publikálva: 2012.12.12 - 11 éve
Lean Culture Change and Raising Children
In November I talked to Mr. István Dorka, the expert proofreader of the book “The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles”. Mr Dorka has been studying and implementing the Toyota Production System since 1998.
When asked about his mentor he mention
In November I talked to Mr. István Dorka, the expert proofreader of the book “The Toyota Way: 14 Management Principles”. Mr Dorka has been studying and implementing the Toyota Production System since 1998.
When asked about his mentor he mentions Celso Soares, his former colleague at Alcoa. His empowering and supportive leadership style has been a fundamental source of motivation for István in understanding the inner workings of the system. He set a positive example for István, influencing his views and attitude to people. The knowledge acquired in the course of their cooperation and the tools and methods comprehended during the introduction are still with him as solid foundations helping him in his work. He also builds upon the processes he encounters at each client, and continues to learn. Due to the successful adaptation of Alcoa his career brought about regional tasks and positions of increasing weight and responsibilities, culminating in consultancy in organisational development. Today he is the senior lean consultant at Concordia.
István says the most important thing during the introduction is to have patience. Few will believe that they can achieve 80% improvement with half the staff and the same number of machinery within a few years, especially when they can hardly achieve 1% at the moment. It is a difficult task to readjust the mindset of people, to make them realise that we no longer work to build up an inventory but we manufacture to order. However there are plenty of reserves in reducing your losses by applying preventive maintenance, by developing processes and by changing the ergonomics.
“Any unsuccessful lean introduction can be attributed to three major causes: 1) the management, 2) the management, and 3) the management.” (James Womack)
In order to be able to reduce our own fears as leaders and to see that we are not alone, that others are struggling with very similar hardships, I have asked István to compile a list of typical mistakes for us.
What are the typical obstacles or traps that we usually fail to avoid in the early stages of introduction? What mistakes are blocking the emergence to a cultural level?
Lean Culture Change and Raising Children
Typical mistakes during the lean introduction process and how to avoid them from an HR perspective
(István Dorka, senior lean consultant)
If you could ask an objective and independent expert from another planet about how many companies they would wholeheartedly recommend a lean journey to (provided they have a heart), or if they could offer them something better instead, I would be willing to bet a considerable sum that the response would be very close to 100%. I believe a lean journey is exciting and interesting, highly efficient in both the short and the long run, and is full of challenges – quite akin to raising a child. You will do your best raising a child if you have at
least one child of your own. Lean is also an empirical genre. There are general principles and rules but each situation is unique, even within the same corporation, and each problem must be solved with consideration to environmental conditions and age. As a lean consultant I have many “children” all around the country, but I have also worked in lean positions in England, the Netherlands, Germany, Spain and Italy. Some of these children I am especially proud of, but I like them all, they are all unique personalities.
Having worked nearly one and a half decades in this field I am beginning to be able to spot recurring themes and motives, even within individualistic clients. Unfortunately we can still encounter infant deaths and abortions but here are four pieces of advice for “parents” expecting or considering a child to make such unfortunate accidents less frequent:
I. Lean Advice #1: Make love and don’t tamper with the incubator switch
Lean is the best and most widely applicable method in this planet to turn your company into the Brad Pitt or Angelina Jolie of the trade, no matter where you work or what you do. No, really. Of course there are exceptions. If I needed to prepare a sales or marketing plan, if I needed advice on retail techniques, or if I needed a running trainer, a conductor, a programmer or a film director I’d still rather hire a professional. But I am pretty sure these experts also apply lean to be able to efficiently perform their sales, marketing programming or any other professional duties, or to turn these tasks into world class processes – maybe lean is even used on Mars. How fast can you react to a new market demand? How flexible are you? And how precise? How about cost effectiveness or speed? Can you retain the best employees and nurture your own leaders?
