions.

Try it… leave a comment if it works for you (or bombs). But please… be specific.  🙂

P.S. – In this video, Cliff Stoll tells the same story, likely more accurately, and makes another valuable point:  “It’s obvious” is a statement which often hides limited understanding of what is being discussed. It might be “obvious,” but… let’s go see.

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Coaching with Intent

As I continue to explore the concepts in David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around, I am finding increasing resonance with the concept of intent. I’d like to explore some of that in relationship to lean, “Toyota Kata” and organizational alignment.

For a quick review, take a look at the sketchcast video, below, and focus on the part where he talks about “we replaced it with intent.”

I think the critical words are “You give intent to them, and they give intent to you.”

Think about that phrase, then think about how we normally talk about “intent.”

OK, are you back?

In my experience, “intent” has traditionally been a one-way communication. “This is what we need to get done.”

A few months ago I was in a plant, discussing this principle. One of the managers expressed frustration saying “I think I was very clear about what I expected…” (And he was) “but then when I checked he had done something totally different. How does this work for that situation?”

What was left out of that conversation?

…and they give intent to you.

Let’s put this in Toyota Kata terms.

What is the relationship between the “Challenge” and the “Target Condition?”

Think about how the target condition is developed.

Start with the challenge – this is the level of performance we are trying to achieve – the “mission” in military terms, the overall intent of what we are trying to get done.

Once the direction and challenge (the intent) are understood, the improver / learner’s next task is to get a thorough understanding of the current condition. How does the process operate today? What is the normal pattern? Why does it perform the way it does? This should be focused in context of the direction / challenge / intent.

Then the learner (NOT the coach!) proposes the next target condition.

Depending on the level of skill in the learner, the coach may well be assisting in developing all of this, but it is the learner’s responsibility to do it.

Imagine this conversation: as the learner / improver is discussing the target condition, he relates it back to the challenge as a verification for context.

“The overall challenge we have is to _______. As my first (next) target condition, I intend to _____ (as the learner relates his next level of performance, and what the process will have to look like to get there).

Adding the words “I intend to…” to that exchange has (for me) proven to be a powerful tool when learners are struggling to embrace / own their target conditions. Those words establish psychological ownership vs. seeking permission.

The same structure can be applied to the next step or experiment.

“What is your next step or experiment?”

“I intend to (fill in your experiment here).”

Going back to the sketchcast video, remember the part where he says:

“Captain, I intend to submerge the ship.”

“What do you think I’m thinking right now?”

“Uh…. hard to tell… I’m guessing you want to know if it’s safe.”

“BINGO! Convince me it’s safe.”

“Captain, I intend to submerge the ship. All men are below. All hatches are shut. The ship’s rigged for diving. We’ve checked the bottom depth. We’re in the water that’s assigned to us.”

In not only stating intent, but going through the checklist, the “learner” demonstrates that the intent will be carried out competently, or not.

We are asking the same questions when we ask about the next experiment, what outcome is expected. Logical follow-on questions could include seeking assurance that the experiment actually addresses the stated “one obstacle” being addressed (this is the right thing to do) and that learner has a plan to carry out the experiment that makes sense, knows what information he intends to collect, what observations he needs to make, and how he intends to do these things (that it is being done competently).

At an advanced level, a good answer to “What is your next step or experiment?” could (should!) include all of these elements – enough information to convince the coach that it is a good experiment, seeking the right information, in the right way.

It becomes  “to address that obstacle, I next I intend to (take these steps, in this way, with these people) so that (fill in expected outcome). I intend to measure here and here, and verify my results by…”

Of course as a coach, if you have a learner who is unsure how to proceed, or looking to be told what to do (which is quite common in organizations that have to overcome a command structure where the boss is the problem solver), how do you need to phrase your coaching questions to get the next level of responsible language out of your learner’s mouth?

If they are waiting to be told what to do, how do you get them to offer an opinion?

If they are offering an opinion, how do you get them to offer a recommendation? Is it well thought out? “What result do you expect?” “How do you expect to achieve that result?”

If they are offering a well thought out recommendation, how do you get them to express an intent? What do you have to hear to be convinced that intent is well though out?

I want to be clear: This is advanced stuff, but it goes hand-in-glove with the coaching kata.

And, to give credit where credit is due, it is all the work of David Marquet. I am just adapting it to the kata here.

