Tag: Reflection

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Reflections and Lessons From 1997

MONDAY: 2 PERS 1 MACHINE. TODAY: 1 PERSON 2 MACHINES

On a Thursday afternoon in the summer of 1997 I sent that pager message (remember pagers?) to Rick from the factory where I had spent a week working with Mr. Shimura of Shingijutsu and Reiko, his interpreter.

I knew that Rick would be wrapping up a class teaching the basics of kaizen events to a group of suppliers and if I were lucky, he would see the pager message and use it as a reinforcement to the participants. Rick and I usually alternated teaching that class, sometimes we taught it together. We were good work partners, finishing each others’ sentences and the mutual respect was very high.

I was on-site at another supplier. We were there to help them take some first steps toward “lean production.” Our goal, at least the idea, was that we would work through the process of making significant improvements with the thought that they would learn enough to try it themselves.

This was not my first visit – the episode with Mr. Iwata that I relate in my third post to this blog had happened there a couple of months earlier, and that visit had resulted in my company offering up Mr. Shimura’s time on our dime.

This may well have been “an offer they couldn’t refuse” and I’m not sure everyone there saw it as help. We were from their 800 pound gorilla customer, they had trouble making on-time deliveries, and sometimes that isn’t the kind of help that you want. From their perspective their biggest customer had people who knew their way around a factory spending days on their shop floor and, most certainly, ascertaining how much more productivity was possible if only, well, the buyers squeezed them hard enough. It didn’t really work that way, but it had worked that way in the past, so who could blame the suppliers for thinking this was a more sophisticated way to audit them?

Anyway, we had worked through the week to carefully look at the tasks involved to unload, load, and machine a single part on a large linear milling machine. Mr. Shimura was there asking questions, not so much from curiosity but to direct my eyes. I’m sure he already knew the answers. As we dug into the timing, it became clear that there was enough operator waiting time as the part was being milled that a single operator could, theoretically, unload and load an adjacent machine – operating two of them at once.

So we carefully worked out the chorography required to make it work, and on Thursday mid-day it all came together. The work was flowing, the parts were flowing. It was really a thing of beauty.

Friday morning we would report out the week to management, and Friday afternoon I would head to the airport to go home to Seattle.

But I had some worries as well. Although the company President, and the VP of Operations were supportive, their support was along the lines of welcoming everyone into the plant, making it clear they were happy to see us, attending the final report-out and endorsing our efforts.

I was still pretty knew at this. I was making the transition from teaching classes and running simulations to making real change in real factories (that weren’t mine!). I was really fortunate to have a lot of 1:1 time with Mr. Shimura and Reiko. I asked questions, he patiently taught me how to use the standard work combination sheet, and other nuances of kaizen and flow production. I got a lot more out of that week than the supplier did simply because I was there spending time with Mr. Shimura and taking advantage of every second I could. I had 1:1 time because none of the supplier’s managers were seeking him out to learn from his vast experience.

Some quotes I will never forget: “If I see something is hand written, then I know at least one person has read it.”

“If parts that are in tolerance don’t fit, it is a problem with the tolerances.”

(Walking through the shop) “Does this company lose a lot of money?” Reply: “No, they are very profitable.” “Then their prices are too high.”

In the end, though, I am equally certain that come Monday morning the work sequence we had so carefully worked out – at great expense to my company for my time, my travel, Mr. Shimura, his interpreter, and others – was never repeated again.

Why not?

Well, we can all blame “management commitment” because that is really easy to do. But I put equal weight on our paradigm of improvement at the time. The idea that, in 4 working days we could institute a change that flew straight against the operational and cultural norms of the company and expect it to last any longer than until we were out the door was, well, ludicrous.

Why should we expect anything different?

It is ludicrous in any company, whether this work is being brought in from outside or internally generated.

The people who have to manage the daily work, whether they were involved in this exercise or not, have no paradigm for dealing with the myriad of issues that are bound to be surfaced after we pulled all of the buffers out of the material and the time. Yes, it can work, IF we understand the conditions required for success, and IF we pick up right away when those conditions aren’t there and IF we respond to fix it very fast. Then, yes, it can work.

It will be more time and trouble than it was before, though, unless the next things are also done.

For at least some of those issues – maybe not all of them, but always working against a couple of them – seeking out why those issues happened and dealing with the causes.

Just to keep this tiny two-machine “work cell” operating in this large factory would have eventually engaged every support system they had.

That’s the whole point, actually, of a model line. It isn’t building the model line. It is what you have to fix in your systems to keep it going.

