I Had No Idea How Complicated It Is!

After a morning session to map all the steps in a small administrative process, the manager of the area was shocked to see what went into getting this job done. "I had no idea how complicated it is!"

The same information had to be entered into seven different places, including computer programs, a wall calendar, a web page, and a couple of binders and note books. There were six different handoffs between staff members, and several different ways to keep track of the calendar events, yet there was no way of knowing if each job actually got done. Everybody just hoped and assumed that things would work out.

After redesigning, the process went from about thirty manual steps, down to about nine, saving everyone time and frustration, and allowing them to easily process several times the volume, with far less effort.

It Seemed Cheaper at the Time

As we seek economies of scale, as we try to keep busy and fully utilize staff, we often keep working even when the next step isn't ready for more. We do things in large batches as we try to be as efficient as much as possible. We try to spread the changeover costs or processing time or transportation time over many items. Unfortunately, things then wait. In piles. In queues. In holding areas. In waiting rooms. In work-in-process. Waiting for the next step to get to them.

Over-production is often considered the worst of the Lean Wastes, as it contributes to the creation of so many other wastes. Whenever one step produces more than the next step is ready for, you have over production. It seems cheaper to produce in batches, but your costs are higher than they could be whenever you produce too much, too soon.

A few examples...

1. A company ordered steel in large batches to get the unit price down. With about six months worth of stock sitting in the warehouse, the company made a major change in it's product design and no longer required that type of steel. The market price for steel was soft and, when all costs were factored in, the company only recouped about 40% of what they had originally spent for this "cheap" steel.
2. A kitchen cabinet manufacturer made colour samples on small wood pieces. Customers would use these colour samples as they shopped for everything else they needed to decorate and finish their new kitchens. The manufacturer would run large batches of samples, to minimize the cost per sample, and all the dealers would get boxes of hundreds at a time. Styles and colours change rapidly in the cabinet industry and, inevitable, dealers would end up throwing out hundreds of obsolete samples.
3. The order handling department in a lab would accumulate ten to fifteen requisitions before processing them in batches, to "be more efficient." A process mapping exercise revealed that this batching was adding, on average, a full day to the total cycle time for the tests. By changing to immediate handling of each order as it arrived, they were able to shorten the cycle time by a day, without any additional expenses.

We seek economies of scale because it seems cheaper. Yet, when total costs are considered, big batches often cost us much more than we imagine.

An Ode to Rapid Improvement Projects

There's a part of your business that's not doing well;
The people are great but they're going through hell.
They just can't keep up and they beg for more staff, but when
You think of hiring you just have to laugh:
"We can't hire more - we have to cut costs
But we have to do something before it's all lost."
Rapid improvement is something we need
Our people can do it! Swift Fox can lead!

Thanks to the Blatant Self-Promotion division of Swift Fox for this little ditty.

He Was Terrible - Will Never Use In The Future

After a recent presentation about quality to a large group of Saskatchewan health care leaders, the feedback forms about my presentation ranged widely, from "What I Liked Most" about the workshop, to "What I Liked Least". I've learned to expect variation, and, striving to improve, I try to learn and adapt based on all the feedback I receive.

The most critical feedback comment I received after this presentation was:

The message of giving patients what they want, when they want it is not realistic. He was terrible - will never use in the future.

Now this one threw me at first, as the insecure side of me reacted to the "He was terrible" part. I quickly re-read some of the other "He was great" comments to restore myself, and then thought about this one for a while. I'm certainly open to adapting my speaking style, or my audience participation exercises, or the ways I present information, but that didn't seem to be what this commenter was saying.

The message here, as far as I could see, was that giving patients "what they want, when they want it", was not realistic. Granted, there's plenty of room for misinterpretation, since it was a very brief comment with no opportunity for discussion or clarification. Still, this is a deeply disturbing comment coming from a health care leader.

If we don't give patients "what they want, when they want it", what do we do instead? What is "realistic" for the health care industry?