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Competence and Clarity: Toyota Kata at Sea

A friend, and reader, Craig sent a really interesting email:

As I was practicing the coaching Kata with one of the First Mates on the factory trawler, whenever an issue arose (usually with the leader blaming an employee) he began asking factory and engineering leadership “what needed to be communicated?” or “what needed to be taught?” He found it encompassed every problem on the vessel and I loved that he made it his own and communicated in manner to which lifetime fishermen could relate.

What I found really cool about this is how it is exactly the same conclusion reached by David Marquet, both in the sketchcast video I posted earlier, and the titles of two chapters in his book. The reasons leaders feel they must withhold authority, remain “in control” ultimately come down to competence – what must people be taught, or clarity – what have we failed to adequately communicate. Maybe it’s being at sea.

In other words, if people know whGiveControl.pngat to do (clarity), and know how to do it (competence), then leaders generally have no issues trusting that the right people will do the right things the right way.

The Improvement Kata  is a great structure for creating and carrying out development plans for leaders (or future leaders) in your organization.

The Coaching Kata is a great way to structure your next conversation to (1) ensure clarity of intent: Does their target condition align with the direction and challenge? and (2) develop their competence, both in improving / problem solving, but also in their understanding of the domain of work at hand.

 

 

 

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Lean Process and Product Development: The Role of the Leader

The LEI was kind enough to send a review copy of their new book, the second edition of Lean Process and Product Development. I have just started it, and am already finding gems. (note to the LEI – the Kaizen Institute is not my address. Thanks to Jon for getting the book to me.)

The original edition was a cleaned up manuscript that was published well after the death of Allan Ward, and bore only his name on the cover.

This edition adds Durward Sobek to the author line. Sobek was a student of Ward and today stands on his own as someone whose views should be respected.

I am not going to try to compare the two editions, rather look at this new book as it stands on its own.

Rather than wait and write a big long review, I am going to publish short posts as I come across key points of note – hence the subtitle of this post.

I am already seeing a tight link to the leadership model outlined in Toyota Kata.

In the 2nd chapter, as the authors discuss Value and Performance of development projects (as in how efficiently they create profitable value streams and create usable knowledge for future projects), I came across a compelling quote:

A general manager of Toyota’s Advanced Vehicle Development department was asked how he spent his time.

He replied he spent about 2 hours a week doing administrative work, and the rest of the time “on technical problems.” Before I remark about the “technical problems” consider the first bit. How much time do your department heads spend administering vs. contributing to the development of the organization?

And that leads to the second part. He says:

“But every technical problem is also a personnel problem, because the problems don’t get to me if my people know how to solve them. So all of the time I’m working on technical problems, I’m also teaching someone.

To paraphrase the next paragraph in the book, the solution to personnel problems is to teach.

So I’ll digress from this book a bit here, and read between the lines a bit. If we go back to David Marquet’s sketchcast video he talks about the necessity of creating an environment where your people need to discover the answer, or “you’re always the answer man, and you can never go home and eat dinner.” (This is really hard when you know the answer, by the way.)

So already, in the first couple of chapters, we are establishing an environment that doesn’t simply produce engineering designs. Those, I suspect, are an outcome of deliberate processes to build the organizational competence and clarity.

We’ll see. More to come.

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Reviving How To Make Things

Almost three years ago I wrote “Don’t Lose How To Make Things.”

In that post, I wanted to emphasize the risks of losing your expertise in the technology and skill required to make your product. Too many companies today seem to be bent on replacing those skills with financial ones.

Today I came across a fascinating article on Bloomberg’s site about how Toyota has come to the same conclusion.

You can read it here: ‘Gods’ Make Comeback at Toyota as Humans Steal Jobs From Robots.

In short, they have established workshops where workers manually produce parts that are normally made by automated processes.

A worker welds an automobile part in the chassis manufacturing department at a Toyota Motor Corp. plant in Toyota City.

The idea is to maintain understanding of how things are made so they do not lose the skill required to improve their production processes.

“Fully automated machines don’t evolve on their own,” said Takahiro Fujimoto, a professor at the University of Tokyo’s Manufacturing Management Research Center. “Mechanization itself doesn’t harm, but sticking to a specific mechanization may lead to omission of kaizen and improvement.”

One result?

In an area Kawai directly supervises at the forging division of Toyota’s Honsha plant, workers twist, turn and hammer metal into crankshafts instead of using the typically automated process. Experiences there have led to innovations in reducing levels of scrap and shortening the production line 96 percent from its length three years ago.

