At GBMP’s recent Northeast Shingo Prize Conference in Hyannis Massachusetts, CCM displayed adaptations of Lean as they have applied it to Biomedical Research  in their Community of Lean Lounge booth.   Conference attendees were drawn in by the wacky display of dangerous animals and props.   But during these times of sharing, CCM staff realized that a majority of the representatives from all different industries shared their frustrations in  getting employees involved with a) active Problem Solving and b) employee engagement. It appeared that everyone – regardless of their work – is faced with the very same challenges when developing a culture of Continuous Improvement. CCM is attempting to address this challenge in novel ways and here is the story that they shared in the Community of Lean Lounge:

“Pulling the Cord”

During a Kaizen event that was focused on improving our Gemba Walks, the Team Leads and front-line technicians recognized that many members of our staff were not making the connections of how 5S and problem-solving are integrated into everyday work.  Many still see Lean as “another thing to do”; a “thing” that requires dedicated time for them to find, think, test and implement solutions to problems. The Kaizen Team announced “we are pulling the cord and we need more help to coach our staff to connect the dots”.

“Making it real”

To address this problem, leadership set out to create a realistic life-or-death simulation that would clearly illustrate how 5S, standard work and Problem Solving are part of everyday work.  From this setback was born the “5S Wetlabs”, a portable, 90-minute training session that was designed to reinforce the importance of Standard Work, workplace organization and stakeholder involvement.  During the intense and dramatic simulation, a critical step goes haywire activating an emergency response to save a life.  The “First Responders” encounter a dysfunctional and chaotic situation making the life-saving process totally ineffective, resulting in the tragic death of the victim.  The Responders fail miserably to perform effectively in their role; they articulate feelings of disappointment, of being demoralized, embarrassed and frustrated by their inability to save the victim.

“Shoveling against the tide… or Making Excuses”

The First Responders are asked to list “what went wrong”, which inevitably becomes a shopping list for 5S-related improvements. The Responders are then asked “who killed the victim” and to write an “Obituary” for the victim that will be presented to the family members at the wake.  The Obituary is often comically uncomfortable, forcing the responders to identify “who” and “what” failed, and their contribution to the victim’s death.  The Obituary exercise illustrates how we tend to make excuses, even when we have influence on a process. A short problem-solving session follows which then leads to Responders identifying dozens of improvements that will make the situation fool-proof; especially since every participant now realizes that “they” are the stakeholder.  They are personally relying on the quality and effectiveness of the system for their own survival.  The simulation is then immediately changed and improved, and the students are  challenged to create a system that will save their own lives when the process goes wrong.  5S principals are now demonstrated to the students by transforming a mundane exercise into a realistic life-or-death situation that makes the mistakes painfully personal.

Lean Learning Goes Both Ways

The theme of CCM’s 2013 Lean Lounge booth was “if we can do it, anybody can”.  The 5S Wetlabs display was an instant hit, as it attracted many trainers and managers who were interested in an unconventional approach to teaching the benefits of workplace organization and problem-solving in a short period of time. One such company was a major aerospace manufacturer that had recently experienced system failures that relied on multiple roles. The Continuous Improvement Director instantly saw the value in life-or-death scenario training for engineers and maintenance technicians who develop and maintain machines and processes that can result in death from catastrophic failure.   Other companies that visited the CCM booth expressed interest in the novel approach to personalized training concepts, and many remarked that perhaps the time has come when industry can now learn from healthcare.   While healthcare has been catching up for years, problems encountered in the dynamic healthcare setting can provide useful lessons for all industries when faced with change that threatens the life or death of an organization.  The learning pendulum has shifted, and healthcare may now be the very industry to illuminate the way to rapid improvements in a threatening market or environment.  Can lessons learned from healthcare help your organization?

Notes from O.L.D. :

1)    I think the answer to above question is:  Yes, definitely!  Lean learning is anything but industry specific.  Thanks again to Gerry and Julianne for their story.