1. Not give patients what they want. Perhaps we should ignore our patients' desires for good health, for effective interventions, for relief of pain and symptoms, for respect, for information, for good service. My mom wanted an appointment with her doctor this week; the clinic's schedule wouldn't allow it. Maybe that's a good thing?
2. Give patients what they don't want.  Perhaps we should try to increase the number of hospital-acquired infections, clinical errors, or prescription drug interactions. A study published in the Journal of the American Geriatric Society found that one out of thirty senior hospital admissions were due to adverse drug reactions.
3. Give patients what we want. Perhaps we need to reschedule their appointments more at our convenience, make them walk further around the hospital, drive to an even-more-distant specialty hospital, and put a few more people into each bed while we're at it.
4. Not give them help when they want it. Face it, patients are whiners. The whole idea of wanting health care when you're sick is just so needy. Perhaps it would be better to extend wait times even further, and add more handoffs and waiting rooms to each procedure along the way.
5. Give them help when we want to. Perhaps it would be better to require people to pre-schedule their visits to the emergency department, or maybe spread out their influenza infections throughout the year. Or, like a recent friend's experience, send notice of a scheduled specialist appointment at an arbitrary date in about six months, then push it back two months, then push it back another three months.

What scares me most about this critical comment is the suggestion that good customer service in the health care industry is not realistic. In every other industry, customer service (giving customers what they want, when they want it) is critical to business, a differentiator between success stories and business failures. Yet somehow it's "not realistic" in health care? I don't think so.

In today's StarPhoenix, Mark Lemstra wrote that Health care needs ideas, not more money, I couldn't agree more. And some of the old ideas and attitudes might have to go, to make room for new ones.

Have You Built a Tower of Babel?

To mess up the ambitious plans for construction of the Tower of Babel, God "confounded the language of all the Earth."(Genesis 11:5-8). In a bit of a mischevious intervention, God divided the people by getting them to speak different languages, where before they had spoken one. Without the ability to communicate, they were unable to coordinate their efforts. There was no possibility of getting the job done at all, let alone getting it done on time or under budget.

In the 1967 sci-fi short story "Babel II", available in War Games, Harry Crosby (aka Christopher Anvil) describes a world where the technology has gotten so complicated, where the degree of professional specialization has become so extensive, that none of the professionals can understand each other, and no-one understands completely how the technology works. Their attempts to build an Esmer-drive starship are doomed!

In your company, it's very likely that the people in purchasing have no idea what any of the stuff they're buying is used for, or how to tell a good flux capacitor from a bad one. Your people in operations probably have no idea what finance means when they talk about "Net changes in non-cash working capital items related to operations". As we divide our companies into departments, into specialists that speak different languages, we build a Tower of Babel where people are truly unable to understand each other.

As you examine the sequential steps that your organization takes to satisfy your customers, you'll see many handoffs from one department to another, from one language group to another. More often than not, the handoff is not well understood by either group. A complete order, for the sales department, means they got a deposit or purchase order from the customer. A complete order for the shop means all the line items are correct and all required materials are in stock. A complete order for shipping has no back orders and clear delivery instructions and address.

When we try to improve, it's common to work within a department, trying to make our work as efficient as possible. We aim to meet our departmental targets in the belief that this will achieve the company targets. We work to improve our individual departments in the belief that this will improve the organization. Paraphrasing a little more of "Babel II": All the departmental curves showed progress. It was natural to assume this meant company progress. But what about the connections between the departments, between their managers and between people generally. It would be possible to carry this specialization so far that nobody understands anyone in any other line of work, and then what will we have?

What we'll have is the typical modern company, where departments speak their own languages and work to improve within themselves, but the real flow of work and value never gets much better.

Rapid Improvement Projects

Are there areas of your business that continually struggle? Are your people having trouble keeping up with your customers’ continually increasing requirements? Maybe growth has strained your systems beyond their capacity. Or perhaps a slowdown has made you realize how out-of-control everything has been. Regardless, it’s gotten to the point that you have to make some changes, and you have to do it now.


You don’t have to figure it out yourself. By pulling together a cross-functional team that includes people who work in the area, people from other involved departments, and outside eyes from valued customers and suppliers, a Rapid Improvement Project can help your people to:

• Map out the current process, warts and all.
• Recover from the shock of seeing your current process.
• Learn to see wastes in the process.
• Map out a future version of how the process could be, should be.
• Identify specific changes to help make the leap from here to there.

Using principles and tools from Lean Enterprise and Systems Thinking, a Rapid Improvement Project empowers your people to address a struggling area of your operation. Along with some pre-interviews and preliminary data gathering, a Rapid Improvement Project can often accomplish in a day what has been dreamed of for years. And, because your people create the improvement, it tends to be an enlightening, positive, and productive experience.