Toyota has eliminated about 10 percent of material-related waste from building crankshafts at Honsha. Kawai said the aim is to apply those savings to the next-generation Prius hybrid.

Today’s financially driven managers are unlikely to allow the space to experiment and learn. Instead, they want a deterministic process so next quarter’s results can be forecast accurately. It isn’t good to surprise the analysts.

At the same time, though, companies are pressing for things like “innovation.” That doesn’t happen in a breakthrough. It happens through the rigorous application of the skill of expanding knowledge. Once enough knowledge is accumulated, expertise develops and innovation follows.

Years ago, when I was working for a company making heavy equipment, one of our Japanese consultants (who had worked many years directly for Taiichi Ohno) urged our engineers to hand-form sheet metal parts – with hammers(!). We didn’t do it. But now I understand what he was trying to get us to do.

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What Is “Lean?”

I did a Google search on the terms [ lean manufacturing definition ]   . Here is a smattering of what I found on the first page of results. (I did not go on to the second page.)

On the lean.org site we get a page with about 10 paragraphs describing the general outcome, philosophy, and what it isn’t.

On a consultant’s web page we get a list of principles and terminology definitions.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says “Lean manufacturing is a business model and collection of tactical methods that emphasize eliminating non-value added activities (waste) while delivering quality products on time at least cost with greater efficiency.”

Tooling U defines “lean manufacturing” like this: “An approach to manufacturing that seeks to reduce the cycle time of processes, increase flexibility, and improve quality. Lean approaches help to eliminate waste in all its forms.”

Another consultancy has a PDF of “Lean Sigma Definitions” that includes Lean Manufacturing or Lean Production: “the philosophy of continually reducing waste in all areas and in all forms; an English phrase coined to summarize Japanese manufacturing techniques (specifically, the Toyota Production
System).”

Let’s Rewind a Bit

What all of these definitions have in common is they are attempting to describe some kind of end state.

Over the last 10 years or so we (meaning those of us who are doing top drawer research) have put together a pretty comprehensive picture of how Toyota’s management systems are intended to work. (I say “intended to” because we are always dealing with an idealized Toyota. They have issues as well, just like everyone.)

What we seem to try to do is try to create a generic context-free definition of what Toyota is doing today.

But they didn’t start out that way. Everything they are, and do, evolved out of necessity as they struggled to figure out how to take the next step.

Toyota didn’t engineer it, so I don’t think it is something we can reverse engineer. Toyota evolved it organically. They applied a common mindset (a dedication to figuring things out) to a specific goal (ideal flow to the customer) in a specific set of conditions.

So What is “Lean?”

Mike Rother makes a really interesting attempt at resetting the definition of “lean” as being about the drive and the mindset that resulted in Toyota’s management system.

Give it a read, then let’s discuss below. (Since you are going to see it – when he sent it around for input, I passed along a thought which he has added verbatim in the last slide. Maybe that will spark a little more discussion.)

 

OK, are you back?

I like this because I think anyone who adopts the mindset that they (and I mean “they” as a true plural here) must take it upon themselves to figure out what they do not know, figure out how to learn it, figure out how to apply it, all in a relentless pursuit of perfect flow will end up with a nimble, empowering, relentlessly improving, formidably competitive team of people.

Focus on the process of learning, focus on the people, and keep them focused on the customer, and you’ll get there.

In my experience, the differentiator between organizations that “get there” and those who don’t comes down to the willingness to work hard to learn it themselves vs. wait for someone to tell them the answers.

Thoughts? Maybe we can take the “most comments” record away from the “Takt Time Cycle Time” post.  *smile*

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Jeff Liker: Is Lean a Waste Elimination Program or Striving for Excellence?

Jeff Liker asks (and answers) the title question in a great Industry Week blog article by the same title.

One of the biggest obstacles we in the lean community need to overcome is our own inertia around “Lean is a process for finding and eliminating waste.”

In the article, Liker brings up a point that is often lost on us: Looking for the problems and negative things kills morale.

The “waste” that you see is the result of underlying issues and culture. Stop overproduction in one place, and it either returns or pops up elsewhere because the underlying reasons for it were never addressed.

Operations that are not operating at a high level of lean typically are lacking underlying process discipline, which leads to these problems and they proliferate daily as the company is in a constant firefighting mode. Trying to eliminate waste in the current system and culture is like identifying and fighting problems—it is debilitating and a losing proposition.

