DailyKaizen

Over the last year I often get frustrated by the pace of change.  I am one that quickly jumps to action, loves the thrill of change and as a result am often accused of being inpatient.  Which is probably pretty accurate.  One area where this gets me in trouble is with the learning process or more specifically the teaching process.  My action orientation often means I forget to slow down and spend the time with the people I am suppose to be helping to teach.  Instead I give them the answers and sacrifice the long-term sustainability for the short-term progress.   Realizing this challenge I have been working hard this year to spend more time asking questions and learning how to balance the needs for results with the learning process.

From an organizational perspective I have also found myself frustrated with the amount of effort we are investing in Lean focused education.  We have gotten far better with our learning methods.  We have move away from the classroom and have integrated our learning into the work activities, but even so I often have to stop and remind myself of the importance of this work.  I realize the need for this education, but it is so very hard for me to slow down and wait for others to come along.  My Sensei often reminds me that to get different results you need different thinking, thus for this to happen learning must take place. 

What has been really exciting is on a broad scale, for the first time, I am starting to see the fruits of all of the investment we have made in Lean related education.  We have focused on teaching the top 120 leaders in the organization the basic Lean competencies through action learning.  We formed cross-functional teams that have mapped core processes, develop visual systems, etc.  At the same time the executive team has made a significant commitment (12 days in a year) toward learning point, cross-functional and system kaizen.  Slowly, over time I have seen this learning begin to change thinking.  Leaders are starting to think process.  They are asking to see process data as opposed to just results data.  They are learning about functions outside of their own.  There is a common language of improvement beginning to take form.  The conversations have changed.  The thinking has definitely started to change and hopefully next the results. 

A couple of weeks ago I had the opportunity to spend some time listening to phone calls in our customer service center in preparation for an upcoming improvement event.  For those of you that don’t have jobs that regularly put you in contact with your customers I highly recommend making the time to do the same.  It is amazing how much you can learn in a short period of time by spending time listening to the voice of the customer.  What is just as amazing is how much you can learn from talking to the people who spend forty hours a week listening to the customer.  They really have an amazing insight into where the problems are and what the customer needs us to do better. 

I spent some time listening to calls with a representative that had been with the organization for more then ten years.  After watching her work I was blown away by how efficiently and effectively she navigated the complexity of our organization in service of our customers.  The products and processes are so complex and the skill she had to take this complexity and simplify it in service of our customers was impressive.   She commented often how each year things seem to get more complex.  After hearing a dozen or so calls it was very clear to me that she was right and we need to follow the same path that our friends in manufacturing have walked before us.  Once processes are brought under control it is time to work upstream and simplify the design of the product and the process. 

Between taking calls I asked her if she thought things were changing for the better or for the worse.  She was quick to state that she thought things were changing for the better.  That Lean had allowed them for the first time to have an outlet for their ideas and a set of tools to make improvements.  She then told me about how applying standard work to how they answer calls had been a huge win for the both organization and the customer.  It was exciting to hear her enthusiasm for the improvement.   I could not help but think how powerful it will be when we learn to apply Lean principles, methods and thinking that she had learned to our product development process so that her job is not so difficult in the future. 

As an organization we are still living with a slight hangover from our long history of Management by Objective (MBO).  One of the areas that this is most visible is in the mental models that we still all hold about how to bring about improvement.   This is a subject I have often brought up in the past so you can tell it is one that on a daily basis I see the organization struggling with.  I decided to write about it again this week after having conversations with several of my team members who are trying to teach leaders how to break out of the mentality that “all improvement is done in projects and most improvement is led by project managers.”

One does not need to look very hard to make this challenge visible.  One glance at our strategic plan and you can see numerous projects underway within the organization.  Most of these projects are point interventions where a small group of people have identified where a process or system needs to be added or changed and now they are working hard through change management issues to get these changes adopted by the operating units.  As you can imagine this creates all sorts of challenges including:

• Difficulty identifying cause and effect.  By taking a project as opposed to process improvement approach it is very hard to make performance visible and understand the effect improvement interventions are having or will have.
• Projects are typically point improvements that can often lead to sub-optimization, because we do not understand the impact the change will have on the entire process.
• Projects have a start and end date while the processs is always there.  Teams that get accustomed to improvement through projects often view improvement as an “addition to the job” as opposed to teams that are focused on process and the improvement of the process on a continious basis. 
• Projects are typically managed and implemented by people outside of the areas that are impacted.  This means that often there is strong resistance and little ownership for long-term sustainability and improvement.   This is a dangerous challenge for an organization, because it creates a system where only a small group of specialist are responsible for improvement.  Everyone else needs to do their job.

I am sure many of you can add additional bullets to this list.  As we move forward with and organization and teach people how to see their processes it will be important that we move away from these mental models.  This will be a long-term change…