The idea is not to create a perfect process in a day. The idea is to get the right people in the room, get everyone looking at how the work really happens (not how you think it does), and identify changes to make it immediately more efficient. It’s not magic, and your ugly old frog might not instantly turn into a handsome prince(ss). But it is a strong, quick and reliable method for improving whatever it is you do.

Company Loses Million Dollar Account

A large Saskatchewan metal fabrication company was well into a Lean Enterprise transformation and was buying $1 million/year of product from a particular supplier. The supplier produced parts using a combination of in-house and 3rd-party fabricators with considerable transportation of work-in-process between their facility and others and back.

As part of their supplier development process, the customer tried to convince them to examine their processes and get rid of all this transportation waste (one of the Seven Lean Wastes), so they could reduce lead times and reduce costs. They were willing to share the savings, but needed supplier improvement to help them meet their own customers' ever-more-demanding requirements. Unfortunately, the supplier wasn't willing to explore Lean, and repeatedly told the customer that their processes were efficient enough.

Another supplier, eager for work, was willing to embrace Lean improvement initiatives and accept the offered supplier development assistance. As a direct result, the first supplier lost $1 million/year in profitable business.

This is what is happening around the world. If you're not willing to embrace continuous improvement and Lean, you can bet someone else will. And they will beat you on price, quality, and delivery time. Can you afford to lose your million dollar accounts?

The Backbone of Your Organization

From one vertebrate to another, a backbone is a wonderful thing. Compared to slime molds, jelly fish and malpractice lawyers, our backbones give us integrity; holding us together and providing a unifying structure on which we can hang all our other nifty bits and pieces.

Working with companies to map and improve their work processes, it's clear that a good, solid process map can serve as a very effective organizational backbone.

First, you map out the things that you do, step-by-step-by-step, to do good things for your customers. Then, you examine every step of this step-by-step-by-step sequence of events. Then, you think about all the things that can and could and should and shouldn't happen at each step...

• Standard Work - Do the people involved in this step all do their work the best known way possible? How do you know? What typically prevents them from doing the work correctly? What gets in the way?
• Pride of Work - Do the people feel proud of this step? Do they enjoy their work? Is it mind-numbingly boring? Is it stimulating? What can you do to improve it?
• Customer Requirements - What are the requirements of the next step in the process? And the step after that? Do the workers know those requirements? Does the next step understand this step?
• Communication - What does this step communicate to the next? What do they fail to communicate? And vice versa?
• Training - Do the people know how to do this step? Is the training material correct? Is the work activity done correctly? What parts of this step are likely to be done wrong?
• Quality - Does this step produce stuff that meets specifications, that meets customer requirements? Are we following our stated work processes? Could we prove this to a customer? To a regulator?
• Regulations - Does this step conform to all applicable regulations? Some steps may have no regulations, some may have many? Do the people doing the work know what regulations are applicable?
• Standards - Are we following the applicable standards in this step, both internal and external? What could cause a non-conformance at this step?
• Capacity - How much can this step produce? How much does it need to produce? Is it a bottleneck? Is it consistent?
• Variation - What causes results to vary at this step? How much variation is there? Is this part of the system in control or does it fluctuate wildly due to special causes?
• Safety - How can a person hurt themselves in this step? What opportunities for injury can we address? What are the ergonomics of this step? How can we improve them?

• Errors - What kind of errors could happen here? What are the consequences of an error here? Does this step produce a lot of rework? Can we disrupt the possibility of an error here?
• Ethics - Do our people face ethical dilemna's in this step? Privacy issues? Inappropriate temptations? Couldn't we anticipate these and address them in advance?
• Waste - Does this step add value for our customers? Is this waiting or transportation really necessary? Are we producing more than the next step can handle? Does all that frenzied motion really make our service better? Can't we identify these wastes and get rid of them? Can't we make our backbone stronger?
• Risk - Does this step expose the organization to risks, whether liability, injury, financial, security, technical, intellectual property, or maybe even a really big explosion?
• Reporting - What do we truly need to know about this step to manage our company? What do we measure? What should we measure?
• Money - What are the costs and investments associated with this step? Can they be identified? Verified? What about contributions to revenue? What about added value? What about efficient use of resources?

The list goes on. At every step of what we do, there are things that we want to happen and things that we don't want to happen. A good process map can be the backbone on which we hang all these other nifty bits and pieces - our Quality Management System, our Safety initiatives, our Lean improvement efforts, our variation-reduction and process control, our ethics and privacy practices, our financial analysis or our business process modelling.

