The production manager was looking at me with incredulity and a bit of triumph in his eyes as he asked me this question. We were standing in his realm, at a machine where a board was hanging in front of an aggregate with this very Lean/Japanese clinging name on it. And I have never heard the term before.
The situation was a bit sensitive. With us we had the plant manager and the Lean leader for the plant and they were looking at me with some disappointment and curiosity. The company was paying handsomely for a Lean consultant and it was an ugly surprise for them to see that their own production manager was more knowledgeable about Lean as the consultant they brought in with considerable effort. Clearly, my credibility was at stake .
I quickly went through my few options: I could brazenly fake it and answer something like “OF COURSE I know what a Kamishibai board is” and then hope for the best. Or be a bit more evasive about it along the lines of “Yeah, I heard something about it …” and see how the discussion develops, or I could just be honest and tell him, that I hear the term for the first time. This was in a sense not a new situation for me: as usual the top management of the company the plant was part of was enthusiastic about introducing Lean to all plants. And again, as usual, local management was not really convinced, but was willing to give it a try. But the production manager saw the whole thing as another unwarranted interference into the way he was running his domain. This being our first serious meeting, it was important to him to establish the pecking order and to check me out.
As in every case, for me the most important point was to establish trust between us. The message I wanted to convey was that it was a given that I will be coaching the Lean introduction to this plant and that was non-negotiable. On the other hand I am no dogmatic Lean guy, throwing around Japanese terms (though Gemba and Kata do get to be used quite often) and most importantly I will acknowledge his expertise and will be willing to learn from him. So, I shrugged, as if knowing or not knowing what a Kamishibai board is was a question without any importance whatsoever, looked at him and said, “nope, never heard the term”.
The production anager had his moment of triumph and could, slightly condescendingly, explain us, Learn ignoramuses, what Kamishibai boards were. It turned out, they were pretty much the same boards we have been using for the last 10 years in every Lean implementation just not under this name. More interestingly, we could also look at the board, which was completely empty of any useful content. So, the discussion quickly moved over to the more interesting topic of why the boards were not active any more and soon we were in a detailed discussion about how to fix the problems and how to cooperate between Lean and production which was my goal from the first moment on .
“I was really curious how you will handle this” – told me my coachee after we were back in our office. From her tone I gathered, that she approved the way this was handled and had I bluffed my way out of it I would have lost some of her confidence. I sure hoped, that the plant manager saw this in the same way.
What I learned from this episode was that Lean being a huge subject we will definitely meet people in our journey who know better or just use a different terminology than us On the other hand Leean is also very simple in its core – we just want to eliminate Muda, Mura, Muri (and if you do not know some of these terms, just ask). As long as we are honestly interested in achieving this goal there is no shame in missing out on some terminology – there are many Lean books and consultants around and we can learn something useful from every one of them. Also, being honest is probably the best medium to long term strategy.
P.S. There is a second ending to this story. A few days ago I asked a colleague who has worked for Toyota in Japan for a few years if he encountered the term Kamishibai board. Well , he didn’t either. But he told me that in the first plant he was working for everybody was using Yamada boards. He basically had the same dilemma as I had and had to ask his mentor what the Yamada boards were. It turned out a previous manager called Mr. Yamada introduced the use of these boards and in his honor they retained the name.
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