Many years later I spent a week on another company’s shop floor with their internal kaizen team and getting an andon / escalation process up and running was the only thing we were working on that week. That process is just as important, if not more, than the baseline work of flow. Because without it, your flow will fall apart.

This is the part of the process that engages people. Putting in the baseline process is the easy part. Fielding the problems that flow surfaces – that takes changing the day-to-day routine in the workplace, and is a lot harder. That is where the culture change comes into play. Actually it is more than engaging people. It engages specific people: This is the part that must engage the leaders. They must lead, guide and coach process of working through all of the issues so stability can be reestablished. Then challenge the team to get to the next level.

But all of that is what I know now. I had the knowledge back then, but not the deep understanding.

So – I am thankful for that week because my understanding of what I had been teaching for months easily doubled… twice in those few days.

I was back there a few more times, they even gave me a badge (which I still have somewhere) so I could let myself in. One time I spent two straight weeks there. They were good people.

But we were applying work to the technical systems, and never really dealing with their default responses to problems, their culture, the way they went managing their daily work.

I know so much more today it is actually humbling to write this. And I still have a lot to learn. We all do.

The company I was working in? They were sold, and sold again. I think they are still in business, but I wouldn’t know anyone there.

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Lessons from Driving a Forklift

The spring and summer of 2000 were a long time ago, but I learned some lessons during those months that have stayed with me. In fact, the learning from that experience is still happening as I continue to connect it to things I see today.

I was a member of a team working hard to stand up a new production line of a new product. The rate pressures were very high, the production, production control, and quality processes were immature.

At a high level, the parts flow was supposed to work like this:

Steel parts are fabricated and welded, based on the production schedule for various configurations.

Unit sets of parts were sent to outside paint. (We didn’t have our own paint system yet.) In reality, unit sets would be broken up as some parts went to sister plants, others went to outside vendors, each with their own lead times and flow times.

Parts return from outside paint. Because of the different vendors and lead times, different parts arrive on different days.

On assembly day, kits are built for the parts required at each entry point on the assembly line. Those kits are delivered based on a pull. The assembly line had a number of entry points and feeders, so for each takt time cycle, though only one “unit’s worth” of parts were actually delivered, those parts were for different units, as feeders had different lead times into the main line.

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The innocuous challenge was to develop the kitting process (in red) that broke down the parts into  kits and got them delivered to the line.

I got pulled in on Thursday of a “kaizen event” that was supposed to develop this process. What had actually happened, though, was analysis paralysis, a lot of theoretical discussions, a lot of drawings on a white board, but nothing had actually been tested or tried. My assignment was simple: Organize this and get it going on Monday.

I had four people working for me, though they were not officially direct reports. They were an eclectic mix of personalities and styles.

A few things became apparent very quickly:

The process of scheduling which parts needed to be fabricated and welded to be sent through painting on any particular day was broken. Result: What was needed wasn’t necessarily what got sent to paint.

The processes of keeping parts organized during the various outside paint operations was broken. Result: Unit sets got mixed together, parts went missing.

As a result this is what my days looked like:

I came in before a hint of dawn at 4:45am to prepare for the assembly line starting at 5:40. I would go out into the parts yard with the day’s production schedule and a flashlight. My goal was to answer a simple question:

What units on this list can I build with the parts that are here?

I would re-sequence the production schedule to front-load the units that looked like we had everything we needed. (This caused all kinds of problems with serial number sequences and engineering change control, but that is a different story.)

We would start pulling in those parts, and breaking them down into the kits. We set up FIFO lanes for each entry point on the assembly line, and worked as fast as we could to build up about a three hour backlog. Why? Because it took about three hours to expedite a missing part through paint. Once we had that queue built up, as we discovered shortages (or parts painted the wrong color!), we had a chance to get the situation corrected and have a shot at not creating a shortage on the line.

We were working 10 hour shifts, I was typically there for 12-14 hours. Even though I was a “lean guy” my daily work was orchestrating all of this chaos, expediting and delivering parts, and I spent at least six of those hours every day driving a forklift. I got really good at forktruck operation that summer.

At the end of the day, I might sit and chill for a little while, then would get in my truck, go home, and do it all again tomorrow. One of those days as I went to back out of the parking space, I hit the turn signal to put my stick-shift truck into reverse – because that’s how the forklift controls worked.

What I Learned

I actually continue to learn. But here are a few things that have stood out for me.

Shop Floor Production Supervisor is a really hard job. I wasn’t a supervisor, but I was doing many of the things that we asked supervisors to do. Making my people take their breaks. Slow down on the pallet jack. Listening to a frustrated guy who was ready to quit – understanding his paradigm, and helping him re-frame his experience. Constant radio calls to places in whatever building I wasn’t in at the time. Operating within a system that functions only with continuous intervention.

