Tag: People Development

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Some PDCA Cycles

We had five sequential operations. Although the lowest repeatable times for each were well within the planned / target cycle time, there was a lot of variation.

Though Operation 3 was working pretty continuously, Operations 4 and 5 (downstream) were getting starved on occasion, and the empty “bubble” was working its way to the output. The exit cycles, therefore, were irregular enough that they weren’t making rate.

The team set their target to stabilize Operation 3, with the expectation that doing so would smooth out the overall exit cycles.

To that end, they went back and started to study Operation 3 in a little more detail to better understand the obstacles that were impacting the Team Member’s ability to complete the work smoothly.

Then a wrinkle – a different team member was now doing the work, and his cycles were faster.

This actually was an opportunity. Why is one Team Member faster than another?

Their hypothesis was that the faster Team Member had some knack or technique, that enabled him to perform more consistently. And indeed, he did have a few tricks.

So the first experiment was to capture this work cycle in a Job Breakdown, then see if using Job Instruction and teaching it to the first Team Member they could duplicate the results of the second.

Then another wrinkle. The first team member was back on the job. Armed with the knowledge gained by breaking down the steps, key points and reasons for Team Member #2, they took more baseline data from Team Member #1 to set up their experiment.

…only to discover that Team Member #1 was also doing things that #2 didn’t do.

One of those things was unbending a part that was sometimes being bent by an upstream operation.

It seems that #2 was just passing those along as he got them. With that background, the conversation went something like this:

“What obstacle are you addressing?”

“The manual rework in Operation 3 is adding variation and extending his cycles.”

“What experiment are you running next?”

“We think the jig being used in Operation 1 is a bit undersize, allowing the part to deform. We are going to adjust the jig to the proper size.”

“What do you expect from that?”

“We expect to eliminate bent and deflected parts, and see more consistency in Operation #3’s cycles.”

Then they tried it. Skipping ahead a bit:

“What actually happened?”

“The parts are now more consistent, and there Operation #3 has a lot less variation, and is running closer to the planned cycle time… except that now he is waiting on parts from the upstream operation.”

“Huh. What is happening there? What did you just learn?”

“Well, it looks like Operation #3’s variation was masking inconsistent delivery from Operation #2. That team member is operating in small batches, then turning and delivering 3-5 parts at a time. When there was a lot of variation in Op #3, those parts were kind of buffering everything. Now he is working more consistently and faster, and ends up waiting on parts.”

“Because of the layout, the Operation #2 Team Member has to turn to his left and pass the parts behind him. He said he batches so he doesn’t have to turn so often. So what we are thinking is we want to…”

“Hang on, I want to stick to the structure so you guys can practice hearing and responding to it… So – what is your next step?”

“We talked to the team members, and they all agree that if we straighten out that bend in the layout, this will be a lot easier on them, so we are going to do that during the lunch break.”

“And what do you expect from that?”

“Operation #3 will get his parts one-by-one, as they are ready, and won’t have to wait on them.

“Great, so when can we see what you have learned?”

“Give us about 30 minutes after lunch break is over.”

You can probably surmise that things smoothed out a bit.

Then they went back to capturing a hybrid of the best practices of both operators in a job breakdown. At this point, the Team Members were genuinely interested in how they were doing, and both were quite open to learning the “tricks” of the other, so “Get the worker interested in learning the job” had pretty much been done.

A lot was learned over a few hours.

Reflection:

The “real world” is often quite a bit messier than the real world. There was actually a lot more dialog than I reconstructed here to keep the “learners” on track and focused on their stated target vs. resorting to an action of “improvements.”

In addition, merely beginning to work on one obstacle revealed enough information that they were dealing with a different underlying problem.

At another point in the week, they also believed they saw a need for more consistent part presentation. I happened to agree with them, but…

when pressed for what result they expected, the initial response was “The parts will be consistently presented.”… but what does that have to do with your target?

That was tough because, at the time, they were looking at the cycles of the 2nd operator that were, actually, pretty consistent, and lost sight of the fact that they were working on reducing the overall variation of output from that position.

They had a very hard time articulating why consistent part presentation would address the issue, even though they knew it should.

I think this is the result of years of conditioning that the “tools” – such as consistent part presentation – are good for their own sake, without really examining the underlying problems and causes that are being addressed.

