A usual story...

“Great things are not done by impulse, but by a series of small things put together” V. v. Gogh

Lean methods should help us to do the right things using the best method possible to meet the customer needs. To think about that, take into account the true root causes of a problem, to grasp the real meaning behind a Lean tool, to approach the problem or improvement idea in a pragmatic way, etc. are part of Lean thinking which is even harder to incorporate into our habits. The biggest barrier to do so is mostly our own ego or lack of self-awareness (which can be created only with accurate self-reflection, which itself is already hard enough). Nevertheless, one part of the concept of management is dealing with organizational & procedural set ups to steer the behavior of people into the direction which is wanted in the context of this business (org. culture). It doesn’t work so bad as many people come to work just to execute some activities to earn money and in many cases they even don’t discuss what they do. Unfortunately this fact is what is mostly the underlying reason that this basic management concept is working. But sometimes, because of laziness, to avoid stress, competitiveness or other ego related causes people stand up to discuss, fight, prove themselves instead of being so apathetic and some improvements happen in this endeavor. Only when a leader tries to support and serve those peoples’ purposes in the context of work he/she can bring them to a state of acting self-driven in an empowered way. Only an inner pull (which can be created from outside but also must be maintained) will move the people into a state of conscious activities (hopefully CI activities) which they are ready to do because of intrinsic reasons. But again, personality, ego, etc. stand in the way.

It takes a much longer time than we would expect to make people understand that it is not really an improvement to replace a manual brush with a vacuum cleaner when you are doing 5S. To make them jump over the mental barrier and see behind the curtains where they realize that working on reducing dust and dirt sources is the main aim. This fact is well known by many Lean experts and even stated on many documents, but do we really know what it means? Basically it means: don’t take the easy first idea to improve you KPI of cleaning time (which is improving for sure). The right path is to systematically work on the dirt source reductions, to embed this way of working into the daily routines. And I can tell you: when the vacuum cleaner is occupied or defect, what will happen in your opinion? (a true story)

Strong personalities or big egos make coaching also very difficult. How do you explain a fish how life is being a bird?

Now I know that strength is not coming from winning but from struggling and that’s how I take those situations.

That’s why for a Lean implementation its never enough to have a Lean expert. They can come with a lot of fancy staff to you and propose a lot of good tools, as an enthusiast there is hardly anything which I am not jumping on. But hold on: if you want to have a qualitative and sustainable mindset change and behavior improvement, which is also detached from specific personal presence/qualities but is available as an "omnipresent atmosphere", you need to bring good leadership skills. That’s a struggle.

Situational leadership, with the application of organizational power is sometimes necessary to keep common commitments. If I am not wrong, I remember from the Toyota Principle, that once a sensei was called from Japan to the Toyota Joint Venture in the US and the sensei had a precondition in order to help them. He requested that everyone does what he says without any question. Very far away from empowerment and other modern leadership principles, not? My daughters also don’t understand why they MUST go to school but they recognized that any discussion about it is senseless.

Well, organizational structures and rules are here to provide the necessary environment for the things we need to do for CI. They should help steering certain behaviors, mechanisms, etc. But there is a limit to that. You can write down all the principles and rules, and people try to stick to them, even accept and want them. But there is a problem of defining them, which you can never completely do so that it is crystal clear for everyone, it never will be. So the quintessence of my todays blog is whenever I face such a situation, which I do very often, where I am challenged of what this means and what that means and why we do things the way we do, is sharing with you my reflex about such situations. Despite the fact that principles, standards, rules are here to be challenged and improved, still they have to meet the underlying philosophy requirements of their existence.

My reaction here is not to explain the process we established together as our standard but taking the time and effort of clarifying the purpose and the initial needs of doing so. There can always be several ways to implement a process and solve a problem but at the end of the day we have to agree on one (the best way) sometimes. The challenge is then coaching people when they want to go a different way, keeping the benefit/risk/cost ratio of the alternative and sometimes say  “NO” to possible new ideas. In the other case it is about creating awareness of different aspects of the new idea and questioning if it really brings an additional value than before.

Once I had a new colleague with a certain Lean experience (which we thought is to our benefit). Although our approach gives a big autonomy and flexibility compared to other implementations, it was not possible to bring him on track so that he is inline with the rest of the team of Lean managers. Rather his ego than his (quite limited but existing) experience was hindering the fruitful progress of the implementation. But the focus was always on the staff of the location and to start exercising and creating the habits which we define as good CI habits. The problem was that this works also into the other direction and once this happens, the way back, especially in this location would have been nearly impossible…This risk was too big to take, no calculations on the cost of the people!

Coming back to the purpose of each individuum: a healthy mind must always be trying to critically reflect if it knows something or not, especially in business situations where you work as a community. There is a difference between an intelligent failure and insanity.