Visual Management in New Product Development

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Lean thinking is moving out of the factory -- downstream into sales, logistics and order fulfillment, and upstream into finance, marketing and New Product Development (NPD).

We're often asked, how do you apply the fundamentals in these areas?

For example, how might you apply visual management in NPD?

A good first step is to decide, What do we need to know to run our business?

Here are typical answers:

a) What's the project loading at each point (P0, P1, P2) in our development pipeline?

b) What are min/max levels and our status at each point?

c) What are the biggest obstacles in each project?

d) Do we have countermeasure plans? What's their status?

e) What are broader system issues? Do we have countermeasure plans? Status?

Now we're ready to engage our teams in developing visual tools that will make the invisible, visible.

In our consulting work we've used funnels, race tracks, football fields, as well as, team boards and the like.

Visual management is also invaluable in NPD physical plants (e.g. Test Labs), and is similar to what you might find in a factory.

For example:

a) What's this week's work?

b) Are we ahead or behind?

c) What are our biggest obstacles? Countermeasure plans & status?

d) How versatile are our people?

e) What's the loading on our machines? Constraints?

The key, again, is to make the invisible, visible.

For more on Lean thinking outside the factory, please check out The Remedy.

Cheers,

Pascal

Images and A3 Thinking

By Pascal Dennis

Seems Getting the Right Things Done has been helpful in teaching A3 Thinking, the "story-telling" approach to strategy.

I'm gratified by all the good people who've told me, "That book really helped us – thanks!"

We're hard-wired to tell stories -- that's what our ancestors on the African savannah did at day's end around the fire.

(They didn't show PowerPoint...)

Like any good story, a good A3 pulls you in...

"And what happens next?" you wonder.

Where do images fit in?

Assignment

Here's an assignment for folks that have gained proficiency developing A3s.

Turn your A3 over – now draw a picture that tells the story.

Don't worry if you "can't draw" – stick figures, circles and arrows are all you need.

Now tell the story to your team through the image.

The better your understanding of the problem, the easier this'll be – and the clearer your image.

We've tried to illustrate Lean Thinking, Tools and Leadership with our Brain Booster pocket cards.

Hope they're helpful.

Cheers,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reprise - How Do We Change Our Thinking?

By Pascal Dennis

We live in difficult times. Organizations around the world can't seem to do what they're trying to do.

America, our management lodestar for most of the 20th century, is struggling with seemingly intractable economic & political difficulties. Europe is doing even worse.

In spite of everything, I believe things are going to be okay. America, Europe and the world will muddle through.

Over time, I believe we'll resume the path of continuous improvement in health, freedom & prosperity.

How do we accelerate this process?

Many of our current problems are the result of dysfunctional mental models.

Here are a few of the most debilitating:

• Top down, instead of bottom-up
• Leaders believe that they & they alone are qualified to identify & lead needed improvement efforts.
• "What can we learn from front-line team members?"

• Initiative-fever
• "To improve, we need to launch a bunch of new Initiatives! Wait, we'll need an Initiative Tsar!"

• We can manage all our 'Initiatives' from a distance, by the 'numbers'.
• "We don't have to go see. We don't have to get our hands dirty. You know, we don't even have to know that much about our business."

The result?

• Disengaged, pathetic team members
• "Ok, just tell us what to do..."

• Wasted potential
• "The problems & countermeasures are clear. Why doesn't our leadership ask us?"

• Absence of focus
• "Okay everybody, here's our list of 147 focus projects for 2012!"

Virtually all my books address these themes, across a variety of industries.

How do we change our thinking?

An esteemed sensei posed this question a long time ago.

It remains our key to the kingdom.

Cheers,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reprise: What is Big Company Disease and how do we get it?

By Pascal Dennis

Big Company Disease (BCD) is the antagonist in The Remedy, and the toughest opponent Tom Papas and Andy Saito have ever faced.

BCD infects companies once they reach a certain size. In a small business, you typically can see your customer and supplier.

