By Al Norval
In the Lean world we hear all kinds of Japanese words. Indeed, it seems like a badge of honour to know obscure Japanese words that baffle your fellow teammates. I’d like to highlight one that isn’t mainstream but is critically important – Yokoten.
Yokoten is a process for sharing learning laterally across an organization. It entails copying and improving on kaizen ideas that work. You can think of yokoten as "horizontal deployment" or "sideways expansion". The corresponding image is one of ideas unfolding across an organization. Yokoten is horizontal and peer-to-peer, with the expectation that people go see for themselves and learn how another area did kaizen and then improve on those kaizen ideas in the application to their local problems.
It's not a vertical, top-down requirement to "copy exactly". Nor is it a “best practices” or “benchmarking” approach nor is it as some organizations refer to a “lift and shift” model. Rather, it is a process where people are encouraged to go see for themselves, and return to their own area to add their own wisdom and ideas to the knowledge they gained.
Simply put, Yokoten equals copy and improve. The role of the senior managers is to make people aware of the existence of these good kaizen examples so that they can go see for themselves, gain the knowledge and improve upon it further. Simply telling subordinates to copy it may be kaizen of a sort but it would not serve the second important aspect of the Toyota Production System, the respect for and development of people.
An effective Yokoten process is a critical step to building capability within the organization and becoming a true learning organization. It truly is one of the capabilities of outstanding organizations.
Thursday, April 28, 2011
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Thursday, April 21, 2011
How Do We Learn?
By Pascal Dennis
Used to be, we believed talent was god-given. Mozart, Einstein, Wayne Gretzky and other brilliant talents were born, not made.
Moreover, we learn best by stopping to fix problems that arise. (Sound familiar?)
2. Ignition -- signals in our environment telling us,
"You can do this! Nothing is impossible!"
Ignition is about connecting with purpose -- then becoming super-charged by a supportive environment
3. Sensei/mentorship
A good sensei is one who has mastered the "coaching kata" through diligent practice and reflection over many years.
Here are some good books:
Here are a few of the implications:
Used to be, we believed talent was god-given. Mozart, Einstein, Wayne Gretzky and other brilliant talents were born, not made.
Turns out we were wrong. Talent is acquired by practicing in a certain way. The latest psycho-neural research teaches us that we learn through:
- Deep practice -- slow, repetitive "stop & fix"
Moreover, we learn best by stopping to fix problems that arise. (Sound familiar?)
2. Ignition -- signals in our environment telling us,
"You can do this! Nothing is impossible!"
Ignition is about connecting with purpose -- then becoming super-charged by a supportive environment
3. Sensei/mentorship
A good sensei is one who has mastered the "coaching kata" through diligent practice and reflection over many years.
Here are some good books:
- The Talent Code, by Dan Coyle
- Drive, by Dan Pink
- Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell
- Toyota Kata, by Mike Rother
Here are a few of the implications:
- We can turbo-charge learning -- there's a recipe to talent
- Hiding problems makes learning impossible
- Culture is indeed, as Lou Gerstner intuited, everything...
- Organizations without senseis will get out-learned -- and ultimately, out-earned.
Monday, April 18, 2011
The Work of Leaders
By Pascal Dennis
Had a eureka moment the other day: The leader's job is to ensure that all their people are working on the right things.
Rather bland, but true, no?
Respect for humanity means I won't waste my team's time asking them to do stupid or wasteful things.
Here's an extreme example to illustrate the point:
One of the most vicious punishments meted out in the awful Soviet gulags was this:
Spend all day digging out a large hole. Then spend the next day filling it back in.
Prisoners would go mad with the meaninglessness of it.
But consider how it parallels so much corporate work.
I've seen good, smart people doing much the same work -- at the whim of some executive, or to satisfy some absurd corporate rule.
"Dig out that hole! Now fill it back in!"
After a while people really do get twitchy. To paraphrase Winston Smith at the end of Animal Farm,
"Two plus two really does equal five..."
So those of us that are lucky enough to be leaders have to accept this heavy responsibility.
Use my people's time wisely.
They're not cannon fodder.
P.S. Check out Getting the Right Things Done for help on how to do this!
Had a eureka moment the other day: The leader's job is to ensure that all their people are working on the right things.
Rather bland, but true, no?
Respect for humanity means I won't waste my team's time asking them to do stupid or wasteful things.
Here's an extreme example to illustrate the point:
One of the most vicious punishments meted out in the awful Soviet gulags was this:
Prisoners would go mad with the meaninglessness of it.
But consider how it parallels so much corporate work.
I've seen good, smart people doing much the same work -- at the whim of some executive, or to satisfy some absurd corporate rule.
"Dig out that hole! Now fill it back in!"
After a while people really do get twitchy. To paraphrase Winston Smith at the end of Animal Farm,
"Two plus two really does equal five..."
So those of us that are lucky enough to be leaders have to accept this heavy responsibility.
Use my people's time wisely.
They're not cannon fodder.
P.S. Check out Getting the Right Things Done for help on how to do this!