I totally knew how to set up a workable, stable process. I knew how to get all of these processes linked together to pull everything through. I knew how to build in effective quality checks.

What I was able to do was spend a few minutes at the end of my day, or during my lunch breaks (instead of eating) trying to implement some kind of simple visual control that mitigated against repeating a mistake we had just made. We attached a tag with a production sequence number (000 through 999, repeating) to each kit. That let us, and the people on the line, see if we had delivered something out of sequence.

Then, after I had delivered a yellow painted kit to go onto an otherwise blue painted unit (oops) we made a board with the production sequence numbers and the associated colors for the major components.

Then… after I had delivered (note the theme here) the wrong size of a major component to the line, we added that information to the board AND tagged those components so we could quickly distinguish one from the other.

But I was never able to address the upstream issues that were delivering short kits to us in the first place. All I could do was add steps, add time, add inventory to protect myself from those things and do my best to fix it before the main line got stopped.

We had a saying in the Army: “When you are up to your a$$ in alligators, it is hard to work on finding the best way to drain the swamp.”

Thus:

It is unreasonable to expect systems improvements when everyone is scrambling to make the system function at all. It isn’t that they don’t want to make improvements. It isn’t that they don’t know what to do. It is that there is barely time to breathe before the next problem needs to be stamped down.

And finally: A five person job requires five people. I had four people working for me. That wasn’t enough. Guess who had to fill in the rest of it? I tried my best to handle the problems so they could get into some kind of cadence on the stuff that wasn’t a problem. But (Routine+Problems) = (or greater than) 5 people in this case, and it took all of us just to navigate the rapids without dumping everyone out of the boat. If everything was running smoothly, it was probably a three person job. If we could have set up a sequenced pull from assembly all the way back through weld, it would have been a two or even one person job.

Reflection

That forklift key is still on the keyring in my pocket as a reminder of that time. What follows are some of the bigger-picture things that come to mind as I continue to construct, tear down and reconstruct my own thinking.

Attribution Error

There is a strong tendency among us humans to attribute our own failures to a poor environment, but to attribute other’s failings to individual character or capability. Yet in many cases, simply changing the venue or circumstances can allow a previously low-performer to blossom. We see this (and the opposite) all of the time in professional athletics.

Making this error is easy when we are talking about “they.”  If only they… Why don’t they… They don’t get it… “They” are people who are likely doing the very best they can within the context of the system they are in. And, as I pointed out above, changing the system from the inside is hard.

Actually that isn’t quite accurate. Changing the system is hard work.

The Pace of Change

The organization I was describing above was experiencing circumstances at the time that outpaced their ability to experiment, reflect, and adapt. Every organization has a rate at which they are able to change.

Just to make things more complicated, it is possible to learn what must be done much faster than those things can be put into place. This frustrates a lot of change agents. They see the technical changes that must take place, but often struggle against cultural barriers and obstacles. These things take much longer, and it is pretty much impossible to put them on a fixed timeline or project plan. Thus, we frame them as “resistance to change.” We know what must be done, but “they” don’t do it.

Organizations Under Stress

When an organization is under stress, there is fear of complete breakdown. People become very conservative and avoid the uncertain and unfamiliar. If they become overwhelmed just trying to get their task done, they are going to shut out any information that isn’t relevant right now. Horizontal communications break down, and the feeling of isolation increases.

At this point, all coordination has to funnel upward and then downward through the vertical linkages, as cross-functional coordination largely isn’t happening.

Now the higher leader gets overwhelmed, feeling she has to micro-manage every detail- because she does. “Why don’t they talk to each other?” Well, the structures for that were probably very informal, and now have broken down.

This Isn’t About “Them”

As I mentioned above, it is really easy to attribute the perception of dysfunction to individuals. And as people become isolated within their own task-worlds, avoiding a mistake becomes the dominate motivation. This happens even in organizations with the most benign intentions.

If you are a leader, pay attention to the emotions. If people are snippy, are pushing back on ideas as “just more work” then that saturation point may well have been reached. Pushing harder isn’t going to make things go faster, it is going to slow them down.

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How Does the Teacher Learn?

In my last post, If the Student Hasn’t Learned…, I made the point (again) that sometimes trying too hard to impose a formal structure on a learner can impede their progress.

Since writing that, I have been doing a bit of reflection on my own development as a coach, and I need to give credit where it is due.

