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Lean Leadership National Forum 2008 Keynote Presentations
Bruce Hamilton - Asking the right questions
Geoff Green - Scoreboards
John Lemberg
Achieving world class performance
The Toyota Production System is based on two interdependant principals - elimination of waste and respect for people.
The element of respect for people means among other things providing the circumstances where your people can perform at their best.
Mr Cho put it this way
"The competitiveness of a company in the global market will be decided by the extent to which the company can employ and manage
excellent and motivated people," Cho said at a press conference he gave earlier this year in his capacity as chairman of the Japan
Automobile Manufacturers Association.
"Manufacturers treating workers as simply one of the 'three Ms'--men, machines and material--won't develop in terms of international
competitiveness," Cho said. "We firmly believe that we need to value our workers so much that every single one of them feels part of the
management of the company and an active participant in everyday business.
"It's important for all companies competing in the global marketplace, and for the manufacturing industry as a whole, to encourage people
to work [to their potential] in return for suitable remuneration."
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PDF - Scoreboard Audit Sheet
PDF - Learning Styles Self Assessment
Imagine having to perform at your best with little or no information on what you are trying to achieve or any way of getting tangible feedback
on how you are going? Or perhaps it isn't hard for you to imagine. If you are working in a traditional culture where feedback on performance is
done an annual performance review then you know exactly how hard it is.
Lean management takes a totally different approach to performance management. People are given a clear understanding of what they are
expected to do and rapid feedback on their performance (or rather the performance of the process that they manage) People work better
because they are given the information they need to understand what they are working towards, they are involved in deploying the strategy,
their input is valued and they get good quality feedback allowing them to calibrate and adjust their actions. This kind on management couldn't work effectively without a sound system supporting it such as shop floor scoreboards. They are a way of making information available to
people
in the format that best suits their style of learning.
Learning Styles
In traditional operations most information is either transmitted by word of mouth or difficult to understand tables of figures. Word of mouth
is not a reliable way of sharing information with multiple people. Have you ever played Chinese Whispers? We know that it is easy for the
message to be distorted when spoke word is the sole form of communication and yet that is the way that most information is exchanged in
many workplaces.
This type of communication is more of a problem for some people than others because we have different Learning or Communication Styles.
The four major Leaning Styles are:
- Visual
- Kinesthetic
- Auditory
- Auditory Digital
About 40% of the population are Visual people - meaning that they think in pictures. You can generally tell a visual person because they talk really quickly, a picture tells a thousand words and so they have to hurry to get it all out before the picture changes. A visual person will
probably go off into daydreams thinking about something else if there isn't lots of visual information available for them to access.
The other 40% of the population are Kinesthetic people - these are the people who learn by doing. Kinathetics usually didn't do well at school in the past as it was set up for the auditory people and to a lesser extent the visuals.
Only about 20% of the population are Auditory people - meaning that their preferred way of learning is by listening to instructions. This group of people if further broken up as about 10% of the people who are referred to as Auditory are actually Auditory Digital.
Auditory Digital people don’t rely on the direct input that comes to them through their senses but have to make sense of things in their own mind. They tend to think in concepts and systems. Often engineers or other people who have to make up their own mind about things rather than relying on what they see or hear or feel about a situation are primarily Auditory Digital in the way they process information.
If your managers or team leaders try to tell new or even existing employees what to do or how to do it there is a good chance that at least 80% of the people won't retain enough of what is said to faultlessly put it into practice.
Take a Learning Styles evaluation to work out your Learning Style.
Visual Management
Visual Management and using scoreboards are ways of making information more accessible to people - no matter what their learning style.
- The Visual People are catered for with as much information as possible is presented in graphs and charts that graphically display the information they need to see how the processes they run are going.
- The Kinesthetic People are able to interact with the scoreboard in sites that encourage the spread of responsibility for updating the information to the people who are using the scoreboard - computer generated reports look neater but are less effective.
- The Auditory people are happy as long as the scoreboards are coupled with a daily Tool Box talk giving them the opportunity to get their information in a spoken format and to ask the questions they need to ask.
- The Auditory Digital people love the graphs and manipulation of data into information that is made possible with scoreboards and it gives them the opportunity to make sense of the process and a much greater understanding of what is going on.
Scoreboards don't just provide information - they provide it in a way that is more accessible to more people by meeting the needs of their individual learning styles. More importantly than providing information about what is happening right now they provide a way of planning for the future and tracking the past that is available, accessible and usable by the team to improve their performance.
How do your scoreboards rate? Scoreboard Audit Sheet
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As part of a new LEI research project on lean management, I have been visiting with a number organizations well along in lean transformations. I ask the leaders of these initiatives about their methods, their experiences to date, and their trajectories. Then I take a walk along one or more of their value streams to observe performance and to talk with line managers about their perspectives on the lean leap. Heres a typical story from a recent visit:
Organization A has an ambitious "lean six-sigma" program for the whole enterprise. As seems to be increasingly common, it is a consolidation of initially separate lean and six-sigma programs into one unified activity, reporting to a vice president for process improvement and quality at headquarters.