You participate in the everyday goings of the world by completing tasks, by maintaining contacts and by applying processes, from doing the weekly shopping to going on holiday, from customer management to manufacturing roller blades, from a hospital operation to milking a cow, or to determining the state budget. As for the optimalisation of operations and processes, as well as for the problem solving necessary for their development, there is no better method than lean. Also, it is a management system which puts people in the focus as primary motors of change. Its principles of leadership are among the most humanistic ones, and include empowerment; coach style developing leaders; leaders who “serve” employees in creating values; cooperation; clear relationships between internal buyers and sellers; thinking in a group… In my opinion (but I am biased) the approach of lean management is the Waldorf School, the T. Vekerdy (Hungarian child psychologist) and the PET Method of raising leaders.
And yet, why would many of you never try yourself at it, or give it some time and leave it off? Would you like to be the preferred supplier of your clients? Would you like to be far more flexible and cost effective by eliminating wastes? Would you like to be able to motivate your employees and leaders much better? Then you should assume responsibility for this child and don’t let anyone tamper with the power switch of the incubator.
Consultant Advice:
From the perspective of HR organisational development we must mention the importance of “Mobilising for change”
Highest level managers should be the sponsors and controllers of change, while changes themselves must launch from below, involving employees. If there is no strong top management, or if the management resists (read: fears) change, they will not want to have this child. An unwanted child will not be born, will not be fit for life, or will be traumatised. Their ‘child’ will be aborted before its conception, as a foetus or as a newborn. Giving life to a cute little leanling that daddy may one day grow fond of is simply not worth the investment. Lean is a complex system which cannot grow and develop healthily without a father. A father is indispensable in raising a child, at least in raising a happy child. I have unquestionably contributed to the production of happiness hormone in my own kids. This does not mean you can only launch comprehensive lean development. You don’t need to have quintuplets. It is completely possible to start off on a pilot project, for example working on a line that gives you lots of issues and recurring, even daily problems, provided that the management is supportive of the idea of becoming a father.
If the prospective daddy is still hesitant, make the problems (the unsustainability of the current situation) highly visible. Create a sense of urgency regarding change, for example through a quick lean diagnosis. You should also organise a leadership workshop, or an intimate candle-lit dinner, to discuss their motivation, fears, roles and tasks regarding the child. Don’t forget to work on emotional aspects and on relationships. Do something about renegade resistance. A single top manager can hurl the child into the proverbial abyss of Sparta before you could bat an eye. Fathers undoubtedly play a critical role in this respect but it is very important that other family members also welcome the newcomer. Work with inside teams, e.g project teams, or organise workshops for multifunctional members. Involvement and communication is indispensable from an early stage. Human foetuses spend nine months in the womb developing; elephant babies are born after 22 months. Real, profound change takes time. Again: children are born after nine months of pregnancy. That is too long, you may be inclined to say, but then I think you are insane. The best lean developments have a given incubation time, so stop kicking them to happen faster.
The first lean success may come as early as after the first workshop, but it takes time to achieve far reaching changes, especially a change in attitude. In the early stages it is very natural to feel that things like FIFO or one-piece flow may never work within your organisation, that you should just forget about small batch manufacturing, and that you are not Japanese anyway. I cannot recall a single company where counter arguments did not include “because we are special”. Indeed you are, which is why one must always tailor lean, always experiment on an individual basis, trying to work out how to apply a lean approach in any specific situation. You will not find two identical situations even within the same plant, which is exactly what makes this an exciting and creative task. The road to embracing lean is paved with repeated personal experiences, with observations, conviction, data collection, coaching style conversations, on-the-job trainings. But the result is worth waiting for. The newborn will be stronger, more fit for life if you don’t try and rush things, and the better midwives get to know the family the more dedicated they will become.
And of course you may decide not to want all of this. It is alright, I will respect your decision. But if you have the slightest notion that you are rejecting lean because of some inner fear, do tell about it to someone you trust. Maybe he or she can help you with your dilemma. Or, once you have pinpointed the situation, you may as well just say yes and watch what you learn about yourself. Resisting change is a completely human reaction up until some degree. But if you look back at past events in your life you will see that the greatest things were always preceded by change. Maybe a leadership coach or a personality development therapist can
help you. Often it is enough for leaders to sit down and think about it together, if that can be done in an open and honest way. Just to be on the safe side it is advisable to invite an experienced third-party facilitator to guide that conversation.
II. Lean Advice #2: Be an adventurous explorer but do not want to find all the results yourself.
It is important to create some sort of a mutual trust regarding lean.