You get to understand them and appreciate that your success depends on them. It keeps you humble and hungry to improve.

In other words, in small companies it’s much easier to develop & sustain direct, binary, self-diagnostic connections between suppliers & customers (both internal & external).

My favorite example of these is my Dad at the Imperial Grill, looking into each plate as it came back.

Did the customer eat everything?

If not, why not? He’d usually ask them directly. “Hey Mabel, why didn’t you finish your moussaka?”

Once a company grows to multiple sites, perhaps in different countries, and multiple divisions – customers and suppliers lose touch.

You can't wrap your mind or your arms around the organization. Out of site is out of mind. So you optimize what you can see -- your zone.

With the best of intentions, we optimize our unit -- often at the expense of overall effectiveness.

Not all big companies have BCG -- but all are prone to it.

We have to work hard to dispel the anaesthetizing fog, connect with our customers, make our purpose and our problems visible.

Lean Thinking & Lean Tools are geared to do this.

Then we have to continually work on our connections, and on involving everybody in improvement. It wakes us up.

Next time, more on The Fog…

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Lean Thinking and the Martial Arts

By Pascal Dennis

I spent 14 years in an Aikido dojo. Practice, practice, practice four times a week, month after month.

We began with the fundamental movements - called kata. There were a couple of dozen in all. When you combined them, endless combinations & permutations arose.

Once you absorbed the basic forms, which took years, you could begin to practice ‘free style’ - wherein you learned to react spontaneously in unpredictable situations.

Our senior sensei’s -- Kanai, Chiba, Yamada -- would emphasize the need for freedom within your technique, which they reinforced with ‘free-style’ practice.

What were our Kanai-, Chiba- and Yamada-sensei trying to teach us? Does their teaching relate to Lean transformations?

Been mulling this over for years. My thoughts are below. (I’d love to hear yours.)

Lean - like Aikido, Karate or any great tradition of learning & improvement – comprises a set of principles and practices which:

1. Have a clear Purpose,
2. Are connected to, and support one another, and
3. Are meant to be applied fluidly in ever more complex situations

Thus, our challenge is to continually translate and apply Lean principles in more complex situations, and across more and more industries – while remaining true to the core principles.

That’s the rub. If we lose touch with the fundamentals, then Lean is merely a set of tools.

Useful and worthy of respect, but unlikely to transform the way we work, or the results we get.

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Lean Thinking in IT

By Pascal Dennis

More and more of our coaching work is in the wonderful world of Information Technology.

Creative, eccentric, and never dull folks, who take naturally to Lean fundamentals.

Great fun for us helping them translate visual management, Level 1/2/3 stand-up meetings, structured problem solving and Strategy Deployment into their world.

Here’s a fine article about the splendid redesign of the UK government’s website (gov.UK) [Here]

Seems key to puzzle was to connect directly and personally with - wait for it – the customer.

Turns out the folks who use actually use UK.gov didn’t want any of the claptrap the bureaucrats had been insisting on.

The more things change, the more they stay the same…

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Lean Thinking & the EU Crisis

by Pascal Dennis

Here's another splendid HBR piece by the excellent Michael Jacobides.

Jacobides argues that the EU's educational establishment is doing a terrible disservice to its youth.

Europe's young people, he tells us, are, in effect, being educated for unemployment.

They are not learning skills critical to the 21C economy -- critical thinking, practical problem solving, teamwork.

These are core Lean thinking skills, of course. I would add a few more:

• Value & waste
• Visual management
• Standardized work,
• Basic flow & pull, and
• Strategy Deployment

That, collectively, is a curriculum a lot of people could get behind, no?

Well done, Dr. Jacobides.

Best regards,

Pascal

Lean Brain Boosters - Making the Invisible, Visible

By Pascal Dennis

Two years ago my colleague, Al Norval, and I were wresting with a tough question.

How do you make Lean principles visible?

Lean thinking, tools & leadership are often paradoxical & counter-intuitive.

Moreover, often they contravene accepted 'wisdom', at least as defined in our business & professional schools.

