I generally love to go Gemba and even more so when we visit a site where we implemented Toyota Kata. It is always very gratifying to see how the rituals start their life of their own, problems are regularly raised, discussed, and solved and how the engagement of the team members just shines through everything they tell us.
But this time it was different. The boards seemed to be filled well enough, but the dates were missing (so no telling how long an issue sat on the board) or even worse the dates were from several month before, with no signs of recent activities. The team members were either apathetic or downright frustrated and some told us stories of missed opportunities, interventions of superiors forbidding topics to be put on the board and the uselessness of the whole initiative. The initiative seemed to be dying at that plant , of an ugly death by frustration and recriminations among the teams.
The boards in the administrative areas were functioning well enough but we had a lot of problems in the production. Management delegated the task of the daily visit of the boards to the shift leaders and considered the issue closed. The shift-leaders without guidance and coaching reacted, like any sensible person, by falling back to the old routines. People were rewarded for empty boards and there was a bit of visible displeasure every time a problem was put on the board. There was always a quick answer why the problem is either unsolvable or should not even be mentioned. One person was known to go around the boards – as our new standard required – and yell at people : “can’t you understand that we can not solve this issue”?
Understandably the operators were quick to learn the new routine. At the time of our visit, they “proudly” showed us the empty boards and just shrugged when we tried to pry information from them. As it was to be expected, no improvement activities were going on, as no one had any problems. Yes, the initiative seemed to turn into a tool for the administrative areas which was very far from what we intended.
Fast forward 5 month: by our next visit the picture could not have been more different. All the boards were filled with recent information, people were coming to meet the shift-lead and to discuss the issues, correct feedback was given and above all: we have seen new ideas and PDCAs being initiated by the operators and actively supported by the shift-leads. If I ever wanted to make a movie about Toyota Kata these would be the scenes to include into it.
How was this spectacular turn-around achieved? Team boards are the fundamental tool to achieve a constant flow of problems we need for a Toyota Kata implementation. However, the team boards work on trust : trust of the teams that their problems will be correctly answered and trust on the receiver side that the problems are correctly reported with the intent of having them fixed. (In case you wonder what could be a problem that does not fit his pattern: low salaries could naturally be a problem but do not belong to the board – everybody signed a contract at hiring, so this complaint can not be solved or even discussed by a shift lead. It still deserves a serious answer though.)
So, the first challenge in order to get the boards working is to build trust between the operators and the receivers of the board messages. The only way I know is to take all problems seriously and give a correct answer. This does not mean that all problems must be solved as we do not miraculously get super-powers by the lean implementation. We, on the receiver side, have three possibilities: take the problem and start solving it WITH the team, take the problem, explain why we can not address this right now and put it into an accessible and visible backlog file, to be regularly discussed and re-assessed, or to explain clearly why we cannot address the issue. It takes a lot of experience and emotional intelligence to pick the right choice for every problem, every day. Of course, not all shift-leaders tasked with visiting the boards routinely will have this capacity by default.
Now the question becomes, how do we train the shift leaders to act correctly and to not fall back to behavioral patterns of the past? To this we have a standard Kata answer – by observation and coaching. Naively, we might think that a kata coach at the morning routines is enough to give the feedback, but this might not be the case. Many production sites have a hierarchical organization, and people will not react to simple feedback, however well meant. It will also take a clear and unmistakable demand to have a behavioral change, a demonstration that the organization takes the rituals at the board seriously and the new behavior is expected from all the participants.
Communicating this demand in a non-conflicting way is the next challenge then and we also have an answer to this : the regular Gemba walks. The idea is to have the operations manager regularly take a round at all the boards and just look at their status. is a board empty this would point to an error in the handling of the morning ritual. Are there no answers to the raised problems – same thing again … and so on. These regular Gemba Walks are no inspections – they are just a demonstration of interest and of the clear demand that certain behavioral standards need to be kept in the plant.
To make a long story short – introducing the bi-weekly board visits solved our issues with the malfunctioning production boards and restored the trust of the operators to continuously report and solve problems. As a side-effect it created a completely transparent communication channel from the operators up to the operations director of the plant, to the benefit of all parties. And for me personally it was a new example of how nicely balanced our methodology really is. We always emphasis the importance of Kata Coaching and Gemba Walks in our introductory trainings but this, for the participants is always a bit theoretical and, well, bookish. What a difference it makes to see how the parts seamlessly fit in real life! As I said, I really love Gemba walks, even the disappointing ones.
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