Thursday, April 14, 2011
Lean Outside the Factory -- Reverse Magic!
By Pascal Denis
Last Fall, I had the pleasure of taking my teenage daughters, Katie & Eleanor, to Las Vegas.
We'd hoped to see the great magician, David Copperfield, who I'd seen make tigers, elephants and the like disappear. On TV I saw David make the Statue of Liberty disappear.
Anyhow, somehow I made the following connection. (Must have been the desert air...)
We have to do the opposite & make the invisible, visible.
Office work, is what Peter Drucker called "knowledge" work - most of it is hidden in the box knows as a computer.
Our job is to take it out that box and put it up on the wall, where everyone can see it.
Otherwise, waste multiplies exponentially, and our office processes become our constraint.
Here's a challenge for you:
a) review total lead time for your top three value streams,
b) where is most of the delay -- in operations (factory, hospital ward, laboratory etc) or outside operations?
If you're like many organizations, most of the delay in outside operations.
Yet where do we spend most of our improvement work?
So...let's work our magic and make the invisible, visible. Then our Lean activities can really take flight.
That's what The Remedy -- Taking Lean Out of the Factory to Transform Your Organization, is all about.
Last Fall, I had the pleasure of taking my teenage daughters, Katie & Eleanor, to Las Vegas.
We'd hoped to see the great magician, David Copperfield, who I'd seen make tigers, elephants and the like disappear. On TV I saw David make the Statue of Liberty disappear.
Sadly, he was out of town & we had to settle for Cher...
Anyhow, somehow I made the following connection. (Must have been the desert air...)
Lean's next frontier is the office -- sales, marketing, engineering, design, planning & scheduling, finance and so on.
Deploying the "profound system of knowledge" here requires us to perform reverse magic.
David Copperfield makes visible things, invisible.
Office work, is what Peter Drucker called "knowledge" work - most of it is hidden in the box knows as a computer.
Our job is to take it out that box and put it up on the wall, where everyone can see it.
Otherwise, waste multiplies exponentially, and our office processes become our constraint.
b) where is most of the delay -- in operations (factory, hospital ward, laboratory etc) or outside operations?
If you're like many organizations, most of the delay in outside operations.
Monday, April 11, 2011
Lean at the Imperial Grill -- and at Starbucks
By Pascal Dennis
Had a good time in Dallas at the LEI Transformation Summit. I gave a presentation on Big Company Disease (and The Remedy), which people seemed to enjoy.
I much enjoyed the Starbuck team's presentation on their Lean transformation work. Took me back to my dad's restaurant, The Imperial Grill, where I grew up & which figures in all my books.
You can't succeed in a family-owned restaurant -- or a Starbucks if you don't apply Lean fundamentals.
Waste & value, visual management, standardized work, 5 S, close connection to the customers, simple replenishment pull and so on are simply common sense. At the Imperial Grill I experienced each form of waste viscerally. Motion waste, for example, means sore feet.
The best waiters and waitresses effortlessly serve multiple tables with minimal motion.
They always add value whenever they move -- by greeting a customer, clearing a table, or closing out a tab.
Waiting waste means unhappy customers who don’t come back. Conveyance waste means unnecessary trips to the farmers market to get our meat and produce. Correction or scrap waste means making the wrong thing, or overcooking something, and having to throw it out. Over-processing means too many steps in a process, so you fall behind -- a killer during the breakfast and lunch rush. Inventory waste means carrying more raw materials than you need, which means either throwing stuff out when it goes bad, or buying a bigger fridge. Knowledge waste means wasting your time doing the above when you could be improving the business.
My senseis taught me that overproduction is the worst form of waste -- because it entails every other kind of waste. At the Imperial Grill, making more than we could sell meant was unthinkable, a sure way of going out of business. My parents understood value and waste in their guts, and had a deep connection with their customers. As a result, the Imperial Grill thrived against tough competition from national restaurant chains.
My folks are retired now and the Imperial Grill has given way to luxury condominiums. But it lives on in The Remedy and other books!
I much enjoyed the Starbuck team's presentation on their Lean transformation work. Took me back to my dad's restaurant, The Imperial Grill, where I grew up & which figures in all my books.
You can't succeed in a family-owned restaurant -- or a Starbucks if you don't apply Lean fundamentals.
Waste & value, visual management, standardized work, 5 S, close connection to the customers, simple replenishment pull and so on are simply common sense. At the Imperial Grill I experienced each form of waste viscerally. Motion waste, for example, means sore feet.
The best waiters and waitresses effortlessly serve multiple tables with minimal motion.
They always add value whenever they move -- by greeting a customer, clearing a table, or closing out a tab.
Waiting waste means unhappy customers who don’t come back. Conveyance waste means unnecessary trips to the farmers market to get our meat and produce. Correction or scrap waste means making the wrong thing, or overcooking something, and having to throw it out. Over-processing means too many steps in a process, so you fall behind -- a killer during the breakfast and lunch rush. Inventory waste means carrying more raw materials than you need, which means either throwing stuff out when it goes bad, or buying a bigger fridge. Knowledge waste means wasting your time doing the above when you could be improving the business.