I've always loved doodling and my recently-published book The Remedy -- Bringing Lean Out of the Factory, which was full of them.

We had a brainwave.

Why not create doodles that expressed Lean fundamentals in a light-hearted, engaging way?

We started with a suite of 12 entitled Brain Boosters - Lean Thinking.

Ya'll seemed to like them, so we followed up with two more suites: Lean Tools and Lean Leadership.

We've been gratified by the response & believe Brain Boosters are a fine addition to the Kaizen toolkit.

Here's how people have been using them:

• Mental Models Self-Assessment
• For each card, have team members individually score the organization 
• 10 = Lean Thinking; 0 = Conventional Thinking
• Plot the results. What do they tell you?
• Pick a few “hot spots” & make an improvement plan
• Reassess again at year-end
• Theme of the Day
• At team huddles, give a card to a team member.
• Ask her to find examples of both Lean & Conventional Thinking & report back at shift-end. Any learning points?
• Rotate on a set cadence so everybody gets a chance
• Lean Training, Kaizen Workshops, Gemba Walks
• Pass out Brain Boosters at training & kaizen sessions.
• Carry them during gemba walks & use to reinforce the basics

From time to time people email us with other innovative uses.

(One company obtained the rights to the images & has turned them into posters, T-shirts, mouse pads and other training aids!)

We'd love to hear more of your stories.

Thanks, as always,

Pascal

Lean Laughs

Life Lessons - What is a Good Life?

By Pascal Dennis

Plato, Socrates and Aristotle asked this question 2,500 years ago.

Both eastern and western philosophy is largely the search for an answer.

Clayton Christensen, author of The Innovator's Dilemma, Harvard professor, and classic hyper-achiever is raising the same question.

A significant conversion -- master of the universe to philosopher.

In a recent Business Week interview, Dr. Christensen remarks that he was struck by how badly the lives of his fellow hyper-achievers had turned out.

Messy divorces, estranged kids, and even, in some cases, fraud and imprisonment.

Can Lean principles help to answer this most important question?

I believe it can.

In my view, Lean thinking is anchored in standards -- images of how things should be.

Values are standards. Integrity entails adherence to one's personal standards.

Those of you kind enough to read my books will notice an emphasis on the Cardinal Virtues.

Prudence, Temperance, Courage and Justice, are, of course, standards of behavior.

Low-down, miserable, tricky, treacherous beings such as us have a hard time living up to them.

But we have to try, and in doing so we partially succeed -- and that makes all difference.

In fact, if I had to hazard an answer to the above question, I'd say living a good life entails having good values, and trying to live up to them.

All for now,

Lean Leadership Excuse #3

By Al Norval

I work with leaders in many organizations that are making the transformation from a traditional way of thinking to Lean Thinking. Some are doing very well and some struggle with this transformation. In previous posts I’ve described a couple of the excuses I hear coming from Leaders about why they can’t make the transformation to Lean Thinking and Lean Leadership and truly lead their organizations to become the best they can be to deliver exceptional value to their customers.

Some of these excuses I’ve talked about in previous posts include:

“I don’t have time” and

“It’s so hard”

Today I’m going to talk about another excuse I hear more than I’d like to, which is:

“It’s easier just to tell people what to do”

This excuse goes right back to our Mental Model of Leader as a Teacher. In a traditional hierarchy with traditional thinking, the leader was the boss who often saw his role as telling people what to do. In a Lean environment, the Leader is a teacher who uses Socratic questioning to build the capability of the team. This is best done at Gemba by using real problems encountered by the team. By building the capability of the team, the team grows and is better able to solve problems in the future. The more capable people are, the more problems they can solve to root cause, the more time they free up for leaders to coach and mentor their team. It’s a very different skill set but one that starts a benevolent cycle of teaching, learning, and improving.

Leaders acting as teachers build the capability of the team but this takes time. Thus the dilemma – If I just tell people what to do, it’s easier and takes less time but people don’t learn, grow and develop their thinking. They learn to go to the boss and in extreme cases learn to do nothing until the boss tells them what to do. Since they keep coming to the boss asking what to do, there isn’t time to build the capability of the team.

