The Fog of Big Company Disease

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Last time I talked about Big Company Disease and suggested that a key symptom is The Fog…

(It’s fun capitalizing it, and reminds me of a goofy same-name horror movie.

A pal & I have had great fun making up horror movie titles related to, ahem, other atmospheric emissions.)

Joking aside, the Fog is deeply frustrating and debilitating. Here are some symptoms:

Your purpose is unclear. You're not sure who your customers or suppliers are.

You don't know if you're ahead or behind.

You can't see your biggest problems.

So you spend a great deal of time in the "spin cycle".

Life becomes unpleasant so you naturally look for someone to blame.

You buffer the chaos with capacity -- your time.

Eventually, you burn out.

The leader’s most important job, in my view, is making the current condition visible – by gradually dispersing the Fog.

Visual management, standardized work and other core Lean tools are terrific enablers.

Lean principles & thinking are even better.

Best regards,

Pascal




In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…

What is a Team?
Target, Actual, Please Explain
Why Do ‘Smart’ People Struggle with Strategy?
Social Media & the Lean Business System -- Risks & Opportunities

Is Lean a Set of Principles or a Set of Tools?

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

“What is your thinking way, Pascal-san?”

Thanks all, for your thoughtful replies to the above question. Fine insights from many good people.

I’m reminded of a gemstone, that when held to the light reveals an array of color.

I suggested that Lean is a set of principles that turn into methods & tools, and that the latter may vary with the application.

Principles are ideas; methods are the action that bring them to life. To quote my friend & colleague, Skip Steward, “Principles and methods work hand in hand. Without one, the other will fail…”

A core principle like ‘Make Problems Visible’ will entail different methods in different situations. Different methods in, say, a consumer goods supply chain, than in a hospital pharmacy.

Much of my personal practice entails coaching senior executives. I start with the principles, which immediately gets their interest. Underlying message: “Lean is a transformational strategy, hard to do, but a game-changer.”

Starting with tools sends a different message. “Lean is like a skilled trade – helpful, useful, worth doing, but not a game-changer.”

Many of you wrote that Lean is a culture, a way of thinking. Well said, and I would add: we create a culture when a large group of people understand, absorb and consistently practice a set of principles.

Our Toyota senseis emphasized principles above all. A common question: “What is your thinking way?”

Lean principles (thinking) are the road to transformation. They open the door for elegant, intuitive and useful Lean methods, and help senior leaders understand Lean’s full potential.

Best regards,

Pascal

Reprise: The Fog of Big Company Disease

By Pascal Dennis

Last time I talked about Big Company Disease and suggested that a key symptom is The Fog…

(It’s fun capitalizing it, and reminds me of a goofy same-name horror movie.

A pal & I have had great fun making up horror movie titles related to, ahem, other atmospheric emissions.)

Joking aside, the Fog is deeply frustrating and debilitating. Here are some symptoms:

Your purpose is unclear. You're not sure who your customers or suppliers are.

You don't know if you're ahead or behind.

You can't see your biggest problems.

So you spend a great deal of time in the "spin cycle".

Life becomes unpleasant so you naturally look for someone to blame.

You buffer the chaos with capacity -- your time.

Eventually, you burn out.

The leader’s most important job, in my view, is making the current condition visible – by gradually dispersing the Fog.

Visual management, standardized work and other core Lean tools are terrific enablers.

Lean principles & thinking are even better.

Best regards,

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

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.

Why Lean in Sales?

By Pascal Dennis

Why indeed? Isn’t Lean a factory thing?

Well, no…

Lean is a business system comprising the entire enterprise.

The Toyota Business System, for example, addresses the three critical “loops”:

1. Design
   
2. Make
   
3. Sell
   

Guess which one is considered most important? Sell – because it’s closest to the customer.

Sales are about information. What features does the customer want? At what price point? What promotions does he respond to? How does she want to receive her products or service?

How was our last promotion perceived? And so on...

Production (Operations), usually our most valuable & expensive asset, runs on information. We only make what our information tells us to make.

If our information is wonky, our most valuable asset is unlikely to operate in its sweet spot. Result: overproduction, inventory and all the associated ills.

So how do we introduce Lean in Sales?

Here are some questions to get you started:

1. What is value in Sales? (Who are our internal & external customers and what do they need from us?)
   
   
2. What is waste?
   
   
3. What are some core mental models in our Sales department?
   
   
4. What are our current processes for delivering this value?
   
   
5. How aligned are they to delivering the value our customers expect?
   
   
6. How do we improve them?
   

Lean is harder outside the factory – because our product & processes are typically invisible.

