Monday, May 30, 2011
Friday, May 27, 2011
Failure Modes in Lean Implementation
By Al Norval
I wrote an earlier blog about failure modes in Lean Implementation in which I described two of the most common failure modes. Both dealt with Leadership.
The two are related in that Lean culture is about discovering problems, solving problems and sharing the learning across the organization. Being a cultural change there is a need for Senior Leaders to lead the way by modelling the new behaviours and making it OK for the rest of the organization to change. The culture change then cascades outwards from examples set by the Leadership team.
Think of the possibilities.
Sadly, this doesn’t occur as often as it should. Leaders do what they have always done. Improvement occurs, changes are made but sustaining is an issue and soon we’re back to the way things always were.
The choice seems obvious. Why is it so difficult?
I wrote an earlier blog about failure modes in Lean Implementation in which I described two of the most common failure modes. Both dealt with Leadership.
The first was leaders not recognizing Lean as a cultural change within the organization and the second one was Leaders not changing themselves and delegating Lean Implementation to others.
The two are related in that Lean culture is about discovering problems, solving problems and sharing the learning across the organization. Being a cultural change there is a need for Senior Leaders to lead the way by modelling the new behaviours and making it OK for the rest of the organization to change. The culture change then cascades outwards from examples set by the Leadership team. So what are some of the changes in their behaviours that Leaders need to make?
They need to let the Lean Mental Models guide their behaviour and change their existing routines. Here’s a few to get started:
- Leader as a Teacher
- Go to Gemba
- Make problems visible
By Going to Gemba and seeing for yourself, Leaders put themselves in a position to act as Leader as a Teacher. Be seeing problems and treating them as gold – to be treasured, they set the tone for the organization. People quickly pick up on these new behaviours and the culture begins to change. See a problem, solve a problem; share the learning becomes the mantra of the organization. Improvement occurs at a faster and faster pace. Everyone jumps on board.
Think of the possibilities.
Sadly, this doesn’t occur as often as it should. Leaders do what they have always done. Improvement occurs, changes are made but sustaining is an issue and soon we’re back to the way things always were.
The choice seems obvious. Why is it so difficult?
Monday, May 23, 2011
Go To Gemba
By Al Norval
It’s a simple phrase but one that gives so much trouble to people. Go to Gemba – where the real value added work is done.
It reflects a Mental Model of “Go See for Yourself”. Instead many people find it easier to sit at their desk and let their computer tell them what’s going on. More than that, they find it easier to send e-mails rather than talking to people and asking questions. We know that much of human communication comes from non-verbal cues. The look on the person’s face, the tone they are using, their hand and head gestures, all play a part in good two way communication. Most of that is lost in the world of e-mails or IM messages. Don’t get me wrong, they have a role to play but nothing beats Going to Gemba and seeing for yourself.
Going to Gemba doesn’t mean going to look around and spend some time on idle chit chat with Team Members. Rather it means going with a purpose and this purpose has three elements:
Go See
Ask Why?
Show Respect
Go See – and seek to understand. See with your own eyes. They won’t lie to you or hide things from you. What you see will be closer to the truth than what you hear or read.
Ask Why? – demonstrate Leader as a Teacher. Get to the root cause of problems. Challenge Team Members and develop their Lean thinking.
Show Respect - always be hard on the process and easy on the people. Only then will people open up, stop being defensive and truly find some creative countermeasures to problems.
A big failure of Leadership is the lack of Going to Gemba. By not Going to Gemba and asking why, Leaders really don't know and understand what is actually happening. They don’t see problems and they don’t teach others to see problems.
Makes it difficult to lead and coach your team and to drive the improvement throughout the organization needed to reach our business targets.
It’s a simple phrase but one that gives so much trouble to people. Go to Gemba – where the real value added work is done.
It reflects a Mental Model of “Go See for Yourself”. Instead many people find it easier to sit at their desk and let their computer tell them what’s going on. More than that, they find it easier to send e-mails rather than talking to people and asking questions. We know that much of human communication comes from non-verbal cues. The look on the person’s face, the tone they are using, their hand and head gestures, all play a part in good two way communication. Most of that is lost in the world of e-mails or IM messages. Don’t get me wrong, they have a role to play but nothing beats Going to Gemba and seeing for yourself.
Going to Gemba doesn’t mean going to look around and spend some time on idle chit chat with Team Members. Rather it means going with a purpose and this purpose has three elements:
Go See
Ask Why?
Show Respect
Go See – and seek to understand. See with your own eyes. They won’t lie to you or hide things from you. What you see will be closer to the truth than what you hear or read.
Ask Why? – demonstrate Leader as a Teacher. Get to the root cause of problems. Challenge Team Members and develop their Lean thinking.
Show Respect - always be hard on the process and easy on the people. Only then will people open up, stop being defensive and truly find some creative countermeasures to problems.
A big failure of Leadership is the lack of Going to Gemba. By not Going to Gemba and asking why, Leaders really don't know and understand what is actually happening. They don’t see problems and they don’t teach others to see problems.
Makes it difficult to lead and coach your team and to drive the improvement throughout the organization needed to reach our business targets.