2)    It’s not too early to register for our October 1-2, 2014 conference in Springfield, MA. – and maybe sign up for your own  Lean Lounge table. Click here for details.

3)    It’s almost too late to register for my Sign up here for “Tea Time with Toast Dude” – but not quite!  The topic will be “Killer Measures”, traditional measures that can derail your lean implementation.  Hope you can join me on Tuesday, December 10 (tomorrow!) from 3:00 – 3:40 p.m. EST.  Read more & register.

A century after the first Labor Day celebration, during a factory re-organization, I discovered firsthand the meaning of “territorial imperative.” Removing organizational boundaries within the shop is one thing, but when you venture into the ‘professional’ parts of the company that’s challenging the natural order!  One office manager, call him Tom, adamantly opposed the idea of moving his department to the floor, next to his internal customer.  Tom had been a good manager and dependable ally during early improvements to the factory floor, but now that his department was directly impacted, he acted as though they were being sucked into a vortex of lesser status.   In a move to provide better internal communication and customer service, factory overhead departments had all been relocated the factory floor. The privacy and seclusion of offices was replaced by open spaces, desks with no cubicles, departments with no walls, and a company receptionist positioned on a raised platform, high enough that she could tell at a glance if someone what at his desk or bench to take an incoming call.  We told our customers “When you call our factory, you’re really calling the factory!”    

While both the internal customer (the factory) and our external customers appreciated the improved service derived from this open concept, Tom had a nagging concern:  “Both my parents worked in a factory their entire lives in order to send me to college and get my masters degree so I wouldn’t have to work in a factory.  This just feels wrong to me.”  I recall getting a bit defensive and suggesting to Tom, “Well I’m sure there are still plenty of companies around who’ll be looking for a persons in three-piece suits.”  I should have been more respectful.  Problem was (and still is) that somewhere along the way from 1894 to 1994, making things had become unimportant – trivialized by visionaries who predicted three-day workweeks.     

So much has changed since the first official Labor Day in 1894 when nearly everybody in the work force would have been classified direct labor.  Today the ratio between direct and indirect labor is somewhere in the 1:4 range.  To be sure, technological changes have effected a good deal of this change if not all for the better.  Still, the trivialization of the frontline worker – the one for whom this holiday was established – continues unabated, increasingly isolating them from those indirect, supposed support services.  In many cases the Gemba is no longer even onshore.   

I have a lighthearted modest proposal for future Labor Days: Let’s make them only for non-exempt employees.  They can have the barbeques; the rest of us professionals can go to work.  

Happy Labor Day! 

O.L.D.

A couple reminders: 
My next free webinar, “Tea Time with the Toast Dude”, entitled Managing Up (click to sign up) is coming up Tuesday, September 10 at 3:00 p.m.  I’ve had many requests to weigh in on this subject.  And one lucky participant will win a free registration to our Northeast Region Shingo Conference in Hyannis, MA, September 24-25.  Time is drawing near for our conference.  Don’t miss it!  

The idea of “seeing what you get” pre-dates the emergence of IT.  The revolution began with Flip Wilson’s Geraldine in the 1960’s and entered our musical vernacular in 1970’s as a laidback Motown classic.    The message in both instances was “Here I am with no guile or pretense and no hidden agenda.”  What you see is what you get.    So by 1980, when the phrase was usurped by techno geeks, we understood what it meant.   [BTW: For a bit of nostalgia, take a couple minutes to click on the links above.]

In the 1990’s with the popularization of the Toyota Production System we were once again Learning to See, except this time, the process ran in reverse as we struggled to correlate our mental image of the workplace with Gemba – the “real place.”  Using a new method referred to a Value Stream Mapping, we toured our factories and offices, our OR’s and ED’s intending to understand and separate the real value provided to the customer from a sea of waste.   With post-its and pencils in hand we walked the process flow to “see” the real place.