[Emphasis added]

I bolded that phrase for a reason.

We aren’t talking about a technical implementation here. We are talking about a shift in the underlying culture – the habitual ways people interact with one another, with the process, respond to challenges and problems.

Today we have, thanks to Jeff Liker and a few others, an excellent picture of an ideal version of Toyota. We know what it looks like.

Getting there is an entirely different proposition, as most companies that have tried this stuff know first hand. It is hard.

What is beginning to emerge, though, is that the thinking pattern that is learned through solving these problems the right way (vs. just implementing tool sets) is the same thinking pattern required to shift the culture.

It is hard. You have to do the work. But the way to get there is emerging.

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David Marquet: Turn The Ship Around

A while back, Mike Rother sent around a link to a sketchcast video of a U.S. Navy submarine skipper talking about the culture change aboard his submarine, the USS Santa Fe. I posted and commented on it below, in “Creating an Empowered Team.” If you haven’t watched it, do so now so you have context for the rest of this post.

Since then, I found other presentations by Capt Marquet (pronounced, I have learned, “mar-kay”), read every post on his blog, then bought and read his book Turn the Ship Around.

His message is compelling, and I have been digesting and integrating it for a couple of months now.

The Empowerment Movement

Back in the late 80’s and early 90’s there was a big push for “empowerment” and the idea of “self directed work teams.”

Supervisors and managers were re-titled as “coaches.”

Work teams were told they were expected to self-organize to accomplish the work at hand.

I suspect this was yet another case of “benchmark and copy” – observing the attributes of high-performance organizations and trying get the same results by duplicating the description. “They have self-directed work teams, so let’s tell our work teams to self-direct.”

In the classic words of Dr Phil… “How’s that workin’ for ya?”

I have worked with, and in, a few organizations with a very bad taste for their past experiments with “empowerment.”

The Difference between “Involved” and “Committed” Leadership

Obviously some organizations have succeeded at creating work environments where work teams know what has to be done and do it. If that weren’t the case, there wouldn’t have been anyone to benchmark and copy.

Capt Marquet’s book gives us a first experience account of a leader who resolved to change the climate of his organization. Admittedly, he did so out of perceived necessity. (Read the book to get the full story!)

Today, though, when leaders say they are “committed” they usually mean they are willing to fund an effort, allow someone else to carry it out, get updates, and give encouragement. That might work for starting a subsidiary, but it doesn’t work for changing “how things get done.”

What we are talking about here is developing the competence and capability of the organization, step by step, individual by individual, as the primary daily work of leadership.

Capt Marquet describes his struggles, setbacks, how hard it was at times, and the long-term reward of his efforts – unprecedented promotion rates or personal successes among his former officers and crew in the 10 years following his time in command. His primary role was developing people. They happened to be the crew of a nuclear powered submarine.

Over the next few posts, I am going to explore the correlation between David Marquet’s leadership development model and Toyota Kata. Stay tuned.

In the meantime, read the book. It’s an easy read and worth your time.

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Toyota Kata “A3 Problem Solving”

Over the years, I’ve been exposed a number of efforts to “implement A3 problem solving” in various companies. I worked for some of those companies, I’ve observed others.

The results are nearly always the same.

Here are a couple of examples. Let me know if any of these match up with experiences you have had.

Example 1: The company had put many people through “Practical Problem Solving” training and was (ironically) trying to measure how many problem solving efforts were underway.

I was watching a presentation by one of these problem solving teams to management. Their A3 was on a computer, projected onto the screen. They were reporting their “results.” Yet there were large discontinuities in their problem solving flow. The actions they were taking simply did not link back (through any kind of identifiable cause) to the problem they were solving.

The management team listened carefully, applauded their efforts, and moved on to the next topic of their meeting.

Example 2: A different company had a form to fill out called an “MBF” or “Management by Fact.” From the labels on the boxes, it was clearly intended to be structured problem solving. By the time I worked there, however, “MBF” had become a verb. It was a solo activity, filling out the form at the desk, and reporting on it in a staff meeting.

Example 3: Well-meaning former Toyota team members, now working for a different large company wanted to “train everyone in problem solving.” They put together a “class” that presented the purpose of each block on their A3 form with the expectation that people would adopt the process.

All of these efforts had something in common.

They didn’t work.