If you make scrap in a factory, everyone can see it. “Hey, we made a whole pile of junk yesterday…”

In business processes, by contrast, you can’t see the scrap. A good forecast & a bad forecast look identical…

On the plus side, sales folks are usually smart & creative. If you introduce the fundamentals with finesse, they run with them.

For more, check out The Remedy – Bringing Lean Out of the Factory to Transform the Entire Organization, and our Lean Leadership Brain Booster suite.

That’s all for now.

Pascal

Aikido and Lean

By Pascal Dennis

Aikido is the Japanese martial art developed by Morehei Ueshiba -- one the greatest Japanese senseis.

I studied aikido for fifteen years -- hard practice 3 or 4 times a week, as well as, summer camps in New England and beyond.

My aikido training has never left me. When I joined Toyota I felt instantly at home.

"I get it, this is a dojo..."

Now, years later, I'm still practicing the techniques our aikido senseis taught us.

Go slow, stop and fix, repeat...

(I pause here and respectfully bow to the late, lamented

• Kanai-sensei of Boston Aikikai, and

• Kawahara-sensei of British Columbia Aikikai)

Turns out this is the best way to learn -- (see Dan Coyne's The Talent Code for more).

I'll say it again: Go slow, stop and fix, repeat...

So easy to say...

Do we have the guts & discipline to do?

Cheers,

Pascal

Success is the Enemy of Future Success

By Pascal Dennis

Strategy Deployment begins with True North -- our strategic and philosophical purpose.

True North entails developing a clear picture of

1. Ideal condition, and
   
   
2. Target condition.
   

At the process level, this means answering questions like:

"Is the process behaving as expected?"

Corollaries: Do I understand my process? Is our hypothesis sound? If not, how do we adjust it?

"Is there creative tension in our management process?

Corollaries: Are problems visible? Are we challenging ourselves or simply resting on our oars?

True North works much the same at the broad strategic level.

In my view, its purpose, at each "level of magnification", is to create discomfort, and reflection (hansei) thereby.

Wakefulness, if you will.

Success is the enemy of future success.

What quality do outstanding individuals (and organizations) share?

Relentless self-examination -- after defeat, and more importantly, after success.

As evidence, I'd offer Michael Jordan, Jack Nicklaus, Garry Kasparov, Pablo Picasso, and all great sports teams...

Regards,

Pascal

East Meets West in the Toyota Production System

By Pascal Dennis

Fall is a good time to reflect on fundamental questions.

What's so special about TPS?

Okay, it has a very good track record in manufacturing and has spread into health care, construction, finance and other sectors.

But over the centuries, have there been other successful management innovations?

What's the big deal?

I believe TPS is unique because it represents a magnificent blending of cultures.

The American occupation of Japan after WWII brought the best of East and West together.

American muscle, optimism and engineering prowess met Japan's (and hence, China's) social, psychological and spiritual inventiveness.

The result -- TPS -- represents an entirely new way of managing.

When ideas "mate" interesting things happen.

Scientific Management, as espoused by Taylor, Ford, Deming and others, enriched -- and was enriched -- by Eastern systems of thinking and feeling.

What other management system combines the rationality of time and motion studies, with the humanity and humor of continuous incremental improvement?

Every day a little up...

What other system is as comfortable with Zen-like paradox?

Lead as if you have no power?

Stop production so it never has to stop...

And what other system embraces the impossibility of perfection, while insisting we must work toward it every day?

TPS is a splendid marriage of East and West, of rationality and intuition, of Left & Right brain.

We're lucky to have it.

So here's an overdue tip of the hat to all those half-forgotten dreamers, engineers and managers who first intuited TPS in the 1940's and 50's.

Arigato gozaimashita!

Cheers,

Pascal

The Paradox of Standards

By Pascal Dennis

The Toyota Business system is full of paradox -- one of the many things that make it unique.

Standards are one its most paradoxical elements.

Standardized work (STW), for example, the best way we currently know to do a given task.

Our Lean Brain Booster pocket cards and apps teach that we need "simple, visual standards for all important things."

I was taught that STW comprises:

• Work content,
• Sequence
• Timing, and
• Expected outcome

Pretty strict, no?

You'd think, therefore, that STW would be restricting...

But STW frees you up -- for learning and improvement!

My wife, Pamela, teaches kindergarten. Her class includes a number of youngsters with special needs (autism, learning disabilities etc)

Children have difficulty with basic activities like tying their shoe laces, washing their hands, and going to the bathroom.

The latter, in particular, is rife with anxiety for many kids.

So, Pamela developed simple, visual standards for each of these activities.

