Heck, they just sent the National Guard to my town, and an adjacent one, to start clearing downed trees.

The root cause of this whole mess was about a foot of snow on heavily treed land…when virtually all of the trees were still laden with their leaves. Near many trees were houses and power lines. You can guess the rest.

Last Sunday was full of chain saws and snow blowers. Now, it’s a lot of dark and cold. But, we’ll make do.

The point here is that there’s a lean lesson somewhere. In fact, I think there are two related lessons.

Before the snow started flying, my youngest noted that my neighbor, Rich was blowing the leaves and pine needles off of his driveway. Rich later shared that he wanted to avoid the messy mix of snow, leaves and needles. At the time, I must admit, I was thinking perhaps that wasn’t a bad idea.

Well, shortly thereafter the heavy snows came. By around 3:00 p.m., the first tree split and hit my house – just a glancing blow, mind you. After that, it really started getting bad. The power went out and the next 12 plus hours were full of crashing tree limbs and trunks. My family and I slept, more or less, in the basement.

At sunrise, we could see the full scope of the damage. We had been absolutely hammered.

It was chain saw, shovel, and snow blower time. Fortunately, my neighbors came by and helped clear a path through my driveway. We then patrolled the neighborhood and cleared the roadway.

(Note to self: there should be a legal limit on the number of chain saw wielding amateurs within a 20 foot radius…)

Well, during this orgy of fuel and bar and chain oil, I recalled a figure that is within my Kaizen Event Fieldbook. This leads to:

Lesson #1: When the muda and the stakes are high, ditch the scalpel and carving knife. Instead, go for the chain saw.

In other words, don’t screw around with making things elegant. If you’ve got to get the tree off of your house or clear a path in your driveway (or road), go big and go aggressive. Make it pretty later.

Too often during lean transformation efforts, folks will spend too much time, resources, and political capital trying to make things perfect. Well, perfect never happens. Get the value to flow better, as quickly as possible.

And my neighbor’s pre-snow leaf and pine needle blowing? Well that, as admitted by Rich, was just plain stupid.

Lesson #2: Quickly understand and acknowledge the magnitude of the coming storm and take proportionate action.

How often do we give the proverbial patient the proverbial vitamins while he is on the proverbial operating room table?!

Put another way, bad things happen when we: 1) are ignorant of the pending competitive challenges for our business, 2) choose to ignore the challenges (maybe they’ll never materialize?!), and/or 3) do something lame that will never sufficiently address the challenge.

Yes, there’s nothing like a little post-storm hansei (reflection)!!

Related posts: The Best or Nothing, Kaizen Principle: Bias for Action

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Add to this rather long list some lies of the lean variety. I’ve heard more than my fair share.

Often, I just shake off the falsehoods and chalk it up hopefully to a case of the utterer not knowing what they don’t know. This means that the “lies” are not truly a conscious effort to deceive. Of course, this would mean that they’re really not lies, but then a post about common ignorant lean statements doesn’t seem quite as snappy.

In any event, effective leadership requires both credibility and competency. The following “lean lies,” and so many others, undermine both characteristics.

1. This situation is totally abnormal, I’ve never see this before. Translation – dear Mr. or Mrs. Observer, do not believe your eyes…please, oh please.
2. We will dedicate resources to the kaizen promotion office. The unsaid caveat – yup, 100% dedicated…when they’re not working on other stuff.
3. We were lean years ago, then we experienced some turnover in key positions…moved from one facility to another (I’m not making this up), etc. What they should readily admit – we may have had a few lean tools in place, but the systems and principles weren’t even an inch deep. We were never truly lean, just fake lean.
4. I’ll be there for the ENTIRE kaizen event. The invisible exception clause – I’ll be a full-time participant, except when I have a meeting or an important phone call, someone outside of the event seeks my attention, or whenever it is apparent that I’ll have to roll-up my sleeves.
5. I have a lot of lean experience. The all too frequent reality – I have a number of unread lean books in my bookcase, got a “belt” or two, and I’ve participated in several kaizen events…how hard can this be?
6. We applied the proper rigor. The intended meaning – there is no need to investigate what constitutes our limited effort to understand the current situation. Are direct observation and data necessary for really smart people?
   