So, unless you work for Slime Mold Structures Inc., the Jelly Fish Facilitation Co., or the Wees Krew Yu & Laff Lawfirm, take a look a process mapping as a first step in understanding, controlling, and improving your business.

A Little Over-Processing Waste at the Pharmacy

A pharmacy has a software system that prints three items at once - a label for the bottle, a receipt for the customer, and a record slip for the files. The software system is robust and reliable.

As part of their work process, one pharmacist routinely checks the information on all three items to make sure it is the same. This is not to make sure that it is correct, this is to make sure that the three pieces are the same. This cursory check takes about 20 seconds and is done on the basis that "you can never be too careful."

Truth be told, you can be too careful, if you're being careful in a way that doesn't actually help anything. These printed pieces are never different; they will never be different; the inspection will never find a problem. The inspection is a hold-over from experiences with previous systems that weren't robust; with the current system, the inspection is not needed.

In Lean terminology, this extra effort, this double check, this inspection, is Waste, specifically Over-Processing waste. It is a step that takes time and effort, but doesn't add any value for the customer.

And these wastes, tiny as they seem, really add up. Consider that 20 seconds/prescription x 200 prescriptions/day x 250 days/year = 275 hours wasted each year. Eliminating this step from the process could free up 275 hours for a pharmacist every year! That's almost two months! Finding and eliminatng a few more small wastes could potentially free up the equivalent of a full-time pharmacist, without adding any new staff.

That's the excitement of Lean and the potential of continuous daily improvement.

One Gallon of Waste at the Hospital

"Do you remember that gallon of blah-blah-blah that I asked you to order last week? Do you know where it is?"

So started the conversation in the hospital ward, and the search began.

The file of paper requisition forms was searched.
The computer records were examined.
Two phone calls were made.
A search of the storage room was undertaken.
Thirty cabinet doors were opened and closed.
Another phone call was made.
Three people were asked if they'd seen the blah-blah-blah.
Two possibilities were suggested.
Two wild geese were chased.
Another staff arrived and said they thought it was back-ordered.
The computer records were examined again.
Two more phone calls were made.
The blah-blah-blah wasn't found.
A new requisition order was filled out.

This is just one gallon of waste, one tiny incident in the life of a busy hospital. This is one small example of how trivial our wastes can be.

This little incident won't even make the radar of management, won't be considered important in the grand scheme of things, but this is the stuff that drives people crazy. This is the stuff that contributes to error. This is the stuff that wastes time and money, day after day after day. This is what Lean, and 5S, and continuous improvement, and employee engagement is all about.

Why Not Drop Your Drawers?

9:37am Busy hospital ward. Drawer stuck shut. Three nurses banging, prying, pulling, sticking a ruler in - trying to get inside for supplies that are needed for one patient.

9:57am Three nurses still taking turns trying to open drawer. Lots of banging noise, reverberating through the entire ward.

9:58am Nurse calls Maintenance. Now two patients waiting for the supplies.

10:37am Maintenance staff arrives with large rolling toolbox, pulled off of another task. He dissassembles the cabinet to open it up. Cheers of relief.

10:38am Groans of dismay - the needed supplies are not in the drawer. Out of stock!

10:39am Nurses phone other wards and central supplies, searching for stock of needed items. Two patients still waiting. Three nurses still scrambling.

10:41am Another ward has four available ! Nurse leaves to go get two.

10:48am Nurse returns with two; staff disperses to treat patients.

11:03am Maintenance completes the reassembly of the cabinet.

11:05am Conversation between maintenance and a nurse indicates that this is the "second time that drawer's been stuck shut. Somebody should do something about it. But nobody will! (Laughter)"

All of this waste adds nothing to the patient experience - it makes it worse. It adds nothing to the staff's experience, other than chaos and frustration. It costs money, disrupts care, and interrupts the flow of the daily work.

Many nursing stations are nicely equipped with cabinetry, complete with drawers and cupboards to neatly tuck things away, out of sight. And, most drawers and cabinets are packed with outdated useless stuff that make it hard to know what you have, what you don't have, and what you should have.

What if, instead, they had open shelves, with clear visual markings to show what and how many of each item should be there, when and how to reorder - the visual world of Lean 5S.

Sometimes you need to remove your doors and drop your drawers to improve the daily work.

Do Certifications Suck?

