A Short Tribute to our clients who Learn, Lead & Change!
| “It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, … who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, … who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”Theodore Roosevelt – “Man in the Arena” Speech given April 23, 1910 | 
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Lean Stories
Self Taught, Self Trained, Self CertifiedThe two trainers hadn’t taught the 2 day lean training class before and it was quite a stretch for them to be in front of a class of (15) of their peers. But they had gone through the course twice and this assignment one of the central requirements for their company to internalize training in their Lean deployment. Leading the simulations was the most challenging for them to lead, but they had planned & prepared and now it was their time to shine. Day one went well – the class had a lot of fun and they were relieved to make it to the second day.
But it was on the morning of the second day when the breakthrough occurred. One of their students mentioned that they were so excited about what they learned in class that they had gone home and read the course manual from cover to cover. They were eager to learn more and this excitement allowed the trainers to grasp the critical role they were now playing.
ELT (Employee led training) or students reading manuals at night. Which is more important – that’s a difficult choice I’d like to face any time.
We had been working with a client for (3) months doing a lot of 5s events when we received some troubling news.
“You must stop doing 5s Kaizen at our company” came a strong rebuttal on a Friday afternoon. The client continued, “we don’t fully understand the problem, but pilferage has increased to an astonishing level and is creating mistrust and unrest in our organization.”
Initially we thought the claims were completely false, but after some dialogue with the supervisors working there we came to the same conclusion – theft had become a big problem. We had not encountered it earlier in our engagement, but the addition of locks on all of the rooms was a clear sign that something was wrong.
It was only after we had some more dialogue with the technicians that we began to understand the heart of our problem. “Lazy” technicians soon learned that it took a lot less effort to walk into an area where 5s had been applied – “borrow’ the materials that they needed – and return to their own work areas … than it did to search and find the same materials in their own work area which had not received 5s!
We took this new information to the client and accelerated the rate of 5s Kaizen so that the problem could be addressed, but in the right fashion. Problem solved!
“Don’t blame Joe, blame the process flow” — our opening direction to the team was key to remove the fear from the associates so that the desktop activity could be recorded. Email and other PC processes are unquestionably personal. We had already observed a plethora of Outlook folders (sound familiar?) which generally is a symptom of tremendous amounts of sorting and NVA handling of email.
We recorded a full day of activity for (3) like-users and began to graph the data. Email took up a substantial part of their work day for this team of (10), and our data analysis and TCL graph quickly narrowed our analysis down to several prominent email contributors. Our data also showed they were getting a phenomenal (150) unique email subject lines per day per user. 85% of the email was inbound and almost all of the outbound were replies or forwards.
As we came back to the team we told them ‘we have good news, and we have bad news.’ The good news is that one single email address contributes over 1,000 emails per day per user (!) The bad news is that most of the group is sending these emails to spam (due in large part to the volume) and some contain vital and time-sensitive information. ”It’s time to establish protocol of how, when, and where this global email address is listed.” They all agreed to that!
Our team was immersed in the SMED data analysis and was growing frustrated as we looked at the improvement prospects. “Base hits – base hits, it’s all about base hits,” I said. “Don’t worry about looking for silver bullets – let’s just make a lot of steady improvements and the results will take care of themselves.”
Aidan had made a lot of trips to the lab during the change over and as we begin to ask why, it was learned that he was making measurements between each of his adjustments. Jeremy quipped, “have you tried using a calibrated eye piece for that inspection?” After some team discussion we determined that we should give it a try.
As an expert change agent I asked, “OK, where can we quickly get and trial an eye piece?” Jeremy pulled an eye piece from his briefcase and said, “how about this one?” Being both excited, but also confused, I asked “Jeremy, why do you have an eyepiece in your (travel) briefcase?” “I thought we might need it on this Kaizen event” he replied.
Again, being seasoned in continuous change, I quickly replied “Jeremy, what else do you have in your briefcase?”
I was in front of the group and announced that we were now going to take (2) hours and go to the Genba and walk the process. When John heard this (2) hour ‘delay’ he visibly changed. He quickly interrupted me and asked to see me outside in the hall.
“You are a failure. You’ve failed to lead since you got here and I will not stand by and let you continue to waste valuable team time. I’ve assembled the best SME’s for this event and there’s nothing that we can’t answer from inside this conference room.” He was red-faced … not to mention pretty close to my face.
“John – we have to go to the actual process, talk w/ the actual people, and observe the Genba – it’s how we can identify the waste,” I replied. “I’d strongly recommend that you ‘stand down’ and simply let me fail by myself.” I further explained that I’d take complete responsibility for this team’s failure at the end of the week.
John reluctantly agreed and the team proceeded to observe the process.
When the group returned John’s demeanor had changed significantly and he was excited about what he had learned during the break. He experienced 1st hand a ‘team’ of co-op students that were several months behind in documentation. He had seen stacks, stacks, and more stacks of work that hadn’t been entered in the system.
Learning the power of Genba was the most important lesson. Mission accomplished! When we explain a process we’ll do one of two things. Explain
1) What we think the process does
2) What we wish the process does, but never
3) Reflect what the process actually does
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