As any regular reader knows, I have been an enthusiastic student and practitioner of Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata since I first read the book. I have written extensively about it in this forum. And I have made my own modest contributions to the practice. It has been over this time, and countless cycles of guiding beginning (and intermediate, and expert) learners through The Five Questions that I can hold the structure in my own head while not imposing rigidity onto others.

I will always default to using the formal structure because I think, in the vast majority of cases, it sets a better foundation. And even in those cases where I have to let go of the structure, that is a temporary countermeasure.

Once my learner is comfortable with the meta-patterns, then the structure follows, and makes sense to them. Some people learn that way, and I have to be able to pick that up.

I may have been an OK coach before all of this, I likely overestimated my ability at the time. Today, though, thanks to the Toyota Kata structure, I am becoming more comfortable with… not letting go if it, for I hold it in my own mind, but maybe withholding the framework and letting the learner fill it in more fluidly.

As we are boring down on the 10th Anniversary of Toyota Kata, and the 5th KataCon, we have a great opportunity to look at how the pattern that Toyota Kata teaches reaches far beyond process improvement and problem solving.

I will be speaking on the topic of Developing Leaders for Continuous Improvement on Day 1, and yes, we can use the same meta-patterns. Craig Stritar and I will be taking a much deeper look into the same principles in our Experiential Workshop. If you want to get a hands-on, reflective look at meeting your challenges as a change agent, come join us there.

In reality, the teacher learns by sharing and swapping experiences with others. I am not going to try to list everyone you will, and should, meet at KataCon here because I would surely leave someone’s name off my list by accident. But look at the presenters and speakers. I know most of them and were I not presenting my own workshops and breakouts, I would be hard pressed to decide which ones to attend. You can’t make a mistake here.

 

 

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KataCon4–Notes along the way: Part 1

The 2018 Toyota Kata summit (KataCon4) ended several weeks ago. During the first three summits, I posted daily updates. This time I didn’t. Since the conference ended, I started a couple of posts trying to summarize but it’s been difficult. Here’s why – Starting last December when I visited Menlo, I’ve been learning and thinking so fast that by the time I wrote anything down, what I wanted to say had changed.

So KataCon4 was, for me, an event along a timeline, and I haven’t been able to separate those three days from everything else.

As part of my own effort to reflect and consolidate where I am, I am going to do my best to write up where I have been along this little journey and share it with you.

Even now, I am probably going to do the best I can to capture this stream of consciousness, not necessarily a concrete insight (yet).

Raw Notes from Menlo

I’m going back to December. What follows is largely unfiltered from the notes I took on a yellow pad while sitting in Menlo’s work space. Some of this is just my impressions, some of it is thoughts for a message for KataCon. I’m going to format the notes as quotes, to distinguish them from any afterthoughts I am adding as I review them to write this.

Menlo 12/12

  • Wow!
  • I am the only person here not talking to someone.

Possible themes

  • Experiments –> Culture
  • Deliberate, purposeful
  • Innovation follows the IK pattern. Learn it. Use it on everything you do.

“A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be patched up to make it work. You have to start over with a working simple system.”

– John Gall

That quote (above) is painted in big letters in one of the two meeting rooms at Menlo. The rooms have glass walls facing the work area.

Thought: Imagine creating a screenplay like this.

What I meant here was I could totally envision a workshop of writers all working on scenes that would assemble into a comprehensive story. The organization seems that robust for coordinating multiple parallel efforts toward a common, integrated goal.

—————–

Quick ( <5min ) stand-up meeting on how to handle communicating a mistake to a client.

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——————-

Possible application for [client] staff meeting:

  • Staff member has fixed daily time for dealing with “action items”
  • At meeting, estimate time to complete.
  • Create a “story card” put on board.
  • Follow up next day.
  • What was done?
  • What was learned?

——————–

Thought: the structure drives the IK pattern more than the conversations.

The structure has evolved with this purpose – to ask and answer the “5 questions” automatically, unconsciously, as an inherent part of the work.

They don’t ask the 5 questions, but as a part of the daily routine, the answers to them are explicitly, or implicitly, discussed.

——————-

“Structure” = “Routines & Rituals” –

The embedded repeating patterns are deliberately designed into the work.

Designed to: Common understanding of…

Maintain direction and challenge between Menlo and the client.

– Developed iteratively through HTA process.

Get a thorough understanding of the current condition (workflow, personnas, etc)

Establish successive target conditions

– Story cards and deadline = delivered, testable function = change in current condition

Iterate against unknowns toward TC

Verify new TC

This process highly structured but organic and evolving as required to meet needs as we learn.

