Laugh a little

You Don't Have to Sing, but ...

Had occasion to fly on Southwest Airlines last week. I realized it has been 8-9 years since I've flown Southwest. A few things had changed...I kind of missed the multi-colored plastic reusable boarding passes. But it was still a cattle-car approach to loading the plane and the peanuts were pretty ordinary.

Yet, they did one thing well. They made the awfulness of business travel a bit less awful by having fun. There was just a lot of joking. All the way from the folks at the gate to the flight attendants, to the pilots who wore really goofy looking ties along with their official looking shirts with the thingies on the shoulders.

As one leg of the four-part journey ended, a flight attendant came on and actually sang this ditty to us (to the tune of the "Barney" song):

We love you! You love us!
We're much faster than a bus.
And we hope you've enjoyed our hospitality.
Marry one of us and you'll fly for free!

I know, it looks really stupid there in print on a computer screen. But, I'm telling you, a plane full of otherwise serious adults all laughed and cracked up! She did it in a wonderful way...it lightened the load considerably.

Which got me thinking...in the midst of onerous tasks, why can't we just add some fun? A lot of jobs are just plain tough. So why not make it a bit more bearable with some "play"?? Shoot, travel is hardly a game anymore. It is tough to live through and tough for the folks who staff the planes and airports. Yet, Southwest makes it fun. And it helps.

Not a strong suit for me, yet I see a need to inject more fun. I hope you can do the same.

I hope this is helpful...and maybe a little bit funny.

Feel free to forward to a friend. Email me

 

Learning About Lean from My Friends 

It’s great stuff when your friends teach you.  Three examples from just today.

Al, on obviousness 

My colleague Al read yesterday's post and said “You haven't stated the obvious with your observations, but after you make those points I'm thinking, "Well yeah, that makes sense......of course." “

Which got me thinking.  Lean is simply a system of thinking that gets you to the obvious point quickly.  In retrospect, it is obvious, common sense.  But, when encountering a job site or an office or a messy garage or a welding shop, things appear chaotic.  Using Lean tools get me to the “Ahaaaa” stage faster. 

But I hadn’t put it that clearly until interacting with Al earlier today. 

Thanks, Al.  

Ken, on slogans 

I had an issue come up today with another colleague, Stan, involving a process breakdown; one of our folks knowingly passed along a defective product to the next stage.  Bad News.  What do we do? 

Ken has, over the past couple of years, typed up and laminated several key Lean principles and posted them next to his desk in clips.  In this case, I realized I could review with Stan the four key actions to take in this setting, (the principles of autonomation or jidoka, in lean-speak)  which Ken had laminated:

1.       Detect the abnormality

2.       Stop.

3.       Correct the immediate problem

4.       Find root cause and install a countermeasure.

I pulled down the card and read through it with Stan, applying it to the situation.  We had a great conversation.  Clarity followed. 

I’m not all that big on slogans, inspirational posters and the like.  But Ken did our company a big service with these cards.  And I learned a lot from it.

Thanks, Ken.  

Sean, on advance notice 

Late today, I received an email from a former colleague, Sean.  He had also read yesterday’s post and offered observations on why “some don’t get it.”  He suggested a possible cause from his own experience:

“If I feel like someone has intently listened to what in put I have to the subject, and has had an open dialogue of discussion with me, I feel like I have some effectiveness and involvement. This makes me want to work harder with or for that person in any given situation.”

Great point.  It is altogether too easy to throw off the phrase “some just don’t get it”.  But this, in itself is an abnormality (see Ken’s chart above).  What’s the root cause?  Countermeasure?  Sean suggests earlier and deeper involvement in goal development.  I learn from that.

Thanks, Sean. 

And I hope you learn from this too

The Kaizen Process, Lived Out

Have had sparse blogging lately, due to getting work done. Most significant was a recent four-day kaizen event with a vendor. I don't think I've ever been on an event where I didn't learn something very useful. This one was more chock-full of learnings than most.