Once I opened Dr. Spock’s book. He advised to let children cry because they will tire of it after 20 minutes anyway. We tried this once and gave up after 30 minutes. Since then I have been in agreement with experts who say infants can only remember their mother for a few minutes; after that they will feel like she is dead if she is not around.
Consultant Advice:
Lean changes should be spearheaded by an experienced lean expert. This includes creating a value stream map, defining a change plan, creating a system of plant KPI-s and metrics, and in general the entire process, for at least the first few years. In 1999, just six months after I had first heard of lean, I had nearly all pieces of machinery moved about on a 150-strong workshop floor and had the entire layout changed. After the initial chaos they reported improved ergonomics and reduced wait times. Suddenly they only needed half as many fork lift trucks, in-process inventory and transit times were reduced to one third, and many products and processes were successfully standardised. We held regular workshops for workers and ended up receiving a bunch of great ideas from them on a daily basis. There was some change left over from the budget earmarked for development (itself a very modest sum) which I used to buy lots of indoor plants for the factory, partly as a symbol of flourishing, partly to just make them feel better. I looked around and felt I was the God of Lean. Looking back I now realise I would not have dared make any moves of significance, or initiate any real change if I didn’t have my lean mentor covering my back. James Womack says it takes 7-8 years of working with lean, ideally in various environments, to be able to launch further reaching lean developments with minimal risk and a steady hand.
If you have a good lean advisor (whether internal or third party) you can avoid many mistakes such as: forgetting to link lean actions to the corporate strategy, forgetting to duly strengthen the process before attempting to create one-piece flow, applying copy & paste type introductions, e.g. starting off with the 5S method whether you need it or not introducing lean tools in a “l’art pour l’art” way without them supporting business objectives in general you can make the entire trip a faster, more cost-effective and less frustrating experience.
The difference is similar to that between new and experienced parents. When my first child was born I bought four cribs, two for each room. However, whenever we travelled somewhere we needed to use chairs and cushions to create a makeshift crib-like structure and make sure he does not fall (but he did). Then, when my second child was born, I only bought a single
collapsible crib. This was great in the garden, during our holidays or family visits, and could easily fit in the trunk when folded.
Involve experts familiar with change management, culture shift, management and personality development from the earliest stages of process planning. You will be surprised to find how much open and covert resistance you will need to manage even within yourself, especially in the early stages. It is no coincidence I work for a consultancy firm that specialises in this activity, and which has accumulated significant experience with this. When I was working on the other side we called on them for help when we felt at a loss because of managers with outdated attitudes or shifts incapable of cooperation.
There are highly fortunate situations where each and every manager and team member is dedicated to the lean process and is eager to change and learn new things. Leaders are natural born coaches, cooperating and empowering, optimising the whole and setting a good example. If this is the case, keep your work place in high esteem because chances are you will never find another one like that.
Experiment with many consultants and as time goes by keep empowering the team to initiate changes on their own. Lean is a highly diverse thing, so everyone is certain to be able to contribute with something new, to vary and energise the process.
Once you have trust in place, don’t be afraid to experiment. You will enjoy it. If not, there is something wrong. Maybe daddy is terrorising the family.
Always work as a group. The success of a lean process is never a one-man show but team work!
III. Lean Advice #3: Give the kids a sense of achievement, let them play. It is okay for dad to enjoy it too.
If the management’s motivation for lean development was to improve business goals, such as precisely meeting supplier delivery deadlines or increasing capacity, do not waste time on general lean training at the beginning: just hire a lean consultant and let an insider team begin analysing and improving the process. Always provide for partial achievements and always communicate such success. Everyone will be happy and have a sense of achievement if the team prepares a lean analysis of a complex problem and involves the management in making a well founded decision about the next move.
It is important to convert the strategy into material values. Whether it is value stream mapping, SMED, production levelling or standard work analysis; or increasing the capacity of a production bottleneck, what matters is that both the team and the management should get a sense of progress and it should also be visible on business indicators.
Consultant Advice:
From an HR point of view there is nothing more important than realising the planned strategy.