If we lean practitioners are scratching our heads wondering why people don’t see this stuff helps, it would be a lot easier to deal with if we could point to the issue being addressed at the moment.

More tomorrow.

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High-Speed Automation

While we lean practitioners seem to have earned a reputation of distain for high-speed automation, industries like mass production consumables, and the food and beverage industry, would not be viable without that approach.

These plants are capital intensive, and the main focus of the people is to keep the equipment running. I hinted at some of these things a couple of years ago from the Czech Republic.

Here are some more recent thoughts.

 

Even though it is about equipment, it is still about people.

This is not a paradox at all. People are the ones who are getting cranky equipment to run, scurrying about clearing jams, clearing product that got mangled. Until you have a “lights out” plant, people are critical to keeping things running.

Robust problem solving and improvement skills are more critical.

In a purely manual world, you can get away with burying issues under more people and more inventory.

With interconnected automated equipment, not so much. The hardware has to run. It all has to run or there is no output.

How the organization responds to a technical problem makes the difference between quickly clearing the issue, or struggling with it for a couple of hours while everything else backs up.

This is where standard processes are critical, not only to short-term success, but also to capture new information as it is learned. This is the “chatter as signal” issue I have written about a couple of times.

Quoting from the above link:

Most organizations accept that they cannot possibly think of everything, that some degree of chatter is going to occur, and that people on the spot are paid to deal with it. That is, after all, their job. And the ones that are good at dealing with it are usually the ones who are spotlighted as the star performers.

The underlying assumptions here are:

  • Our processes and systems are complex.
  • We can’t possibly think of and plan for anything that might go wrong.
  • It is not realistic to expect perfection.
  • “Chatter is noise” and an inevitable part of the way things are in our business.

Those underlying assumptions say “Our equipment is complicated and difficult to get adjusted. All we can do is try stuff until it runs.”

That assumption actually lets people off the hook of actually understanding the nuances of the equipment; as well as letting them off the hook of a disciplined approach to troubleshooting. The assumption essentially says “We can’t do anything about it.”

A dark side of this designed ignorance is that the only thing leaders are really able to do is hover about and apply psychological pressure to “do something” or, at best, contribute to the noise of “things to try.”

Neither of those is particularly helpful for an operator who is trying to get the machine running. Both of those actually have a built-in implication that the operator (1) Does not know how to do his job or (2) Is somehow withholding his expertise from the situation.

But we get a different result from the alternative assumptions:

On the other hand, the organizations that are pulling further and further ahead take a different view.

Their underlying assumptions start out the same, then take a significant turn.

  • Our processes and systems are complex.
  • We can’t possibly think of and plan for anything that might go wrong.
  • But we believe perfection is possible.
  • “Chatter is signal” and it tells us where we need to address something we missed.

What does this look like in practice?

A known starting condition for all settings, that is verified.

A fixed troubleshooting checklist for common problems (that starts with “Verify the correct initial settings).

What things should be verified, in what sequence? (Understand the dependencies).

If a check reveals an issue, what immediate corrective action should be taken?

I would also strongly recommend using the format of a Job Breakdown (from TWI Job Instruction) for all of this. It is much easier to teach, but more importantly, it really forces you to think things through.

Of course, the checklist is unlikely to cover everything, at least at first. But it does establish a common baseline, and documents the limit of your knowledge.

The end of the operator checklist then defines the escalation point – when the operator must involve the next level of help.

It takes robust problem solving skills (and willingness to take the time to use them) to develop these processes; but doing so can save a mountain of time that pays back many times over.

The alternative is taking the time to mess with things until it sort of works, and never really understanding what was done or what had an effect – every single time there is an issue.

Cry once, or cry every day.

What does this have to do with improvement?

The obvious answer is that, if done well, it will save time.

The more subtle effect is that it sharpens the organization’s knowledge base, as well as their ability to really understand the nuances of the equipment. But this must be done on purpose. It isn’t going to happen on its own.

By getting things up and running sooner; and reducing the time of stoppages; it increases equipment capacity.

But more importantly, all of this increases people capacity.

It gives people time to think about the next  level of problems rather than being constantly focused on simply surviving the workday. Of course you need the right organizational and leadership structure to support that.

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Good Leads Are Critical

When we did the first “Toyota Kata” based kaizen event here a second shift lead came up and told me “I’ve been working here 34 years and this week I learned what my job is.”

