A Value Stream Manager advised me of a process problem they wanted fixed.  The symptoms were obvious and had tons of waste, but it was important to investigate to find where the BEEF was that was causing the problem. 

Similar to the 5 Why's, keep pressing in to find the root of the problem.  Usually it is deeper than it originally appears to be!

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When I meet friends or strangers who ask what I do, I try to share my passion for Lean.  Usually my explantion is long-winded and technical which cause eyes to glaze-over.  When I try to be brief, they think I am a person who goes in and eliminates jobs.  Neither experience really captures what I do.

So I would like to question my readers for advice.  How do you describe implementing Lean in 60 seconds or less to someone outside of work?

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1: The Meeting is Never for Decision-Making: A Product Management Lesson I Learned at Matsushita

The meeting is the ceremony.  All of the decisions are made individually.  You never want to show up at a meting that you called without having reached agreement with each stakeholder ahead of time ... Leaders invest in people they trust and have a sense for, and the ceremony of a group meeting is the wrong place to try and build your trust and credibility. 

2: Leader: Are Your Meetings Straight Out of A Dilbert Comic Strip? 

3:  How to Improve a Dysfunctional Meeting Culture Without Removing the Chairs  

... rave against the time-wasting, dysfunctional debating society events that masquerade as meetings in many corporate settings ... Keep the focus narrow.  Operations meetings are not strategy meetings and vice-versa ... Manage the clock and the agenda maniacally ... Every once in awhile, create meetings without boundaries for brainstorming, idea generation, market discussions etc.  Operations meetings and process meetings must run like clockwork.  Creative meetings are essential to feed the energy of the organization and the boundaries should be relaxed for these occasions.

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I think there is a lot of great thinking here for Lean leaders.

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.1151258&w=425&h=350&fv=] from vodpod.com posted with vodpod

If you liked this post, then try:

• Stephen Covey on Knowledge Workers
• Knowledge Economy

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Cornelius Fichtner, PMP is a mentor to me for Project Management via his PM Podcast and his PMP Prepcast.   He recently attended a Lean Six Sigma workshop and shared his initial impression on the podcast Episode 093: Lean Six Sigma Overview.  It was really fun to hear his first thoughts and I am excited more project managers will get exposure to Lean because of him!

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Have you ever considered how a soccer referee pulling a yellow or red card is like an Andon?

Players are cautioned with a yellow card when they show misconduct.  A red card from the referee means the player is sent off from the field.  While Andon is not used to show misconduct, we can repurpose this concept to pull the cards when we see errors, safety issues, or quality problems. 

• The yellow "caution" card is a fixed position stop andon.  The team can be cautioned of the issue and work to correct it before it moves to the next step. 
• The red "send off" card is a stop the line andon.  The team stops to get the issue corrected and the line doesn't continue until it is resolved.

Toyota Culture says (paraphrased) "no SUSPECT cars ever make it to a customer".  Team members need to feel comfortable to pull the yellow or red cards.  Everybody should act as a referee on the field.  Once all eyes are looking to help maintain quality and safety, more value will make it to the customer. 

Above photo used with permission from roger g1 

If you liked this post, then try:

• Remember To Add-On The Andon
• How To Thrive When Your Company Goes LEAN

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Every once in a while you pick up a book you just can't put down. This happened to me recently when I finally got around to reading The Toyota Way, by Jeffery Liker.

The Toyota Way goes deep inside the heart of the company. Jeffrey shepherds readers through the birth of the company, the development of its founding principles, and the ever so popular Toyota Production System (TPS) itself.

The book is full of stories about the birth of Lexus (Toyota exec's basically got tired of driving European luxury cars into work everyday) and the revolutionary development of the Prius.

If there is one thing that is made apparent to me after reading this book, it is how young the agile software movement is, and how universal the Toyota principals are. They cross industry, transcend business, and could be used by many companies (more on this later).

I am also starting to appreciate how difficult it is to copy Toyota (I don't believe you can). Toyota's been practicing and refining these practices for over 70 years. It's no wonder Ford and GM can't catch these guys. It's much more than the practices.

