DailyKaizen

This last week we began the second cycle of our strategy deployment process with a catchball event that brought together the top 100 or so leaders of the organization.  During the event the broad goals for the year were shared by the executive teams and our major Operating Divisions began vetting the potential list of strategies for 2009.  This process will continue for the next four weeks as more and more parts of the organization are brought into the process and the sufficient means are identified to achieve our yearly goals.   During this time the organization needs to decide what current improvement work will continue and what new improvement work will begin.

As I walked around the room it was exciting to see how engaged everyone was in the process.  Its fun work to vet and define improvement work.  And boy as an organization we sure are good at it.  This is evident by the dozens of improvement strategies that are currently in process and the dozens more that are waiting in inventory.   And yes, this is a problem.  A problem that we all know about, but have not been very effective in solving.  We are really good at saying yes and really bad at saying no and equally as bad at stopping work that no longer should continue.  This leads us to each year take on far more improvement work then we can complete with available resources.  This causes all kinds of inefficiencies that are no different then allowing a production process to develop inventory and backlog.  Long cycle times and low throughput means that improvements end up being outdated, slow to mature and often lose much of their potential for results as time slips by. 

So how does this happen?  There are many causes all of which we can solve over time (many we are working on right now).  Looking at the history of the organization causes include:

• A lack of sufficient data and information meaning that all improvements are good improvements
• A lack of a Value Stream view meaning that each silo is focused on improving itself, but loses the large potential improvements that come from improving across our system
• A lack of understanding of capacity and how much discretionary resource is available.  This leads to over and under commitment of resources
• A lack of a strategic planning and deployment system that makes work transparent and drives organizational focus
• A lack of stable and standardized processes that means leaders who should be working on improvement work are often called to stop what they are doing and focus on firefighting
• etc.

The good news is that we are making improvements on all of the causes listed above.  While our new strategic deployment process did not help us stop a lot of working during its first cycle it did help us for the first time make all the work visible.  This is a huge improvement and should allow us to get a little better this year at focusing our resources.  Additionally, we have Value Stream work underway, we are engaging far more people in the planning process, more and more processes are being standardized, etc. 

Over time we will become more focused, but there is no silver bullet.  Just a lot of really hard work at breaking down barriers, connecting and putting in new management systems and learning more and more about the organization.  In the interim the heavy lifting will fall to our senior leaders in making tough choices with incomplete information.  We all will need to help them in making it okay to say no and okay to stop work.  I remember reading an article a while back that said something to the effect of ‘leadership is more about knowing what not to do then it is about telling people what to do.’  I could not agree more.

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