A Tale of Two Meetings

In attending back-to-back meetings last week, I saw much.

Meeting one involved three of us trying to solve a logistics problem. The organizer set it up at the spot of the problem and involved just the people who had a stake in it’s solution and had the tools to fix it. We stood up for about 35 minutes, touching the offending product problem. The organizer had compelling and clearly presented data, plus she offered some solutions. The meeting had both facts and emotional punch. We settled the issue quickly and the solution was soon implemented.

I then attended a more traditional meeting. We gathered around a conference table in comfortable chairs. We looked at Power Point slides of black text on a white background. One person attending brought some product samples, which added a visual clue to the problem we were trying to solve. Yet, it didn’t have the energy or the punch of the first meeting.

Now, the Lean folks among us will say, in Pavlovian fashion, “Yep, that’ll show ya, gotta have the meeting in gemba, get to the workplace.” True. But why?

My favorite marketing writer Seth Godin wrote recently about how to organize the room for a meeting. Well worth the read, he makes the point we all walk into a meeting room, look around and quickly pick up clues about how we should behave. Often, this is at cross purposes with what we need to get done. So, he says, change up the clues! Make it look different…you’ll get a different response.

Which is why meeting in gemba so often works. It changes the clues. What do I do when I don’t have a chair? What do I do when there is noise in the room? What do I do when I’m faced with a wall full of product rather than a nicely paneled wall?

Try it.

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Getting to Email Zero

Following my recent post on Minimizing Work-in-Process for Knowledge Workers, several folks wrote and asked me to write more on getting their email inbox to zero. I put together an outline for such a post.

When I discovered I didn’t need to write anything further.

In Yes, You Can Stay on Top of Email, Michael Hyatt describes all you need know to empty your email inbox. Daily. Yes, daily. Hyatt writes the blog From Where I Sit. As the CEO of a major publishing company, he’s a busy guy who also thinks a lot about process. Long time blogging buddy Frank Patrick clued me to Hyatt’s blog a while back and I’ve come to appreciate his input.

Go read Hyatt’s post. Then, start applying it. Today. Not tomorow. Now. I highly commend his outline. And add two more points.

First, find a way to turn off email. In July 2007, unannounced, I started only sending and receiving emails once an hour at work. I found the way in Outlook to automatically send and receive email once an hour. I write them anytime I need to...but they only go out once and hour. Amazingly, not one single person I work with has asked me about this. For a full year. Now maybe they think I'm a jerk and haven't told me. I suspect, though, it simply hasn't been an issue. In fact, the only way any of them will know I do this is if they read this post! Yes, you can do the same. It really eliminates a LOT of distractions.

Second, find a way to separate personal and business emails. Most of us with regular jobs have a mandated email program for work. So use it. I strongly suggest getting a web-based email for your personal use. I’ve used several and Gmail is my vastly preferred choice.

Don’t let email run your life…get on top of it. Now.

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Minimizing Work-in-Process for Knowledge Workers

We all know the drill; work-in-process is a problem in manufacturing. It ties up cash, limits flexibility, masks problems, decreases customer satisfaction. We’ve seen the “lower the water level; expose the rocks; fix the problems” illustration.

It’s no different in non-manufacturing setting. Making it personal, it’s no different for me, either. I’ve been bugged the last few years by this concept and, finally, have seen some progress over the last few months. Let me illustrate, in hopes you might find something useful.

My first step was to isolate just what constitutes WIP for me in my managerial role. I concluded it is all in two places:

• My physical in-box. This is all the physical junk that lands in my office. Papers, forms, mail, memos.
  
• My email in-box. All the electronic junk that comes my way.

Some folks might add Voice Mail to this list, making three piles. For me, VM is not a big deal so I simplified it to two.

And these two are crucial. Virtually everything I do which does not involve face-to-face meetings flows through these two portals. And the degree to which I do or do not deal, promptly, with both flows does all the things WIP does in the manufacturing setting. It ties up cash (slow decisions), limits flexibility (“we’re waiting on Joe”), masks problems (I don’t respond), decreases customer satisfaction (“he's avoiding me”).

The breakthrough that hit me a few months ago is classic lean. I have always tried to minimize and optimize these two queues. Not good enough. I realized I had to take them to zero. Empty. Zip. No email in the in box. No paper in the in box.

Zero is easy to measure and observe. Impossible to fudge. And, I have found, amazingly liberating.