If you are looking for a great read, and hunger for more after reading Mary and Tom's Implementing Lean Software Development, this book is for you.

Share, learn, and grow!

Kaizen workshop teams usually build great standard work or reliable methods.  I see them eliminate waste, create detailed implementation communication schedules, and ensure the auditing plan will give something to measure in PDCA.  Andon is not always added.

Andon must be built into a new or updated process to make it sustain.  If there is no mechanism to stop and fix errors before they are passed to the next step, quality will suffer.  Waiting for the error to show up in the audit or a visual management system may be too late.

Workshop teams usually have tons of confidence their new process will be flawless because they thought it out thoroughly.  Challenge and remind them the importance of andon. 

I would like to recommend two articles:  Fixed Position Stop Systemby Jon Miller at Gemba Panta Rei and Parenting Tips from Toyotaby Craig Woll at Evolving Excellence

I am in a workshop this week so I wanted to share some articles I have enjoyed recently.

101 Kaizen Templates: Kaizen Newspaper by Jon Miller

• Lean Topic:  KAIZEN – A visual way to involve people in giving improvement ideas to areas other than their immediate work area or job scope
• Excerpt:  The only responsibility of a non-manager or non-team leader is to identify the problem and write it down on the kaizen newspaper, number it, identify the type of problem (safety, category of waste, etc.) and take a stab at a cause or root cause. The kaizen newspaper frees people from bringing the solution along with the problem and in that sense it is very different from the kaizen idea suggestion system. ... The kaizen newspaper is a daily management tool and should be read and acted upon each day.

Lean Leadership In Healthcare White Paper by Richard Doss and Cameron Orr

• Lean Topic:  GROW LEADERS - This 9-page paper suggests a focus on the leadership behaviors that are crucial for Lean to progress beyond limited pilot studies and get sustainable results.
• Excerpt:  Take note of the statement there is “no such thing as organizational change, only personal change” (source unattributed). Lean Leadership in healthcare, as in any other industry, is dependent on the transformation and behavior of individuals. Training courses, culture change initiatives, rapid improvement teams, etc., will have only limited impact unless Lean leadership is developed on a one-to-one basis. The good news, however, is that behavior can change very quickly. Given the right support, the rest of the stakeholders will begin to mimic the Lean leadership behavior.

The Physician Culture and Resistance to Change, Part I by Richard L. Reece, MD

• Lean Topic:  DEVELOP EXCEPTIONAL PEOPLE – Tips for understanding why physicians resist change and suggestions for handling them.
• Excerpt from Part I:  To understand why physicians have resisted, you have to get inside their minds and skins. ... These cultural characteristics may reflect a self-centered, narrow-minded, and shortsighted worldview. But these traits dominate many physicians' minds and can’t be dismissed.
• Excerpt from Part II: Certain specialists, including heart surgeons, cardiologists, orthopedic surgeons, general surgeons, neurosurgeons, and oncologists – the economic lifeblood of most hospitals – are accustomed to acting decisively in clinical matters. This decisiveness carries over into business affairs. … Physicians ask to be trusted to do the right thing, to be considered professionals, to be paid for productivity, and seek information systems that provide relevant information and speed patient flow.
• Excerpt from Part III:  In The Effective Executive (Harpers, 1956), Peter F. Drucker state leaders igniting fundamental change share these traits: They rely on courage rather than analysis to dictate their priorities.  They pick the future rather than the past. They focus on opportunity rather than problems.  They chose their own direction, rather than climbing on someone else's bandwagon.  They aim high, for something that will make a difference, rather than something that is "safe" and easy to do.  They seek fundamental contributions to improve society.

I have started my new job where I am on the project management team applying Lean to healthcare.  I am still learning and hope to be able to add my thoughts about the subject on this blog soon.  

For the time being, the following articles provide great visual and interesting ways to explain Lean. 

