Hoshin Kanri--a Surprise

Last week, I made a presentation to our local Lean network on Hoshin Kanri, the Lean system of strategic planning (you can look at the presentation here; I’ve also listed as a download on the sidebar). The group was attentive and gave good feedback.

But some of the feedback surprised me.

In our group are folks with a lot of Lean experience. They’ve been exposed to some of the best teachers in the field. Yet, these folks said they have been unfamiliar with Hoshin Kanri or unsure how to apply it. My attempts to make it a bit understandable seemed to help; which surprised me, since I’m a novice at the topic myself.

Which shows me one point; never assume you can’t make a contribution. In the effort to eliminate waste, to make organizations work well to deliver value quickly, we can never know everything. And each one can add to the understanding.

For me, when I try to teach something, I learn it better. I think most are the same way. Encourage those around you to teach; try to teach something yourself. Soon.

Waste gives birth to more Waste

Yesterday, I reviewed a large stack of invoices flowing through our company. In the midst of the pile, two caught my eye.

One particular vendor had two invoices. This vendor sells us some common, widely-available, commodity-like items. Each of the invoices had, along with the regular purchases, a single no-charge listing. One was for a T-shirt for a very popular NFL football team (size XL). On the other was a nice 2008 calendar. This triggered a memory of seeing a sleeve of Maxfli golf balls listed from the same vendor before.

Which got me wondering.

Is this vendor seeking to differentiate itself in a business where all of its competition sells pretty much the same stuff? By itself, that’s commendable. But, by giving away freebies, is it subtly enticing our company to NOT compare prices and service with other competitors? Look, I know the golf balls and the T-shirts are not free. I know we are paying for it, indirectly. It adds no value to our company, though it probably adds value to the golfers or football fans who benefit from the give-aways. Does it also drive waste for us, by paying too much for basic goods our company needs?

The realization triggered a direct review on my part of this vendor. You may want to poke around and do the same.

Standard Work for Managers = Go to Gemba

As many times as I've heard it, as many times as I've said it to others, I still have to relearn the lesson. Over and over.

Get to the workplace. Look. Listen.

It seems the culture of our supposedly modern managerial world is so driven by meetings and emails and reports to read and papers to sign we squeeze out what is truly important and transforming.

It it me afresh this week as I attempted to build into my routine a regular walk-through of each of our production areas. I made it standard work for me, as a manager/leader.

Like most aspects of standard work, it was not hard to do. It seemed routine. Yet, when I did the standard work of walking, looking at certain workplaces, greeting people by name, listening to their observations, good things happened. Very good things happened.

Further, how bogus is it for me to expect our production team to follow standard work in their processes if I don't follow standard work in mine? Yeah, embarassingly bogus.

I remind myself. If you need reminding too, consider your self reminded.

Wasting Attention

Kelly Forrister, a coach with David Allen of “Getting Things Done” fame, wrote recently on How much do you value your attention? She argued for the supreme value time has for each of us and how foolish we are to waste it. Specifically, she asked why we would hit “reply all” to an email when only one person needed the response. The response to all the others represented waste of their attention to open, read and process yet one more email.

Thus, I can contribute waste by asking someone to give up their attention to see something I pass along not worthy of their attention. I create muda with the simple click of a mouse.

Think about not wasting attention today in your email interactions.

And I truly hope I did not waste your attention with this post!

Blogging Update, plus links

Even though this space has been quiet for a while, I’ve been blogging quite a bit here during the fall.

I’ll be adding more items in Learning About Lean over the next few weeks. Mostly short, pithy items I hope get you thinking without wasting your time. I've also cleaned up the layout here, hope you like it.

Here’s a summary of my recent blogs on the IIE site:

Cut the batch size

What does standard work look like?

Waste not...even welding slag

It is the size of the scoop that matters

Yeah, but... (bad words to use)

Kanban the coffee!

I’ll add links here as well to those articles as they come up.

Where's Joe?

Where’s Joe?

I’ve not published in this space for a while. I should explain.

I’m on a blogging experiment and I welcome your input.

