by Lee Fried, on 30 Jan 2008 10:31 pm
The Journey
Complete Transparency
This might sound simple and obvious to many of you that are more experienced so please accept my apology in advance. Yesterday, as I sat in the back of the room during our annual leadership conference I reflected on how we were going to begin to change the culture of an organization of 10,000. During the event our senior leadership engaged in a large scale process of catchball (feedback and enrollment) with 900 managers. It was the first time anything like this has ever happened. Basically, senior leaders were opening up the doors to all of the leaders in the organization and sharing real time data about where they are in their learning process, the real challenges we face, and where we need to go next. It was open, honest, raw and completely transparent.
It occurred to me that creating transparency was really at the heart of everything we are doing and will do over the next few years. At all level and for all purposes we need to create an organization of complete transparency. A transparency in making visible everything from the problems that we face, to the resources that we have within each function, to the competencies or lack there of that we have as leaders. This openness will allow us to know realistically where we are, where we need to best focus our improvements and what will come next.
It has already begun in pockets and we have real experience about how hard it will be to accomplish this goal. At the organizational level we have begun the process of implementing a strategy deployment system. We are a typical organization that is used to planning within silos and by the budget. This means that very few people have a broad view of the organization nor do many have a deep view of any function but their own. Thus as a first step toward focusing and aligning the organization we are asking each leader to make visible their work in progress, their capacity for supporting improvement and their biggest problems. Only then can we have a realistic foundation by which we can begin to build a plan.
At the work team level we spent the entire year last year working in our Model Line area creating transparency. We made demand and work-flows visible through the application of Lean tools and visual management. We mapped value streams and began to measure key metrics for the first time. And most challenging we implemented standard work and made use of skills matrix that allowed everyone to see how capable they are in supporting their processes. Our purpose in doing this was not to embarrass anyone or any team. Our purpose was not to punish those that were not as skilled as others or teams that were not performing as well as others. Our purpose was to make visible a realistic assessment of how we were performing so that we could focus on the right improvements. Teams for the first time knew where their problems were. Team members knew what skills they needed to develop and we could build a plan for them to get them. But it took a lot of energy to break away from cultural norms that ran counter to our goals.
Through this view I guess you might say that one key principle of Lean is to create complete transparency. What do you think?
on 31 Jan 2008 at 3:53 pm 1.Ed McKlousky said …
After reading your post, and thinking of my own healthcare organization it is unfortunate that secrecy and confidentiality is so ingrained into the system. We seem to have gone too far. I think this is one of the big obstacles for lean management in healthcare. How do you have daily accountability when all of the metrics are hidden in the manager’s office? How do you improve quality when half of the staff doesn’t know the quality metrics, and those that do can’t drill down to their own individual performance? I doubt my system will have much success with lean without transparency.