7. Our employees are our most important asset. Well, first of all, people are NOT assets… although they can/should appreciate in value (while assets typically depreciate). Second of all, you don’t value anyone enough to boldly promise that no one will lose their job as a result of productivity improvements. Rather, you’ll chop heads at the first opportunity and crow how you “leaned-out” the organization.
8. Senior leadership is committed to lean. The fine print – until we must truly change our own behavior.
9. We will practice line stop jidoka. Expiration date clause – yes, line stop, until we start missing production time and my standard direct labor dollar metric looks like it will suffer.
10. Everyone was fully trained in _______. The Clintonesque mental reservation – of course, it depends what your definition of “fully” is.

What are some of the lean “doozies” that you have encountered?

Related posts: Time Observations – without Rigor, It’s Just Industrial Tourism, Show Your Work, Humility, or What Does Dirt Have to Do with Lean?

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picture from Wikipedia

To avoid confusion, the term headhunter in this post does not refer to those who: 1) take the severed head of others as some sort of trophy (that practice, as far as I know, is defunct), or 2) find, at a price, qualified candidates for employment at their clients. Rather, we’re talking about those leaders who see their own employees as fungible things, as ”heads.”

That thinking is clearly counter the lean principle of respect for the individual.

Tell me that you’ve never observed these headhunters! They blow quickly by the first three objectives of improvement (easier, better, and faster), and get straight to cheaper. Cheaper of course means reducing heads – not the size of heads, that would be head shrinking. Some of the other kind of headhunters did that…

Headhunters seek productivity improvements. Productivity is a wonderful thing. As the lean scion, Art Byrne said, “Productivity = wealth.” That’s absolutely true…unless you squander it. Headhunters squander the wealth.

They see productivity as an opportunity to take out heads. You can usually identify them easily. They often say things like, “There are 37 heads in that department,” or “How many heads can we take out?” Their comfort in using the term “heads,” belies their values and motives.

They don’t understand one of the oldest and most foundational promises of lean – no one loses their employment due to productivity improvement.

This is not a lifelong promise of a specific job, but it is employment security. It certainly does not preclude redeploying folks to different positions, but it often provides new opportunities for personal growth.

I wonder if headhunters can get wrap their headhunting heads around an institution like Toyota. Toyota has often said that they don’t build cars as much as people.

During the depths of the last recession and beleaguered by the ostensibly false, but publicly widespread belief that Toyota was complicit in the unintended acceleration thing, Toyota could have laid many of their folks off. Certainly, others in the industry were doing it. Instead they chose to invest their “idle” time in training and kaizen. Their belief was that if they laid-off a 10 year employee, they would lose the wealth of experience and long-developed skill set (like problem-solving). It would take 10 years to develop a new one!

Doesn’t that make a LOT of sense?

So, when you identify a headhunter, try to convert them. Extol the virtues of in-sourcing and growing the business as well as growing people. If the conversion is unsuccessful, consider running away…fast.

Related posts: Easier, Better, Faster, Cheaper…in that Order, Humility, or What Does Dirt Have to Do with Lean?

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We often talk about lean principles, systems and tools, but clearly that’s not the whole story. So, here’s another part of the story – without profound, unwavering and unambiguous leadership commitment (by the leaders that matter) ANY serious lean transformation effort is DOOMED.

If leaders can’t muster the courage to plunge forth (not talking recklessness), they will bastardize lean principles, fail to apply the requisite resources and time, delay and defer hard decisions, tolerate and often enable non-lean behaviors, etc.

In short, they’ll try to live with one foot in the present and one foot in the lean wannabe state. A sure recipe for disaster.

Noncommittal is not “transformative” and not inspiring. If the leaders aren’t committed, why would the rest of the organization go all in? And for those underlings who do go all in, they’re likely to suffer feelings of confusion, despair and betrayal. Not good.

I will leave you with some Mr. Miyagi wisdom from 1984 movie, Karate Kid.