It is a complex system, anchored, evolved from simple systems that worked.

You can’t copy it, you have to develop it through your own deliberate learning.

Started with “Let’s try it” on a small scale, even though there is tons of literature describing it.

——————

How we feel [values] drives how we think.

How we think drives what we do.

Get crystal clear on your values.

  1. What emotion are you striving to create? (JOY!)
  2. What will you absolutely do?
  3. What will you absolutely never do?

Next Post: Making this relevant for the Kata Geeks.

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Only Action Reveals What Must Be Done

I am reading Story by Robert McKee (because the structure of stories interests me). There is a profound passage which totally resonates with everything we discuss here.

Every human being acts, from one moment to the next, knowingly or unknowingly, on his sense of probability, on what he expects, in all likelihood, to happen when he takes an action. We all walk this earth thinking, or at least hoping, that we understand ourselves, our intimates, society, and the world. We behave according to what we believe to be the truth of ourselves, the people around us, and the environment. But this truth we cannot know absolutely. It’s what we believe to be true.

We also believe we’re free to make any decision whatsoever to take any action whatsoever. But every choice and action we make and take, spontaneous or deliberate, is rooted in the sum total of our experience, in what has happened to us in actuality, imagination, or dream to that moment. We then choose to act based on what this gathering of life tells us will be the probable reaction from our world. It is only then, when we take action, that we discover necessity.

Necessity is absolute truth. Necessity is what in fact happens when we act. This truth is known — and can only be known — when we take action into the depth and breadth of our world and have its reaction. This reaction is the truth of our existence at that precise moment, no matter what we believed the moment before. Necessity is what must and does actually happen, as opposed to probability, which is what we hope or expect to happen.

As in life, so in fiction.

In other words, the best we can do is make a prediction. We will not, we cannot, know for certain what will actually happen until it does. The choice we make in that moment to either learn from this experience, or disregard it, is what decides the course from that point.

We are all protagonists in our own lives.

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The Ecosystem of Culture

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An organization’s culture and mindset evolve over time. When confronted with a problem or challenge, the organization (or more accurately, the people in the organization) view it through a filter of their experiences. Ideas that they believe have worked for them under past similar conditions are more likely to be applied again. Ideas that have seemed less successful, or more difficult, in the past are less likely to be applied again.

Over time, this collective experience determines how they respond to the day to day rough spots as well as more serious challenges. Those unconscious biases drive the responses, and in turn, shape how their processes are structured.

Different Cultures = Different Ecosystems

The process mechanics in a company like Toyota evolved over decades in a very specific organizational culture ecosystem, with specific values and beliefs shaped by their historic experiences.

When we are looking at the current processes in a different company, we are seeing the process mechanics that evolved in their management culture. Those process mechanics are optimized by the pressures that are exerted by the way THAT company is managed. Since Toyota is managed differently, its processes are optimized by different pressures, so will look different.

If we take Toyota’s process mechanics and shift them into a different ecosystem, they will have the different pressures exerted upon them. Different default decisions will be made. These alien process mechanics will likely begin to resemble the legacy processes rather quickly, if they survive at all.

This is why the promise of a rapid and dramatic change in operational results is frequently unfulfilled. The process mechanics are imported from a tropical rain forest, and installed in an alpine meadow. As beautiful as it looks in one environment, it won’t stand for long in the other.

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Adjusting the Culture vs. Adjusting the Process Mechanics

If we want this transplant to work, we have to pay careful attention to those evolutionary pressures. In practical terms, this means we try the new mechanics, we must watch carefully to learn what problems they reveal. We also need to observe the decisions that are made when these problems come up.

What adjustments need to be made in the way people interact, and to the immediate response to problems or surprises if this new process is to thrive?

Having a formal structure for this deliberate self-reflection is critical.

The Improvement Kata is engineered to specifically drive this kind of reflection by making changes as experiments, then deliberately reflecting with the question “What have we learned?”

For this to work, of course, we must be honest with ourselves and not just issue a flip answer like “It doesn’t work.”

Because we are asking people to adjust their responses, we are asking them to do things which are unfamiliar and may well run opposite from what they have experienced as successful for them in the past. If we try to move too fast, we are asking them to trust an alien process which is, in their experience, unproven in their environment. We might be asking them to reveal their own limits of knowledge – which is very scary for most of us.

That, in turn, asks for reflection on why “I don’t know…” is so scary to admit in the organization’s culture.

We have sold “lean” as a deceptively simple set of common-sense process mechanics with the idea that if we just implement them, we’ll get incredibly great results. As true as that is, “just implement them” is a lot harder than most of the “rapid improvement” models imply.

