DailyKaizen

Yesterday I had the opportunity to spend two hours with Pascal Dennis, a Lean consultant that is currently working with our organization to develop a strategic planning and deployment process.  It was a humbling and informative discussion.   Six months ago Pascal taught us the basics of A3 thinking and after the training we adopted most of the methods that we learned.   During our consult we told our A3 stories and then got feedback on how we can improve.  What was very clear from the discussion is that we have made good progress, but we are far from mastering the thinking and the practice .  This became very  apparent when Pascal could not tell “what experiment we were running” by looking at our A3.

Reflecting on the conversation there are several changes that we will make for this coming year’s planning cycle that will result in further refinement of our management systems.  Most importantly we need to focus on developing more effective measurement systems that transcend our organizational silos.  Our biggest challenge right now is our inability to get cross-functional data, which means that much of our plan is built on intuition and not analysis.   Additionally, we need to greatly expand our efforts around developing standard work for management.  Until we have effective checking processes in place it will be hard for us to establish the level of organizational learning necessary to make breakthrough improvement. 

I will look forward to Pascal returning in a few months.  In the mean time I will work hard to make sure we have a strong hypothesis and clarity around what experiment we are running. 

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