Emphasize Strategy Deployment, Not Selection

By Pascal Dennis

"Any damn fool can make a plan. It's the execution that screws you up."

My favorite military adage.

Corporate strategy usually entails spending 80% of our energy devising the "perfect strategy" - and precious little on deployment.

But deployment is what screws you up.

Strategy development entails answering questions like:

1. What are we trying to achieve? (Our "Policy" to use a military metaphor),
   


2. Where, when & with what forces will we fight?
   

Important questions, to be sure, but usually not as complicated as people make out.

The tools of strategy selection -- SWOT, Five Force analysis & the like -- are well known.

Most important is a gut level understanding of your business gained by long apprenticeship, numerous annual PDCA cycles, and by getting your hands dirty.

Often the best strategy is some combination of:

1. Design & make cool stuff
   


2. Sell more,
   


3. Wring out cost, and
   


4. Involve everybody in improvement
   

And the most adroit strategy will falter unless it is translated (deployed) such that each level and team have a focused set of breakthrough activities.

We deconstruct the elephant, if you will, so that everybody has a piece of it.

In summary, in developing your strategy, go see, reflect deeply, and use the core tools in the strategy tool box.

But put 80% of your organization's energy into:

1. Deployment, i.e. translating objectives & means level by level,
   


2. execution, and
   


3. in creating a freewheeling, entrepreneurial atmosphere where initiative flourishes
   

Cheers,

Pascal

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,

Standard Work or Training?

By Al Norval

As I start to introduce Standard Work to teams, I’m often faced with a lot of questions that go like this:

How can I get all the information I need to put down onto a 1 page document?

What’s interesting is that people want to write down absolutely everything about the task and put it into a Standard Work document. This includes not just “What to do”, but “How to do it” and even “Why we do it that way”. What they are trying to do is to mimic their Standard Operating Procedures (SOPs), which are often great volumes of documents buried in a computer system that nobody can or does read.



Why don’t people read them?

Their sheer size dictates they will never be read. Many times I’ve seen a 7 page introduction before the task details. The details themselves are written out in English with no visual indicators, diagrams or pictures. (This is done since the visuals take up too much memory in the computer). Then there is the perfunctory closing pages which gives a 10 – 15 page document on one task. No surprise that no one reads them.

When I’m at an organization, I like to ask to see the procedures and am told – “They are in the computer”. I then ask, can you find them for me and pull them up. After several minutes of trying, inevitably, the person says something like “The systems not responding” or “Somebody moved them” or “They used to be here”.

These organizations forget the purpose behind Standard Work, that is, to reduce waste and variation and to form a foundation for problem solving. Standard work is there to tell us when we can’t meet the standard due to abnormalities in the process. These get surfaced and problem solved by the team so the entire process gets stronger and stronger. The standard work constantly changes over time as the people who own the standard work develop new more waste free ways of doing the work.

Contrast that to large SOPs. Can you imagine the people who actually do the work, changing these routinely?

People also fail to distinguish between Standard Work and Training. The purposes are different although in many cases organizations mix the two together. I like to keep them separate. Standard work is there for qualified team members to use and to improve. A training system is there for new team members; to build their capability and bring them up to speed while ensuring the quality of their work. This is where the “Why” and “How” behind the “What” is critical.

Mixing the two together leads to confusion and to a lack of engagement of people in driving improvement.

Standard Work or Training – they are related but different. You need a system for both.

Cheers

How Standard is Standard Work?

By Al Norval

Are standards like straightjackets? There to limit our movement and our creativity? Many people think so.

In fact, standards are there to help put order into things and thereby reduce the waste and variation in how we work. The key is understanding that Standard Work is the current best way of performing a task. That doesn’t mean it’s the ultimate best way of doing the work. It means it’s the best way we know how right now. As we learn more, we’ll figure out more ways to reduce waste in the work and a new standard will be created. That standard will then become the new least waste way to do the work but again as we identify and remove waste through kaizen, the standard work will change.

Most people can understand the linkage between standard work and the elimination of waste but get confused when it comes to standards and creativity.



I like to think of standard work, like sheet music for musicians. The standards provide the base melody. As people are learning to play an instrument, they need to follow the standards closely but as they obtain mastery of the instrument, they begin to riff on the music and create new standards.

In the words of Taiicho Ohno;

“Without standards there can be no kaizen.”

Standards are the foundation for improvement. They form a stable platform upon which we can experiment and set a hypothesis for improvement using the scientific method. Without a stable base built on standards, we’re just building improvement upon a variable base. Our improvement becomes like a house of cards. One slight deviation and the whole thing comes tumbling down.

Sometimes we can’t follow the standard work due to interruptions and disruptions that occur during the execution of the work. When this occurs, there are two choices;

1. Ignore the cause of the variation and find a workaround
   


2. Signal for help and indicate a problem has occurred
   

Unfortunately most organizations do the former and the workarounds eventually become locked in as the new standard work and the cause of the disruption never gets addressed.

What should happen is that a signal for help goes up. Often this is called an Andon. Help arrives quickly and the standard work is completed and a temporary countermeasure is put in place. The team then goes into problem solving mode and works to eliminate the cause of the disruption so that it doesn’t occur again.

Organizations that understand this know that standards are there to tell us when we can’t meet the standard so that we surface problems. The problems are there anyway, we just need a formal way of surfacing and addressing them or they will become the way we do the work via workarounds.

The key is to make the disruption visible and engage the team in problem solving the root cause.

So, how standard is standard work? It’s standard in the short term but should be constantly changing over time. A rule of thumb I use is that if the standard work hasn’t changed in six months, something is wrong.

Cheers