Over the last few days, I’ve been privileged to be included in an email exchange about the relationship between A3 and Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata. My small contribution was apparently enough to get my name onto the cover, but I want to give a real nod in the direction of a Jenny Snow-Boscolo for instigating inspiring a really good exchange.

The result is here. I think this presentation does a really good job of summing up the relationship between Toyota Kata and Toyota A3. Thanks to Mike Rother for taking the initiative and putting it all together (more below)

One of the difficulties with gaining insight into Toyota’s management processes is that they really aren’t codified. This shouldn’t be a surprise. Look at your own company, and ask how much of the culture – the reflexive way things are done and interactions are structured – is written down.

(In fact, if it is written down, I would contend it is likely your actual culture has little resemblance to what is written about it. Those things tend to be more about what they wish the culture was.)

Culture, any culture, is learned through daily interaction. This is all well and good in cases where people are immersed in it from the beginning.

But the rest of us aren’t operating in that problem solving culture. Rather, we are trying to create it. And as the former Toyota Team Members from Example 3 (above) learned, it isn’t a simple matter of showing people.

Rather than two different things, we are looking at a continuum here. At one end is the culture described on Slide 9. There isn’t any formal structure to it, the process for teaching it isn’t codified. It is learned the same way you learn the way to get the job done in any company. They just learn different things than you did.

But in another organization there is no immersion. If there is anyone who is steeped in The Way, they are few and far between.

In these cases, we want to start with something more overt. And that is the purpose of having a rote drill or kata. It isn’t something you implement. It is a structure, or scaffold, to learn the basic moves. Just as mastering the musical scales is only a prelude to learning to play the instrument, the kata is the foundational structure for learning to apply the underlying thinking patterns.

So… if you are working on kata, it is critical that you are reflecting on your thinking patterns as much (or more) than you are reflecting on your improvements. It might seem rote and even busywork at first. But it is there to build a foundation.

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Navigating the Learning Hairball

Credit: A lot of stuff comes across my screen, sometimes more than once. I have seen this illustration several times, but don’t remember where it originally came from. If you created it, PLEASE comment so I can give appropriate credit.

Improvement is messy. Science is messy. Research and Development is messy. These are all cases where we want an outcome, are pretty sure what that outcome looks like, but there isn’t really a clear path to get there.

This illustration has illustrates two very different mindsets.

On the left is how many people believe the improvement / organizational development / learning process works. We set out a phased project plan to transform the organization. We carry out a set of pre-defined steps, and when they are completed, we are at the goal.

Sadly our education process is largely constructed on this model. Take the classes, pass the tests, the student is educated.

This thinking is appropriate when the outcome is something we have done before, like constructing a house. Even if this house is a bit different, the builders have rich experience in carrying out all of the constituent process steps. Further upstream, the designer carefully followed building and construction codes. In those cases, we are applying a rich body of experience (or the documented experiences of others) to reach the end goal.

These tasks can be scheduled and sequenced in a project plan. The steps are known, the result is known.

 

image

On the right is the hairball of learning and discovery.

We know where we are starting.

We know where we want to end up.

We are reasonably certain we can get from Point A to Point B. But we don’t know precisely which detailed steps or experiments will give us the results we need.

We don’t know for sure that the next result will be a forgone conclusion from the next action step.

Each step gives us more information about the next step.

In the world of continuous improvement, we live in an interesting paradox.

We often believe we are operating in the set-piece model on the left. We see a situation, we apply tools to duplicate a solution we have seen work in a similar situation before.

An interesting thing happens at this point. The Real World intervenes, and we discover that the situation was actually more like the right side. We thought we knew the right answers. We might have even been mostly right. But at the detail level, things don’t work quite as we predicted.

Now… if the system has been deliberately set up to flag those anomalies, and we are recording them and being curious to discover what we didn’t understand then we are in learning mode.

But all too often the experts who guided the original installation have moved on, leaving the people executing the process behind. The assumption was “It works, we can go to the next problem.”

The people in the process did what they were told, or guided, to do. We might have even asked for their input on the details. But that process rarely leaves them with additional skills they need to deal with anomalies in ways that make the process more robust.

So they do what they must to get things done. Mostly that means adding some inventory here, some additional checks or process steps there. Over time, the process erodes back to something close to its original state.

Why? Because we thought we knew everything… but were wrong. And didn’t notice.

This model applies to any effort to shift how an organization performs and interacts. We outrun our headlights and take on the Big Change because that company “over there” does it, and we just copy the end result.

What we missed was doing the work.

More about this later.