In most companies leads are expediters charged with forcing product out of the process when the system breaks down.

As we have introduced better flow into this process, things generally work better for overall output, but obstacles still occur.

The leads now assume a critical role for daily kaizen. They are the nerve endings for the entire production process. They are the ones who see the issues when they are small.

We are working with them this week to develop their skills to see, and capture those issues – the rough spots where the production team members struggle a bit to get things working; or where the team needs to bypass the intended process flow to make things work.

By helping them see the difference between smooth flow and rough flow, we are increasing the sensitivity of those nerve endings, and starting to flush out more sources of unplanned variation in a process with a fair amount of part and cycle variation.

At the same time, we are working with the core shop floor leadership team running then through PDCA cycles to develop their skills for improving flow.

What is kinda cool is that it is working, and the linguistic patterns (which reflect thought patterns) are shifting.

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Toyota Kata at lean.org

Mike Rother sent out an email today pointing out that the Lean Enterprise Institute’s web site now has a Toyota Kata page.

I believe this is a significant event for the lean community as a whole, as well as for the LEI.

As many of my regular readers know, I have maintained the view that the LEI had not kept up with the current state of knowledge about what makes “lean” work.

Back to Basics

An Open Letter to John Shook

When the LEI published Kaizen Express in 2009, I wrote a review that addressed this topic. The review had two parts. One part about the book itself, and the other about the context of the community’s knowledge at the time.

I think it is a great book, for 1991.

But this is 2009. So while Kaizen Express is a welcome refresher of the mechanics, those mechanics are, according to the current standing theory, built upon a foundation of something that Kaizen Express, and for that matter, the LEI has not, to date, addressed. What is missing, in my view, is how the tools and practices outlined in Kaizen Express and its predecessors actually drive daily continuous improvement that engages every team member in the process. [bolding added for emphasis here]

When Toyota Kata was published, I believe it closed that gap for the community at large. But I felt a bit of irony that while Mike Rother had co-authored the LEI’s flagship workbook Learning to See, Toyota Kata was not only outside the LEI’s community at the time, it was hardly acknowledged to exist.

The purpose of this post is to acknowledge that a significant step has been taken: For the first time in many years, the LEI is embracing material that they did not originally publish.

From my perspective, this looks like a turning point away from the path of irrelevance.

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Failure as Success

A great insight from a client today.

The target condition at this point is simply to establish some degree of transparency of the current condition on a status board without having to resort to probing questions to elicit what is working, and what is not.

The observation was:

“We’ll know we are succeeding when we see a failure.”

In other words, “no problem is a big problem” but I think this says it just as well.

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Learning vs Teaching

Coincidently my experience this week ties in nicely to the last post.

I have a couple of teams working to develop pull systems through their respective work areas.

The conventional approach (I suppose) is a lot of PowerPoint about kanban, some exercises, developing a future state value stream map, then devising an implementation plan.

An alternative approach is to have a small group of experts design the system.

Most of the time this results in a fairly arduous process of wringing out the issues once the system goes live. If the team isn’t prepared for that, it is likely the system will come apart as people bypass it out of necessity to get the work done.

What I am watching this week is more organic.

First, we covered a few fundamentals about flow and pull signals in a simple demonstration of “build and push” vs. one-piece-flow with a visual limiter on work-in-process inventory. They saw the throughput, productivity, stability, visibility all increase while lead time dropped by an order of magnitude. That took about an hour.

The team then set up a tabletop simulation of their existing work flow, and exercised it a few times to confirm that it is a fair representation of the way things actually work today. In doing so, they gain more understanding of the current condition because they have to replicate it.

They then set out to make their far more complex real-world situation work more like what they saw in the demonstration. To help them get started, they were given some suggestions about a few things to try, and some basic principles and rules.

Some of that advice included restricting changes to a single factor at a time, and predicting what would happen, then trying it. If you find yourself speculating, or discussing alternative speculations, try it and see.

Two days into it, the teams have full-blown multi-loop kanban working, and are devising experiments to learn how the system responds to things like machines going down, unpredicted shifts in product mix, and other things they normally need to respond to.