Result: no accidents, anxiety or humiliation.

Effect: kids have more energy for learning. I'm very happy to report that Pamela's kids are thriving.

Lesson: Standards set you free.

Cheers,

Pascal

Why Images?

By Pascal Dennis

As you may know, we've worked hard to illustrate Lean Thinking, Tools & Leadership with doodles.

We've developed three corresponding suites of Brain Booster Pocket Cards, as well as an App (& more to come).

We're lucky to have a gifted artist in Dianne Caton.

But even the humblest drawings (like mine) can be interesting.

My latest book, The Remedy, is full of my scribbles, which Di transformed charmingly.

Images go directly to the limbic brain -- the timeless world of direct experience, memory & intuition -- where learning happens.

The rational or Left brain is helpful in processing and applying learning.

But we learn largely in our limbic brain.

Our limbic brain likes stories, images, drama, emotion...

Disengaged students don't learn. Accident victims, who tragically have suffered damage here, also struggle to learn.

So...in our own modest way, we're trying to connect with the seat of learning.

Humor also helps. It's a grim world -- the "Light Touch" has always been my ideal.

People learn best when they're laughing.

Cheers,

Pascal

The Value of Images

By Al Norval

What is the value of an image?

We’ve all heard the old adage – “A picture is worth a thousand words” but what is the real value that’s implied by this phrase? We all know that value is driven by the customer so what value do customers see in images?

Let’s start at the beginning - who is the customer of the image? It’s the person who is receiving the information the image is conveying.

What do the customers want? To receive the information in the least waste way; this means understanding it at a glance and to be able to retain the information.


Let’s look at an example situation. We have new hires into the organization and are trying to bring them up to speed quickly and safely without compromising quality. They are the customers of our training process. We use a TWI based process where we have an experienced trainer and standardized work.

Would our customers, the trainees, see value in images so they can tie what their instructor has shown them to the critical elements of the work? Of course! Images reduce training time and take away much of the confusions that occur when using only words even when we show people as well as talk them through the steps.

Would our customers, the trainees, see value in being able to use images to poke yoke their standard work after the training? Again the answer is Yes. Simple images trigger recall of key learning points.

What is it that makes images so powerful in learning a new concept? Images are much deeper, richer and convey more information. Our brain reacts differently to images. Images cause an emotional connection to be formed in our brains so we form more neural connections with images than with words only. This means we have a greater rate of retention with images and a faster recall of the learning point.

My observation from working with many different organizations is that most training consists of slide after slide of PowerPoint? Why? Because it fits into computer systems better. In reality, our minds work so much faster than the words appear on the screen that we become bored and don’t retain the key teaching points. I believe that images are undervalued in training and we in the Lean community should be striving to change this as part of our work.

For more information on the use of Lean images in training, see Lean Pathways Images.

How Do You Motivate People to Keep Asking Why?

By Pascal Dennis,

What's the most common attribute of great organizations?

Problem solving...

Whether problems of design, marketing, manufacturing or distribution -- great companies are full of problem solvers.

Toyota's famous Five Why technique has been widely adopted now -- but results vary widely.

Some cultures get it -- others, not so much.

Here are a few thoughts as to why...
To get to root cause, you have to keep asking why. You have to care...

People have to feel, "This is my machine, department, factory, company." and "Getting to root cause benefits me."

So how do leaders create this sense of ownership, loyalty and esprit de corps?

Focus on Safety first -- everything else (Quality, Delivery, Cost...) follows.

Safety is our window on the process, as well as, as concrete message to team members:

“You’re our most valuable asset. We’re going to keep you safe, we’re not going to lay you off except in the direst of circumstances and as a last resort, and we’re going to teach you stuff that’ll make you even more valuable to us.”

Who wouldn’t want to work at a place like that?

Pascal
P.S. We've launched our Lean Leadership Brain Boosters -- to help lock in the fundamentals. Would love to get your feedback on them.

The Purpose of True North

By Al Norval,

Many companies as they implement Lean and go through a Lean transformation, develop a continuous improvement system modelled after the “Toyota Production System”. These come in all kinds of names and formats ranging from …Production System to … Business System and all manner of variations in between. Often these are just a collection of tools and other stuff and really don’t make up a true system.

If we zoom out and look at the definition of a system, we see that a system can be defined as:

“an inter-related set of parts with a clearly defined outcome”

So the parts of a system are all connected to one another and have to fit together like the pieces of a puzzle. Standardized Work needs to have 5S and Visual Controls in place for it to work. Without them, we could never get repeatable cycles of work. We would be endlessly searching for things. Even with them, there are many interruptions and disruptions to the standard cycles of work which we need to turn into problems and launch problem solving.