The kaizen's objective was to construct a value stream map of a particular family of products. Which we did. And so much more came out while trying to do a thorough job on that one task. The high points of learning:

• A kaizen requires focus. If it isn't focused, it isn't rapid improvement. It picks up the pace of change. It says "let's try it now and see if it works. The sooner we know, the sooner we can get to something even better."
• A kaizen requires a clear goal. We actually had three groups running in parallel. Two of the three came pretty close to hitting the goal. The third missed it by more. IMO, due to a much fuzzier goal.
• A kaizen requires a simple goal. It seems we are often happier going broad and shallow than narrow and deep. The kaizen method drives to the latter. It seeks clear results and full implementation. A simple goal forces depth.
• Some people get it; some don't. I'd like to say this more delicately but can't. Some kaizen participants grasped that change can happen and get into it. Others just resisted, declined to participate or, at times, become downright ornery. Is it the clarity that emerges that threatens? Is it the fact they didn't volunteer but were asked to be on the kaizen? Is it worry about retribution? I don't know...but it happens on almost every kaizen event I'm on.
• Follow up determines success. What do kaizen participants do with the "to do" list at the end? Ignore it, just glad it is over? Drive hard to completion? Follow up determines what will happen.
• The closeout, management review session is crucial. I saw one of the best ever on Thursday. The CEO of our host company was intently involved and asked very good (and very hard) questions at the review, while affirming the results and efforts of the teams.

It was a great four days. I hope you can benefit from this description.

Feel free to forward to a friend. Email me

 

And so why aren’t hospitals lean? 

One simple answer…incorrect assumptions.  If you are interested, check out this extended piece by Jeff Angus .  It illustrates just how hard it will be to lean out health care.  Assumptions that were once valid become the unquestioned reality of the day.  Even when the assumptions no longer apply.  It is an insidious and difficult issue for us all.   

One of the great contributions of Theory of Constraints is it’s disciplined approach to questioning assumptions.  It is a huge breakthrough when encountering thorny problems or seeming dilemmas.  The application in Lean environments for this is significant.   

I hope this is helpful.

 

 

 

Lean in the Hospital? 

In case you missed it, Friday’s Wall Street Journal (fee required) had a front-page article on applying Lean to Hospitals.  It flowed from a frustration by Pittsburgh-area companies at the rapid rise in health care costs.   

The essence of the article resonated with me in controlling costs that originate outside of our own companies.  Nothing seems quite so distant and non-controllable as health care.  So many layers exist between the payee (a corporate health care program), the user (the employee) and the price setter (the hospital/physician).  So many conflicts of interest exist.  Can a waste-free system exist? It seems impossible.  It was encouraging to read of the effort. 

I hope this is helpful

Gemba in cyberspace

Going to Gemba, even in a cyber world

I got an email from consultant of ours, Julie Kowalski of Spizzerinctum Group, last week ( email Julie ) in which she captured something I’ve struggled to say but not as well as she did:

I sometimes feel that we as a business society allow email to do all of our talking for us; sometimes we just need two way dialog. Therefore I do not intend for these documents to be stand alone. I would like to talk through each of the items with you, when you have a chance ---- can we schedule a call for sometime on Tuesday?

Julie captured something very important here; she moved the conversation to the workplace, or as many in the Lean community would say, she went to gemba, the place where value is really added. She proposes, boldly yet clearly, to breakthrough our tendency to avoid direct conversation and immediate feedback.

Do something like this today. Don’t send an email; go find the person and ask. Pick up the phone rather than sending the document. Get to her/his place and ask, directly. Observe what you see and hear. Give that feedback to the person to see if you really understand. Then note what you learn.

Thanks, Julie, for the clarity you bring here.

I hope this is helpful. Feel free to forward to a friend. Email me

 

Big Hat and No Cattle? 

My friend Frank Patrick posted a very useful piece on project management yesterday, worthy of your reading.  He summarizes a recent book he read Waltzing With Bears: Managing Risk on Software Projects.  Frank quotes one passage of note for those of us involved in change management.   

The worst organizations penalize unappealing forecasts but not unappealing results. When the project fails, they reason, "Hey, the guy missed the date, but at least he gave it a good try." This problem feeds upon itself: People understand that promising big is more important than delivering, and everybody learns to act accordingly. If you work for this kind of organization, you might as well go with the flow and keep your risk assessments to yourself. 