They are exploring not only the mechanics and the rules, but the dynamics of the process in operation. They are learning what “normal” looks like in the face of abnormal conditions. They are testing the boundaries – where and when does it break, and what does “broken” look like vs. something that will recover on its own.

They are figuring out how to make it more robust, without making it cumbersome or too complicated.

They are gaining confidence and a deep understanding by iterating through ever more complex scenarios.

The people doing this are the ones who will be working IN the system in the future. We are seeing who emerges as thought leaders.

What they have right now – mid week – is a crystal clear view of their target condition, and they are very confident that they can make it work in their real world. Are there unknown issues? Sure. There always are. Translating this to the real world will involve more cycles of iteration. Only now they know exactly how to do those iterations because they have practiced dozens of times already.

This is actually less about kanban than it is about learning how to gain knowledge about something previously unknown.

It is pretty cool to watch, and a lot more fun (for everyone) than just implementing a process designed by someone else. Even the skeptics get drawn in when people are working hands-on to try to make something work.

Oh – and I’m really glad this process works because that saves me from having to know the answers.

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Toyota Kata Seminar, Day3

The key points addressed today (Day 3) at the Toyota Kata seminar were:

  • The PDCA cycle – small experiments that the “learner” develops to advance toward the target condition.
  • The coaching cycle (or kata) – an introduction to the role of the coach, and how coaching is structured in practice.
  • A fairly brief discussion on the current experience with the implementation path for an organization.

Roles

Even though the book and course material are quite explicit, a couple of people in the room weren’t readily grasping this until today.

Who Is Being Coached?

In the Kata model, the first level of “learner” is the first line leader who has direct responsibility for the process, and the people who work in it.

On a production floor, this would be the area supervisor.

The core material of the course is how to plan and execute continuous improvement in your work group. This is called the “Improvement Kata”

The “Coaching Kata” is covered and demonstrated (quite well), but it is not the prime topic this week.

Who is doing the coaching?

The coach is nominally the direct supervisor of the person being coached.

To learn how to coach, one must first learn the game. Thus, no matter your role in the organization chart, you come to this seminar gain awareness of the role of your first line leaders.

Then you go home and practice the role some more. Once you have lived in their shoes, then you can turn around and expect them to do the same.

What is absolutely critical to understand here is that this is not a “kaizen event” model. This is a daily improvement model. The coaching cycle happens for a few minutes every day between front line supervisor and the immediate manager. It is a process for developing better supervisors. It cannot (or at least should not) be delegated.

Here is the crucial difference: In many kaizen events, the specialist staff workshop leader is the one directing the actions of the team. The area supervisor may be a member of the team, but she is often not the one actually guiding the effort. In this model, there is no “learner” because there is no deliberate process to improve the problem solving and leadership skills of the supervisor.

If the course has a weak point it is that we “learners” are organized in a way that LOOKS more like a traditional kaizen team, which shifts the instructor / coach more into a role that LOOKS like that of the traditional kaizen workshop leader. Thus, it is easy for a participant to slip into a well-engrained mindset about kaizen events. We have all “practiced” the kaizen event pattern many times. The “kata” pattern is new.

This is the nature of the instructor coaching a group of “learners” rather than the 1:1 that is designed to happen in reality.

So, advice if you decide to attend: Be explicitly conscious that the structural limitations of the course, and deliberately work to overcome them in your mindset. This will help you grasp the material that you are there to learn.

That being said, I have a very explicit picture now of how I want shop floor supervisors to behave and lead. I have a pretty good idea of how to help them get there.

I’ve got an early flight, more later.

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From The Toyota Kata Seminar

I am taking the Toyota Kata seminar this week in Ann Arbor. There are two programs offered:

  • A one-day classroom overview of the concepts in Toyota Kata.
  • The one-day classroom overview followed by two days of practice on a shop floor, for a total of three days.

I am taking the three day version.

Impressions of Day 1

There are about (quick count) 36 participants, a big bigger group than I expected considering the premise. I don’t know how many are not going to be attending the shop floor part, but most people are.

I suppose the ultimate irony is the slide that makes the point that classroom training doesn’t work very well for this.

Realistically, I can see it as necessary to level-up everyone on the concepts. The audience runs the gamut of people who have read, studied, written about, made training material from, and applied the concepts in the book; to people who seem to have gone to the class with quite a bit less initial information.