My senseis taught me that overproduction is the worst form of waste -- because it entails every other kind of waste. At the Imperial Grill, making more than we could sell meant was unthinkable, a sure way of going out of business. My parents understood value and waste in their guts, and had a deep connection with their customers. As a result, the Imperial Grill thrived against tough competition from national restaurant chains.
My folks are retired now and the Imperial Grill has given way to luxury condominiums. But it lives on in The Remedy and other books!
Monday, April 4, 2011
Power of Simple Images
By Al Norval
Complexity is over-rated!
It’s easy to be complicated but it’s difficult to be simple. Elegance is simple, yet it is not easily achieved.
One of Lean’s most powerful principles is to make things visual. People often do this yet fail to think about what message they are trying to convey. The result is overly complex visuals which fail to meet their purpose. Confusion reigns. Instead, what we really want is to be able to understand the current condition at a glance. Then we can tell if we on target or off target so we can launch problem solving.
The same holds true in our communications. We’ve often heard that a picture is worth a thousand words but what if that picture is so complicated we can’t understand it. A thousand words may not be enough to explain it. In today’s age of powerful graphics available on every laptop, we often see fancy slides that look like a Las Vegas light show. We call this Powerpoint Junk. The image is so complex the message is lost.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy. “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, as the room erupted in laughter.
The Mental Model of simple visual images for all important things can dispel the fog of Big Company Disease and allow us to focus on the real problems.
Cheers
Complexity is over-rated!
It’s easy to be complicated but it’s difficult to be simple. Elegance is simple, yet it is not easily achieved.
One of Lean’s most powerful principles is to make things visual. People often do this yet fail to think about what message they are trying to convey. The result is overly complex visuals which fail to meet their purpose. Confusion reigns. Instead, what we really want is to be able to understand the current condition at a glance. Then we can tell if we on target or off target so we can launch problem solving.
The same holds true in our communications. We’ve often heard that a picture is worth a thousand words but what if that picture is so complicated we can’t understand it. A thousand words may not be enough to explain it. In today’s age of powerful graphics available on every laptop, we often see fancy slides that look like a Las Vegas light show. We call this Powerpoint Junk. The image is so complex the message is lost.
Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal, the leader of American and NATO forces in Afghanistan, was shown a PowerPoint slide in Kabul last summer that was meant to portray the complexity of American military strategy. “When we understand that slide, we’ll have won the war,” General McChrystal dryly remarked, as the room erupted in laughter.
The Mental Model of simple visual images for all important things can dispel the fog of Big Company Disease and allow us to focus on the real problems.
Cheers
Friday, April 1, 2011
Supporting the Value Stream
By Al Norval,
Where is value created?
In the value streams where people change or transform the functionality of materials or services into things which our customers are willing to pay for. It isn’t created in the staff groups that live in Corporate headquarters. Yet, the question often comes up – who is there to serve who?
Wouldn’t it make sense for staff groups to work on problems that eliminate waste from the value streams. This allows our people to spend more time creating value for our customers. Alas, often this isn’t the case. Instead we see staff groups acting like petty bureaucrats making and enforcing policies that take people away from doing value added work in the value streams and spending their time on things they weren’t trained for or filling in reports to managers in faraway places who would never dream of going to Gemba. Why? It’s easier to ask someone to fill in a report for me.
A recent example that comes to mind is a large multi-national company that downsized it’s HR dept. Now all inquiries about benefits, job postings, and in fact any HR policy were to be handled by the Team Leaders and the Shift Supervisors. Without the depth of training and experience to handle the issues that come up, these folks now spend large portions of their day chasing around searching for answers to questions raised by Team Members. The rate of improvement has slowed down but they did reduce costs in HR.
Wouldn’t it make sense to do things the other way around. To focus on eliminating everything that takes away from front line people doing value creating work for our customers. Isn’t this the real role of support staff – to support the value stream and the people in it.
Where is value created?
Wouldn’t it make sense for staff groups to work on problems that eliminate waste from the value streams. This allows our people to spend more time creating value for our customers. Alas, often this isn’t the case. Instead we see staff groups acting like petty bureaucrats making and enforcing policies that take people away from doing value added work in the value streams and spending their time on things they weren’t trained for or filling in reports to managers in faraway places who would never dream of going to Gemba. Why? It’s easier to ask someone to fill in a report for me.
A recent example that comes to mind is a large multi-national company that downsized it’s HR dept. Now all inquiries about benefits, job postings, and in fact any HR policy were to be handled by the Team Leaders and the Shift Supervisors. Without the depth of training and experience to handle the issues that come up, these folks now spend large portions of their day chasing around searching for answers to questions raised by Team Members. The rate of improvement has slowed down but they did reduce costs in HR.
Wouldn’t it make sense to do things the other way around. To focus on eliminating everything that takes away from front line people doing value creating work for our customers. Isn’t this the real role of support staff – to support the value stream and the people in it.
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