However it is also important that this is done with due empowerment and in a creatively inspiring way. My personal contribution to this could be to let the team go wherever their energy takes them. There is no need to forcibly feed a child if they are not hungry. If we agree on five actions and for the next session the team prepares three of these but brings in five new ones I often ask them if we could just set the remaining two issues aside, since focus has obviously been shifted away from them. On other occasions if I suggest we should rethink the entire production planning process because what they have now is simply defunct, but they don’t seem to bite on the topic I just let go of it. Naturally if it is something of high importance, something we cannot proceed without, I’ll just talk about it until I arouse their appetite.
Another trap both the lean consultant and management must make sure to avoid is shifting the focus from the original issue and overloading the team. Often times the better the team learns about the current state of the process, the more they begin to overwhelm themselves with actions. You must learn to pause and select from time to time, to prioritise or suggest new considerations. We should not be aiming for a “perfect” state, and especially not for “delivering the baby” of the management or the consultant. Instead, try something like improving line productivity by 10% via utilising their own ideas and giving them a personal sense of achievement. Leaders who refuse to let go of an idea (especially their own) are highly detrimental because the only thing they can achieve is frustration and overload within the team. Members will stop coming up with ideas once they feel their leaders are trying to gain full control of the process. This is a matter of empowerment, a fundamental aspect of lean. Will I trust the team to reach the set goal, will I let them learn from their mistakes, or do I want to control them and the process? I have had many occasions where we achieved as much or even more by not trying too hard, although working fairly regularly, in a favourable atmosphere, than if we had been acting on strict orders. This way you can also get away without those boring action plan debriefings which do nothing but drain your energies and suspect lies in everything anyways.
Do not start with insignificant things. Choose an entire process for your pilot and define challenging goals!
Spend plenty of time with your inside team observing operations and processes. This will ensure a much deeper level of understanding and learning about lean and the nature of processes, and will create a more direct connection to workers and stakeholders; not to mention it is far more enjoyable than just sitting in the office discussing the theoretical aspects of lean and pondering over what we should do.
Involve daddy in bathing or playing. Report to the management regularly, involve them when you make decisions or get stuck, ask for their opinion. Do not let them feel that the team has stormed ahead; do not leave them thinking about how fast their child has grown. Involve them actively in certain observations and workshops, or given phases thereof. They will then assume responsibility for solving some management level problems.
IV. Lean Advice #4: Do not forget to feed and change regularly, and to nurture continuously
What I mean by this is better exemplified by the Tamagotchi than by flesh and blood human children. You may remember the electronic gadget that you needed to “feed” regularly in order to keep it “alive”. Even today Toyota invests heavily in keeping the system going and
continuously updated. You can never say ‘I am lean, I am done’. Continuous improvement is, per definition, continuous. It does not ever end. It does not grow up and establish its own family.
One problem that can arise is when after the initial successes you say this is lean enough. You then fail to go deep enough, or instead of fundamentally improving the process you settle for producing neat visual charts and decide that your are lean enough to take a rest.
The other important aspect of regular feeding is similar to the Maslow theory.
If the child has nothing to eat, there is no heating in the apartment, and especially if you run out of clean diapers, issues such as buying larger bodysuits suddenly lose importance because you need to concentrate on keeping the Tamagotchi alive. You need a degree of stability before you can attend to finer details.
You should not want to work on one-piece flow, balanced lines or minimum required staff as long as you are struggling with issues of process stability, you keep running out of raw materials, you have no trained operators, too much rework or too much equipment failure.
Production smoothing is also an issue relating to fundamental stability. It will do your baby no good if you want to feed it five litres of milk one day and half a litre the other day. Lack of levelled production can cause far more problems than any other loss. So can continuous overload, when mommy and daddy, as well as all relatives, continue to work overtime, or you don’t have time for equipment maintenance.
Consultant Advice:
From an HR perspective the main thing is to think in terms of a culture change instead of a one-off project. In terms of how you can maintain the dedication, and increase the involvement, of the management team. You need to disseminate the lean approach both vertically and horizontally.