The further breakthrough was pragmatic. In a dynamic business environment, I can't keep the boxes empty. So, my quest is to get to email zero and/or in box zero once in every business day.

Here’s my current metric. A simple blue 3x5 index card. With an “E” for days I get to email zero and an “I” for in box zero.



You can see I don’t get it done every day. I've had some bad streaks. The metric, though, is huge. It sits there on my desk as a brutal reminder I have not flushed out email for 3 days, that I’m avoiding something in my in box.

It’s not perfect. But it is way better than my other efforts. And, as goofy as it sounds, it's fun to get to zero and record the "E" or "I".

How to get to email zero or in box zero? That’s another discussion…if you’re interested, please let me know and I’ll write on either.

But, until I settled on a) the location of WIP b) the zero standard for WIP and c) the simple measurement of WIP, I was not making progress at all.

Hope you can find something here you can use.

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Why do visuals help?

Several recent observations converged for me.

• A colleague drew a Value Stream Map for a new process we were developing. Two major barriers became clear. In 45 minutes, we had a plan to overcome them, problems that had bugged us for six months.
  
  
  
• We had a struggle over a particular system of nomenclature; the group of six were stuck. One member then walked to the whiteboard, drew a simple diagram of his understanding. Then another person modified this diagram with her perspective. Soon, all six people had added to the drawing. And a solution became obvious.
  
  
  
• A vendor was preoccupied with the splendor of his proposal and talked and talked. One of our engineers then asked him to draw how his system worked. Reluctantly, he began putting boxes and arrows on the board. And the conversation turned to solutions. Egos faded.
  
  
  
• A friend of many years invited me for lunch to discuss an important decision he faced in his career. A visual person to begin with, he had put an elegantly simple line drawing capturing the history, context, and trajectory of his options. Making the drawing, coupled with the active discussion, made choices clearer.

Why do drawings make decision making clearer? People a lot smarter than me have looked hard at this. I simply see that it works.

Somehow, the drawing, however simple or clunky, engages a different part of the brain. Flowing through both the eyes and the ears, the idea finds a different path to the processing parts of the brain. In this way, new understandings of tough problems emerge. The original idea then burns more brightly, more clearly, with more focus.

Go doodle somewhere. It usually helps.

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Toyota Tour, opus 5

Last Friday, eight engineers from our group of companies and I had the chance to tour Toyota’s North American Fork Truck manufacturing facility, Toyota Industrial Equipment Mfg (TIEM). I continue to be astounded and grateful for the openness, transparency and astounding skills of Toyota.

This was my fifth walk through this plant. My first trip was in August 2000 and I was there most recently in October 2005. I wanted to use this visit to grasp more of the “how” of the Toyota Production System.

My colleagues were making their first visit to a Toyota facility. Not surprisingly, they were blown away by the cleanliness, systemization and flow of the place. The innumerable small tools, carts, jigs, jib cranes, rollers were astounding, as was the ergonomics, the attention to detail, the visual communication and sheer energy of the place.

And this plant let us get up close and personal to the energy. Unlike Toyota’s large car plants, this facility employs only about 650 people, making about 130 fork trucks per day on four final assembly lines. Thus, we could easily walk the entire plant in a little over an hour, with time to stop and observe items of interest. There was no catwalk tour or trolley train…we were on our feet, very much in gemba.

Two events while there capture my observations.

When we arrived and were greeted by our host, she led us to a table holding our name tags. She then requested we make sure our names were spelled correctly. One of my colleagues with a complex last name chuckled softly to herself observing two transposed letters; it was not a problem to her. Our host was listening carefully, however, to the response to her question. Immediately, she asked what the correction was and, over my colleague’s mild objection, took the name tag to correct it. Her assistant disappeared into an office, caught up with our group about 3 minutes later and personally delivered the now-correct name tag.

What happened ? It was a line stop. There was an error and, at Toyota, you simply do not allow a known error to proceed. Ever. In this case the error detection method was inspection by a qualified person; each one of us checked our own name. More specifically, this was a pull on a yellow cord (signaling an error but not stopping the process) rather than a pull on the red cord (signaling a complete stoppage of the process). Our tour continued to the next stop yet they corrected the error. My colleague was wowed; I commented to her it was impossible for them to NOT fix the mistake. This is consistent with foundational principles of the TPS; rapid error detection and correction (jidoka) and respect for people.