• Mark Graban's Explaining Lean at a Bar
• Mike Wroblewski's Think Milk
• Wikipedia's The Toyota Way 

Related Post(s)

• New Job First Impression

This Just-in-Time method consists of "what is needed, when it is needed, and in the amount needed" that's the key for TPS. Inside TPS there is an important method called "Kanban system" (generally called "supermaket system") which is a card where product-related information, such as product name, product code, and storage location is listed. We know that in a supermarket the products demanded are stocked, so they are available for sale anytime. The engineer Taiichi Ohno merge the two process (the preceding one to the supermarket with the next one to the costumer) into one. Then, the wastes are much lesser (don't know if I explained well, if there are any questions ask me)making it more efficiently.

The other part of the TPS method is the "jidoka", which means automation with a human touch". Treating this method we must trace back to the first automatic loom, that was the first automatic machine, invented by Sakichi Toyoda, was a revolutionary self-powered invention. After that, Sakichi added some other new utilities to his looms including the weft-breakage automatic stopping device, which stopped when a thread of breakage was detected. Therefore, "jido" means automatic machine, and with a human touch "ka" pointing out the need of a human operator supervising it. Since machines stops when they detect errors, then a great amount of them can be assign to single operators, consequently arising productivity.

Today, this jidoka method is accompained with visual control reflected in the "ando" panel, that allows the operators find out the problems easily at a glance.

The article puts me in a mood of irony and frustration at the opportunities that the West is wasting by attempting to understand Toyota within the framework in which we have been so busy killing our own automobile industries for so long. Greg and my mother call what this article is doing, "Cutting off your nose to spite your face."
What do I mean?

1. "... not all is running smoothly at Toyota" is exactly the same condition that the company has been in every day for the last 50 years. They don't expect it to run smoothly, and it has not run smoothly. The difference between Toyota and its competitors is that Toyota organizes itself to deal with a world in which things don't run smoothly, and to take massive advantage of every breakdown.

2. Where GM (for example) pats itself on the back for making 20,000 changes in its operations a year, Toyota makes a million changes. Literally. They do that as part of paying close attention to the evolving space in which they interact in the world, and adjusting continuously. The article implies that the company is experiencing momentous, techtonic shifts that they are not in condition to deal with. There is no evidence for such a claim that I have seen. The evidence cited in the article is no more than the kinds of events that are happening every day in every company.

3. The website to which the article points us to show that "nine of America's leading scientific and environmental organisations took out advertisements in newspapers and started up a website" is a political hit site without, as I can tell, any substance.

4. If someone wanted to do the research (I don't have the time) I'd bet a good sum of money that this is a planted article originally constructed (or shaped less directly) by someone attempting to defend the American automobile establishment. "Toyota could be leapfrogged ...." In whose dreams? The time and money spent here, attempting to pretend a "balanced" report on the state of the Toyota enterprise, would be far better spent trying to figure out why for 50 years the Western auto companies have not been able to understand or build their own version of what Toyota has built.

5. The author, whoever he or she is, could not make sense of what Toyota's president was doing in a "personal mobility concept," and goes on to ridicule the man and the company, calling it a "silly stunt." This reminds me of the report that my friend George Kuper gave me on returning from one of the earliest visits of US auto executives to Japan to tour Toyota plants that were beginning to use the Toyota Production System. The American executives had been invited by the Japanese to see what they were doing, as a gesture of goodwill originally born out of Taichi Ohno's admiration and gratitude to Henry Ford for his inventions. At the end of the day, George told me, the American executives caucused in private to discuss what they had seen. One consensus: they could not figure out why the Japanese were so committed to try to convince them that they were running their plants without inventories and parts warehouses. They ridiculed the Japanese for their "silly show." Everyone knows, the American executives agreed, that it is not possible to run a plant without inventories, and they could not grasp what kind of devious intention was hiding behind their hosts' insistence that they were operating without these essential components of a good facility.

It only took 30 or so years for some of the people in the US auto industry to discover what was behind the "devious intention." Perhaps 30 years from now someone from the Economist might want to investigate whether what the president of Toyota was doing with his "personal mobility concept" was really only attempting "to polish Toyota's image as a car company with a highly developed sense of social responsibility rather than one chasing growth at all costs." I know what I bet we'll find....