There is a lot going on behind what appears to be well understood and simple on the surface.

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Creative Safety Supply: Kaizen Training and Research Page

Normally when I get an email from a company pointing me to the great lean resource on their web page, I find very little worth discussing. But Creative Safety Supply in Beaverton, Oregon has some interesting material that I think is worth taking a look at.

First, to be absolutely clear, I have not done business with them, nor do I have any business relationship. I can’t speak, one way or the other, about their products, customer service, etc

With that out of the way, I found their Kaizen Training and Research Page interesting enough to go through it here and comment on what I see.

What, exactly, is “PDCA?”

The section titled Kaizen History goes through one of the most thorough discussions of the evolution of what we call “PDCA” I have ever read, tracing back to Walter Shewhart. This is the only summary I have ever seen that addresses the parallel but divergent histories of PDCA through W. Edwards Deming on the one hand and Japanese management on the other. There has been a lot of confusion over the years about what “PDCA” actually is. It may well be that that confusion originates from the same term having similar but different definitions depending on the context. This section is summed up well here:

The Deming Circle VS. PDCA

In August of 1980, Deming was involved in a Roundtable Discussion on Product Quality–Japan vs. the United States. During the roundtable discussion, Deming said the following about his Deming Circle/PDSA and the Japanese PDCA Cycle, “They bear no relation to each other. The Deming circle is a quality control program. It is a plan for management. Four steps: Design it, make it, sell it, then test it in service. Repeat the four steps, over and over, redesign it, make it, etc. Maybe you could say that the Deming circle is for management, and the QC circle is for a group of people that work on faults encountered at the local level.”

So… I learned something! Way cool.

Rapid Change vs. Incremental Improvement

A little further down the page is a section titled Kaizen Philosophy. This section leans heavily on the thoughts / opinions of Masaaki Imai through his books and interviews. Today there is an ongoing debate within the lean community about the relative merits of making rapid, radical change, vs. the traditional Japanese approach of steady incremental improvement over the long-haul.

In my opinion, there is nothing inherently wrong with making quick, rapid changes IF they are treated as an experiment in the weeks following. You are running to an untested target condition. You will likely surface many problems and issues that were previously hidden. If you leave abandon the operators and supervisors to deal with those issues on their own, it is likely they simply don’t have the time, skill or clarity of purpose required to work through those obstacles and stabilize the new process.

You will quickly learn what the knowledge and skill gaps are, and need to be prepared to coach and mentor people through closing those gaps. This brings us to the section that I think should be at the very top of the web page:

Respect for People

Almost every discussion about kaizen and continuous improvement mentions that it is about people, and this page is no different. However in truth, the improvement culture we usually describe is process focused rather than people focused, and other than emphasizing the importance of getting ideas from the team, “employee engagement is often lip-service. There is, I think, a big difference between “employee engagement” and “engaging employees.” One is passive, waiting for people to say something. The other is active development of leaders.

Management and Standards

When we get into the role of management, the discussion turns somewhat traditional. Part of this, I think, is a common western interpretation of the word “standards” as things that are created and enforced by management.

According to Steve Spear (and other researchers), Toyota’s definition of “standard” is quite different. It is a process specification designed as a prediction. It is intended to provide a point of reference for the team so they can quickly see when circumstances force them to diverge from that baseline, revealing a previously unknown problem in the process.

Standards in this world are not something static that “management should make everyone aware of” when they change. Rather, standards are established by the team, for the team, so the team can use them as a target condition to drive their own work toward the next level.

This doesn’t mean that the work team is free to set any standard they like in a vacuum. This is the whole point of the daily interaction between leaders at all levels. The status-quo is always subjected to a challenge to move to a higher level. The process itself is predicted, and tested, to produce the intended quality at the predicted cost, in the predicted time, with the predicted resources. Because actual process and outcomes are continuously compared to the predicted process and outcomes, the whole system is designed to surface “unknowns” very quickly.

This, in turn, provides opportunities to develop people’s skills at dealing with these issues in near-real time. The whole point is to continuously develop the improvement skills at the work team level so we can see who the next generation of leaders are. (Ref: Liker and Convis, “The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership”)

Staging improvement as a special event, “limited time only” during which we ask people for input does not demonstrate respect, nor does it teach them to see and solve those small issues on a daily basis.

There’s more, but I’m going to stop here for now.

Summary

Creative Safety Supply clearly “gets it.” I think this page is well worth your time to read, but (and this is important), read it critically. There are actually elements of conflicting information on the page, which is awesome because it gives you (the reader) an opportunity to pause and think.