That being said, everyone had some kind of exposure to lean principles, though there was a lot of “look for waste” and “apply the tools” mindset present. Since one of the purposes of the class is to challenge that mindset, this is to be expected.

You can get a good feel for the flow and content of the material itself on Mike Rother’s web site. He has a lot of presentations up there (via Slide Share).

Like any course like this, the more you know when you arrive, the more nuance you can pull out of the discussion.

Since I have been trying to apply the concepts already, my personal struggles really helped me to get a couple of “ah-ha” moments from the instruction.I arrived with a clear idea of what I wanted to learn, and what I thought I already knew. Both pre-disposed me to get insight, affirmation, and surprise learning from the material.

I would not suggest this for anyone who was looking to be convinced. Classroom training in any case doesn’t do that very well, and this material isn’t going to win over a skeptic. You have to be disposed to want to learn to do it.

At the end of the day, the overall quality, etc. of the presentation was pretty typical of “corporate training” stuff – not especially riveting, but certainly interesting. But we don’t do this for the entertainment value, and the learner has a responsibility to pull out what they need in any case.

Insights from Day 2

Day 1 is intended, and sold, as a stand-alone. The next two days are available as follow-on, but not separately.

The intended purpose was to practice the “improvement kata” cycle in a live shop floor environment. Today was spent:

  • Developing our “grasp of the current condition.” There is actually a quite well structured process for doing this fairly quickly, while still getting the information absolutely necessary to decide what the next appropriate target is.
  • Developing a target condition. Based on what we learned, where can this process be in terms its key characteristics and how it performs, in a short-term time frame. (A week in this case)

Key Points that are becoming more tangible for me:

The “Threshold of Knowledge” concept.

I elaborated on Bill Costantino’s (spelled it right this time) presentation on this concept a while ago. In the seminar, I am “groking” the concept of threshold of knowledge a bit better. Here is my current interpretation.

There are really three thresholds of knowledge in play, maybe more. First is the overall organization. I would define the organizations’ threshold of knowledge as the things they “just do” without giving it any thought at all.

For example – one company I know well has embedded 3P into their product design process to deeply that the two are indistinguishable from one another. It is just how they do it.

They still push the boundaries of what they accomplish with the process, but the process itself is familiar territory to them.

Likewise, this company has a signature way to lay out an assembly line, and that way is increasingly reflected in their product designs as 3P drives both.

It wasn’t always like that. It started with a handful of people who had experience with the process. They guided teams through applying it, in small steps, on successively more complex applications until they hijacked a design project and essentially redid it, and came out with something much better.

Another level of knowledge threshold is that held by the experienced practitioner.

Today I walked into a work cell in the host company for the first time, and within a few minutes of observation had a very clear picture in my own mind of what the next step was, and how to get there. My personal struggle today was not in understanding this, but in methodically applying the process being taught to get there. I knew what the answer would be, but I wasn’t here to learn that.

An extended threshold of knowledge in one person, or even in a handful of people, is not that useful to the company.

But that is exactly the model most kaizen leaders apply. They use their expert knowledge to see the target themselves, and then direct the team to apply the “lean tools” to get there.

They tell the team to “look for waste” but, in reality, they are pushing the mechanics. You can see this in their targets when they describe the mechanics as the target condition.

The team learns the mechanics of the tools, but the knowledge of why that target was set remains locked up in the head of the staff person who created it.

So his job is to set another target condition: Expanding the threshold of knowledge of the team.

He succeeds when the team develops a viable target themselves. It might be the same one he had, but it might not. If he framed the challenge correctly, and coached them correctly, they will arrive at something he believes is a good solution. If they don’t he needs to look in the mirror.

So the next level of knowledge threshold is that held by the team itself.

If enough teams develop the same depth, then they start to interconnect and work together, and we begin to advance the organization’s threshold. Now what was previously required a major “improvement event” to develop is just the starting baseline, and the ratchet goes up a bit.

None of the above was explicitly covered today, but it is what I learned. I am sure I’ll get an email from a certain .edu domain if I am off base here. Smile

There is no Dogma in Tools

This is the third explicit approach I have been taught to do this.

The first was called a “Scan and Plan” that I learned back in the mid/late 1990’s. It was more of a consultant’s tool for selecting a high-potential area for that first “Look what this can do” improvement event.