But what did we see?  The traditional supposition, that the workplace was dirty, unimaginative, unmotivated, cut-and-dry often tainted our observation.  A general manager of a large consumer goods manufacturer commented to me in a loud voice as we stood on a load dock watching a worker unload a truck, “Wow you can tell we’re paying him by the hour.  How much time is he going to take to unload this truck?”  The worker shot around and glared at the manager, responding, “Last week I got my butt reamed for making a mistake on the count.  The way shipments arrive here it’s a miracle anyone ever gets the count right!  So now, I’m taking my time and triple-checking everything, BOSS.”

It seems that what this general manager saw was exactly what he got.   Respect is a two-way street, something with which many managers still have difficulty.   Thirty years (and 14 million copies) after Kenneth Blanchard and Spencer Johnson advised managers to “catch someone doing something right,”  this continues to be a challenging concept.   The VSM symbols describe material and information, but they don’t provide a WYSIWG of the people who do the work.

How about in your workplace?  Are employees your most valuable resource or a necessary evil?  Geraldine was right:  What you see is what you get.    Share some thoughts.

O.L.D.

“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign
Blockin’ out the scenery, breakin’ my mind
Do this, don’t do that, can’t you read the sign?”

Both office and factory were heavily invested in workplace organization, striving to create a workplace free of confusion.  Employees told me, when asked, that they never had to search for anything – ever.  The manager who walked with me proudly spoke of their team effort to create order from chaos by sorting out unneeded items – information, material and equipment.  “The employees in each department were the change agents,” he said.  “They decided first what should go and then where to place the things they need.”

To be sure, there were clearly marked, set locations for almost everything. Floors, bench tops, shelving, cabinets and bookcases all were taped and addressed. But one thing bothered me.  Lots of signs.  Little reminders were posted everywhere (“do this, don’t do that”) intended to usher the flow of production and information sans delays or defects:

• A decal on an assembly fixture warned:  Caution. Do not operate without material.  An operator explained to me that fixture would be damaged if run empty. “Has that ever happened? I asked.  “Why do you think the sign is there?” she replied.
• Above a packing bench in the shipping department a cute sign inquired, Got manuals? to remind packers to include operating instructions with products.
• In the test lab, a sign over a test bath read, Turn on at shift start, off at shift end.  “Do you ever forget?” I asked.  “Yes, occasionally,” was the reply.
• In a production control department, signs on computers read, Please log off at night.
• Signs for the order desk were everywhere, some formal and some just hand-written notes.  “How do you keep track of all of these exceptions and special conditions?” I asked the order-entry person.  “I just know,” replied the employee, “and many of these notes are out of date anyway.”

“Sign, sign, everywhere a sign ,” I began humming to myself.

“Why all of the signs?” I asked my host as I pointed a couple do-this-don’t-do that’s.  “They’re work standards,” he replied.

“But aren’t most of these signs just warning employees about problems that haven’t been fixed?” I asked.

My host looked at me incredulously and said, “It’s just part of their jobs.”

“Is it really?” I persisted.  “Are these things they were hired to do, or are these signs just mental clutter?”

What do you think?  How many signs can you find in your department?  Chime in.

O.L.D.

The basic formula was:          Price = Cost + Profit

There were no reviews of costs – didn’t need to be.  Nobody blinked when prices went up.   In fact, each price increase created an opportunity for distributors to stock up just before the increase at a lower price: more sales for us, at least in the short term, and more profit for distributors.  This was sales’ perpetual motion machine.

Sometime in the early ‘80’s the winds changed; customers in our market no longer accepted price increases.  On the contrary, they began asking for price decreases.  Our first instinct was to object.  We were in denial for about five years thereafter, our salespeople forced to haggle with customers just to avoid an increase.  In the process, we lost customers.   A principle referred to by the creators of TPS as “cost subtraction“ had put the customer in the driver’s seat:

Profit = Price – Cost

The phrase “new normal” is used to describe a recent sea change in the world economy.   “Cost subtraction” marked a less obvious sea change in the 1980’s, but one that arguably has contributed significantly to our latter day new normal.   Simply put, the cost subtraction formula assumed that the customer determined the price and that profit therefore required effective cost management.  Organizations that had previously been free to pass along cost increases, now had to find ways to reduce costs.