Miyagi: Now, ready?
Daniel: Yeah, I guess so.
Miyagi: [sighs] Daniel-san, must talk.
[they both kneel]
Miyagi: Walk on road, hm? Walk left side, safe. Walk right side, safe. Walk middle, sooner or later
[makes squish gesture]
Miyagi: get squish just like grape. Here, karate, same thing. Either you karate do “yes” or karate do “no.” You karate do “guess so,”
[makes squish gesture]
Miyagi: just like grape. Understand?
Daniel: Yeah, I understand.
Miyagi: Now, ready?
Daniel: Yeah, I’m ready.

Source: The Internet Movie Database

Related posts: Lean Leader Principle – Show Them Your Back, The Intrinsic Discipline of the Lean Leader

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For good reason, judgmental should NOT be a regular lean adjective. Why? At least two reasons.

Reason #1 – People. It’s counter to the foundational lean principles of respect for every individual and leading with humility. When’s the last time you witnessed someone being judgmental towards an inanimate object? Rarely. It’s typically something that is directed to or at a person or persons. In a lean environment, the intent is to develop and engage folks, not shut them down. When we employ the five who’s instead of the five why’s, we risk driving the organization into a mode of problem-hiding, not problem-exposing and solving. Judgmental behavior drives fear and cynicism and freezes the flow of ideas, the very lifeblood of kaizen.

Reason #2 – Process. It violates, or at least distracts the practitioner from the principles of focusing on process and embracing scientific thinking. When the bluster of “judgmentalism” can trump or distort going to the gemba, conducting direct observation and relying on data (or, more appropriately as Taiichi Ohno insisted, first-hand “facts”), we become worse than blind. This kind of blindness harms an organization’s PDCA effectiveness. That’s one reason why time observation forms, spaghetti charts, standard work combination sheets, operator balance charts, process maps, value stream maps, etc. are focused on facts.

I’ll leave you with some reflection questions. Admittedly, some are very specific. The purpose is to get you to think.

• When you observe 9 pieces of work-in-process (WIP) within a line and standard WIP has yet to be established, do we ask, “Why is there so much WIP here?” or do we ask, “How come there are 9 pieces of WIP?”
• When we observe a process in which an operator does a fair amount of walking, do we tell the team leader, “Man, operator B walks way too much,” or do we say, “I observed operator B during process X, he walked about 300 feet during that process. What can we do about that?”
• When you conduct a time observation of a worker for a certain process and then you share your findings with the team, do you say, “She was painfully slow when doing these 2 steps,” or, while referencing the time observation form, do you explain the variation in cycle times, speak in quantifiable terms, note the factual points observed and let it be about the process?
• When you listen in on a handful of customer service phone calls and there are consistent errors and omissions relative to standard work, do you dismiss the lot as a bunch of incompetent folks who obviously need some re-education or do you characterize (number, type, conditions, etc) the errors and omissions and share the anonymous (no need to name names) and non-judgmental observations with the team and engage in some PDCA?
• When you visit another operation, whether one within your own company, supplier or benchmarking target, do you key in on the shortcomings and have a good laugh or do you observe the elements (large or small) from which you can learn and improve – noting (literally) the rigor of and adherence to standard work, the simple elegance of the heijunka box, the line stop escalation protocol, etc.?
• Has anyone ever been judgmental to you regarding your area(s) of responsibility? How did it make you feel? Defensive? Engaged? Enraged? Did the exchange help identify specific actionable opportunities? Or, was it a fuzzy, dark cloud of, “you need to suck less”?
• Can you think of how you can improve your approach in the future? Perhaps, be a bit less judgmental? I know I can.

Related posts: Want a Kaizen Culture? Take Your Vitamin C!, Book Review: How to Do Kaizen, Time Observations – without Rigor, It’s Just Industrial Tourism

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A lot of folks think of discipline, especially in the context of lean, as something extrinsic. It’s something that is applied and reinforced through the rigor of leader standard work, daily accountability processes, and value stream improvement plan and strategy deployment checkpoints, etc. Discipline is enforced…by leaders on others. Obviously, not even close to the full story, but we are not so naive as to believe that extrinsic discipline is not important or necessary.