About the title: My friend Fernando Flores has been talking about bullshit as a formal distinction for understanding deceptive misrepresentations for more than 20 years. I wrote about it here. Harry Frankfurt, in his marvelous little book "On Bullshit," speaks of bullshitting and bullshitters: "... carefully wrought bullshit involves, then, a certain inner strain. Thoughtful attention to detail requires discipline and objectivity. In entails accepting standards and limitations that forbid the indulgence of impulse or whim. It is this [apparent] selflessness that, in connection with bullshit, strikes us as inapposite. But in fact it is not out of the question at all. The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are relplete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept. And in these realms there are exquisitely sophisticated craftsmen who--with the help of advancend and demanding techniques of market research, of public opinion polling, of psychological testing, and so forth--dedicate themselves tirelessly to getting every word and image they produce exactly right. Yet there is something more to be said about this. However studiously and conscienntiously the bullshitter proceeds, it remains true that he is also trying to get away with something. ..." (p23)

Two books worth recommending: The Toyota Way outlines and explains the principles and practices behind the Toyota Production System, and lessons Toyota learned from prior work by the renown US quality consultant W. Edwards Deming. The Poppendiecks' book on Lean Software Development ties the Lean principles all together with software development.

This is an awesome outline of what lean manufacturing means and what sort of changes in thinking and doing are needed to move from a traditional assembly line manufacturing process to one that is lean. Also includes some history about the rise of Toyota in Japan and in the world markets. An excellent read, especially since it is applied to a field other than car manufactures - it gives a fresh perspective on what it means to be lean and follow the Toyota Production System in a field that is somewhat different than the native one.

Historic inventions are often built from historic difficulties, and they are always accompanied by new distinctions. At the end of the Second World War, the people of Japan were in terrible trouble, their morale, productive capacity, and international relations demolished. An engineer named Taiichi Ohno, in the enterprise today known as Toyota, began the task of building a new capacity for Japanese production, on top of Henry Ford’s designs, with some important additions. Ford incorporated everything into one plant; Ohno designed for operation in a network. Ford went all out for volume, and minimized variety, in the interpretation that this was the most efficient way to support the US market, and make the money that he needed to support enormous investments and pay his workers enough to buy his cars (roughly doubling the historic pay for that kind of employment). Ohno built a production system that would optimize scarce capital and raw materials, allowing efficient operation with small production runs. The operational heart of Ford’s designs were the way the engineers designed the coordination of the work; Ohno’s design was centered in processes that built the capacity of each person on the production floor to take responsibility for the quality and coordination of their work. Ohno’s inventions became the foundation of the quality movement that swept the world starting in the 1970s and 80s.

To keep the workers thinking, Ohno invented a new collection of “wastes” for them to observe and eliminate. Waste is an assessment, an interpretation; the word “waste” names a class of assessments that we make about events, phenomena, and features of our world that diminish our capacity to take care of what matters to us. For example, Ohno said that time that workers spent waiting – for parts, or for others to complete work, and many other things – was waste. The value of that interpretation was immediately obvious to most observers. Until right around now, the most important classes of waste in human enterprises have had to do with scarce resources: waste of money, waste of materials, waste of opportunities, waste of human time and capacities.

What was not immediately obvious to most observers was Ohno’s interpretation that inventories were waste. This example, the “waste” of inventories, illustrates the way that we invent new wastes. Before Ohno said ‘inventories are waste’, there was no question that inventories were an asset. They appeared on the balance sheet, they could be re-sold, they gave confidence to people that production could be sustained and customers satisfied with products from the inventories, and so forth. By inventing the interpretation that inventories are waste, and putting attention on many other previously underappreciated wastes such as workers waiting to work, Ohno was able to trigger important revisions in the way the people of Toyota thought and acted. What we in the West now call “just-in-time logistics,” and many other innovations of the last 30 years, were born in these inventions.

