The great escalation

"One disaster is better than 1000 advices"

As I am naturally a risk seeking person, I took a risk in the beginning of our multisite Lean implementation program. Sometimes, if nothing else helps, you just have to let things happen with what you know now in order to get a picture about what you don’t know.

See what happened with a problematic site and a MD who was resisting and behaving opportunistically

Once we have implemented certain basics of CI we do perform a so called “Lean summit” in the respective location during our roll-out. First of all to ensure the top management focus on the topic and secondly to celebrate this first major milestone with acknowledging the achievements of the colleagues.

As we already had some summits, we had a good picture about what was expected and what to prepare in the location. I was preparing the local Lean manager for the summit, when I recognized that things were just not going as expected. Although everything seemed to be understood and commitment was given to work on the missing points there was no real progress. I was even taking into consideration to cancel the event, but it’s hard to cancel such an event where 3 of the 5 board members are participating. One of them responsible for this location among others, one of them my direct manager and accountable for the CI program and the other one responsible for the entire operations in the group. Coming back to the location, although having volunteered as one of the first pilot locations, there seemed to be many obstacles preventing their progress, and somehow we had pushed the initiative to come to this level. I had the feeling that whatever I tried, however I explained the requirements, I couldn’t make the local MD understand the situation and every meeting was finished with a vague alignment. The boards and visuals where “decoration” for him, the name which we choose should be changed into something else and, of course the very classic, they are already very good and are working in their own way every day on improvements.

On the last Friday before the summit I went over the agenda and the presentation once again with the local Lean manager. I could feel that there were unspoken problems but I was sure that he understood what we are going to do and to show. So I gave him the last small inputs and we went into the weekend, the summit was supposed to happen on the upcoming Monday. My idea was also that whatever was missing or if there was a game played, it will come out with the summit and a decision will be taken out of that. So I took a risk of having a maybe not so convenient summit in order to create the needed urgency and also some more empowerment to implement Lean in our way.

As you can imagine, the event was awfully bad. I wont go into the details here but the same ignorant local MD with having changed some of the content and wording in the presentation meanwhile, was feeding the tense air in the meeting room with his praises about Lean. There was a huge mammoth in the room which everybody saw, but no one talked about. Another disaster followed on the shopfloor. The “Lean tour” was supposed to happen in the few areas where the basics have been implemented during the 1^st phase (6-8 months). As we performed the tour, my manager was looking at me several times rather than at the area or at the line where the implementation was supposed to be – which was very clear because there was literally nothing to see. I was surprised about the blatant self-confidence of the local MD not to cancel the event as everybody must have been asking the question of what we are doing there at all. No boards, some stripes which should indicate 5S, no knowledge about the WHY and the HOW – I was asking myself where all the consultancy money was spent on.

Long story short: I was thinking that this is the first big fail, but bigger than expected and it felt awful. Maybe our approach of implementing lean with the way of scientific thinking was not working at all? Maybe I should have prepared a 100 points check list of what exactly to do and how, in order to ensure profound implementation – but then it would have been a blind execution of the tasks without thinking and learning. So what to do in such a situation? Maybe the Toyota Kata was not applicable on that scale or i made a mistake during the steps?

So my vision of creating a tailor made solution for implementing CI in our group was having troubles. The idea of starting with just the direction and creating the detailed framework out of the learnings in a community of Lean managers was nice in the beginning but was it really working? We didn’t want to replicate the Toyota Production System at all, my vision was to be able to translate the principles of Kaizen and Lean thinking into our very own environment, because this is what most companies are usually struggling with.

Of course the reflection about the summit with my team and later with my manager was not a picnic. I was heavily thinking about the outcomes and why the approach was not working with being in self-doubt for a long time. Some of us were talking about measures, some of us were talking about learnings.

My manager ordered me not to perform such an event anymore and to not expose him to such a “situation”, which I understood, so we agreed on measures and a procedure to really ensure a proper situation. Out of the discussions we recognized weaknesses in our approach and adapted to them. We worked out some Poke Yoke into our processes that some discussions even cannot come up if the principles are applied correctly into the implementation.

Only 1 year later I started to realize that everything what we learned and therefore developed out of that great escalation was because of this unpleasant event. Any argumentation, the justification of any decision, the explanation of certain standards and rules we implemented, many of them have been realized because of the behavior of those few people. Actually we needed to thank them for their resistance and sometimes lies and false tricks, which made us even stronger – this I mean without sarcasm.

A big part of our mental Andon cords, sensibilities and direction towards the target picture were created by the findings after the reflection on this event. As also “no news is bad news” this event affected the focus and readiness of many other top managers positively.

One of the main learnings? A framework can support you in taking risks if you are not naturally equipped with a risk seeking attitude, isn’t this the core of being able to walk over the knowledge threshold?

And today…we are having our main event to hand over the further development of CI to this respective location as they did a great job so far and have reached a flight level to move forward autonomously and empowered in their own way.