Though I don’t use any of those forms and tools explicitly, I do carry some of the concepts along and apply them when appropriate.

Then I was exposed to Shingijutsu’s approach. This is heavily focused on the standard work forms and tools. Within the culture of Shingijutsu clients, it would be heresy not to use these forms.

The “Kata” approach targets pretty much the same information, but collects and organizes it differently. I can see, for myself, a of better focus on the structure of establishing a good target. I can also see a hybrid between this method and what I have used in the past. Each form or analytical tool has a place where it provides insight for the team.

One thing I do like about the “Kata” data collection is the emphasis on (and therefore acknowledgement of) variation in work cycles. (All of this is in the book by the way. Read it, then get in touch with me if you want some explanation.)

Now, I want to be clear – in spite of the title of this section, when I am coaching beginners, I will be dogmatic about the tools they use. In fact, I plan to be a lot more dogmatic than I have been.

I am seeing the benefit of providing structure so that is off the table. They don’t have to think about how to collect and organize the data, just getting it and understanding it.

What I can do, as someone with a bit more experience, is give them a specific tool that will give them the insight they need. That is where I say “no dogma.” That only applies when the principles are well within your threshold of knowledge.

The real ah-ha is that, unlike the Shingijutsu approach, we weren’t collecting cycle times at the detailed work breakdown level. Why not? Because, at this stage of improvement, at this stage of knowledge threshold for the team, the work cell, that level of detail is not yet necessary to see the next step.

I will become necessary, it just isn’t necessary now.

Target Conditions and PDCA Cycles

One place where my work team bogged down a bit this afternoon was mixing up the target condition that we are setting for a week from now, and what we are going to try first thing in the morning.

The target condition ultimately requires setting up a fairly rigid standard-work-in-process (SWIP) (sometimes called “standard in-process stock) level in the work cell.

There was some concern that trying that would break things. And it will. For sure. We have to stabilize the downstream operation first, get it working to one-by-one, and make sure it is capable of doing so.

The last thing we want to do while messing with them is to starve them of material.

So – key learning point – be explicitly clear, more than once, that the Target Condition is not what you are trying right away. It is the predicted, attainable, result of a series of PDCA steps – single factor experiments. You don’t have the answers of how to do it yet. So don’t worry about the SWIP level right now. That will become easier… when it is easier.

More tomorrow…

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Lean Leadership: Kaizen is Management

Chapter 4 of The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership lays out the picture of a company where continuous improvement of operations is the primary focus of the management system.

Note here that I said “focus of the management system” rather than “focus of the managers.” I believe there is a crucial difference which I will explain in a bit.

Liker and Convis start out by explaining what “kaizen” isn’t. Sad that they have to do this, but the problem is summed up nicely:

Too often [kaizen] has come to mean assembling a special team for a project using lean of Six Sigma methods, or perhaps organizing a kaizen “event” for a week to make a burst of changes. We sometimes hear the phrase “doing a kaizen” as if it were a one-off activity. At Toyota, kaizen […] is how the company operates at the most fundamental level.

One of the persistent mysteries (to me) is why, after decades of knowing otherwise, so many businesses still consider “kaizen” or “improvement” to be a separate activity from “management.”

A few weeks ago I expanded on a great presentation by Bill Costantino that explained the relationship between challenges, targets, kaizen and the knowledge space of the company.

In that post, I created an animation of Bill’s graphic that illustrates progressive targets pushing the threshold of knowledge relentlessly toward the objective.

In this model, although we have a decent idea where we are, and what we want to end up with, the details of the path to get there are not known in advance.

Lean Leadership illustrates the same point quite well with the story of a factory kaizen team at TMMK (Toyota’s Georgetown, Kentucky facility). Of note is that this team is made up largely of production workers. It isn’t “the improvement team.” It isn’t an engineering department team. It is the people who have to live with the solution.

The team’s challenge was to improve a wasteful process for handling and moving sheet metal parts through the plant to the point of use on the assembly line.

They started by studying another company’s solution to the problem.

Did I mention that this team of factory workers from Kentucky spent two weeks in Japan studying this supplier’s system? Why make this kind of investment? Ponder that a bit, we’ll get back to this too.

Once back in Kentucky, the team had a clear sense of the challenge, and set out to progressively develop their own solution by experimentation, observation, and learning.

