by Lee Fried, on 03 Feb 2008 06:18 pm
The Journey
Transitioning Into a New Way of Working
Over the last couple of weeks I have begun to notice evidence of a new management system beginning to take hold in the organization. It is subtle, yet, very exciting. After gaining executive commitment for adopting an enterprise Lean transformation we no longer in the situation of having to gain agreement on the “what”, there is no longer resistance to Lean. Instead, we now get to focus on helping leadership with the “how” in terms of making the transition. Given that we are a large organization steeped in the practice of conventional management the “how” can be a real challenge. You need to be careful to now overwhelm leadership by trying to move at a speed that outpaces peoples ability to learn.
Our approach has been to support senior leadership in this transition by helping them make small changes to our management system each week. We started with a two part strategy: First, we would work with senior leadership to begin the process of reducing waste and variation in their own management practices, which I have talked about in several postings in the past. Second, we have asked them to committ a significant amount of their time for planning, kaizen, gemba and reflection with the purpose of supporting their learning about Lean and the business system itself.
This second strategy has mainly taken the form of organized events, with purposes ranging from lean education, learning about the business to developing A3’s. We had to use an event format to break out of the challenges of our current, conventional management system where available time was non-existent. This approach has a negative side effect at first, basically, leadership would practices the new way of working during the event, and then go back to the old way of working once it was over. Please note that I am not being critical, learning takes time and lots of practice.
What is exciting is that over the last couple of weeks I have watched some of these learnings begin to take hold in daily practice. I have watched many of the leaders break away from a reliance on the events to get things done. I have seen a couple of the leaders out, in the gemba, engaging staff in the learning and teaching process. This last Friday I talked with a group of very excited mid-managers who had just walked out of a training, led by their executive, on root cause analysis. Perhaps the best evidence of all of this transition will take place over the next couple days during a stratgic planning event with a group of top leaders. The event starts with four hours of training on Strategy Deployment and PDCA followed by a day and a half of detailed planning. Typically, it would be a Lean consultant leading the training and the sub groups, but not the case this week. The Executives will be leading the training and leading the break out groups. Leaders are becoming teachers, how cool!