From that, I think this one-page summary really reflects the state of “lean” today: There IS NO CANONICAL DEFINITION. Anyone who asserts there is has, by definition, closed their mind to the alternatives.

We can look at “What Would Toyota Do?” as somewhat of a baseline, but ultimately we are talking about an organizational culture. Toyota does what they do because of the ways they structure how people interact with one another. Other companies may well achieve the same outcomes with different cultural mechanisms. But the interactions between people will override process mechanics every time.

Hopefully I created a lot of controversy here.  🙂

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There Are No Silver Bullets

There are no quick, simple solutions

Occasionally I get an email from someone who asks a question like “How can I improve cycle time in the [fill in the blank here] industry?” Generally my reply is along the lines of “I don’t know, but I can help you figure it out.” I’ll give them some homework, often pointing them at Mike Rother’s Toyota Kata Practice Guide online, and asking them to do the Process Analysis step and get back to me with what they have seen and learned.

Lone Ranger with Silver Bullet
Who was that masked man?

This is usually followed by silence (cue the crickets here). Perhaps they think there is an easy answer and a single email can just tell them what to do to get that 20% performance improvement.

Unfortunately it doesn’t work like that. Process improvement involves work. There aren’t easy fixes (that last). There isn’t any solution anyone can give you that can just be implemented, nor can anyone learn it for you.

The real work is adjusting your culture

Digging a little deeper, if you want that productivity improvement to reach even a fraction of your full potential or sustain for any length of time, you have to go beyond technical solutions. When I said process improvement involves work, the technical mechanics are the easy part. The real work is understanding what social and cultural norms in your organization are holding you back and dealing with those.

Fortunately we have learned a lot more about the influence of the organization’s culture and how to influence the culture. But influencing the culture doesn’t happen by accident. And you can’t outsource your own thinking, reflection and learning.

 

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Learning Starts With “I Don’t Know”

If an organization wants to encourage learning, they have to get comfortable with not having all of the answers. Learning only happens when we discover something we don’t know, and then actively pursue understanding it. Many organizations, though, equate “having the answers” or “already knowing” with “competence.” Thus, if I say “I don’t know” then I am setting myself up for being regarded as incompetent.

What I see in these organizations is people will take great pains to hide problems. They will try very hard to figure things out, but do so in the background always reporting that everything is going fine. They live in the hope that someone else’s problem will emerge as the show-stopper before theirs does, and give them the extra time to sort out their issue.

Meanwhile, the bosses are frustrated because people aren’t being truthful with them. But what should they expect if “truth” attracts accusations of being incompetent?

But… there is hope.

I was talking to a friend last week who works in a huge company that seems to be making an earnest effort to shift their culture. There is nearly unanimous agreement that the existing culture isn’t working for them. On the other hand, actually changing culture is really, really hard because it involves changing people’s immediate, habitual responses to things.

Nevertheless, I was encouraged when my friend recounted a recent meeting where someone admitted two things:

  1. There was an unexpected problem that came out in a recent test.
  2. They, right now, don’t know how to fix it.

Just to be clear, these two things coming out in this meeting is a big deal. This has been a culture where unexpected problems have not been warmly received. Bringing them up without a confident assessment about a prospective solution was inviting the kind of intervention that is rarely helpful.

This time, though, was a little different.

The leaders started going down the expected responses such as “What do you mean we don’t know what to do?” then… stopped short. They paused, and realized this was not in line with their newly stated values of creating trust and accepting failure as an inherent part of learning.

And they changed their tone. They shifted the conversation from trying to assign responsibility blame for the test failure toward asking what we, the organization, needed to learn to better understand what happened.

My thoughts are:

Kudos to the person who was brave enough to test the waters and admit “I don’t know.”

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Learning = Extending the Threshold of Knowledge

“My computer won’t boot.”

Mrs. TheLeanThinker’s computer was hanging on the logo screen, keyboard unresponsive.

I know already that if the CPU were bad it wouldn’t get this far.

I also knew that the system hasn’t even tried to boot the OS from the hard drive yet, so that likely isn’t the problem.

Working hypothesis: It’s something on the motherboard.

Start with the simple stuff that challenges the working hypothesis:

  • Hang test a different, known good, power supply. No change.
  • Pull memory cards and reinstall them one by one. No change.
  • Pull the motherboard battery, unplug, wait a few minutes to possibly reset the BIOS. No change.
  • Try holding down the DEL key on power-up to get into BIOS settings. Nope, system still hangs, though it does read that one keystroke, the keyboard is dead after that.
  • Try Ctrl-Home to reach the BIOS flash process. Nope.

image

There is no evidence that the motherboard is not dead. Final test:

Get the numbers off the motherboard, find the same model on Amazon, order it for $37.50 to the door. (Intel hasn’t made this processor type since 2011).

