Scatter - Our Nemesis

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Big Company Disease has many causes.

One of the most subtle is our inability to ‘wrap our arms around’ the PDCA cycle.

Myriad improvement cycles begin – but they become fragmented:

• Group A develops the Plan,
• Group B deploys,
• Group C checks the Plan, and
• Group D adjusts it.

I call this Scatter, with a deep bow to the late, great Al Ward – friend, colleague & profound Lean thinker.

Al described this syndrome to me over lunch a decade ago, and then again in his splendid book Lean Product & Process Design.

Improvement, whether a Kaizen Workshop, Problem Solving cycle or Strategy A3, requires complete PDCA cycles

One person (or team) needs to wrap her arms around the cycle, and thereby develop the profound, sympathetic knowledge central to breakthrough.

Thereby, our entire brains start firing – Left, Right, prefrontal cortex etc.

The countermeasures we select are usually simple and clear.

There’s usually a sense of release. “Of course! Why didn’t we see it before!”

As opposed to the ponderous, countermeasure-by-committee stuff that blights so many report outs.

So how to reduce Scatter?

Lean fundamentals like visual management and Leader standard work are a good start.

Veteran Lean companies like Toyota have developed the Chief Engineer role in Design, and Key Thinker (aka Deployment Leader or Pacemaker) role in Strategy Deployment.

Their job is to oversee & manage broad PDCA cycles – and to record & share the learning.

There are all a good place to start in your never-ending battle with Scatter.

Best regards,

Pascal



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

The Biggest Weakness is Contemporary Business Culture?
What Makes a Great Sensei?
Beware Prizes, Belts & Self-appointed Experts
Aikido & Lean – It’s All the Same

Value Stream Maps

By Al Norval (bio)

Last week I came across an organization with a value stream map hanging on their conference room wall. What’s the big surprise with this? In fact it’s no big surprise at all as I often see this happen. Teams do a wonderful job of mapping their Current State and identifying different sources of waste and various kaizen they are planning on doing to eliminate it. This team had even added a timeline and calculated a leadtime for their value stream which is something I don’t usually see.

What was my concern?

I could see their Current State map but I couldn’t see their Future State map nor what business gap they were trying to close. A Future State is driven by a business need and that need comes from the organization’s strategy. The strategy says what objectives we need to achieve as a business and outlines at a high level how we are going to achieve it. Often the strategy goes on to say what we’re not going to do to meet the business needs or targets and quite frankly this is another often overlooked step but that’s the subject of another blog.

The Value Stream takes this strategy and develops the tactics describing what the value stream needs to improve to meet the business objectives of the organization. There is a direct link between the kaizen and the improvements the value stream is making and the business objectives it needs to deliver to the organization. This link means a testable hypothesis is formed “If we do this, then we will get that”. It’s a simple binary test that can be checked at every review session.

This is a very different approach from the one that says – map the current state, identify waste, drive improvement and remove waste and see what results we achieve. This approach doesn’t set up a hypothesis, doesn’t use the scientific method and although it can lead to some improved business results, doesn’t stretch us to experiment, try new things and learn rapidly, all of which are required parts of a lean system.

What I’d wish I’d seen in the organization I visited last week, was a Current State map, a clear business target with gap identified, a Future State map and a plan on how to close the gap.

Now there are several testable hypothesis:

• Does the Future State close the gap to the business objective?
• Does the plan close the gap to the Future State?

By following the PDCA cyle and doing a Check/ Adjust against these questions, organizations can learn a great deal and accelerate their improvement efforts. More importantly, the improvements are driven by a business need rather than being random acts of improvement.

Cheers

Al


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

What is a Key Thinker?
Macro Value Stream Kaizen – Zoology
Poka-Yoke – Preventing Inadvertent Errors
Making the Invisible Visible in Design Projects

PDCA - the Pounding Heart Muscle of Life

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Plan-Do-Check-Adjust - so easy to say.

An inexperienced young fellow recently said to me, "PDCA is too easy. I need something more..."

At his age, I was thick too. The mist gradually cleared for me, as I'm sure it will for him.

My Toyota sensei once said, "Ten years to learn Plan, ten for Do, ten for Check and ten for adjust. I am beginning to understand PDCA now."

Forty years - for one the world's top auto executives.

There isn't much that's truly new. And there are eternal verities, like PDCA.

