DailyKaizen

As I discussed during my last post this week was a big week for the organization and I am glad to report that the event was a success.  Thursday night we concluded our three day session with first draft of the organizations Mother A3’s (strategies) in each of the focus areas.  Today we came into work and everyone was exhausted from the energy expended over the three days.  We spent a couple of hours debriefing and planning the next steps for the organization’s deployment process.  I thought I would take this chance to share some of my own reflections about the week and what is next for the organization.

Overall, it amazes me how fast we are moving.  Just two months ago the decision was made to move forward with Lean as an enterprise-wide management system.  This decision came after many years of experience applying Lean as a tool, testing the waters by sponsoring a model line and long debates.  It was clear this week that the debate over.  The “what” was no longer in question and the “how” was prominent on everyone’s mind.   What a huge relief, since as a consultant I am far more helpful in teaching and coaching around the “how.”  But to be honest, I had to check myself often during the session as I found myself looking for reasons to try and convince others that Lean was the right direction when they were already there.  How gratifying, yet, strange.

It was clear that most participants were excited and overwhelmed at the conclusion of the session.  We spent three solid days talking through our problems, gaps and getting clearer about priorities.  For those that expected to have a polished product (plan) at the end of the session I would bet they went home disappointed.  There was a common realization across the group just how much work we still have to do in order to finish the deployment process.  The deeper we got, the more problems we found, the more work we realized we needed to still do.

At the end of the session the CEO did a great job in summarizing his thoughts.  I thought his final remark was the most powerful and thought I would conclude with sharing it:

‘We all knew coming into this session that we have a lot of challenges that we need to overcome.  Over the last three days we have learned a lot more about what they are.  These challenges may seem overwhelming, but just because we now understand them better does not mean they did not exist before we came into the room three days ago.  We now have a much better idea of what we need to do.’

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