Parental attention is very important for the development of the child. And by attention I do not mean continuous control but rather increasing a sense of mattering. Management focus should never for a split second be removed from lean developments. Co-workers and project teams involved in lean will be doing what they see reflected in the eyes, or deduct from the behaviour, of their leaders. If the focus keeps changing, the process will stall. Cf. Advice #1: do not tamper with the power switch of the incubator.
At one point in the process you should compile a development plan. Include lean actions in corporate strategy planning and break-down, using for instance the A3 method. Issues pertaining to stability problems should enjoy utmost priority. Plan your actions according to the available resources of the team and make it clear that no one should try to squeeze in ten more projects of the same priority. It would be great if your child could learn how to play the piano, the guitar and the flute, learn karate and basketball, and could still do beading and learn English. Yet if you as a parent force all of this upon them they may not become proficient in any of these skills but will certainly get tired. Instead, try to decide which two or three skills you should be concentrating on for the moment. Make sure you involve your child in the decision-making and pick skills that they are also fond of. Similarly, a lean development team
should not generally focus on more than 1-3 top priorities at any given time. Fragmentation kills creative work like nothing else.
Among long term HR tasks you will find nurturing talents, preparing training plans for the entire organisation, harmonising the bonus system with the lean strategy, but may also include the restructuring of the whole or a part of the organisation, such as converting from a company operating along functional lines into one built upon value streams. It is important to continuously check whether related fields (engineering, logistics, quality assurance, merchants, etc) are adequately involved in lean processes.
Summary
If done properly, changes with a lean focus will soon lead you into a process of culture change. The corporate vision and mission will grow to include approaches like ‘customers first’, ‘on-going development’ or ‘the creativity of our colleagues is our most important corporate asset’. Production and cascade breakdown methods of the lean strategy will find their way into the corporate strategy; leaders will make strategic decisions based on an understanding of line processes and actual customer needs, involving employees and home-grown change agents, thereby continuing the lean journey.
Sooner, rather than later, aspects such as the importance of cooperation among organisational units, the issue of leadership development and dedication, the empowerment of colleagues and their involvement in development processes, the creation of a system for rewarding and managing ideas, or empowerment are bound to come to the fore. It becomes important to provide wide-ranging trainings, and to formally establish a full-time lean team within the organisation. Among the persons participating in lean developments you will soon be able to spot “natural born leaders” who will turn into the corporate leaders of the future.
And all of this will show in the results. I can provide personal examples proving that incredible degrees of improvement are possible in any industry or at any service provider if you avoid the traps I have outlined above.
Lean introduction will be a success: if the management unanimously support the lean process, if you leave plenty of time for people, for processes and for change instead of checking your plant daily to see if its roots have begun to strengthen if you regularly nurture, feed, energise your process. if he process has been planned well in terms of change management and lean expertise, you will have your sense of achievement without pushing too hard for it
At some clients we have managed to reduce the entire process lead times by 50%, other places we achieved a 40% improvement of productivity and capacity within a few months, without changing the number of staff. Yet another corporation managed to nearly double its output with half as many employees, vastly improved keeping delivery deadlines (to the rejoicing of their customers) or reduced in-process inventories by 70%. Other places were happy to see that they have virtually eliminated constant crisis management and co-workers no longer needed to develop an ulcer just by coming to work.
But I also see other organisations which have not even begun to think about why exactly they don’t want to have a baby. All of this is your decision, the door is open.
After finishing the article last night I went to bed thinking about the topic. Then I had a dream. I was in the street, ready to turn around and find that little green rose I left on the side of the road the other day. I could soon locate it. It was living a solitary life because it wanted to be grand and creative and refused to adopt anything all the “old roses” would do except for growing five petals like all the greatest roses. In my dream I told the rose that if it wanted to become the most creative football player in the world then it would be best to start by learning and internalising all the moves by Puskás Rose and Pelé Rose. Or, if it wanted to be a unique thinker, it should read everything already written in the field. The little green rose agreed and we walked to where the Pelé and Puskás Roses usually reside, only to find out they no longer live in that neighborhood, and that they certainly had far more than five petals. This surprised my little rose who decided to stay there for the time being, start growing more petals, and then we will come up with something to move on with. Well, by and large that is how it goes.
For Hungarian translation pls visit: http://www.lean-hr.hu