The program is being conducted by a large staff team assisted by a few external consultants. Good progress has been made in reconciling the approaches of lean and six-sigma by adapting DMAIC (Define, Measure, Analyze, Improve, Control) as the organization's PDCA (Plan, Do, Check, Act) problem-solving method. (I'm often asked whether DMAIC or PDCA or A3 is the "correct" method to use and I always say, "Pick one, adapt it as necessary to your needs, make sure everyone understands it, and get going. The right method is the one that produces consistently good results in your organization and you will be able to judge that for yourself over time.")
The team has offered introductory training in lean thinking and process capability for a wide range of employees and has conducted black belt and lean certifications for a substantial number of line managers. It has done this while leading a large number of rapid improvement activities (labeled "kaizen") that engage both line managers and the front-line employees touching value streams. It also conducts six-sigma analyses of quality issues over an extended period, which collect and analyze large amounts of data.
The individual improvements have often been very impressive, particularly as measured in financial terms using six-sigma methodology. But as I talked with line managers I discovered that the improvements are not connected end-to-end as key processes cross areas, departments, and functions in the organization. Perhaps as a consequence, the business results for the organization are much less than the sum of individual achievements would suggest. This led to an observation I hear frequently: "How do we save so much money and improve quality so much on individual process steps yet little seems to be dropping to the bottom line and customers seem no happier."
Even these isolated improvements are not easily sustained once the improvement teams focus shifts to the next project. The line managers are sympathetic to the concepts they have learned but note that they are still fighting fires due to issues up and down stream from the areas they manage. This leaves them little time to install standard work to sustain what has been achieved and none for planning the next leap. In addition, none of the corporate metrics they are being judged on have been changed, so it's easy to get poor performance on a metric despite a worthwhile improvement in a process. Finally, many managers noted that they will soon be rotated out of their job as part of the organization's high speed management advancement -- without a good means of handing over what they have learned about the process to whoever takes charge next.
When I visited, the lean six-sigma team was reflecting on its achievements over several years and asked my view on where the program should be going in the next five years. I believe they were expecting me to say that they needed to speed the pace of improvement, with more training, more improvement events, and quite possibly a larger staff. My answer was quite different:
"You need to transition during the next five years from a point-improvement program driven by a staff team to a new way of thinking and acting by line managers. The line managers' key work must be to continually solve problems end-to-end in primary and support process for which they are given responsibility. Put simply: You need to transition from a staff conducting a program to line managers routinely solving problems important to the organization, often with the technical assistance of your lean team."
I assured them that a change in focus will not reduce the importance of the lean team. Rather it will create demand for tackling process issues that are more technically interesting, as line managers take the lead on easier problems. And it should also create a role for the lean team in advising on design of the production process for each new product. This is a critical weakness of the current organization, which routinely launches products with poorly conceived production processes, leading to the immediate need for kaizen. (It turns out that there is even a Japanese word for this practice -- "touzen" which is used to describe kaizen which should not have been necessary.)
Unfortunately, I couldn't be so reassuring on what I see as the lean teams biggest challenge: They need to make the case to senior management that Organization A's management methods need to be fully rethought. Every important process needs to have a fully responsible manager who stays on the job long enough to really understand the process. And the corporate measures of management performance need to be carefully rethought so managers will consistently be rewarded for doing the right thing for the extended process over an extended period.
While it may seem difficult for a staff team to make this case to senior management, I wonder who can if the executives with the greatest knowledge of process thinking and with the best understanding of what is happening today can't. So I urged them to try and promised to help to the extent I can through my writing and speaking.
Before I sign off, please understand that I'm not criticizing lean programs, which Dan Jones and I helped popularize in Lean Thinking. They are usually essential to get people's attention, move organizations off dead center, and rapidly introduce new ideas while clearly demonstrating their potential. But they are never sufficient. What every organization must do at some point is make the conversion from lean programs led by staffs to problem solving by line managers. And the faster and more completely an organization makes this transition the more successful it is likely to be.
James P. Womack
Founder and Chairman
Lean Enterprise Institute
P.S. I plan to visit Organization A again as our research continues and I would be interested to hear from other organizations who would like to participate in our research program. We can only include a small cross-section of the many firms now pursuing a lean transformation. But if your organization is interested in participating, please let me know.
Reprinted with permission. Copyright 2008 Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) www.lean.org Feel free to forward this message to suppliers, customers, or colleagues who are implementing lean -- or should be.
About Jim Womack-Management expert James P. Womack, Ph.D., is the founder and chairman of the Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI), a nonprofit training, publishing, conferencing, and management research organization chartered in August, 1997, to advance a set of ideas known as lean production and lean management, based initially on the Toyota Production System. Feel free to forward this message to suppliers, customers, or colleagues who are implementing lean - or should be.
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