Late in our walk around, our host invited us to look at an area of the plant displaying extensive manufacturing data. As our tour group of 9 looked, I noticed the area rapidly filling up with Toyota staffers. Our host introduced me to one of them, the plant's Director of Quality. He quickly explained: “This is our 2:35 meeting. We gather daily to discuss quality problems in the past 24 hours.” Conveniently, it was 2:35pm…I stuck around to hear what went on.

Attending were the Plant Manger, the senior managers of functional areas and a number of Team Leaders. With no fanfare and all attendees simply standing up in the metrics area, the meeting promptly started with a discussion of an error discovered late in the day Thursday. The Team Leader of the area briefly described the problem (a missing latch). He then introduced an associate from the line who gave detaila on what went wrong and how he missed installing the latch. The Team Leader then resumed the brief presentation, describing the countermeasure their group had already installed to prevent this from happening again. The whole discussion of this single problem took perhaps three minutes. The senior managers of the plant heard directly from an hourly employee what happened and how his group planned to fix it.

Describing this in text loses the impact of the moment, though. I observed the body language, the tone and the mood of the meeting. It was these factors which astounded me. The group was attentive and welcoming to the associate and Team Leader. Their walk matched their talk of wanting to know about problems. There was no hint of blame or punishment. The obvious expectation was the work group itself could fix problems and their fix would eliminate errors. Further, was the expectation the group could act promptly. I could feel it…and it was mind-boggling to see the culture this plant had built through thousands of repetitions of such discussions.

At 2:45, the meeting ended and the group which had assembled so promptly dispersed just as quickly…again, the context of speed and action rang true.

Two brief vignettes illustrate what must happen hundreds of times each day at this small plant in a quiet corner of Indiana. It was a moving and challenging day. My nature is to mull this for some time…yet I’m also challenged to make something happen soon.



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Walk the Talk

At a recent community business luncheon, a local executive told us about their training program, showing video of manufacturing simulations, showing the number of hours they give each new employee, describing the industry attention the program had attracted.

That afternoon, our firm interviewed a candidate for an open manufacturing position. On his application, the candidate indicated he had worked at the firm with the exemplary training program. Having just heard about it, I asked him to describe his training.

“What training?” he asked. “I was pretty much just put on the line, watching another guy and trying to figure it out.”

We explored this further; he had received no training at all.

Do we walk the talk?

My oldest son is currently “out-processing” from the US Army, having completed two deployments to Iraq. I phoned him this week on his base and heard a lot of voices in the background. “Yeah, I’m just waiting in line for a medical review,” he told me laconically. “I’ve been in line about three hours. I brought a book.” We chuckled about this and talked of his final days in the Army.

“Oh, Dad, I saw something you’d like here,” he told me as I started to let him go. “On a bulletin board here in this hallway is a poster about a Lean Six Sigma project. I figured you were the only person who might even understand it.” I asked him if it had anything to do with shortening the medical wait time. He laughed, saying it looked just like a poster.

Do we walk the talk?

I had a business lunch on Thursday at a local restaurant. The businessman next to me requested a “sweet potato,” placing his order perhaps absent-mindedly in the middle of an engaging conversation. The server delivered the sweet potato with the rest of the food.

“I didn’t ask for a sweet potato, I wanted a baked potato,” he told the server, though he offered to eat the sweet potato. Before anyone could say anything, the server apologized, said he’d go get a baked potato and, whoosh, away went the sweet potato. About two minutes later, a baked potato appeared. By my ears, the server heard right the first time; yet he didn’t argue and served the customer quickly and courteously.

Do we walk the talk?

When our talk goes one way and our walk goes the other, we become a headless oddity. When our talk moves with our walk, credibility rises.

The waiter had it, in spades.

I wonder how others view me.

I’ll try to keep my head.

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What is Value, anyway?

One of my fellow engineers recently shared this story and gave me permission to share with you. It speaks for itself.

I had an experience this weekend which really made the idea of customer-specified value clear to me. I thought I'd share it with you.

As some of you know, I recently discovered that the diamond in my engagement ring had a chip in it. So, my husband and I took it back to the point of purchase last week Sunday and we were informed that the stone would be replaced free of charge, no problem. Great! I couldn't wait to pick the ring up a week later (yesterday) and get on with it. I do, after all, wear it every day and well, I sort of missed it.