How did US industry respond?  With outsourcing, off-shoring and leveraging of suppliers.  We purchased larger lots from suppliers to avert their price increases, and then rewarded buyers for “cost avoidance”.  We downsized our workforces and reduced employee benefits.  A company president quipped, “we’ll charge employees for parking spaces if we have to.”  Companies large enough to afford it sought to automate their way out of the dilemma, replacing employees with machines.  These superficial improvements created paper savings while weakening productive strength and emptying cash reserves.  Russ Scaffede, a former executive at General Motors, joked as a Shingo Conference speaker, “All our plants made money, only the corporation was losing its shirt.”

My little company did not have the financial resources to exercise many of these superficial options, which fortuitously led us to the discovery of TPS.   We learned the story behind the cost subtraction principle: that the lion’s share of cost reduction could be found through many small improvements.

Forty years after the cost subtraction sea change, many organizations continue to deny it.  Some are “lucky” companies, still able to price their products or services to cover wastes; others revert to superficial improvements to eke out a profit.  Where does your company stand?  Are you a lucky company?   What are your cost subtraction strategies?  Share a story with us.

O.L.D.

“That may or may not be so,” my friendly heckler responded, “but just because 5S is easy, should that make it first?”

“What do you suggest as a first step to improvement?” I asked.

“Kanban,” he replied.  “A pull system is the thread that holds everything else together.”

“Pull systems are a tough place to begin,” I offered.  “Maybe it would better for a company to “get its feet wet on something less conceptually challenging.”

“No,” he shot back, “the pull system is where my company started and it’s worked very well, end-to-end.”

I hesitated, then gave a consultant’s non-committal b.s. response: “Where you start may be less critical than just getting started.  No two companies are alike,” a non-answer that ended the question, but was not satisfying either to the questioner or me.

For the next half hour, I pondered his challenge.  I recalled a quote from Hajime Ohba, then General Manager of Toyota Supplier Support Center (TSSC), about doing the right thing:

“True North is the vision of the ideal.  Always do what we should do, not what we can do.”

This seemed to contradict my “do the easy things first” theory.

TSSC had worked with my plant in the mid-90’s to help us better understand “true TPS.”  Mr. Ohba had said to me after his first visit to our site, (I’m paraphrasing) “You have made some nice individual improvements, but you will not receive the full benefit of TPS until you can put them all together.”  He asked us to identify a product line where an improvement was needed.   I picked a small assembly line that had delivery problems, one where we were not betting the farm, and we went to work.  There was no mention of 5S, or kanban, nor any lean ‘tool’ with which we were marginally familiar.

Instead there were many questions:

“Why is that assembly fixture over there?”

“How do you know what to build first?”

“Where do the finished products go next?”

“How long has this machine been down?”

One question frequently led to another.  Sometimes the answers were obvious, and other times we had no answer.

“Why don’t you have the answer?” was the next friendly but persistent question.

They wanted us to watch and think.  It was hard, and I guess it was what we should do.

———-

Back in the land down under, about a half hour later, I caught up to my Aussie friend to apologize.  “I think I headed in the wrong direction today with my comment about 5S.  Consultants like me tend to break TPS into little pieces because it’s easier for us to describe.  Implementing TPS isn’t about 5S or kanban or any other tool.  Sometimes we just ask the wrong questions.“

“Well I still hold that kanban is first,” he replied.

“No worries,” I said.

O.L.D.

“How can we get the docs to accept standardization?”