Thursday, May 19, 2011
Waste in Service Organizations
By Al Norval
Have you ever had people say this to you? I’ve had numerous people say to it me.
Take a simple shopping experience to a large department store. We could define value narrowly as simply as the consumer purchasing a product (so they must have found value) but what if we expand the definition to encompass the entire service experience the consumer had while in the store. How many of us would pay for the experience of standing in line waiting at a check-out line, or the experience of searching through stacks of articles for the correct one, or the experience of looking for a store clerk to answer questions we have only to have none around or to be told “his isn’t my area”?
Let’s take it one step further. How many of us would pay for the experience of waiting in line to return a purchase, or the ultimate – how many of us would pay for the experience of being placed on hold to wait for a Customer Service agent or endless telephone tree options just to talk to a live person who can answer our inquiry.
When we map the entire customer experience through the customers eyes, we can see the rich opportunity we have as waste is buried everywhere.
In these simple examples, we see waiting, over-processing, correction, inventory (queues), motion, and knowledge wastes.
Why do organizations do this? Typically, because they are looking at short term profits not at providing superior value to customers which will ultimately provide long term profits. Ironic isn’t it? By adding short term costs, we can ensure long term profits if we can provide superior value to our Customers.
Try this. Look at the service you provide and map the process, not from the suppliers point of view but from the customers point of view. I’m sure you’ll find many opportunities for improvement.
Have you ever had people say this to you? I’ve had numerous people say to it me.
“I can see how Lean applies in a manufacturing organization but does it really apply outside of manufacturing? I’m in service, we don’t make things, we’re different”Providing a service is somewhat different than making a product but from a Lean perspective, all the principles still hold true. It all starts with the Customer and how we provide value to our customers. The key is understanding what Customers truly value and what drives the Value Proposition.
Take a simple shopping experience to a large department store. We could define value narrowly as simply as the consumer purchasing a product (so they must have found value) but what if we expand the definition to encompass the entire service experience the consumer had while in the store. How many of us would pay for the experience of standing in line waiting at a check-out line, or the experience of searching through stacks of articles for the correct one, or the experience of looking for a store clerk to answer questions we have only to have none around or to be told “his isn’t my area”?
When we map the entire customer experience through the customers eyes, we can see the rich opportunity we have as waste is buried everywhere.
In these simple examples, we see waiting, over-processing, correction, inventory (queues), motion, and knowledge wastes.
Why do organizations do this? Typically, because they are looking at short term profits not at providing superior value to customers which will ultimately provide long term profits. Ironic isn’t it? By adding short term costs, we can ensure long term profits if we can provide superior value to our Customers.
Try this. Look at the service you provide and map the process, not from the suppliers point of view but from the customers point of view. I’m sure you’ll find many opportunities for improvement.
Sunday, May 15, 2011
Innovation
By Al Norval
For the electric light bulb this involved over a thousand experiments until he finally came up with a carbon filament that would pass the test of time.
Perspiration indeed!
For us within the Lean community the same holds true. Rapid experimentation against the problems we are trying to resolve, leads to faster learning and ultimately better countermeasures.
Can we all learn from Thomas Edison – observe, set a hypothesis, experiment, check, learn, make adjustments, repeat.
Sounds simple, all it takes is a little hard work.
“None of my inventions came by accident. I see a worthwhile need to be met and I make trial after trial until it comes. What it boils down to is one per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration” – Thomas Alva Edison
Fabulous quote from one of the greatest inventors of all time. Edison was very familiar with the scientific method and how it is embodied within the PDCA cycle. It starts with a deep understanding of the Customer, their unmet needs and the problems they are having. From this he was able to define the problem and form a hypothesis after which he would run a series of experiments. The key was the Check/ Adjust of each experiment against his hypothesis. The power of a hypothesis is in its binary nature which allows the scientist either confirm the hypothesis or rule out that experiment. In either case, Edison knew the power of knowledge gained from each experiment. In that way he didn’t see experiments as a failure as he learned something new from each one. What he learned allowed him to constantly refine his designs until he had one that met his hypothesis.For the electric light bulb this involved over a thousand experiments until he finally came up with a carbon filament that would pass the test of time.
Perspiration indeed!
For us within the Lean community the same holds true. Rapid experimentation against the problems we are trying to resolve, leads to faster learning and ultimately better countermeasures.
Can we all learn from Thomas Edison – observe, set a hypothesis, experiment, check, learn, make adjustments, repeat.
Sounds simple, all it takes is a little hard work.
Monday, May 9, 2011
Strategy Deployment and Chess
By Pascal DennisWhat's the difference between Strategy Deployment and other planning & execution systems?
I get this question all the time.
SD is akin to playing chess. The left side of your strategy A3 summarizes your grasp of the current "chess position".
"I'm attacking on the King side, my opponent on the Queen side. My pawn structure is weak, but I have dangerous bishops, but his King is well protected. In order to checkmate him, I need to..."
As in chess, sports -- or life, grasping the situation requires both your rational mind & your gut feel.
Chess grandmasters do a lot of analysis -- but they also look at their opponent's face & body language, and take in the atmosphere in the tournament hall...