So I go in yesterday to pick it up and I'm told to go back to the service area to retrieve the ring. I do this and the lady behind the counter very cordially greets me and goes off to retrieve my ring. She returns and hands me my ring and I excitedly replace it on my finger. And then I notice that my ring looks nothing like it did before. The diamond used to sit up much higher and frankly looked a lot bigger. This ring that I now have on my finger looks much smaller and a lot less attractive. It looks like someone took a hammer to it and squashed it down.

So, I told the woman this and she looked confused but then called the person who actually did the work. And he told me that "this setting is a lot more durable and less likely to wear". He added "You're going to like this a lot better."

For the record, I don't like it better. I hate it. It looks nothing like my ring and I have the wedding pictures to prove it :)

And the light went on. He incorrectly specified value rather than asking his customer to define it. The value of the ring, to me, is the aesthetic look of it. It is NOT its durability. When women talk about our diamonds we do not discuss their durability. We do not discuss how likely the ring is to wear and whether or not the ring will hold up during our next home improvement project. We talk about how sparkly they are and how large they are and how pretty they are. And since we are by and large the customers (directly or indirectly) of these rings, should they not be designed with our desires in mind?

So now I enter phase 2 of my ring saga where I must decide whether to trust the store with a further modification of my ring or whether I take it to a jeweler in my home town who can do absolutely anything and will, I know, actually listen to me!

Who decides “value”? The customer. Who delivers value? We do. How does this define waste? In terms of what the customer things value is.

Worth remembering.

Upside Down Visuals

Circuitously, I ended up shopping for shampoo recently. Actually, I was shopping for a shampoo bottle, not shampoo. My wife had found a deal on shampoo but it came in a big batch, a huge bottle. I wanted to find a smaller bottle to put in the shower.

As I wandered down the aisle, a fully clueless male clearly out of my element, I noticed some bottles were right side up, others upside down.

I decided I’d like one of the upside down bottles…it would keep the shampoo closer to the opening…less “waste of waiting” you know. I reached for one bottle…oops, the label said “conditioner” not shampoo.


I kept looking…and then it hit me. Sometime in the last decade, multiple manufacturers decided all shampoo would be in right side up bottles, while all conditioners would be in upside down bottles. BRILLIANT! A wonderful visual tool for a place when many people have impaired vision…no glasses, no contacts, not awake yet…the reasons are many.

Which got me thinking…what a great way for simple A-B differentiation of tools, supplies and other needed items. Upside down, right side up. Add color to the mix and it is even more useful. I’m looking for opportunities.

Keep on learning.

Eight Reasons for Buffer Inventory

Why have any Work-In-Process Inventory? Why have any intermediate subcomponents in your system?

1. It is a shock absorber for uncertainty.
   
2. It shows you where flow ends…thus you must do pull.
   
3. It shows you where you sense variability in your process.
   
4. It insulates you from vendors who don’t deliver on time.
   
5. It provides a tool for managing your entire process by observing buffer quanitities.
   
6. It gives you a quantitative way to see changes in customer demand.
   
7. It forces you to “declare” your process steps to others, making the process more transparent and visible.
   
8. It allows you to measure your progress to the degree you can decrease buffer inventory sizes as a proportion of your total inventory.
   

WIP, in itself is not a waste. Too much of it is a waste. And paying attention to it is central.

Keep learning.

Just what DO you do, while in Gemba?

The more I learn about Standard Work, the more I learn what I don’t know. Like peeling an onion, just to see another layer underneath, so working through Standard Work is an unending process for me.

Today’s observation. I’ve written quite a bit about "going to gemba", physically getting to the place where work is done to see for myself what is happening. And I’m now implementing my own standard work for the trip to gemba.

In each of several work areas, I have particular concerns. For me, as a leader and manager, I have to take specific actions to communicate to others my concerns. My objective, after all, is to engage others in addressing these concerns; I can’t operate under the illusion I will fix all problems. So, standard work for me is a) to go to the work place and b) take specific actions to reinforce action on the key concerns.

For example, in one work area, we have had issues scheduling daily work assignments. We now have a simple white board at the place of the morning start-up meeting. Yet, to make this more standard, I go to the board once each week and write encouraging comments on the board. In so doing, I want to communicate I see what is happening and encourage it to improve. I currently have four such activities to do weekly. I chart my done/not done on each. It is very humbling and alarming and encouraging...all at the same time.

At a deeper level (look out, onion), it is very arrogant of me to expect our team to do Standard Work if I am unwilling or unable to do Standard Work myself.

I have a long way to go. At least I know the road I am on.