How often are we distracted, like crows, by the latest shiny object?

How many people are distracted by the latest get-rich-quick scheme -- Real Estate! Gold! Emerging Markets!

How many folks fall under the spell of latest & greatest motivational speaker?

Some of these may have merit in the short term.

But the real road to success is PDCA, the pounding heart muscle of the universe.

Inhale & exhale, expand & contract, wax & wane.

PDCA distinguishes us from the animals. It informs, or should inform, all human activity

So with all respect to Tom Robbins and Oprah, we already know the answer.

The 'silver bullet' is right in front of us. It's difficult, humbling work, but it works.

As we used to say at our old Toyota factory, "If you follow the recipe, you get a Big Mac every time..."

Best,

Pascal


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

Want to Make Better Decisions? Simplify…
How do Adults Learn?
Back to Basics – Visual Management
Back to Basics – Visual Order

Scatter - Our Nemesis

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

Big Company Disease has many causes.

One of the most subtle is our inability to ‘wrap our arms around’ the PDCA cycle.

Myriad improvement cycles begin – but they become fragmented:

• Group A develops the Plan,
• Group B deploys,
• Group C checks the Plan, and
• Group D adjusts it.

I call this Scatter, with a deep bow to the late, great Al Ward – friend, colleague & profound Lean thinker.

Al described this syndrome to me over lunch a decade ago, and then again in his splendid book Lean Product & Process Design.

Improvement, whether a Kaizen Workshop, Problem Solving cycle or Strategy A3, requires complete PDCA cycles

One person (or team) needs to wrap her arms around the cycle, and thereby develop the profound, sympathetic knowledge central to breakthrough.

Thereby, our entire brains start firing – Left, Right, prefrontal cortex etc.

The countermeasures we select are usually simple and clear.

There’s usually a sense of release. “Of course! Why didn’t we see it before!”

As opposed to the ponderous, countermeasure-by-committee stuff that blights so many report outs.

So how to reduce Scatter?

Lean fundamentals like visual management and Leader standard work are a good start.

Veteran Lean companies like Toyota have developed the Chief Engineer role in Design, and Key Thinker (aka Deployment Leader or Pacemaker) role in Strategy Deployment.

Their job is to oversee & manage broad PDCA cycles – and to record & share the learning.

There are all a good place to start in your never-ending battle with Scatter.

Best regards,

Pascal

Design Thinking and the PDCA Cycle

By Pascal Dennis (bio)

To everything there is a season

In a world of tumultuous and endless technological change, Design Thinking has rightly become a core methodology.

In many industries, we can no longer confidently claim that we understand the customer’s problems. An thus, we can no longer define Value with any certainty.

A generation ago we rediscovered, seemingly, Deming’s Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle.

Deming’s work, in turn, was heavily informed by Walter Shewhart and the idea that operational data comprised both a signal and noise.

And that through patient observation and statistical methods, we could separate the proverbial wheat from the chaff.

Before Shewhart, Deming and the other great pioneers of modern management, business processes were essentially unknown – unknowable.

(In a some sectors this is still the case, no? The ‘Noble Savage’ approach to management…)

Both Deming and Shewhart informed our Toyota senseis. Every day, a little up, Pascal-san!

Is Design Thinking entirely new? Or is our current expression of the timeless ideas that Shewhart and Deming conveyed in generations past?

Like PDCA, Design thinking entails a Diverge-Converge pattern. The 4 D’s are perhaps its most succinct expression:

Discover – (Diverge)

• Develop empathy with the customer
• Go see and experience for yourself
• Seek thereby to understand their jobs/pains/gains in a direct way

Define – (Converge)

• Define the customer’s jobs/pains/gains
• Pick a focus and define the essence of problem

Develop – (Diverge)

• Ideate possible countermeasures
• Develop and test prototypes
• Focus on the best solution

Deliver – (Converge)

• Test and confirm your design choice
• Once the design is confirmed, develop a deployment plan
• Release and scale

Each of the 4 D’s finds unique expression in different industries. Develop, for example, entails very different activities in, say, web design vs car detailing products.

In the former, Develop entails developing, say, the web page’s content, and the front and back end – (translation to HTML, functionality, database, logic).