So, I hear the excuse – It’s just easier to tell people what to do. Get it done, get it over with and just move on. Short term thinking with short term gains but no foundation for the future. Lean is a journey to True North with our people pulling us into the future. For our people to do that, leaders need to invest in building people’s capability one step at a time. It’s long term thinking with respect for people at its core and it’s not easy.

But just because something is easy, doesn’t mean it’s the right thing to do. That’s why it’s called Leadership, the ability to do the right things not just the easy things.

For more on Lean Mental Models, please see Lean Brain Boosters.

Cheers

Lean Leadership Excuse #2

By Al Norval

As I work with leaders in organizations who are making the transformation from a traditional way of thinking to Lean Thinking, I hear many stories about lack of leadership commitment. That seems like a fuzzy problem so I ask people how to make it concrete and real. The answer I get is people want to see evidence of leaders at Gemba daily, leading and involved in problem solving.

When I talk to leaders about why they can’t do this, I get a string of excuses, the most common one being “I don’t have time”. After that , the excuse I hear the second most often is:

“It’s so hard”.

A few weeks ago I wrote about the first excuse – lack of time. If you want to refresh on that excuse, please see our blog dated January 12, 2012.

And yes, change is hard but as leaders we need to step up to the plate and lead the organization towards True North. But why is even a change for the better, so hard to implement? I’m not an expert in organizational design by any means but I observe that organizations have an inertia to them. Much like Sir Isaac Newton, the great English mathematician, physicist and astronomer described as the first of his three universal laws of motion – “A body in motion tends to stay in motion unless acted upon by an external force”. In organizations we tend to perpetuate those things we’ve learned and practiced over the years and it requires energy to overcome that inertia.

The role of leaders is to be the force, that source of energy, that changes the inertia of the organization.

In adults it takes a great deal of energy to replace what we’ve learned and done in the past with something new even if that something new is better than what we already know and do.

As a great sensei one told me “You have many years of unlearning to do”

What’s the remedy? Daily practice at Gemba

We have to practice over and over again. It takes repetition and with repetition we build the muscles of the organization so it gets a little stronger every day. The key is to make time to go to Gemba every day. Over time the repetition becomes a habit and the organizational culture begins to change. As leaders - what you do is what you get. This is the water ring model of change. Start in one area of the organization and the change spreads across the organization like ripples across a pond. But it needs to be reinforced continually to overcome to inertia of the organization.

Is it hard to transform a culture and implement Lean? Yes, but by going to Gemba every day and starting small, the culture will change faster than you think is possible.

Cheers

Lean Laughs

Images and A3 Thinking

By Pascal Dennis

Seems Getting the Right Things Done has been helpful in teaching A3 Thinking, the "story-telling" approach to strategy.

I'm gratified by all the good people who've told me, "That book really helped us – thanks!"

We're hard-wired to tell stories -- that's what our ancestors on the African savannah did at day's end around the fire.

(They didn't show PowerPoint...)

Like any good story, a good A3 pulls you in...

"And what happens next?" you wonder.

Where do images fit in?

Assignment

Here's an assignment for folks that have gained proficiency developing A3s.

Turn your A3 over – now draw a picture that tells the story.

Don't worry if you "can't draw" – stick figures, circles and arrows are all you need.

Now tell the story to your team through the image.

The better your understanding of the problem, the easier this'll be – and the clearer your image.

We've tried to illustrate Lean Thinking, Tools and Leadership with our Brain Booster pocket cards and apps.

Hope they're helpful.

Cheers,

Pascal

Lean Laughs

Gary Kasparov and the Breakfast of Champions

By Pascal Dennis

Chess is arguably our greatest strategy game.

More books have been written about than for all other games combined.

Chess has infused our language: checkmate, stalemate, opening phase, end game, gambit...

Chess has such a strong hold on the human mind that chess champions are notoriously eccentric.

