What is a Self-Improving System?

 

What is a people network? Connectedness, shared information and reciprocity.  What does it look like? Short, focused, connected huddles around visual boards. Why does it matter?  A strong network is like a nervous system. Think quick response, adjustment and learning. If you pull it off, it’s a gold mine. So how do you build one?

Building a Self-Improving System.

Here are some key elements.

·       Clarity & alignment around Aspiration & Winning Logic. Each level and team translate the these into a tactics & metrics they track on their huddle boards.

·       A Big Room called an ‘Obeya’ (aka Control Tower, Cockpit) that serves as ‘mission control’. The Obeya answers the big strategy questions at a glance. What should be happening? What’s actually happening? What are the biggest blockers & what are we doing about them?

·       Information flows up, and support flows down. “Here's how we're doing, and here are the blockers. Can you please help with this one & that one, boss?”

·       World class problem solving – more to come on this topic in future posts

·       Clear roles: It’s understood that the team owns the problem. Senior leaders help remove the blockers that are beyond the team’s control

What are the enablers?

·       Simple visual standards for all important work

·       Repeatable operating rhythms at each level.

·       Visual management - at a glance understanding of what’s happening

·       Strong connections between teams in the form of Ok/Not Ok tests.

·       Clear rules of engagement such as:

o   Make problems visible – they’re gold

o   Warm heart principle. Hard on the problem but easy on the people. Remember the problem is usually in the process.

o   Respectful inquiry. Leave your rank at the door. Listen more than you speak.

o   Evidence-based management – no Zebras or Hippos![i]

 

Common Blockers

Common failures modes include poor (i.e. invisible, low quality, incomplete) information flow, lack of shared Purpose, and an overly rigid strategy deployment system.

Team Hassles: The ideal team size is typically between 5 & 9 people (e.g. Amazon’s famous ‘two pizza teams’). This sweet spot balances the need for diverse skills & perspectives against the communication & coordination challenges that plague larger groups. There are many other team-related hassles well described by Patrick Lencioni and others.

Information Hassles: E.g. Information that is incomplete, low quality or invisible. Team boards can be both analogue & Digital, but a messy analogue board is more compelling.

Lack of Shared Purpose: Have we articulated our purpose in clear simple language?  Can team members explain in their own words? Leadership is oratory, leadership is storytelling.

Dysfunctional Cultural Norms: Reciprocity means ‘you scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours’.  Incentive structures obviously help but are not enough. Cultural norms around Safety, Respect for People, Teamwork and other core principles drive reciprocity.  Great companies provide continual nudges in this direction. Leaders at every level have a shared set of values that they reinforce through shared ‘ceremonies’.  Culture is what you do when nobody is watching.  Over time these shared routines and norms permeate you way of thinking and behaving.

Here’s an example from early in my career. The scene: my first day at Toyota, in the manager onboarding program.  Our instructor began by drawing three ovals, one at a time, and labelling each:

·       Oval 1: something for the customer & community

·       Oval 2: something for the team member

·       Oval 3: something for the company

My fellow trainees and I stared at the Toyota logo.  It’s a nudge I’ve never forgotten.

That said, please do not copy Toyota or any other company. Make a system that fits your company, culture and industry.  Weave in the fundamentals, run experiments and keep getting better.

Best regards,

Pascal Dennis

E: pascal.dennis@leansystems.org

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[i] Highest paid person’s opinion; Zero expertise but really arrogant.

Neither Too Rigid, Nor Too Loose

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

When it comes to fundamentals like Strategy, Management System, Standardized Work, Quality in the Process and the like, it’s easy to become rigid and even doctrinaire.

After all, these are the concepts that underlie TPS, the ‘world’s most powerful production system’. In the circumstances, we’re right to be doctrinaire, aren’t we?

“We have to have four mother A3s – one each for People, Quality, Delivery and Cost! We have to have strategy A3s and dashboards for everything!

Standardized work means Content-Sequence-Timing-Expected Outcome! Quality in the Process means detect the abnormality, stop the process, fix the immediate problem and develop countermeasures for root causes!”

No doubt, you’ve heard this sort of thing too.

In fact, as we apply these timeless ideas in areas further and further from manufacturing, finesse is of the essence, and rigidity, a recipe for failure.

The further from manufacturing we get, the more important it is the we translate the principles, and not insist, “This is how did things at Toyota, or Honeywell, or Proctor & Gamble or…”

This is a major challenge for ‘Lean’ practitioners in these times of tumultuous change. Who cares if your muffler manufacturing factory has the best SMED process in the industry?

Demand for mufflers is going nowhere but down, no? But the principles underlying SMED – separate internal & external work, convert internal work to external work etc. – transcend manufacturing.

SMED principles can readily be applied to shortening changeover times in healthcare, aviation, and software design.

The same applies to any ‘Lean’ principle. Principles are eternal, countermeasures temporary.

And this reflects the deeper challenge facing the Lean movement these days.

Is ‘Lean’ a principles-based profession, or a skilled trade? The distinction is important.

I don’t want to be misunderstood. I respect and admire skilled tradespeople. They’re an honorable and essential element of successful organizations.

But they’re insufficient if you want to transform an organization or an industry. For that you need principles.

Principles are harder to internalize than countermeasures. But principles are eternal, whereas countermeasures are temporary.

Which brings me to the title of this piece, which a wise old gentleman taught me many years ago. The old gentleman is gone, and I am his scarcely adequate proxy.

Neither too rigid, nor too loose, expresses reflects the subtlety and intelligence needed to apply principles in ever more complex situations.

It reflects the need to be humble and learn from quick experiments – because we don’t really know, and can’t really know what’s going on unless we study the situation.

As a colleague likes to say, “If your first hypothesis isn’t embarrassing, you’re not really trying.”

Good advice in a world where Value is often a vague shadowy thing, and changing with every new technological miracle.

Best regards,

Pascal