• The Society of Manufacturing Engineers has a three-tiered Lean certification program, with Bronze, Silver and Gold levels of recognition. The American Society for Quality and the Association for Manufacturing Excellence have also contributed to this program.
• The Kaizen Institute has a two-tiered Lean and Lean Six Sigma Green Belt and Black Belt certification program.
• The International Independent Board for Lean Certification offers independent Lean certification in more than ten countries.
• The list goes on and on - Lean Certification Online has, as it's name implies, an online Lean Certification program. Automated Learning has an International Lean Certification Standard. Beyond Lean offers Lean Six Sigma Certification.

From one point of view, this is great, and I mean that. There are literally hundreds of companies and organizations offering some form of Lean certification, trying to teach people standard skills and philosophies to improve their organizations. There is great debate about what standard is, about what Lean is, but the intent (beyond making money through training and certification exams) is noble - let's teach people about Lean.

Now I've known many skilled professionals who've pursued and maintained various certifications, and who are very effective in their roles, so this is not a criticism of the valuable learning inherent in the various certification programs. Yet, there's a significant problem with certifications that emerges in most of the companies I've known.

Almost without fail, organizations seem to end up with a Quality guy, or a Lean department, or some Six Sigma gurus who end up doing the improvement work. There ends up being a quasi-elite group, generally of certified this-that-or-the-others, that are the people who "do that sort of thing." Certifications often suck the initiative out of the rest of the group, and often suck the confidence out of the other workers. You'll hear variations on "I don't make the changes - I just do the work" or "that's something the Lean team does" or "I've given up making suggestions" - the workers themselves are not involved in continually making their own work better and better.

So, while Lean Certifications are well-intentioned, it creates a very different workplace than that advocated by Deming in his 14th point for management, "Put everybody in the company to work to accomplish the transformation. The transformation is everybody's job."

So, pursue certifications and get some Lean training as you see fit, but remember that the goal is to get everybody involved in the transformation, not just an elite certified few. Are certifications sucking the initiative and confidence out of everybody else in your organization?

We Removed a Shelf That None of Us Could Reach

In a recent report-out session with a hospital department, one of the changes that the group was most excited about was "We removed a shelf that none of us could reach." Among the many other improvements they made, this one stood out for several reasons:

1. "We" removed a shelf. It was the people in the area that made this change, not a facilities department, not a Six Sigma black belt, not a Lean guru, not a project team. "We" did it. "We" owned the change. "We" liked the change. If someone else had tried to impose this change on them, they probably would have resisted.
2. We "removed a shelf". We didn't add a shelf, we removed it. This was a simple, inexpensive change that required no budget and freed up a resource for someone else to use. It goes against the common thinking that bigger is better, more is better, just-in-case is better. In a small way, it goes against the annual budget dance, be voluntarily reducing what they needed. They improved their area by reducing the amount of storage capacity.
3. We removed a shelf "that none of us could reach". Not only was this shelf too high for convenience, it was too high for safety. Getting rid of it eliminating the climbing, the standing on chairs, the reaching, the give-me-a-boost's. They took away one structural factor that might have contributed to an accident, and made their environment safer.

Simple changes like this, taken one-by-one, seem insignificant. We're tempted instead to look for big, dramatic breakthroughs. But taken over time, these little day-by-day changes add up. After ten, twenty, one-hundred little changes, we're surprised to realize that our entire department has been transformed. "We removed a shelf that none of us could reach" is a perfect example of what Continuous Improvement is all about - small changes, made daily by the people doing the work, to make things better, bit by bit.

I See You Shiver, With Antici...pation

You're faced with a choice between some sizzling bacon and some raw brocolli . Do you choose the brocolli with its anti-oxidants and nutritional goodness, or do you choose the bacon, with its mouth-wateringly delicious fatty yummy-ness? You won't really know the health impact for years, and even then you won't be sure what effect this choice really had on your long term health.

The immediate feedback is about flavour and pleasure, and the bacon wins easily (be honest!). The long-term feedback is about health, but this has little effect on our immediate motivation. When we expect to receive feedback on our choices has a big effect on the kind of choices we make.

In the workplace, it turns out that when we expect to get feedback also has a big effect on how well we perform. Keri Kettle at the University of Alberta School of Business published some interesting findings in his paper Motivation by Anticipation: Expecting Rapid Feedback Enhances Performance. University students performed objectively better (22% better) when they anticipated immediate feedback on their speaking presentations, compared to when they were told to expect feedback in a couple of weeks. The effect was strong and linear, meaning that an anticipated delay of eight days for feedback reduced performance by about twice as much as an expected delay of four days.