(Check out the recent, excellent documentary called Bobby Fischer vs. The Rest of the World)

Gary Kasparov, the greatest chess player of them all, is the exception.

After retiring in 2005, he has devoted himself to exposing Vladimir Putin's corrupt regime, and to leading Russia's fledgling pro-democracy forces.

He is also successful entrepreneur and author, and is happily married.

So his recent book about chess and business strategy is especially important.

It's called How Life Imitates Chess: Making the Right Moves - from the Board to the Boardroom.
Kasparov's insights into excellence are especially interesting.

What makes a champion?

Frequent, frank - even ruthless - reflection and self-assessment, Kasparov tells us.

Indeed, if we think of elite performers across a range of endeavors - Steve Jobs, Jack Welch, Michael Jordan, Jack Nicklaus, Tiger Woods (pre-implosion), Yoyo Ma, Yitzhak Perlman come to mind - we see the same pattern.

What's this got to do with you?

The Lean Business System is about elite performance.

It's best practitioners - Toyota, General Electric, Proctor & Gamble, United Technologies, Alcoa, Danaher and the like - ruthlessly self-assess, and adjust based on what they see.

Our improvement kata - tip of the hat to my pal, Mike Rother, is our driving force.

Here at Lean Pathways we've boiled the kata down - and call it Four-Step-Problem-Solving.

(There are others. I'm not into theology - pick a good one & get going...)

We supplement our kata with Brain Booster Pocket Cards and Apps.

But it's all about reflection and adjustment thereby - the Breakfast of Champions.

More about Kasparov in future blogs.

Sayonara ya'll.

Cheers,

Pascal

American Manufacturing Basics

By Al Norval

It’s hard to believe but in 1979, the US Manufacturing workforce peaked at 19.5 million jobs. Since then US Manufacturing jobs have declined by about 40% to 11.7 million jobs with much of the job loss occurring in the last decade. About half the job loss is due to jobs displaced by Chinese manufacturing and much of the rest due to improved labor productivity. Yet with productivity up substantially, the US is still the world’s manufacturing leader producing 19% of the world’s goods compared to China’s 15.6%.

This is quite a dilemma. Labor productivity must go up to enable US Manufacturers to compete with off shore manufacturers who often have lower labor rates. Yet as labor productivity goes up, we face having unused labor.

How do we deal with this in the Lean world? We want labor productivity yet this can often mean job losses as fewer people are required to maintain the same output.

Let’s go back to the basics of Lean and remember the principle of “Respect for Humanity”. This is very deep and can have multiple interpretations but in this case it means that improvements in labor productivity must never result in lay-offs or people being let go to “cash out the gains”. Instead Lean views the unused labor as unused capacity to produce more goods and produce more improvement. Rather than overproduce goods (one of the biggest causes of waste), people are used to drive out waste and solve problems resulting in stronger processes. This allows Manufacturing to work with Sales and Marketing to open new markets and launch new products, both of which drive up volume and use up the excess capacity that was generated.

Organizations that do this are on an upward spiral. The more improvement they get, the more people can be freed up to drive more improvement. At each loop, costs go down allowing volume to go up driving a need to use some people to produce the additional goods.

Sometimes this is short term pain for long term gain as it takes time to develop new markets and launch new products but isn’t that just another opportunity to apply Lean?

This all becomes possible if we view Lean as a growth strategy, rather than a cost reduction strategy and we stay true to the basic principles of Lean including “Respect for Humanity”.

For more on this and other Lean principles see the Lean Manifesto at www.leansystems.org.

Cheers

Alistair Norval

Humor in Adult Learning

By Al Norval

We in the Lean community have a unique challenge. We need to be both students as well as teachers at the same time. While we are rapidly learning and applying many new things, we have an obligation to teach others in our work groups or organizations what we have learned. Part of this is the concept of Yokoten, the rapid sharing of information laterally throughout the organization. This requires a mature Lean organization with systems and structures developed to ensure this happens. More on the topic of Yokoten in a later blog.