In the latter industry, Develop entails testing the various chemicals and application methods in the lab. This one works, that one does not…

Like PDCA, Design Thinking entails a journey up a staircase in the fog, during which we learn through rapid experimentation and iteration.

In my view, both are rooted in the same tradition but differ in that one is aimed at continuous improvement, the other at continuous innovation.

We need both arrows in the quiver, no?

Best regards,

Pascal

Reflection - the Breakfast of Champions

By Pascal Dennis

Reflection entails. honest, humble acceptance of successes & failures, strengths & weaknesses.

Hansei, as the Japanese call it.

Reflection is the countermeasure to hubris, overweening pride & arrogance, that destroyer of people and organization.

Reflection is central to all great religions, in the form of prayer, meditation, and rumination.

In some traditions the acolyte leaves civilization and seeks reflection in solitude.

In my experience, reflection requires both solitude, as well as, the camaraderie of one's team.

Thus, questions like 'What have I learned?’ naturally lead to 'What did we learn?'

Reflection, of course, reflects the Adjust phase of Plan-Do-Check-Adjust cycle.

We close of the loop thereby, and lay the foundation for next year's PDCA loop.

A couple of points here:

To close the loop, we need to observe each PDCA phase.

Otherwise, we suffer the debilitating ailment I call Scatter - one group does the Plan, another Deploys the Plan, yet a third Checks the Plan.

Result: lousy results and little learning.

Scatter is at epidemic proportions, especially in large organizations.

So important activities need a deployment leader, ‘key thinker’, ‘chief engineer’ or equivalent to ‘wrap their arms around the problem’, observe each PDCA phase, and thereby harvest & share the learning.

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Reprise - Scatter - a Symptom of Big Company Disease

By Pascal Dennis

By scatter, I mean the tendency large organizations have of disassembling the PDCA cycle - and giving different parts to different people.

One group develops the Plan, another deploys the Plan, yet another monitors the Plan.

Sometimes a fourth group is responsible for adjusting the plan.

More often, though, there is no adjustment. We just hope what's left of the Plan will quietly fade away.

The role of a Key Thinker (Deployment Leader, 'Control Department' at Toyota) is to "wrap their arms around" the problem -- and to shepherd it through the entire PDCA cycle.

Thus, you have a holistic understanding of what's happening - and a much better chance of making diagnoses & adjustments.

I see scatter is New Production Development, Marketing, Engineering and Strategic Planning in general.

We like to take things apart.

That's okay, so long as we put them back together.

And so long as one person is charged with seeing the whole chessboard, and grasping the unfolding story.

Best,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Scatter - Our Nemesis

LPI Back to Basics Series

By Pascal Dennis

Big Company Disease has many causes.

One of the most subtle is our inability to ‘wrap our arms around’ the PDCA cycle.

Myriad improvement cycles begin – but they become fragmented:

• Group A develops the Plan,
• Group B deploys,
• Group C checks the Plan, and
• Group D adjusts it.

I call this Scatter, with a deep bow to the late, great Al Ward – friend, colleague & profound Lean thinker.

Al described this syndrome to me over lunch a decade ago, and then again in his splendid book Lean Product & Process Design.

Improvement, whether a Kaizen Workshop, Problem Solving cycle or Strategy A3, requires complete PDCA cycles

One person (or team) needs to wrap her arms around the cycle, and thereby develop the profound, sympathetic knowledge central to breakthrough.

Thereby, our entire brains start firing – Left, Right, prefrontal cortex etc.

The countermeasures we select are usually simple and clear.

There’s usually a sense of release. “Of course! Why didn’t we see it before!”

As opposed to the ponderous, countermeasure-by-committee stuff that blights so many report outs.

So how to reduce Scatter?

Lean fundamentals like visual management and Leader standard work are a good start.

Veteran Lean companies like Toyota have developed the Chief Engineer role in Design, and Key Thinker (aka Deployment Leader or Pacemaker) role in Strategy Deployment.

Their job is to oversee & manage broad PDCA cycles – and to record & share the learning.

There are all a good place to start in your never-ending battle with Scatter.

Best regards,

Pascal

Pascal Dennis Bio

Fail Forward to Success

By Al Norval

I watch as organizations practice the PDCA cycle. Typically, they do a good job setting up their plans with a hypothesis and begin to deploy them. But as time passes, they discover things aren’t going according to plan. They get frustrated, angry and jump up and down.