Now, since wastes are particular to specific concerns, and concerns change, the wastes that are appropriate for particular moments in time ... change! What was wasteful yesterday may or may not be wasteful tomorrow. In fact, the wastes with which we have orchestrated our interpretations of work for the last 50 years – wasted movement, wasted time, wasted resources, and so forth – were invented in the traditions of the industrial revolution. I am convinced that they will not be the most important wastes for human enterprises in the next 50 years. In the “old” world – the era of work that is now passing – we understood ourselves as intelligent and largely autonomous agents moving around in a world of fixed objects that we manipulated to achieve certain goals. Today, increasingly, we are understanding ourselves as moving in relationship with other human beings, inventing worlds together as our concerns shift, and coordinating our work together to satisfy those concerns. Central to the challenge of building skills and capacity for working in this “new” world, is a fundamental re-orientation to work. The notions of agility, adaptability, flexibility, and other popular notions are connected to this.

Here is my list of the most important wastes for the coming era – the Five Great Wastes:

1. Not Listening: Tolerating working together in conditions in which people do not and often cannot effectively speak and listen to each other, in the midst of institutionalized mistrust, resignation, resentment, and simple incompetence for speaking and listening. We tolerate a world of practices in which the fundamental expressions of our moods and emotions about our worlds and our futures are ignored or spurned.

2. Bureaucratic Styles: Working together bureaucratically, undertaking to design and produce our work through sterile procedures — sequences of movements and activities — in which our concerns show up at best only briefly before and after the work, but not during it. We interact with each other as if we would be better off were we simply machines doing tasks.

3. Worship of Information: Orienting ourselves, our actions and our attention around information and information systems, valuing “data” and “measures” above the interpretations of the human beings in the enterprise. We tolerate the illusion that the essential matters of work can be invented, managed and sustained through the creation, storage, retrieval, display and publication of information.

4. Suppressing Innovation: Tolerating ways of working in which people, ideas, and practices that are different, unusual, or new are avoided, feared, or rejected, so that it becomes all but impossible to develop flexibility and evolve practices for dealing with a changing world.

5. Work as Toil: Tolerating the interpretation that work consists fundamentally of unrelenting sequences of “things to do” that have only commercial value, we invent a kind of ‘modern indentured servitude.’ We sell ourselves into service in exchange for money and fleeting "real" lives available to us outside of working hours, outside of work. In this interpretation, most people appear as victims trapped by their needs to make a living, prepare for retirement, support families, and so forth. We ignore, diminish, or distort the ways that work brings meaning to people’s lives and takes care of features of the world for which people care.

These “Great Wastes” produce a major part of the cost of running and working in enterprises today. When I have taken the time to add up the "costs of miscoordination" that can be attributed to these wastes for clients, I usually end up with numbers in excess of 75% of the administrative and managerial costs of all parts of the enterprise.

If people are not listening to each other, because of mistrust, resignation, resentment, and other poisons, accomplishing anything significant becomes extremely expensive, and making effective changes becomes all but impossible. Bureaucracies pay attention to the correctness of their practices, and to their standards. From within a bureaucracy tremendous wastes are not even visible: repetition, unnecessary actions, obsolete actions, actions that produce the opposite of their designers' intents, and actions that produce horrific side effects. The environment of Eastern Europe was an epic monument to bureaucratic blindness, and global warming may become an even more important monument. Information systems don't take care of people, and the failure of the information systems field to fulfill its promises for improving management and organizational life underlie the confusion of IT managers about the value they produce. An organization that cannot innovate is dead; the only things missing are the inevitable result, and suffering along the way. And finally, to have our work be toil saps all our strength and turns people's working lives from a source of inspiration and contribution in life to a gray daily hiatus in a futile search for meaning.

New orientations for building value

"Waste" is a curious assessment. Assessments generally have the role in our lives of inviting action. "Help," "Fire," and "Look out" are universal attention-getters. "I feel like a coffee" invites the speaker, and possibly others, to start looking for a place to get one. The assessment that something is a waste invites people to go to work to eliminate it. When my daughter Livia grasped from her mother that my occasional cigarette smoking was wasteful - of my health and our money - she became a formidable detective for finding the places in which I had secreted them. A central operational mechanism of the current environmental movement has been the declaration of wastes that have mobilized a world of actions.