This suggests that our traditional best-practices in performance management are crap ... or, to be polite, marginally effective. The annual performance review is so far in the future that it provides little motivation and no feedback day-to-day. Moving to quarterly performance reviews is little better (remember that a two-week delay in Kettle's study resulted in twenty percent poorer performance). So, annual and quarterly performance reviews are useless, monthly reviews are still weak, and weekly performance reviews not much better, but this starts getting ridiculous - we can't have daily performance reviews, can we? That's crazy talk!

In the traditional world of performance management, daily performance reviews would be crazy. But we can find effective ways to provide immediate feedback, and leverage this principle of Motivation by Anticipation to improve our desire to perform well and avoid dissappoinment.

Consider the daily, tiered accountability meetings of Leader Standard Work from the world of Lean, or the daily Scrum meetings from the world of Agile Software Development. When done well, these approaches shift the feedback towards short, structured meetings about immediate daily progress. Visual displays of status also constribute to making progress understandable at a glance. In Lean, the feedback time frame is further shortened to match the takt time, the heartbeat of the process, which may be as short as a few minutes depending on the facility. Imagine getting non-judgemental feedback about your performance every few minutes. This aligns perfectly with Kettle's work, and suggests why working in a well-run Lean or Agile organization can be such a pleasure, and produce such good results.

When we choose bacon over brocolli, we're choosing immediate feedback over future feedback. If there were a way to make feedback on the health benefits immediately concrete and real, we would likely choose the healthy alternative more often, and our personal health performance would improve dramatically.

Kettle shows that expecting rapid feedback enhances performance. If our corporate Performance Management efforts are truly intended to improve performance, we need to shift away from the disconnected, long-term evaluation inherent in our current review processes. We need to shift towards providing immediate, concrete feedback - daily, hourly. We need to foster an expectation of immediate, concrete feedback amongst our people. And this means that management needs to change. Management needs to do standard daily work. Immediate feedback one day and no feedback the next is not enough. Management needs to step up its consistency.

By building the expectation of rapid feedback, we can get better performance, better intrinsic motivation, and better results. It's like getting the health benefits of broccoli with the flavor goodness of bacon. Yum.

The Hidden Waste of Hunting for Waste

A health care department had been on a Lean Six Sigma improvement journey for several years. They'd become quite effective at avoiding wastes in their medical processes. Unfortunately, they became so aggressive at hunting for waste that they inadvertently created another form of waste that they had real trouble seeing.

One example was a discussion about whether to get a water cooler and make bottled water available to staff on one small unit. Some of the staff had requested one, as they wanted purified cold and hot water to drink, and the topic was discussed at a meeting. The debate focused on whether a water cooler was a waste of money, whether it would waste time if people congregated at it (waiting waste?), or if it would add to walking time (transportation waste?), whether you really needed to filter water or whether the tap water was good enough (overprocessing waste?).

Looking around the room at the people attending the meeting, the overheaded cost of the meeting was about $2,200 per hour, and the portion of the meeting that dealt with the water cooler lasted about an hour and a half! So, while diligently trying to avoid waste, the organization burned up enough cash to pay for the water cooler and water for about four years. This pattern repeated on numerous small decisions, as everyone up the chain of command tried to make sure that nobody "below" them was wasting precious dollars.

Decisions need to be made close to the point-of-use. If we involve every layer of management in every little decision, we waste time and money, and send a frustrating message to people whom we are supposed to be empowering. Give people guidelines, define some practical limits, then get out of the way and let them make good decisions. And don't assume that meetings are free just because you don't see the immediate cost.

Three Simple Ground Rules when Introducing New Ideas

By setting a few simple ground rules in advance, you can help smooth the path when trying to introduce positive change into your organization. In early group meetings, in which you'll attempt to explain your visionary plan for change, consider asking your audience for the following three things:

1. Don't dispute concepts. Let's try to understand. Let's try to apply.

By definition, since the "new" thing you're trying to introduce is outside your people's experience, it will not fit into their current world view. Consequently, they will feel justified in challenging the ideas, in dismissing them, since the ideas don't fit with the way things are done here. Simply asking for a shift in thinking - away from dispute and challenge, towards understanding and possibility - can make a big difference in the progress of the conversation.

