DailyKaizen

I had an interesting conversation with a group of leaders last week about how to fill the Lean talent gap in the organization. Up to this point the organization has primarily focused on training Project Managers, Technology Consultants and other professional staff to become RPIW leaders. This approach was sufficient to support our event driven approach of primarily making point improvements, but in no longer sufficient with our aspirations. It is now apparent that Lean will be the primary mechanism by which we achieve cross-functional, value stream improvement in the organization. Just flipping through our three year business plan shows just how prevalent Lean has become in the organization.

By taking a Value Stream improvement approach we have a huge opportunity to make break through improvements for our patients and members. Being a staff model HMO we could even demonstrate true breakthroughs for healthcare in general by leading the nation in preventative medicine. In order for this to become a reality we need talented Lean leaders. We need to find a way to identify, train, support and turn loose our high performing line managers with the mission of transforming our core value streams. It is far easier to train someone the technical aspects of Lean then it is to train someone how to be an effective operations manager. Becoming a talented Operations Manager takes years of experience. Yet, we need people with a deep understanding of what it takes to be a successful line-manager to lead this ambitious an effort.

One of the outcomes of the meeting was to connect our Lean efforts to our leadership development and succession planning programs. I wonder if there are other strategies that organizations have used successfully?

I saw these quotes today and could not resist. They remind me of a personal improvement that I have been working on lately: to try and be more honest and call things are I see them. In every organization that I have ever worked in there is a tendency of management to try and only focus on the positive side of things. Leadership meetings tend to be filled with talk of grand plans and praise for successes. There is hardly ever discussion of mistakes, problems or short-comings. Managers are often promoted because they are in the pleasing business. The culture is all about not rocking the boat. A consultant we have been working with calls this type of talk “ford talk.” As an organization I am pleased to see that we are moving away from this tendency and I have seen at lot more honest discussions lately, but we still have a long way to go. Here are the quotes:

“I cannot give you the formula for success, but I can give you the formula for failure: which is: Try to please everyone.”–Herbert Swope

“Its hard to lead a Calvary charge if you think you look funny on a horse.” –Adlai Stevenson

We have a good problem.  A year ago as a Lean consultant it was extremely hard to find a line-manager in the organization that was willing to work with us.  Very few people in the organization knew what Lean was and those that did were skeptical.  When we found leaders that were willing to sponsor a project it was typically small in scope, delegated down to the frontlines and non-transformational.  When it came to contracting we had very little leverage, because demand was non-existent, thus we often were forced to deal with messy people issues that were way out of role.

So what is the problem?  The problem is now demand.  We are being asked by almost every department in the organization to come and support them.  We are currently responsible for the execution of many of the business strategies in the organization.  We need to figure out how to continue to properly support teams, develop new Lean consultants, sustain results and change the culture.  This is a lot better problem then the one we faced last year.

So what happened in the last year to change this situation?  Well, a lot of different forces have led to the change. Leaders like Ted have become Lean zealots and have championed our work at every opportunity at great risk to themselves.  We have quickly grown our infrastructure meaning we have been able to demystify Lean, now more then 8% of our total employees have participated in a Lean event (approx 800).  We have shown some great results in terms of productivity, quality and staff engagement.  Finally, the business climate has changed and there is suddenly a burning platform for change.

Tomorrow I am meeting with a group of our senior leaders and Lean champions to figure out how to solve our problem.  We know that we will need to focus.  We know we need to say no.  It will take discipline and great organization.  It will not be easy to fix, but at least this problem is one we can be proud of!

Last friday, we pursued the next step in our planning around an important initiative for us (which I described earlier, and is different than Lee’s work on the Model Line), and ended up producing this affinity diagram in real time. It is intended to show all the possible things we can do to obtain the outcomes we want for our members. some colleagues pre-thought their opportunities. I wrote mine on the fly after listening to what we had done in the previous year and what our success was with each. I received permission to display this image here, which in and of itself required a little bit of courage.

The purpose of doing this as part of planning, for me, is for us to figure out what we should do. The image shows that there are a lot of things we can do. That says a lot about our ability to deliver for our patients. It also shows some clustering on the areas where we think we have the most leverage.

Now we have to decide which of the things we can do add the most value. Maybe there are some things that the team I am a part of could do, but it might be of greater value to assist another team in using the tools they have, or vice versa.

I can really see the power of doing this work visually; it shows that we’ve developed a strong infrastructure with teams that know how to use it. Now we can aim it together and create a logical story around what we chose to do among all of the possibilities.

How often we assume we know more then we really do. That was the big learning for me over the last six weeks. I have been working closely during this time with a Sensei to do some very complex value stream analysis. The area we are mapping is made up of around 20 separate and specialized departments. Any given piece of work could have one of a thousand potential routings through the system and the complexity of the processes is mind numbing. The purpose of the work it to determine the common pathways and product families so that we are able to design a future state that is simpler and more efficent.
Going into this work I had already done a significant amount of analysis in the area from a prior project. As a result I thought I had a pretty good grasp on where we needed to go. Working with the Sensei I started to become frustrated. She insisted that every piece of information that I brought to the table be verified. She dove far deeper into the detail then I thought was nessessary at the time. She allowed no assumption to go uncheck. She also pushed me hard to support everything with evidence and data. I am not a detail person and often have to force myself to slow down and focus. As you can imagine this was torcher for me.
When we first started with this work it was very dauting. The complexity made it hard to imagine that it would ever be possible to gain clarity around the current state. Through this work my Sensei taught me a great lesson: Huge problems can be solved by breaking them down into very small, detailed pieces. As the work progressed the value of her methods really started to surface. The route cause of many problems started to surface, many of which did not match my original assumptions. Now, six weeks later we still have a lot of work to do, but we have much greater clarity on the why, how, and when.

I chose this week’s quote because it goes well with a conversation I had last week with a group of managers in the Model Line area. Most of the managers I am working with grew up in the department that they now manage and as a result has seen first hand how much the organization has changed and gotten bigger. One thing they have not changed is how slow the change process is in the organization. During lunch last week one of the managers pulled out a list of improvement opportunities that her team had developed five years ago. More then half the opportunities on the list are things that we are only now about to tackle with our Lean efforts. The managers are skeptical, yet excited when I tell them that they are going to be empowered and resourced to make the changes on the list.
“The measure of success is not whether you have a tough problem to deal with, but whether it’s the same problem you had last year.” —John Dulles