So we can see how the parts of a system are related to one another but what about the purpose? A system must have a clearly defined purpose. True North gives us that purpose.

True North defines the outcomes of the system and where we want the system to take us in the future. In essence it pulls us into the future.

True North defines the Philosophical and Strategy Objectives of the organization. It is comprised of two parts:

- Hard Goals that speak to the head and define the hard business targets

- Broadbrush Hoshins that speak to the heart and define direction, purpose and values

Together these are deployed through the organization to align and focus the organization. An analogy I like to use is one of river. The river flows to the ocean which is True North. The broadbrush Hoshins define the banks of the river. The river can take many paths to get to the ocean but we want it to remain inside it’s banks. Along the way it encounters rapids which are problems which must be resolved for the journey to the ocean to continue but all the time the river continues to flow to the ocean.

For more on True North and Lean Leadership, please see Lean Leadership Brain Boosters at http://leansystems.org/cart.php?page=pocket_cards

Lean & Green

By Al Norval,

A topic that doesn’t get as much time as it deserves is the relationship between Lean and Green.

We know that Lean is based on Team Members driving the elimination of waste to provide our Customers with more value. Toyota has summarized these in three key principles:

• Continuous Improvement
• Elimination of Waste
• Respect for Humanity

Green has become the symbolic color of environment protection and social justice. It was chosen for its association with nature, health and growth.

But how are they related?

One of the key tenets of Lean is “do more with Less”
– less human effort, less time and less resources so we’re able to turn our inputs into outputs faster with less waste.

Normally we think of this as the waste of production materials but let’s look deeper and see what other wastes we can uncover. This means less waste in:

• The water & energy used to produce the materials
• The effort, equipment & energy required to move the materials
• The man-power, materials and energy needed to build equipment that over-produces to customer demand
• The energy required to heat & cool buildings built to house these over-sized pieces of equipment
• Information systems needed to track the materials and transactions
• The effort needed to maintain all this extra stuff

The list is almost endless. The truth is our current cost systems don’t track these types of wastes very well, if at all, so they form part of a large, barely visible mountain of waste. The Remedy to this is to begin to see waste with a new set of eyes and that begins with developing a new set of Mental Models to guide us. The Lean Thinking Brain Booster pocket cards are a great starting point for anyone beginning this journey and for people who need a quick refresher.

Elimination of Waste – great for customers, Team Members, Shareholders and good for the environment.

 

Creativity & Innovation

By Al, Norval,

In a previous blog I wrote the problem of organizations pushing products out to customers rather than having customer problems pull products from Designers. As a countermeasure to this, Lean Innovation needs to:

 

• Develop a deep understanding of Customer problems through direct observation of the customer experience
• Eliminate waste from our Product Design processes  
• Carry multiple alternative deeper into the design process to allow time to explore alternatives

 

Doing this allows the creation of an environment that fosters creativity and innovative solutions to customer problems can come alive.

But how do we become creative all of a sudden? Many times I’ve heard it said, you can’t schedule an invention.

We start by “thinking like a twelve year old”. Why think like a twelve year old? We invoke our twelve year old mindset since it was one of curiosity that wasn’t encumbered by the structured learning process adults go through. An unfortunate by-product of this learning process is that adults stop asking why and how. To think like a twelve year old, we must unlearn many of things we learned becoming adults.

To help us with this new way of thinking we look for seven alternatives for any problem we are faced with. Why seven alternatives? Developing a couple of alternatives is easy but developing seven is difficult. This causes us to stretch and begin to think out of the box. To further assist us in our creative thinking we look for inspiration from nature. Natural designs are elegant in their simplicity. Understanding this and applying them to our problem leads to creative alternatives we would never have come up with before.

Developing seven alternatives is one thing but we must then quickly turn them into working prototypes. Not fancy and costly prototypes but quick and crude physical mock-ups. We need to make the intangible concepts into something people can look at, touch, feel and even listen to and smell. We activate all of our senses to help us learn more about the prototype. We call this type of learning “Trystorming”. It’s brainstorming with a practical, physical application that accelerates the learning process which becomes a platform for even more creative ideas. We use the learning from several prototypes to refine our designs and converge on an optimal solution.

All the while we’re practicing PDCA and with rapid experimentation and feedback.

Can we schedule inventions? – No, but we can certainly accelerate the process of designing creative value added solutions for our Customer problems.

Paying more than list price.

Target Conditions vs Random Acts of Improvement.

What can we do vs what do we need to do.