First they tried copying the benchmarked system on a small-scale test to deepen their understanding of what they had studied. Trying it on their parts surfaced differences that weren’t obvious at first, and they learned copying definitely wouldn’t work.

Key: The reason they tried to copy was to learn more about it. This was a small-scale concept test, not an attempt at wholesale implementation.

Even if it had worked, copying develops no skill other than reverse-engineering someone else’s solution that was developed for a different problem in different conditions. When people then say “See, it won’t work here” this is likely how they got to that conclusion. Too many companies “benchmark” and then try to do this. This team took a completely different approach.

“OK, cool, it didn’t work. Try something else.” And that is how learning happens.

They go back to grasping the original problem – damage from forklift handling. This is crucial. So many teams get bogged down on defining the “problem” as “making the fixed solution work” and end up expending a lot of effort in a tunnel with a dead-end. This is about exploring possible solutions to the actual problem.

They end up developing something quite different from what they benchmarked, that delivered the right parts, in the right orientation to the assembly operator. They knew this because they were their own customers – these were people who did this job.

Once they had it working on a sub-set of easier parts, they expanded the concept step by step (a few parts at a time) to handle the larger ones.

Key: Get the simple version working before trying to add complexity. Control your experiments. This is how learning happens vs. “just fiddling with it until it works.”

They proceed step by step – now sharing back and forth with the benchmark company who is seeing their solutions and building on them, until they have an AGV pulling a sequenced line of part carts that were loaded by robots, everything moving at takt.

Still, there was a lot of human interaction and they kept working to better synchronize everything.

Step by step, they worked their way back into parts that came from outside suppliers, dealing with one issue at a time.

Then a remarkable thing happened:

…at some point an hourly team member asked why the company was spending so much money to buy AGVs from external suppliers. Toyota manufactures vehicles, after all. Team members found they could buy the little robotic device that pulls the carts and custom-make the carts themselves.

But they didn’t stop there.

Later they discovered they could buy inexpensive, generic circuit boards of the type used in the AGV and program the boards themselves so that the AGVs would stop and wait at certain points along the line. Programming the AGVs themselves was a breakthrough, since it cut out licensing fees and added the flexibility to reprogram them. The original AGVs cost about $25,000 each; the ones built in-house cost under $4,000. With more than 100 AGVs in use, the team members kaizen initiative saved TMMK more than $2 million.

Let’s take a step back from this and look at what was really happening here.

What did these team members know at the end of this process that the didn’t know at the beginning?

What knowledge did they add to the company’s capability? Beyond the simple technical solution, what else did they learn? What confidence did they gain?

In other words, how did participating in this process improve the capability of the team members to improve other processes?

What would it be worth to your company to have team members who could think like this? (Hint – you already have them)

I promised to address a couple of points later. Here they are:

The role of managers vs. the management system.

The management system in any company is rightly focused on ensuring that operations are delivering the most customer value for the least cost. This is true of any value-creating operation, be it organized for profit or non-profit.

But the picture being painted by Liker and Convis is one where this management system works by ensuring the managers (that is, the individual people who are responsible for the operation) are focused on developing people’s capability.

To do this, Toyota has a specific process for developing leaders to embrace this responsibility.

This isn’t a new message. But it is emerging more clearly and more consistently in the popular literature in the last few years.

Which brings us to who made the improvements.

In this example, the improvements were made by production team members.

The company probably could have achieved similar (or at least similar looking) results with a project plan and a team of engineers. It might have even been faster.

But the production workers would have learned nothing other than to accept whatever the engineers gave them.

It is unlikely it would have occurred to anyone to build their own AGVs and save another couple of megabucks.

And the capacity of the company for improvements would have remained the same rather than increasing. At some point, the rate of improvement is constrained by the resources that can be dedicated to the task.

So, while an individual improvement task might take longer as people learn, in the end there is a multiplier effect as more and more people get better and better at making improvements. Sadly, it is really impossible to assign an ROI to that, so traditional management doesn’t allow for it.

This post is long enough. There is more in Chapter 4 to talk about, but I want to get this out there.

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The Structure Behind Leader Development

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

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

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

First is the expectation that leaders lead.

Leading vs. Delegating

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ito, though, had other ideas.

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

Zing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Technical Support

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The A3

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Big Picture

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

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

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

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

More to follow.