New motherboard arrived today. Switch it out, takes about 30 minutes.

Boot up the machine, works OK, set the time in the BIOS, and pretty much good to go.

Convince Windows 10 that I haven’t made a bootleg copy.

Done.

The Threshold of Knowledge

I learned to code in 1973 on PDP-8 driving teletypes. Although my programming skills are largely obsolete these days, I am comfortable poking around inside the box of a PC, and I generally know how they work. Thus, the troubleshooting and component replacement I described above was not a learning experience. Yes, I learned what was wrong with this computer. (The “bad motherboard” was a hypothesis I tested by installing a new one.) But I didn’t learn anything about computers in general.

Rather than working through experiments into new territory, I was troubleshooting. Something that had worked was not working now. My experiments were an effort to confirm the point of failure.

Therefore, as interesting as the diversion was, aside from a little research on some of the more arcane troubleshooting, it was not a learning exercise for me. It was all within my Threshold of Knowledge.

In the Improvement Kata, “threshold of knowledge” refers to the boundary between “We know for sure” and “We don’t know.” Strictly speaking, we only say “We know” when there is specific and relevant evidence to back it up.

image

In this case, my challenge (fix the wife’s computer) was well inside the red circle.

But this wouldn’t be the case for everyone.

The Threshold of Knowledge is Subjective

Someone else with the same challenge may not see this as a routine troubleshoot-and-repair task. Rather, he has to learn.

I had to learn it at some point as well. The difference is that I had already learned it. I had already made mistakes, taken a week to build a PC and get it working many years ago. I learned by experimenting and being surprised when something didn’t work, then digging in and understanding why. On occasion, especially in the early days, I consulted experts who coached me, or at least taught me what to do and why.

Coaching To Extend the Threshold of Knowledge

Learning is the whole point of the Improvement Kata. That is why we call the “improver” the “learner.” If someone encounters a problem like my example and I am responsible for developing their skills, I am not serving them if I do something like:

  • Sit down at their machine and troubleshoot it.
  • Tell them what step to take, and asking what happened so I can interpret the outcome.

That second case is deceptive. The question is “Who is doing the thinking?” If the coach is doing the thinking, then the coach isn’t coaching, and the learner isn’t learning.

In this case I would also have to recognize this is going to take longer than it would if I did it myself. That is a trap many leaders fall into. They got where they are because they can arrive at a solution quickly. But the only reason they can do that is because, at some point in the past, they had time to learn.

“My computer doesn’t boot.” If my objective is for this person to learn, then I need to go back to the steps of learning. Given that the challenge is likely “My computer operates normally,” what would be my next question to help this person learn how to troubleshoot a problem like this?

I need to know what they know. “Do you know where in the boot sequence it is hanging up?” If the answer is “No,” or just a repeat of the symptom, then my next target condition is for them to understand the high-level sequence of steps that happens between “ON” and the login screen. That would be easy to depict in a block diagram. It’s just another process. But my learner might have to do a little research, and I can certainly point him in the right direction.

I’m not going to get into the details here, because this post isn’t about troubleshooting cranky computers.

General Application

“If somebody comes to me with a problem, I have two problems.”

  • The original issue.
  • The fact that this person didn’t know how to handle it.

You can easily translate my computer example into a production quality example. A defect is produced by a process that normally does not produce them. What is different between “Defect” and “Defect-Free?” Something is. We just don’t know what.

Is it something we need to learn? Something we need to teach? Or something we need to communicate?

If my working challenge for my organization is something like “Everyone knows everything they need to do their jobs perfectly.” then I am confronted every day with evidence that this is not as true as I would like.

If I look at those interventions as “the boss just doing his job” then I lose the opportunity to teach and to grow the organization. I am showing how much I know, and by doing so just extending the dependency. That might feel good in the short term, but it doesn’t do much for the future.

Think about this… in your organization, if the boss were promoted or hired out of the job tomorrow, would you look outside the immediate organization for a replacement? If so, you are not developing your people. When I see senior leaders being hired from outside, all I can do is wonder why they have so little faith in the people they already have.

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*I remember when Gateway built their own machines, which I guess shows how long I’ve been playing with PCs. Then again, I remember when the premium brand was Northgate. Of course, I also remember programming on punch cards.