I smiled at the question, not only because doctors as a group are notorious individualists, but also because they are not so different from any other occupation in their view of standards.   The word “standard” makes people cringe because to many it implies loss of personal choice:

• Several years ago a program manager at a local defense contractor offered this view of standardization:  “I never liked the idea of sameness. I want my engineers to be creative.”  I snapped back at her with some frustration, “When you’re driving home tonight on the right side of the road, would you consider that “sameness?”
• On factory floors, where work has been measured (although too infrequently) for a long time, standards have a bad name as well.  A shopfloor employee related to me, “They (the industrial engineer) ‘made up’ a standard when the product was released and it’s been wrong from the start.  Then last year to meet a cost reduction target, they just arbitrarily reduced the labor figure.”
• My friend Gifford Brown, a former site manager at Ford relates the outcome of a set-up reduction exercise at his plant conducted by Shigeo Shingo (a story for another post) back in the mid-80’s.  In just half a day, working with Dr. Shingo, Ford operators, tool makers and set-up folks changed over a 300 ton press in just 10 minutes, down from a previous standard of four hours.  When Gifford saw this, he ran up to congratulate the Ford team:

“Did you imagine this time-savings was possible?,’ he asked one operator.

“Actually, much of what Dr. Shingo showed us we already had discussed,” the operator replied.

“Then why didn’t you make these changes before now?” Gifford queried.

The answer?

“We don’t set the standards, boss.  You do.”

So there are more than a few reasons for skepticism surrounding standards.  American industry’s track record of time-setting without careful observation and without significant involvement of workers (be they doctors, engineers or machine operators)  has created an almost universal cynicism.  The road to standardization has many obstacles, but the start of the journey is often the hardest because of a legacy system that suggests standards will be forced upon us and will stifle originality.

On the other hand, coming from a musical family long before I got into industry, I understood “standards” to be the great songs that every musician should learn.  They define a level of excellence to which we should all aspire.  I have never heard a blues player complain about sameness because only three or four chords are a standard for blues.  In fact, those standards define the genre and are the basis for creativity.  We establish boundaries within a norm and sometimes stretch that norm to create new standards.  Just as in TPS, the standards for musicians are the baseline for creativity.  Standardization means “reading from the same sheet of music.”

So I responded to the question posed to me at the hospital gathering:

“Doctors worry that forced conformity will impact their ability to care for their patients.  Docs don’t want to be the objects of change.  So, make them the change agents by first finding a few small things on which they already agree.  Dr. Shingo referred to this as “Socrates Secret.”  Then pick some small differences and normalize those.   Every doc will have some preferred practice on which he or she is intractable – don’t go there, leave those objections alone for now.  The first objective is to create a more positive view of standardization itself. “

 In the words of Dr. Sami Bahri, 

“Do whatever is possible, and the impossible starts seeming more possible. “ 

O.L.D.

BTW:  The deadline is fast approaching to take advantage of the 25% discount for the 2012 Northeast Shingo Conference.  Register today!

Yet some towns were up and running within hours of the storms passage while others were only just coming back on line by Veterans Day.  How could this be?   A partial answer to this query came to me as I had occasion to travel by car from Boston to Pittsburgh over the Veterans Day weekend: Convoys of utility trucks – dozens and more – traveled the same route, heading home after weeks of mutual aid.  Some were from states as close as Pennsylvania, but many were much farther from home: Kansas, Texas and Louisiana to name a few.  Distance alone would have delayed response from the more distant areas for up to a week.   Some utilities, it appears had more responsive reciprocal agreements than others.  Later stories in the local papers revealed additional delays in even contacting these overflow contractors.   And in some municipalities, no clear authority to remove downed trees had been given to the utilities. Many small problems combined to delay recovery efforts.   And yet there were also examples of good practice, where power was rapidly restored.   Ultimately there was plenty of culpability to go around and also many lessons learned.

Or were they?    The storm has passed, power has been restored, homes are warm again and businesses are open.  But what has been learned?  Deming Prize Winner, Ryuji Fukuda, points out that railway accidents in Japan were prevalent until a concerted effort was made to understand their causes.   What process exists for municipalities and utilities to learn from major events like the October snowstorm?  I guess we’ll have to wait for the next big storm to find out.

How does your place of business handle lessons learned from problems?  Do they feed back to the process or are they considered “acts of God”?   Let me hear from you.