Ouch.   

It is so much easier to talk big than to deliver big.  And how many times do we kid ourselves that writing a plan is equivalent to achieving it?  

So how to overcome this?  I go back to one of the basics of project tasks, about which we discussed in our Gutter Project series: Making Reliable Promises.   

And one of the central practices of Reliable Promises is stating clearly the “conditions of satisfaction”.  Here, the customer states, clearly, what needs to happen for him/her to be fully satisfied.   

For example, I asked my colleague Stan for some logistics data on eight different buildings earlier this week.  When I stated my conditions of satisfaction, I listed for him five pieces of data on each of the eight jobs and that I wanted it by noon Friday.  He looked at his schedule, said he could block time for it and proceeded.  On Thursday afternoon, he brought in the data.  It looked great…except he only had four of the five data points done.  I said “Good. I like the four.  And I’ll really be happy when I get the fifth as well.  Remember?”  Oh yeah, he said and off he went.  He’ll have it for me by noon today.   

In Texas, someone who talks a lot but does not deliver is referred to as having “a big hat but no cattle.”  Do your best to deliver some result today.

I hope this is helpful.

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Thanks for your interest.

 

The Gutter Project...all of a sudden, it is over!

The gutter project I wrote about starting and then continuing is now concluded!   It is kind of amazing and I think instructive, though not in the way I expected it to be instructive. 
About 10 days ago, as part of fulfilling a promise to identify equipment we'd need to handle the slit steel coil to make the gutter, team members Ken and Dave visited our current vendor.  Their discussions with the vendor sparked in the vendor's manager's mind (I'll call him Steve).  The next day, Steve called me to request a meeting.  Soon.

He came down and described to Ken and me an alternate production schedule he was thinking about and wondered if it would work for us.  After discussion and some tweaking of the proposal, we realized his proposal met all of our needs...in short, we didn't need to make our own gutter anymore if he could deliver in this new manner. 

What he proposed, in effect, got away from large batches of gutters being run every three weeks to more of a flow of gutters (no pun intended), delivered weekly.  This was our core problem that moved us to try to in-source gutter manufacture in the first place.  So, we'll write it up and the new plan will be rolling in a couple of weeks.

So, last Friday, we held our last project meeting, saying thanks to Chad, Dave, Ken, Bryan and John for participating. We'll also inform our senior managers that we won’t require the funding we had earlier requested.

What did we learn? We did a plus/delta at the end.

-The hard work to get the physical layout right was worth it.  A simple simulation with sticky notes, made to scale, was a super tool.
-Driving open discussions with the vendor ultimately affected his response.
-Our intention to insource probably triggered the flexibility by the vendor.
-Utilizing reliable promises was useful and understandable to all.  Everyone on the team had several promises they had to deliver on during the project’s six-week duration...no one was left behind.  My thanks to Hal Macomber for this concept. 
-PPC metrics also gave us a feel for where we were doing. 
-We learned a lot about stating, openly, conditions of satisfaction.  It felt mechanistic and stiff at first.  We persevered and it got better.
-We need to practice this approach to projects to get better at this.
-We committed no funds.  We spent only time.  We did not work that we were not fully ready to do.  

It was disappointing to not take this through to a physical completion.  But we did get our desired result, which is hardly disappointing. 

I hope this has been a small bit helpful.  I suspect I may try this effort at a "public project" again in the future.  Stay tuned.

 

One Size Does Not Fit All 

It is tempting in a Lean conversion to copy, blindly, what someone else has done.  Better is to apply that which works in your context.  Steadily.  Quietly.   

I had a chance this morning to tour a local facility which is doing just this.  Taking the appropriate tools and making them work in a 110 year old building with machine tools built in the 1920s.  With very insignificant capital infusion from a parent company.  And doubling productivity in three years. Passion and intelligence will offset financial might in many, many situations. 

For a fascinating view of how to get your ego out of the way to realize "one size does not fit all", check out Jeff Angus’ view of effective coaching for excellence.   

Oh, and don’t be like oil's  Procrustes. 

I hope this is helpful.