I had this remark or variations of it, so often in Lean implementations that I believe it is a typical reaction that needs to be discussed. It generally happens in the early phases of introducing the Team Boards to a plant. We explain people that everything that is disturbing their smoothly flowing working-day may and should be put on the board and there will be an honest response to it. It takes training and exercise to develop the right Kata for the Team Board – namely to look at our own process with a critical eye, compare to the ideal state and note the difference but not with a cynical shrug but with the intent to improve. This intent will be visible if the problem is written to the board, of course.
So, if you are a process worker in a plant and we have just told you that anything that disturbs your smooth day should be written on the board, what will you pick? It will largely depend on how much exposure you had to Lean and process thinking but also on the relationship with the administration and management of the plant. In traditional hierarchically led plants people will have a long history of having been told to not worry about (no to stick their noses into) affairs that do not concern them – like planning, sales etc. If this is the case, then the safest is to start with something simple and direct. In the plant where I heard the remark about the wailing wall, it was the fact that the corridor where the administration offices were situated, was closed on the weekends. The problem was that all the coffee and sandwich machines were on that corridor, so people doing overtime on a weekend had the additional problem of not having access to them. Of course , this was one of the first issues that appeared on the board.
Now, if you think that this is a minor issue in the grand scheme of things, you are absolutely right. However, for starting the Kata routines in the plant, it is essential that we take these matters seriously. Not just because it seems to be a problem that can be easily fixed, but also because it is a cheap and easy way for the management to send the message : “we listen and we care”. This is how they can train their teams to take the boards seriously and employ them as a communications channel. Imagine the impact of the following answer to this issue: “We closed the corridor because there were some theft incidents in the past and the office workers can not be relied on to lock the doors of their offices after work, so it has to be the corridor”. Although this was the real reason, answering like this would send a deeply wrong message to the teams – namely that management does not expect office workers to respect even simple procedures. This could have made the relationship much more tense than before the boards, simply by making these kinds of biases visible.
No wonder, that people might find using the boards risky or even harmful. By furthering open communication between different teams in the plant, especially at the beginning, unpleasant, long covered issues might come to light. It takes skill and honesty to accept the messages from the board and to react and answer them honestly. Not everybody can do that easily. For those who do not have these skills , the introduction of Toyota Kata will prove to be quite unsettling.
However, this is also an occasion to show character. I will always remember several maintenance managers who decided to go to each board meeting of the most troublesome machine they had in their plants. (And I use plural because this happened more than once). At first, they were greeted with hostility and derision, but by furthering the dialogue, reacting to some issues immediately and explaining, as equals, why some other issues will take time to fix, they invariably gained the respect of the machine operators and of the lean team. And in the end this is the future state we want to reach by implementing Toyota Kata: taking down the barriers in the plant and creating teams that are committed to do better, transparently and every day.
Complaining about making existing issues suddenly visible by building the Wailing Wall will definitely not help us towards this goal. Character and honesty will.
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