by Lee Fried, on 09 Dec 2007 03:34 pm
The Journey | Tags: A3
A3–Its about the Thinking
A year or so ago the organization decided to make a commitment to using A3’s to support planning and improvement in the organization. At that time I was a big proponent of this change. I was fully convinced that if we only had a standard tool for planning we could be far more effective in not only developing the plan, but also executing to the plan. Like most organizations our’s had a high level of variation in our planning and deployment tools and formats. Primarily, long and boring PowerPoint’s were the primary tool of choice. Far from compelling.
Now it is a year later and A3’s are being used widely across the organization, but I would say that the change has led to moderate improvement at best. Yes, we have cut down on the over production of long status reports and planning PowerPoint’s. Yes, there are some teams that have embraced the A3 process and it has led to improvement. But overall the change has fallen short.
Why? The answer is simple, the A3 is a tool and without the process and thinking behind it nothing really changes. In our organization in most cases leaders and more often staff took the plans they had already developed and translated them into a new A3 format. As you can imagine, there are a lot of A3’s floating around with size 8 font in order to fit all of the content into a single page. In most cases PDCA was not applied, nor was the basic root cause and Pareto analysis.
Please don’t get me wrong, I am not trying to be critical. We learned the tool, but were not yet ready to learn and embrace the the thinking. Now that the organization has made an enterprise wide commitment to implementing a Lean Management system things have changed. Leadership is very vested in learning the foundational thinking that underlies Lean and the A3 process. We are developing a standards and a process around how the A3’s should be used and more importantly we are now capable of coaching leadership in the thinking. Just this Friday I spent a couple hours with one of our physician leaders as he worked to develop an A3. He was very excited by the process and how close the thinking is to how physicians approach their work every day through the scientific method.
I guess sometimes its okay to learn the tool, but like everything, its all about the thinking!
on 10 Dec 2007 at 2:55 pm 1.Rob said …
I agree!
With Lean its critical to base management decisions on a philosophical sense of purpose. Its about believing in people and their abilities to solve problems and create opportunities. Any number of techniques will fail unless the culture is supported and embedded by top management. You said it yourself here.
My own thoughts can be read: here,
here and here
on 14 Dec 2007 at 12:26 pm 2.Anand said …
Well said Rob!!! Regarding Lee’s comment on PDCA not being applied, I think it is true. I think that PDCA should not only be applied for ‘process’ changes but also to ‘behaviour’ changes. The question to ask is “How much have I changed in my thinking or behaviour?”