A blessing in disguise

It is always interesting to see how worried managers get after they have been experiencing the first benefits of a Lean implementation and when, because of any reason, the Lean Manager decides to leave the company. What will happen with the initiative now? How will we make it continue? What will happen with the costs and efforts so far? Do we now have to start from the beginning?

Well, if the success and sustainability of your continuous improvement program is depending so much on the initiator, namely the Lean Manager / Lean Department which is taking care for it, certainly something is wrong, not?

Especially in the beginning phase of an implementation, there is a high risk of backfall and even stoppage of the initiative in case the responsible persons, the drivers, leave. The invested resources can easily turn into sunk costs and moreover, the moral can decline so much that another initiative can be much more harder to leverage than even before. People turn into business as usual very quickly when there are no activities towards the Lean implementation done anymore.

Leaving Lean Managers was something we have experienced during our journey. Because of several reasons we had a high rate of fluctuation in the beginning. This was neither something we thought of nor had we decided to take precautions for this situation. All of a sudden we experienced these situations in a relatively short time in some of our locations. Our barn was burning and the initiative was exposed to high risk of getting seriously harmed. For sure the initiative was about to stagnate or even deteriorate in the location and the credibility was under high pressure. We had invested a lot of money and time for those people and were developing them from scratch. In most of the cases they were head hunted away by other companies, some of them were frustrated with the conditions they had to deal with.

At that time the fire in the barn seemed to be a small catastrophe and we have not been thinking of stress testing our approach for resilience. We didn’t know what actually would happen, in the contrary, we were sure that would harm the respective locations moral. Of course it was not possible to immediately replace the colleagues and even if, the recovery time would have taken months for the new colleague to (re)build the trust and the CI culture. Sometimes the management decision was to stop the program anyway, given the expected recovery time, and postpone the continuation to the next year. All in all a very bad barn fire.

But when we were starting to see the moon, we recognized one of the most important benefits of our implementation approach. We could see very clearly that at least the departments which started and which had a minimum amount of time to practice the criteria of our approach were continuing with the routines and the mindset. They never thought of changing back again! Not the new Lean Manager had to rebuild the trust and the CI culture, the remaining culture and existing habits have been “absorbing” the new Lean Manager !

Our approach, consisting of the KATA mindset, implementing the very basics and focusing on people, their habits and exercising was preventing most of the negative effects we had due to losing a Lean Manager. Normally a company does not have the possibility to start slowly and with the basics to focus on mindset and habits. Most of them want immediate results (which they often get, but it doesn’t mean there is a CI Culture implemented) and as many Lean tools implemented as possible in a short time. We had the possibility to focus on the culture instead, not reaching the expected ROI in the 1^st phase was tolerated by the management and we were enjoying a high level of trust by them. It seemed that the few things we were systematically and in a structured and deliberate way exercising were sticking – I personally would have expected to exercise many tools longer but it seemed that the time of 8-12 months was enough to create a reflex. Of course not everything was perfect, some of the tools were not being accurately used but the habit was there: Thinking in terms of waste, keeping the routines and their principles, working with the PDCA method, keeping a healthy backlog and transparency, etc. etc.

It seemed that we created another competitive advantage out of our approach which we didn’t have in mind, the resilience in case of change of key people. In my opinion, one of the Top 3 achievements and benefits of our approach, which is also confirming the strength of the vision.

We are still striving to find out ways how to increase this strength discovered “luckily” even more. There are many indications available, and many experiences, we will certainly share with you.

Here, the reader has to be reminded that we do not have any Lean department in our locations, so there is no successor to step in immediately and to keep at least the status quo.