What about the lean leaders? Sure, the leaders of the leaders can drive discipline. But, purely extrinsic discipline is more like a dictatorship. Lean leaders must have intrinsic discipline. It’s got to come from within.

Lean leaders must have sufficient commitment to, and faith in, lean principles (lead with humility, respect the individual, flow, pull, PDCA, identify and eliminate waste, rely on data, etc.) such that they will discipline themselves to do what they don’t want to do when they don’t want to do it. Because it’s worth the pain.

And their peers, teammates and subordinates watch and learn from the leader’s example as he or she:

• Sucks it up and goes the extra mile to visit the gemba and directly observe the current reality,
• Guts it out and takes the 5 whys to the fifth…or tenth in order to get to the root cause,
• Remains super-humanly patient mentoring an individual through yet another revision of an A3,
• Requires a number of painful desktop simulations to see if, when and where the kanban system breaks (before it’s piloted for real),
• …and so on.

Related posts: Want a Kaizen Culture? Take Your Vitamin C!, Lean Leader Principle – Show Them Your Back

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This same thing happens way too often in other gemba locations. Insufficient tools, and often just the plain LACK of tools, get in the way of performance.

The four-fold improvement objective is first, easier, then better, faster, and cheaper. Short-sighted leaders often think they can jump to cheaper by being cheapskates when it comes to basic tools for the job. Among other things, this belies a lack of respect for the employee. Maybe they need to “walk a mile” in their employees’ shoes…or at least  directly observe reality at the gemba!?

Just to be clear, here we’re talking about pragmatic tools, not overbuilt, gold-plated tools with unnecessary features and performance levels. And yes, as the saying goes, we must always, “reach for our brain, before our wallets.” But, workers need sufficient tools that: 1) protect them from ergonomic stress and trauma, 2) are capable of producing sufficient repeatable outcomes, and 3) support the least waste way, as captured within good standard work.

I’ve run into my share of “bad brooms,” as in the picture. Like the homemade knives that the operators made in order to cut foam. Their knives were basically pieces of scrap metal, with tape wrapped around one end for the handle. No knife looked the same. Many made ragged cuts. A lot were unsafe. Could management have done a better job?

How about the leaders who resist buying the required hand tools and storing them, at the behest of engaged employees, at a point-of-use shadow board for a routine set-up? The tools will get lost or stolen, anyway, why bother? Meanwhile, operators constantly venture out on long, time-consuming safaris to go find the required tools (yes, I know tool-less set-ups are the target condition…). Not easier, and certainly not least way.

We could go on. I am sure that you have countless examples from your gemba.

The scary thing is that workers in such situations get numb to the waste that their cheapskate leaders have helped create and sustain. Penny-wise, pound foolish environments are death to the kaizen spirit.

Don’t be a cheapskate.

Related posts: Book Review: How to Do Kaizen, Easier, Better, Faster, Cheaper…in that Order

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Her workplace has been infected with management that tells her how many FTEs are required; she doesn’t even know what a FTE is.  She is exasperated, disenfranchised and done.  Her strategy now is to try to keep her head down until retirement.

There were many difficult aspects to this conversion, the worst part being that she is a friend.  Her pain and frustration is palpable.  I was not surprised to hear of magical thinking.  It is an apt description of something I have seen in many organizations, in many different industries.  But, I was surprised to learn that it has invaded health care.

In magical thinking, management teams set BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals), often reductions in staff or increases in workload, that are unrealistic, unsustainable, or unachievable.  They may look good on paper, but without the tools, people, resources, infrastructure, and leadership needed to achieve them – they are folly.  They often leave employees, like my friend, tired and dispirited, with justifiably diminished confidence in their leadership.

I have seen “magical thinking” in the private and the public sectors.  In my experience, the most pervasive form lately is “lower cost at any price.”   These are initiatives that solely focus on cutting cost, often at the expense of quality, safety, and customer satisfaction.   One particularly egregious example that I recently encountered, is an organization, that in the interest of costs, switched from instructor/hands-on training to solely computer based training.  While this may be appropriate for some positions,  I doubt it served the diesel engine mechanic  well , who,  on their first day on job said of the 16 valve 30 ton engine that they were responsible for -  “I didn’t think it would be so big, or so hot.”