2. Grasp the basic ideas. Don't dig into the details.

Especially with complicated concepts, initial discussions can often get fatally bogged down in discussions of tiny details which would naturally sort themselves out further into the learning cycle. When introducing Lean Thinking, for example, the conversation can often get bogged down as people try to understand how inventory is a waste, or how making a process less efficient can actually be better. Pull back to the basic ideas, leave the details for when there is deeper understanding and more common language.

3. Try to get experience in using the concepts.

Without experience using new ideas, it is often hard to see their value. Rather than passing judgement on something new based on what you know already, ask people to play with the ideas, explore them, use them; ask them to seek some experience using the concepts so they will develop an appreciation of their value for themselves.

This helps even with very complex and controversial topics. It's not magic, but it might help ease the start of your next initiative.

Change Won't Stick Without Changing What Managers Do

We add some new shelving to help get organized. We move several workstations together to improve flow. We create a place for everything, with everything in its place. We change a procedure; write a new policy. We change something, anything, about the nature of the work, and we'd like the change to stick. But it doesn't.

So we set up training courses, write thick manuals, post signs to remind people, create an intranet, and send out memos. We plead for discipline, for attention to detail, for people to do what they're supposed to do, but within a very short time, the new shelving is disorganized, flow has stopped, everything is not in its place, and the signs, procedures and memos go unread, and unused.

When we set out to make an improvement, we usually think of a specific change, of an event, of something to cross off our list. "Organize the storage area ... check. Change the warranty claim procedure ... check." We like to accomplish things and it's comforting to believe that we've improved things, we're done, things will be better now. But that's not the way it works.

Everything we create is impermanent. Nothing stays the way we'd like it. Everything changes, deteriorates, requires maintenance. We hate to acknowledge this, because it's uncomfortable, but it's a truth that permeates both philosophical writings like Pema Chodron's Comfortable with Uncertainty and practical business guides like David Mann's Creating a Lean Culture.

For every change we want to make, we need to look beyond the change itself, and look to how we will sustain it; how we will make it a part of "how we do things around here". In the workplace, each technical or structural change also requires complementary changes in what management does, not just in what the workers do. This piece is almost always ignored when we change the design of our work - the leader thinks "This is a change for the workers, not for me," and soon everything reverts back to the way it was before.

Most leaders do not understand or embrace the concept of Standard Work, of having some specific clearly-defined tasks that leaders need to do each day, or even each hour. "That's for front line staff, not me." Yet what the leaders do - what the leaders care about, ask about, talk about - directly affects what everyone else does. What the leader shows to be important, is what actually is important.

So, when we organize a shelf, it's not enough to stop there. We might go farther and ask questions like - Who will keep the shelf organized? How can we tell at a glance that the shelf is properly organized? How do we know what is supposed to be on the shelf, and what is not supposed to be on the shelf? How do we know what to do when something is missing? How often should the shelf be checked? What do we do when we get new stuff for the shelf?

So, we answer these valid questions, and use them to set up some standard work for Paul, the new Shelf Organizing Guy. But Paul gets busy, Paul gets pulled onto other important tasks, and no one asks Paul about the shelf until three weeks later when something that's supposed to be there is not. Then we have a crisis, with finger pointing, blame, and misguided accountability - "Paul was responsible for this - why didn't he do his job?"

Instead of this dysfunctional and ineffective change strategy, management needs to become part of the daily accountability process. Paul's team leader Steve needs to change some of his own standard work to support the change and help it stick. Steve's standard work might include a daily check of Paul's standard work list, a periodic spot check of the shelf itself, and immediate support to resolve problems that have prevented Paul from doing his standard work. And the facility manager's standard work might include a daily check of Steve's standard work, and immediate support to resolve problems that have prevented Steve from helping Paul. Eventually, maintaining the new shelf becomes a part of "how we do things around here", but that change is not an event, it's a process.

If any of this sounds like effort, it is. Remember that everything is impermanent, everything requires maintenance, and maintenance requires effort. But the minimal daily effort of standard work is nothing compared to the chaos and frustration of the alternative. The next time you plan an improvement, don't just plan a change event. Plan how management's daily standard work will change to support the improvement. That's how to make it stick.