For today, I wanted to talk about teaching and adult learning. Adults learn differently from children. Kids are sponges for information. Adults on the other hand are full up or overloaded with information. In order to learn, adults have to replace what they have previously learned. To make matters more complicated, adult retention of things they have learned can be as low as around 10%.

In summary, adults are tougher to teach and retain less of what we teach them. This makes it tough for us in the Lean community to fulfill our role as a teacher.

What are some possible countermeasures to this?

The first countermeasure is “Learn by Do”. The act of applying the learning drives it deeper and makes it real. But what is it about “Doing” that drives higher learning and retention? Because people are involved in “Doing”, their brains create more neural connections with the activity than with just passive listening to a talk about the subject. The more active the participation, the more neural connections are formed and the higher the learning and retention. That’s why just listening to lectures has low learning while Learn by Doing has a much higher retention rate of the learning.

But how to drive the learning even higher?

The first is to teach others. We learn by teaching. After all, you’ve got to know a subject before you can teach it. Nothing tests your knowledge of a subject as much as trying to teach others.

Lastly, adults learn best when the learning environment is light and has some humor. Again we can see how humor creates more neural connections by triggering emotions and so enhances the learning experience.

How to add humor to the learning environment – through the use of images. Not all of us are comedians so we need props. Images with a light, humorous touch provide that and help create a learning environment that is conducive to adults both learning and retaining what has been taught.

Putting this all together, a process of a little training using light images, followed by doing, followed by rapid feedback creates rapid learning cycles that drive home the key learning points in adults. Practicing these ourselves enables us in the Lean community to fulfill our mission as being both students and teachers.

For more information on the use of Lean images to add some humor into your training, visit the Lean Pathways Shop.

Social Media & the Lean Business System -- Risks & Opportunities

By Pascal Dennis,

Been thinking a lot about this lately.

Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, as well as, the abundance of cell phone apps -- what do they mean for Lean thinkers?

Seems to me social media represent a powerful new learning channel -- provided we keep the fundamentals in mind.

Yokoten -- means shared, lateral, experiential learning.

We learn by doing -- not by browsing.

If we spend too much time at our screens -- we sacrifice depth.

Depth of understanding requires action followed by reflection -- away from your screen.

Use the screen to supplement your knowledge.

Then turn the damned thing off and get to the gemba, where you must practice, practice, practice.

Social media are marvelous, helpful and oh so seductive. Used properly, they're a boon.

But they're no substitute for experience, for the school of hard knocks, of growth & learning.

Regards,

Pascal

Curing What Ails Our Hospitals

By Al Norval

I read this article in a recent issue of Fortune magazine and have to admit it was the catchy title that caught my interest. "Curing What Ails Our Hospitals” went on to talk about a new design for hospitals that dealt with three problems that afflict most current hospitals. That is:

Infections
Energy Efficiency
High Cost

The article stated that infections were the leading cause of death in US hospitals.

In a play on words, the article quoted Norman Cousins saying that “A hospital is no place for a person who was seriously ill”.

I think that one line summarizes the state of Healthcare in North America.

Rather than just stating the obvious, the authors did offer several countermeasures. I’ve summarized the approach this way – improving the quality of patient care by reducing hospital induced infections will result in lower a length of stay for many patients. A shorter length of stay translates into savings and improved patient (Customer) satisfaction. Combine that with energy efficient buildings and a focus on prevention using team based care and the costs of healthcare can be brought back into line. Makes sense to me – I’d be interested in your opinions.

Their ideas for team based care included small neighbourhood hospitals which sounded a lot like SMED and small lot size needed for flow. Flow occurs in the absence of waste and I could visualize many waste reduction ideas in their design. Having the doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and others involved in patient care work as a team eliminates many forms of waste and more importantly allows the team to problem solve quickly and efficiently.

It all comes back to the basics of Lean:

Eliminate waste
Focus on the Customer
Engage team members in problem solving

By doing this, costs will take care of themselves.