I recently visited a site that has progressed a lot in implementing Toyota Kata. We went to the morning routine and the operators were confidently reporting the issues of the last day, with the production manager leading the discussions and the shift leads taking notes and capturing problems. We reviewed the backlog of the plant and there was a nice flow of reported , addressed, and solved problems, with many quick fixes, some PDCAs and one or two projects. The whole time, the coordinator was proudly explaining that he most of these activities run without the need for him to intervene. We were quite close to the dream of our implementation – to make lean disappear by turning it into the natural, usual way the plant does business.
Then, we visited the PDCA meeting that was due. The team already knew the cycle well – define a target condition, check the present state, list obstacles, pick one and define an action. So, no problems there – but still , something felt a bit off. The stages from defining the target to obstacles seemed to be way to fast, as if the team were in a hurry to come to the planned actions for next week. Except, they did not . They started to discuss solutions instead, and before we knew the meeting was back in the old run: someone proposing a solution and somebody else opposing it vehemently only to have a new proposal and rejection again by someone else. So , we were stuck, with everybody becoming frustrated and the familiar old school feeling “we can’t change anything around here” becoming more and more apparent.
Then, something happened. A new proposal came up and immediately we had a list of why this will not work. But this time a team member interrupted the argument with the simple question : “why don’t we just try this out”? After a bit of silence, the team agreed, that a trial would indeed be possible, and we closed with the plan to implement the test – a textbook example of how PDCA meetings should run.
After the meeting I saw the coordinator walk away with the team member who proposed the test – and saw her face light up in big smile. Obviously, the coordinator was giving feedback to her, reinforcing the behavior that we need. And this is why we need to have coordinators even in plants where most of the implementation is running well.
As Mike Rother put it in the Toyota Kata book – even the best athletes need a coach. And there is no soccer team in the world that would lay off the coach after having won a championship.
We train and force ourselves to learn new routines and there is a moment when we might think that they already became our normal behavioral patterns, but this is generally wrong. We underestimate the inertia that we have. Our inefficient spontaneous ways had a reason why they existed: they were probably on the path of the minimal effort. So, the moment we get preoccupied, stressed or simply tired there will be a tendency to fall back to the old, easy ways. If this goes unchallenged the next time it will be even easier to fall back and soon, we will be in the situation from before we learned a new, more efficient routine. This is absolutely natural and will happen in all situations of life quite often. I, to my shame, have experienced this several times as a programmer.
That is where a coach /coordinator is needed. We need a person to be there, observing, comparing the ideal target condition to the messy present state and continuously making small adjustments. These need not be, indeed must not be, severe or even loud. In the PDCA meeting I am telling about, the coordinator (or myself, as a guest) could have intervened earlier and could have held a small lecture about PDCA thinking and all. But this is the call of the coordinator – and he has to juggle many parameters in his head. Is the behavior stemming from not knowing the correct procedure or is it just everybody being tired? Will he have a better impact by calling out the bad behavior or by lauding the right one? In front of the team or just private feedback? And so on and on …
This is valuable know-how that is not taught anywhere. And it is the only way known to man to maintain newly acquired routines. Giving this up is a sure way to slip back to the old ways.
Does this mean that we need a coordinator for ever and only to do the coaching and feedback? When someone asked Faraday what the use of his experiments with electricity in the 1830-ies is he famously asked back : “What’s the use of a baby?”. To the question – do we need a coordinator once we successfully implemented Lean, we can ask back “do athletes give up their coaches after a gold medal”?
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