by Lee Fried, on 08 Mar 2008 06:41 pm
The Journey
Back from the Summit
I got back to work on Friday fully energized from a great couple of days at the Lean Enterprise Institutes’s yearly Lean Transformation summit. Like last year it was a great event and I left with a mind full of new stories and ideas to apply back in Seattle. The last couple of Lean conference I have attended I always felt overwhelmed and somewhat behind at the conclusion of the event. That was not the case this year. As an organization we have advanced so far in a single year and as a Lean practitioner I feel so much more confident then I have in the past. I have to admit that it feel pretty good to have folks come up to you and ask for consultation for an invitation to “come see” our gemba.
Myself and two senior leaders from Group Health had the opportunity to present twice during the event. The focus of our session was Implementing Managers Standard Work. Instead of having dozens of slides full of bullets and playing the part of talking heads we decided to just tell a story about what we are trying to do at Group Health. Our slides were simple picture of the work place and the people we work with. Overall, I think most found the talk useful and we got mentioned a couple of times by the keynote speakers. I was surprised by how popular the topic was and how few organizations have focused on standardizing their management processes.
The event concluded with James Womack giving the final talk. I was very impressed by his thinking and his challenge to the group. He told the audience that his greatest fear for the next couple of years as the country inches toward a recession is that so called “Lean Consultants” will begin to appear out of the woods and begin selling their head cutting expertise. I hope this is not the case and Lean does not go the way of Process re-engineering. In concluding this posting I will quote Dr. Womack who discussed the PDCA process at Toyota during his talk:
‘At Toyota there is no such thing as solutions there are only countermeasures. This is because Toyota is smart enough to realize that by the very act of solving one problem you always introduce new problems into the system.’