In defense of magical thinking it can occasionally work.  There can be some fantastic wins – perhaps accidentally when the directed action (a.k.a. “countermeasure(s)”) happen to address the root cause(s) of the barrier between the current condition and the target condition. But in the long run, the results are unsustainable.  Like any gambling strategy, the laws of probability describe the long-term behavior and unfortunately the odds are not in the magical thinker’s favor.  Fortunately, there are better ways.  There are tools, systems, and philosophies that give better and more consistent returns.

Hard work, coupled with sound principles is a better approach.  Nothing can re-align magical thinking like going to the gemba and challenging one’s assumptions with fact.  Continuous improvement can only be accomplished  and sustained through humble leadership, not through arrogance and hubris.  Indeed, PDCA presumes that there is a check with reality and the openness to consider and make the necessary adjustments. In hoshin planning, this same spirit is applied within the catchball process – another means of immunizing the organization against magical thinking.

Lean thinking’s magic is about people, learning, science, value creation, the seeking of perfection and the like. Magical thinking, well…that’s for people who really dig the emperor’s new clothes.

Related post: Easier, Better, Faster, Cheaper…in that Order

This post was authored by Michael O’Connor, PhD. “Dr. Mike,” as Mark Hamel refers to him, is a lean six sigma implementation consultant and a passionate learner, educator, and communicator. He was recently bestowed with the Master Black Belt of the Year award by the International Quality and Productivity Center.

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Organization Development article with fall pictures

By  the way, Chuck and I collaborated on a Defense Industry Daily article back in February called, “Want an Effective Kaizen Event? Don’t Forget the Human Side!” Chuck also co-authored the Kaizen Event Fieldbook’s third chapter on Transformation Leadership with me.

Related post: The Human Side of the Kaizen Event – 11 Questions for Lean Leaders

Charles J. Wolfe is CEO of Charles J. Wolfe Associates, LLC. Chuck is internationally recognized as an expert in applying emotional intelligence to organizational change, leader development, coaching, and teambuilding. Chuck created the Emotion Roadmap™, a unique methodology, featured in his workshops, publications, and radio talk show. He can be reached at cjwolfe, over at cjwolfe dot com, or via 860-985-3747.

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click to enlarge

Over the years I have learned to be more patient. In the not too distant past and in the interest of quick results, I frequently told people how to solve problems – which countermeasures to apply as well as where and when. I do that a lot less now, but admittedly I still sometimes lapse.

Telling is fine when time is short and the real risk to life, limb and financial viability are high.  But, if we were to honestly reflect on the frequency of these types of situations, we would see that they’re pretty rare. Unfortunately, it’s normal to make a false choice between urgent and important.

So, what’s important? Certainly, building a lean culture, part of which is an organization of effective problem solvers, is eminently important. Effective problem solvers know how  to apply PDCA and take responsibility for solving their assigned or adopted problems.

How powerful is an organization of engaged and empowered problem solvers? A lot more powerful than a handful of puppet masters pulling the strings of a bunch of disenfranchised folks.

Think about it. If someone tells you “how” to solve the problem, then you do not, and cannot, really own it.  You essentially end up being an un-invested robot. You also end up with very limited (felt) responsibility, because the leader took the P, C, and A away from you and left you with just the D of PDCA. When you execute what someone has told you to do (and you have little insight into the “why” ) and it doesn’t work…well, it’s that do-telling bozo’s fault. Just following orders! I’ll wait for the next set of orders. Not good.

So, what to do? Try coaching your people on the why and the underlying methodology behind PDCA. Surely, make certain that they never violate lean principles – for example, observe reality, takt, flow, pull, etc. Coach them by asking them penetrating questions that will force them to think and hopefully adjust when required. Hold them accountable, but allow them to fail…and learn. In short, respect them and gain a fellow lean thinker, lean doer and lean owner.

Related posts: Lean Leadership – Lessons from My Dog Obedience Sensei, Stretch, Don’t Break – 5 ways to grow your people

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