“We are not here to conquer countries, we want to conquer hearts”
In my last blog entries I was talking about the importance of the creation of the Lean mindset and development of a CI environment in an iterative way instead of rigorously planning beforehand how the Lean implementation should look like.
This time I will be giving more information about some of our success criteria and best practices. Also you will get insights about what we did and how we developed the organizational structures and responsibilities to implement Lean.
Almost any Lean enthusiast is d’accord that applying some Lean tools in projects is not equal to implementing a Lean mindset. So if Peter Drucker says that “Culture eats strategy for breakfast” it is maybe not so easy to understand in the beginning but the immense power of ANY culture is not to be neglected to create this mindset (or does the mindset create the culture? We will see). Also we had to be aware that in any environment a certain culture is already existing. The power of a culture is a big advantage and a huge disadvantage as well of course 😊 The strength comes with the benefit/disadvantage of not being easy to be changed. The question is rather what kind of culture do you CURRENTLY have in your organization? To refer back to our questions, I strongly believe that behaviors and routines create culture. At the end of the day, in an organization, this is what managers can influence and change: How do we communicate? How do we solve problems? How do we organize work? How do we focus on the problem instead of the people? What kind of tools & structures do we have to support us here?
A simple board with a set of routines can elevate your CI culture – of course there are many boards and some routines already existing, but does it mean that it enables CI? I have seen many top managers performing daily shop floor tours but whats the outcome? It depends on luck and a lot of expertise to recognize SOME problems and to address them to the team. Still it is not ensured that they will work (in the right way) on them. It’s the awareness about what lies behind the curtains which differentiates the routine from a routine. Spending the same amount of time on a “Genba walk” would have much more impact in CI than just letting yourself being seen in the shopfloor.
If you implement a board and promote transparency, you can refer back to the board and your process in case of any problems which you could have recognized and worked on to avoid the actual problem, IF the symptoms have been made visible there. If you refer all of your management routines to the board and restrict it only to what is disclosed there, everybody will learn that there is no other way to address problems (or ideas). Also any explanation of not reaching certain targets is another source of creating a CI backlog to work on – that’s should be a clear expectation from the management. Once you create this transparency, you create a reality which requires to be worked on, otherwise the list will get longer and longer and anybody will feel uncomfortable with that. Never forget: all those issues were already existing, you are not coming with additional topics to the people, you just helped to make them transparent. In this way you also make people deal with their KPIs and actual issues in this certain area. This was an example of one specific tool called “team board routines” and in some cases it is still a challenge to implement and make these routines work.
Basing the CI on routines “including everybody” like Toyota is stating, has another important side effect. Of course breaking up silos is considered as a big advantage in organizational agility and continuous improvement but the most important benefits lies in the self-dynamics of the respective group: When it comes to problems, their refinement, sizing and scoping with especially prioritizing, the group controls and cross checks itself. On the other hand the worst thing which can happen is that there is a big difference about the mentioned points between group members. This again enables the first steps of the correct problems definition and the beginning of root cause analysis if coached effectively, and without any real Lean method application yet.
So with the setup of having a coach taking care of the facilitation of routines as a practice with focusing on the elements described above, you can have some of the most important and basic fundaments of CI implemented in your organization. I know how uncomfortable and frustrating it can be for many people when they repetitively receive the question of “Whats the actual problem/root cause?” instead of starting the fire fighting on base of some symptoms. We may expect the knowledge threshold much later but it comes already very early in the coaching process, which is the exact formulation of the actual problem. Many people have problems in defining the target condition, even the actual condition: so before starting to implement Lean but already starting practicing Kata, we need to pave our way into this direction with some basic routines which may not necessarily come from Lean.
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