Early this fall, the Institute of Industrial Engineers contacted me and asked if I’d like to be one of a set of authors for their new blog. After some discussion, I decided to give it a go. There are six of us writing there, three on aspects of Lean and three others on related topics. You can see my blogs here and follow the links to see others. I’d suggest you utilize some sort of RSS feed to make it easier to know when something new is up. Full commenting facilities are there, so weigh in, please.

I only seem to have energy for one blog outlet at a time, so I’m going to run with this for a while, hoping to have more contact with the broader world of Industrial Engineering.

Let me know what you think!

The Waste of Waiting

THE WASTE OF WAITING

Michael Hyatt, CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers write about what he calls friction, what we would call in Lean Circles the waste of waiting, here.

Take a look at what Apple and Amazon have done to eliminate waiting. And what that does for throughput for them.

It should provoke some fresh thinking for you. It did for me.

Keep on learning.

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Shallow Gemba, Deep Gemba

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SHALLOW GEMBA, DEEP GEMBA

We talk a lot in Lean circles about going to gemba, the place where work actually happens. There we can see, with our own eyes, what is happening. Mark Graban got me thinking more deeply about this recently when he posted about a Presidential candidate visiting the workplace, to “understand how the worker felt.”

The political candidate, by definition, can’t go deep into the workplace. It’s a “drive-by” gemba. No matter how sincere, it is shallow. The politician simply can’t know enough to “see” what is going on to any depth at all. When I drive by a wooded area, I see trees. My friend who is an outdoorsman sees oaks and maples and ash and sycamores. I’m shallow, he is deeper.

After reading of the politician, I turned the question on myself, someone responsible for manufacturing. How many of my visits to gemba are, in fact, really shallow? If I take a quick walk through, greeting people, exchanging pleasant comments about kids and family, I advance some of the human issues needed to show respect for people. Yet, on the other hand, I’m not much different than the politician; indeed, I risk coming across as no better than a candidate pressing the flesh, looking for votes.

I must also spend time in the workplace doing deep gemba. This is almost always focused on a single item or small group of items. One process. One machine. One cell. One loading dock. One cart loop. It also must take time. I don’t know how you do this in less than 30-60 minutes, at a minimum. In some cases it will be several hours or a day or three days.

Further, deep gemba must have some end in mind. While we generically say we are “looking for waste,” I must scroll though the seven wastes with an mood of curiosity, asking “just what am I seeing?” And when I see something that doesn’t make sense, stop. And find out what it is. And this takes time.

Keep learning.

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So make it Standard Work anyway, dude

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SO MAKE IT STANDARD WORK ANYWAY, DUDE

Had a small-ish project land on my desk about a week ago, one I really didn’t want to deal with. So I buried it under other activities for the week (don’t tell me you’ve never done this).

When I got to it Friday afternoon, unappealing though it was, I noted that in the period of inaction another similar project had landed on my desk and been similarly buried. What to do?

I chose to create Standard Work.

The task was administrative in nature and, as such, didn’t seem to lend itself to describing in a Standard Work form. I did it anyway and noted a few useful things.

First, the very act of making out a Standard Work form busted the inertia. I started breaking down the tasks and discovered it wasn’t as bad as I had imagined.

Second, I recalled a key principle of Lean. Start with the existing process and then practice kaizen, small changes for the better. This applied. By getting something down, no matter how imperfect or incomplete, I was advancing.

Third, in the doing of the (new) Standard Work, I saw how to make it better. Having a list to work off of was way better than just playing with it in my mind.

Try making something that seems non-standard Standard today. You might surprise yourself. Like I did.

Keep learning.

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Curiosity

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CURIOSITY

While doing the dishes tonight, I flipped on a CD I enjoy only to surprise myself by learning something about Lean.

In one of the songs, a phrase stopped me in my dishtoweled-tracks:

"Only the curious have something to find."

How

How key for the Lean leader to simply be curious! To have a mood of intrigue, of wonderment. To be curious about why things are the way they are. To be curious about why the waste exists. To be curious about why a process takes 3 hours and not 2. Why it takes six people and not five. Why a tool rests on a bench rather than is suspended close to the operator's hand.

And, without curiosity, we have nothing to find.

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Be curious today. You just might find something.

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