Digging Up the Garden - Lean, Reliability and Machine Availability

Living on a prairie acreage, there's a lot of dirt to be dug. Whether it's cultivating the space between the shelterbelt rows, preparing the garden for planting, or digging weeds out of the too-big flowerbeds, there's always some kind of digging to do. Since a big goal of acreage living is relaxing and enjoying nature, you end up with a bunch of different tools in an attempt to get everything done with as little effort as possible. And since work on the acreage usually has to squeeze between the demands of life and your real job, the digging usually has to happen now, or you won't get a chance for another week or two. Otherwise, things (ie. weeds) get out of control.

Preparing the large garden this year, I planned to use our old 35hp Massey Ferguson tractor with its sixty-inch three-point-hitch cultivator. Unfortunately, I noticed a crack in the tractor frame that definitely needed some welding before taking it out in the field.

Since I only had one day between work commitments to get the garden done, I decided to use the 16hp John Deere riding tractor with the 36" rototiller instead. That worked pretty well for a good three-quarters of the garden, but then the drive belt broke and I didn't have a replacement. Since the parts store was on the other side of the city  (a full hour round trip), I switched to Plan C; I wanted to get the job done.

Plan C was the 8hp rear-tine TroyBilt tiller, 24" wide and usually reliable, although I'd remember having trouble with it the previous year. In checking it over, I found there was no lubricant in the worm gear and remembered the leak that I didn't fix last fall. Rather than take the time to fix it and go buy the right oil, I turned to the small 40-year old Craftsman 7hp front tiller, 22" wide that had been sitting in the shop for years. To my surprise, it started fine but the mechanism to engage the digging tines was bent and needed repair.

Since there was only a couple hundred square feet of garden left to do, I turned to plan E, an 8" wide potato fork and a rake. Working hard for about an hour, I dug up the remainder of the garden by hand and raked it to break up the chunks. The garden was ready, but hardly a smooth, lean, waste-free process.

As we strive to improve our processes, and get more done with less work and less waste between steps, we end up relying on things to happen properly the first time. We rely on consistency. When things go wrong, it can bring everything to a standstill. Two simple lessons here from digging in the dirt:

First, your equipment, tools and technology must be well-maintained, reliable, and available to do the job when needed. As your processes become Lean and the inventory and backlog buffers that previously hid downtime are eliminated, equipment failures can have immediate, rippling, far-reaching effects on production. Effort spent on reliability and root cause analysis of downtime is effort well spent.

Secondly, simple tools are pretty darned reliable. Instead of complex ERP systems, computer networks and electronic devices, consider hand-written visual status indicators on a white board in the work area. Which is more likely to break down, be unservicable, and be hard to improve?

Advanced technology, automated equipment and other complex tools can be great, but they dramatically increase your vulnerability to unplanned downtime, and to being stuck with a system that is hard to fix, hard to change. If you are unable to work on the system yourself, the risk of failure, and the effects of a failure, are both increased.

Keep it Simple. Keep it Maintained. Keep it Available.

You Can't See Your Doctor

A lovely lady, approaching eighty years old wanted to see her doctor to talk about some immediate health troubles that were concerning her. But she hated calling, and hated going in to the clinic, so she kept postponing it.

"Whenever I phone them, it's so frustrating. It says push this button, then push that one, then I talk to someone but they won't let me see him for for three weeks. It hurts today! If I go to the clinic and wait, I don't know who I'll get and I have to tell them the whole story. At the desk, they won't even tell me if my doctor is working that day! Sometimes I wait and he ends up being the one that I get. It's OK to see another doctor, but I really just want to see my doctor. Why can't they even tell me whether he's working or not?"

If you're sick today, you want to see your doctor today. We get so concerned about "optimizing our time" and "filling the schedule" that we end up giving really bad service to our patients. We need some slack in our day, so we can handle the unpredictable demand. And it turns out that the unpredictable demand is actually quite predictable.

If you're struggling to provide quick service to your patients, clients or customers, check out the work of Dr. Mark Murray with Advanced Access in health care, and of John Seddon's approach to Lean Service with the Vanguard Method. Turns out, you can see your doctor.

Mean and Scrawny

The manager of a small office proudly spoke about how Lean their organization was. He described how few staff they now had, and how much more work they were doing than before. Conversations with staff quickly revealed that they were all extremely stressed, turnover was high, clients were falling through the cracks, important tasks weren't getting done, and serious mistakes were common. This office wasn't Lean, it was just mean and scrawny. What he called Lean was really just dramatic under-staffing.