O.L.D.

• The creators of TPS who understood decades before the West that a supplier-first philosophy is not viable, and that employees are not just “human machines.”
• The hardworking shopfloor employees who, after decades of being beaten down by a bad system, still have the chutzpah to overstep their traditional roles.
•  Middle managers who take a risk when it’s not personally necessary and often potentially hazardous to their careers to support a fledgling Lean effort.
•  Top managers who leave their offices and meetings to see the real world.
•  Engineers that get their hands dirty.
• Accountants who ask why 5 times about traditional cost accounting.
• Buyers who know more about the part than its piece price.
• Marketing and Salespeople who “get it” that just-in-time sells products and services.
• Material handlers who once were lowest in the pecking order but now are the governors of material and work flow.
• Maintenance departments who do more fire prevention and less fire fighting.
• Boards of Directors who consider the value of making products in the regions where they are consumed.
•  CEO’s who are not slaves to quarterly earnings reports.
• Businesses and individuals that freely share what they are learning.

This is the short list.  I should add a couple more quasi-personal things: I’m happy to be doing what I’m doing, and grateful for the dedicated and passionate staff at GBMP.

Are there any things you would add to this list?  Let me hear from you.

Happy Thanksgiving.

O.L.D.

After several days of operating with this change, I approached a production employee with the question, “Vahram, what do you think of the new layout?”   Vahram answered back to me, “I like my job!” Not exactly the answer I was looking for, but I took it as a positive opinion, and responded “Thank you, I’m happy to hear that.”   There were seven different languages spoken in our factory, and English was a second language for many employees, so short interchanges like this were normal.  What was not normal however was the concern that shown on his face as he answered me.  I asked him, “Are you sure?  Is there a problem?”  He tried to smile as he responded once more, “I like my job.”   “Okay,” I said, “I’ll see you later.”

Several hours later the employee’s supervisor approached me with this concern: “There’s a rumor going around in the plant that there’s going to be a layoff.”

I groaned.  “Great.  Where would a rumor like that come from?”

“Well,” answered the supervisor, “Vahram said you told him that there was going to be a new layoff and then said that he was a problem.  He said you’d be coming back later to fire him.”

I think I let out a faint yelp as I heard this, half laugh and half gasp.   “I didn’t say anything like that!” I explained.  “I only asked him how he liked the new layout.”

“Well,” responded the supervisor,  “Varham is good man. I hope I’ll have something to say if there’s going to be a layoff.”

“There’s not going to be any layoff!”  I exclaimed.   I was startled that Vahram misunderstood me, and now more startled that the supervisor was not hearing my explanation.  The factory was buzzing with anxious rumors based upon what I had thought was a friendly exchange.

I accompanied the supervisor, who unlike me was multi-lingual, to apologize to Vahram for the misunderstanding.  I realized during this exchange however, that the primary reason for the confusion was not language, but predisposal: Neither Vahram nor his supervisor had anticipated an interrogative statement from the boss.  They both took it as declarative.   In short, they didn’t know me, and they didn’t trust me.   I was a new kid in town, but to them I was just more of the same.  Another boss.

As the cliché goes, “Actions speak louder than words.”  Over a period of months and years I worked to earn their trust, but I don’t think the layout/layoff confusion was ever completely clarified.   What I had said was never recorded or witnessed by anyone other than Vaharm and me, but what he heard had impacted the anxiety and output of the factory for several days.

Dénouement:

About a week later I heard this version of the incident, which had been circulating in the plant:  “Bruce was planning to layoff Vahram, but Vahram’s  supervisor spoke on his behalf, so Bruce changed his mind.”

How about communication in your business?  Between departments?  Between management and workers?  Between your organization and your suppliers?  Or between divisions within your company?  And what do you think this story has to do with TPS?  Please share your thoughts.

O.L.D. 

BTW:  This week is the 25^th anniversary of my layout faux pas, and it’s also the first anniversary of my Blog.