The right side of your paper summarizes your plan based on that deep intuitive understanding.
"I need to slow down his Queen side attack by....and shore up my weak pawns by doing....Then I can break through on the King side by..."
How do we gain that deep understanding? By going to see, running experiments and reflecting deeply on results, by PDCA in other words.
Otherwise, strategy devolves into "wood-pushing" -- same old dull moves & results.
The challenge and joy of Strategy Deployment is in:
1) Clearing the fog so you can see the chessboard,
2) Keeping it clear (with visual management and other techniques) so that you can assess the effect of your moves,
4) Learning from what happens -- and sharing that learning, and
5) Locking in the process so it becomes "no big deal"
Not easy, but if it were, Strategy Deployment wouldn't be a killer app...
Thursday, May 5, 2011
How Do Adults Learn?
By Al Norval
Adults learn very differently from children.
Children are sponges. Every day is a new adventure in which new things are learned. Somewhere along the way this all changes and we mature and become adults.
Adults on the other hand, only learn what they feel they need to learn. Adult learning is very practical. If I can’t see how this will help me now, then the true understanding and retention rate of the learning will be very low. I’m sure we can all remember the blah, blah, blah of college professors droning on about some mundane topic that was soon forgotten after the final exam was written.
So, what does this mean?
Adult learning focuses on solving problems. More concretely, realistic problems that people have right now.
When teams have problems, leaders have an opportunity to teach and use the problem to raise the capability of their Team Members. This is the power and magic behind kaizen.
We solve problems and learn in the very process of doing so. This is also the basis of Mental model #1 – Leader as a Teacher. Not to teach like a college professor but to teach Socratically by asking question to build the teams capability and guide the Team through the problem solving process.
Children are sponges. Every day is a new adventure in which new things are learned. Somewhere along the way this all changes and we mature and become adults.
Adults on the other hand, only learn what they feel they need to learn. Adult learning is very practical. If I can’t see how this will help me now, then the true understanding and retention rate of the learning will be very low. I’m sure we can all remember the blah, blah, blah of college professors droning on about some mundane topic that was soon forgotten after the final exam was written.
So, what does this mean?
Adult learning focuses on solving problems. More concretely, realistic problems that people have right now.
When teams have problems, leaders have an opportunity to teach and use the problem to raise the capability of their Team Members. This is the power and magic behind kaizen.
We solve problems and learn in the very process of doing so. This is also the basis of Mental model #1 – Leader as a Teacher. Not to teach like a college professor but to teach Socratically by asking question to build the teams capability and guide the Team through the problem solving process.
Monday, May 2, 2011
Empowering Team Members
By Al Norval
Many organizations talk about Empowering people.
In truth they may ask for people’s opinion or input on ideas but that speaks more to involving people not to truly empowering them. To empower people means we will allow and encourage them to solve problems for themselves. This means Leaders don’t undermine Team Members or second guess the countermeasures the team has come up with. Rather it says Leaders must coach and mentor their teams developing the teams capability along the way.
Sounds simple. But what happens when the problems the team face exceeds their capabilities? Team Members become anxious and learning stops. The easy and expedient answer is to give the problem to someone else. While this may lead to quick resolution of the problem, it does little to build the capability of the organization for the long term.
What happens when the opposite occurs – when the problems the team faces are less than their capabilities? Team Members become bored and give up. Again no learning occurs within the organization.
The key is to give teams problems that are a good match for their capabilities. When this occurs Team Members excel. The key for Leaders is to give teams and team members problems which stretch their capabilities without exceeding them. Adults respond to this challenge and work becomes interesting and learning occurs. Over time the capability of Team Members and in fact the organization as a whole goes up.
With more capability, more problems can be addressed leading to a cycle of continuous improvement.
This entire process requires finesse on the part of Leadership – giving people problems that are not too hard and not too simple. Finesse enabled by Mental Model #2 – Go to Gemba to see and understand for yourself.
In truth they may ask for people’s opinion or input on ideas but that speaks more to involving people not to truly empowering them. To empower people means we will allow and encourage them to solve problems for themselves. This means Leaders don’t undermine Team Members or second guess the countermeasures the team has come up with. Rather it says Leaders must coach and mentor their teams developing the teams capability along the way.
Sounds simple. But what happens when the problems the team face exceeds their capabilities? Team Members become anxious and learning stops. The easy and expedient answer is to give the problem to someone else. While this may lead to quick resolution of the problem, it does little to build the capability of the organization for the long term.
What happens when the opposite occurs – when the problems the team faces are less than their capabilities? Team Members become bored and give up. Again no learning occurs within the organization.
The key is to give teams problems that are a good match for their capabilities. When this occurs Team Members excel. The key for Leaders is to give teams and team members problems which stretch their capabilities without exceeding them. Adults respond to this challenge and work becomes interesting and learning occurs. Over time the capability of Team Members and in fact the organization as a whole goes up.
With more capability, more problems can be addressed leading to a cycle of continuous improvement.
This entire process requires finesse on the part of Leadership – giving people problems that are not too hard and not too simple. Finesse enabled by Mental Model #2 – Go to Gemba to see and understand for yourself.
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