The feature that is "curious" is the way that by eliminating the right kinds of wastes, a community "backs itself" into a new future, without having to say precisely what the future will be. My interpretation is that the central operating mechanism of the invention of the Toyota Production System was the collection of "new wastes" declared by Taiichi Ohno. Those writing about TPS tend to speak about the values that constitute it; my interpretation is that it is only with the wisdom of hindsight that we can say those things. The invention of TPS was accomplished by a group of waste-gatherers who diligently backed themselves into a new future by eliminating sets of innovative wastes.

The perspective of these five “new” wastes does, in fact, invite a re-orientation of our understanding of our selves and our work that will lead to new ways for organizations to produce lasting value:

* Our understanding of listening shifts away from determining the “requirements” of customers as shallow lists of targets for our products and services. We move, instead towards collaboration with our customers, suppliers, and investors to invent mutually enriching arrangements. We attune ourselves to other people as embodiments and disclosers of concerns, traditions, experiences, and ambitions, and together we build competence for speaking, listening, and building trust.

* Our design of cooperative work shifts from managing the handoffs of materials and information to complete tasks, to inventing platforms for the delivery of services: structures of requests, promises, assessments and declarations in which people come together to take care of their concerns and invent futures together.

* Our design of information systems shifts from managing the movement and protecting the security of information in the enterprise, to developing and continuously redesigning robust, reliable, and effective infrastructures for communication and action.

* Our interpretation of the future shifts from extrapolations of today to an open field of innovation – designing and discovering – in our common world. Continuously reinventing concerns, offers, and work practices is a natural aspect of our working relationships. Competences and practices for innovation and entrepreneurship need to be developed and will be pivotal for bringing and taking care of our future. We listen to the continuously changing concerns and conditions of the world as opportunities for us, our customers, our suppliers, and our investors. We embrace relationships with those who are different from us as a fountain from which innovations for the future can be brought.

* Our interpretation of ourselves at work shifts from toil and renting our bodies to the opportunities we have to invent ourselves as interpreters and participants in structures serving the concerns of ourselves and other people. Our relationships with our enterprises are partnerships, in which our contributions to the financial strength, practical knowledge, and reputation of the company are also our route to developing our own financial success, competence, and identities in the world.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 License.

Chauncey Bell August 22, 2007

In a February 14th article titled "In Humbling Overhaul, Chrysler Faces Big Cuts", Wall Street Journal writers begin, "... Chrysler becomes the last of the Detroit Big Three to abandon hope of growing its way out of problems. Now it has a humbler goal: making money." The article quotes Tom Lasorda, Chrysler Group Chief Executive, explaining the way that the strategy functions: "We lost money building inventory, and then we lost money trying to get rid of it." 

We are sure that the management of Chrysler, or Ford, and GM, are not humbled. If they were, they would begin to question the way they are thinking about the mess. 

What is it going to take for the Big Three to recognize that their stories about why Toyota has out-paced, out-flanked, out-thought, out-designed, and bested them in all aspects the running an automobile business are bad stories. Good stories give hints about what to do to change the situation. For literally decades the stories we have listened to from the Big Three have failed to point to new effective actions.

Turns out Ford is a sponsor of "American Idol." I suppose this is a very fancy case of life imitating (art).   

I will be reviewing the 20 "Episodes" shortly, and seeing what is there. Perhaps the designers of the program have begun to address some of the questions we have been bringing over the last postings. We shall see, and make assessments.

I attempted and failed to put the "Bold Moves" feed into my blog. If someone out there knows how to do that, the code is <script language='javascript' src='http://www.fordboldmoves.com/clientscripts/externalflash.aspx?episode=20'></script>, but I can't figure out what to do with it.

More later; I am getting ready for a trip to Europe right now.

Give me your reactions and comments!

Best,

Chauncey Bell