The problem is they expect things to go according to plan and in truth, nothing goes according to plan. That’s one of the reasons why the Check/ Adjust part of PDCA exists and why it is so important. If things don’t go according to plan – problem solve and get things back on plan. Lean organizations understand this and get good at rapid PDCA cycles so they can surface and solve problems quickly and make many, small adjustments to keep them going forward towards their goals.

They also understand the other part of Check/ Adjust. When things do go according to plan, standardize and lock in the process.

In both cases, lean organizations learn from using the PDCA cycle. When things fail the hypothesis at the check step, they problem solve and get to root cause. They learn from this and develop a deeper understanding of what is actually happening. When things pass the hypothesis, they learn as well. The key is they expect to have failures and expect to learn from their failures.

In both cases, it’s important to lock in the learning and to share it across the entire organization. This sets up the formation of a learning organization, one that is based on learning from problem solving using the scientific method.

The faster they check/ adjust, the quicker they learn and the faster they can meet their objectives. Thus Lean organizations get good at using rapid experimentation and many small PDCA loops.

This concept was summed up nicely in the following quote:

“Virtually nothing comes out right the first time. Failures, repeated failures, are finger posts on the road to achievement. The only time you don’t want to fail is the last time you try something. One fails forward to success”

– Charles F. Kettering

The only real failure is not learning from our failures.

Cheers

Fragmentation

By Pascal Dennis

It's one of the most common failure modes in Lean transformations.

Here's perhaps the most important example:

Fragmentation of the PDCA cycle.

One group plans, another deploys & implements the plan.

Yet another checks the plan, and a fourth group adjusts it.

Nobody sees the entire chessboard, so we keep on making bad moves.

Indeed, we don't play chess -- we push wood.

Great Lean companies continually seek to integrate PDCA cycles.

Toyota's famous Chief Engineer or Shusa is nothing if not an integrator.

I remember the Corolla Shusa & his team, visiting our Toyota Cambridge plant year after year.

I had an image of him wrapping his arms around the entire platform.

Thereby, we have a chance at connecting the disparate silos that are perhaps the most obvious symptom of Big Company Disease.

So, here's a homework assignment.

Take a walk around your gemba and assess how well your organization integrates the PDCA cycle.

Are there people that wrap their arms around critical strategies, problems, product lines, value streams etc.?

Are your management processes designed to integrate the elements of PDCA?

If not, how might you improve?

No Plan Goes According To Plan

By Al Norval

January is always the time of year when organizations take the annual plans they have been developing and start to work on them. Or at least this is the time of year that organizations are supposed to begin working on their annual plans. In fact, to many organizations the annual strategic planning exercise is just that and once the plans are developed they are placed on a shelf where they gather dust until the perfunctory review at the end of the year. After the plans are made, the modus operandi is business as usual. This organization completes the Plan but never moves out into the Do part of the PDCA cycle.

Another thing I see is about this time of year is the plans are deemed to be in need of updating since something has changed and so the organization goes through an exercise of re-planning and will inevitably re-plan again later on in the year. This type of organization follows a Plan, Plan, Plan, Do cycle or a Plan, Do, Plan, Do, Plan, Do, cycle but again never gets into a PDCA cycle.

At least this is better than organizations that just Do, Do, Do with no Plan.

What we really want organizations to do is to complete the annual PDCA cycle which means that after we have completed the plan and get into the Do or implementation phase, we need to focus on the Check and Adjust process. In my experience this is the hardest part of the PDCA loop and the one that most organizations are the weakest at and therefore the process that needs the most strengthening.

The plan is a hypothesis:

If we do these things in this timeframe, we will get this result.

The Check process tests the hypothesis, both the execution of the plan (the process) as well as the results. If either is off target, the organization launches problem solving. But how are we to know we’re off the plan unless we have a rigorous Check process and a rapid response to the problems raised as part of the Adjust or Act process.

No plan goes according to plan, something unforeseen always happens, and because of that, good Lean organizations understand the need for a quick checking process so they can respond rapidly to being off plan and an marshal the resources needed to solve the problems and get back on plan.

January – the time to get the year off to a good start by getting into implementing the plan via the Do phase. But just as importantly, the time to set up a Check process that allows us to see when we’re off the plan so we can respond with problems solving and get back on plan.

Cheers