Lean is not all about waste, despite what we see in most definitions and applications. If it were about one thing (which oversimplifies things) it would be about problem solving, at all levels of the organization.

We take problem solving for granted. Why? Because we’ve been doing it since we were very young. We learned it in school. And because when we teach lean we mostly focus on the technique of solving problems, it sounds pretty simple and so we dismiss that we have much to learn.

One of the most frustrating problems I hear managers at all levels of organizations talk about is not having enough time. It is one of the reasons I spend so much coaching time on prioritization and personal productivity. But we always have time for problem solving. I haven’t met a manager yet who somehow skips problem solving because they are too busy with other things. We might skip doing it well, or doing it differently, or doing it collaboratively, but one way or another, problem solving always makes the cut.

Therefore, I would contend that it is one of the best levers for change that we have, because we are doing it anyway. Just think, with all the problems we’re already trying to solve, if we became 5% more effective at solving the problems we are already working on…or 50%, or 200%…just how powerful that would be!

Here is the first level that we make the mistake. Imagine you have 5 direct reports, and each one of those directs has 5 problems. We think we have 25 problems. If our directs have 25 pieces of equipment down, we think our problem is that we have 25 piece of equipment down. If our directs have 25 unhappy customers, we think we have 25 unhappy customers. If our directs have 25 projects behind schedule, we think we have 25 projects behind schedule.

This is a fallacy. Our directs’ problems are not our problems. Our problems are different.

The manager’s problems are why those problems exist. The manager’s problems are why we can’t solve those problems faster.

I’ve met too many executives who think their job is to go and meet with the largest client who is unhappy, or to ask about the why the largest piece of equipment is down, or why a particular department exceeded their budget. There is nothing inherently wrong with these questions, depending on why you are engaging them. Of course sometimes those are the right problems for you to work on as well, but often they are not. You have different problems.

Your problem is why is the preventive maintenance program not working that allowed all those pieces of equipment to go down in the first place. Or why are your customers not seeing the value proposition. Or do we have a planning problem or an execution problem that allows so many projects to get behind schedule.

You have unique problems, and until you understand that fact, and work on the appropriate problems for your role, little progress can be made.

But this is not our comfort zone. Our comfort zone is our past experience, not the problems that lay before us. We take a super-worker and turn them into a supervisor, but their skills were already most effective in their last role.

The role of a manager is more than problem solver…it is problem solving architect. You must put into place and into practice all that is required to make those around you effective at solving problems; and not just solving problems, but solving the right problems. This isn’t a company issue or a CEO issue or a “lean guy” issue but is an issue anyone leading a group of people must face and tackle.

There are 3 components of doing this work. The reason that these 3 components are so important is that too often we try to improve problem solving one-dimensionally. We roll out new problem solving training, and find nothing changes. Those 3 components are:

• the problem solving culture and behaviors: how do we think about and treat the problems we have
• the problem solving methods and skills: yes, the technique still matters, but not as much as the skills in which we deploy those techniques
• the systems to manage problems: how do we manage problems, surface them, track them, prioritize them

Are you a problem solver? Or a problem solving architect?

Reflection question: what components are holding you and your team back from more effectively solving the problems you are already dealing with? 

Want to learn more about problem solving through A3 thinking? You can download my ebook on LeanPub or Kindle.

 

I want to thank Enterprise Minnesota and the Center for Business & Industry for hosting me during the Lean Enterprise Summit held today. The following are my slides from my talk on building a problem solving organization.

 

This is a quote from the book Lean Thinking by Jim Womack and Daniel Jones, and I think one of the most useful phrases brought out from this book. What does it mean?

So many companies spend considerable amount of time focusing on their competitors: what are they doing? What’s their next product? What’s their pricing? Which markets are they going after?

If you take this line of thought far enough, you are not looking for competitiveness. You are looking to find whatever niche is leftover after everyone else has made their moves for you to still make a bit of money. That’s no way to win.

Instead, focus on perfection. Focus on new ways to deliver value to customer, or new customers to deliver value to. When you do that, you end up creating new markets and forcing your competition to follow you.

We (the Lean Learning Center) get asked all the time to compare ourselves against our competition. It’s quite difficult, because that’s never been our focus. We don’t know what they’re doing. We haven’t hired people from them. In fact, everyone on our team has never done consulting before they were with us, they’ve only been applying lean as leaders inside companies. What does this gain us? We have many unique offerings that are unlike anything found in our field. Our Lean Learning Laboratory, our Lean Experience, some of our simulations, our Single Point Lessons – these are very unique offerings and products. I’m not arguing whether they are better or not – that’s a matter of opinion. But what’s fact is that they are unique.

Our focus has always been on helping clients solve their most difficult problems on a lean journey. That has lead to these unique solutions. And sometimes, because of this, when our solution fits someone’s needs exactly, we have no competition.

I believe Womack and Jones got this premise right. Focus, as a concept, is the point that you can only pay attention to so many things at once. All the time you spend looking at, analyzing, and copying your competitors is time and energy that you could have used to focus on pursuing perfection.

Reflection question: How do you or your company view your competition? How does it affect your decisions and actions?

 

My latest column for Industry Week, Lessons from the Road, titled Experiment Your Way to Success has been posted. Here is an excerpt:

The heart of most effective continuous improvement is experimentation. Experimentation is the mother of all learning methods. It drives learning throughout an organization based on what is real, not based on theory or opinion. Whether you use PDCA, DMAIC, 8D, A3s or any other method in the alphabet soup of continuous improvement, there is a backbone of experimentation whose spirit you can follow, or fail to.

You can read the entire post here.

Here are my previous Lessons from the Road columns:

Experiment Your Way to Success
How the mother of all learning methods can help your organization improve.
4/18/2012

Securing the Elusive Lean Buy-In
Take advantage of this four-step process to achieve buy-in for your lean efforts.
2/15/2012

Building Manager Standard Work
Standardization can help you free up time and use it more proactively.
11/16/2011

Going to the Gemba
Far from a stroll on the plant floor, a gemba represents a purposeful attempt to learn what is really going on.
9/14/2011

How to Train Without Training
When training dollars are scarce, there are still good ways to develop your workforce. Try these three strategies.
7/20/2011

Lessons From the Road: Sustaining Your 5S Efforts
5S too often is short-lived, but these six steps can help keep it running smoothly.
5/17/2011

Lessons From the Road: Surfacing Problems Daily
Advice for building a problem-solving culture.
3/16/2011

 

As I’m sure you know by now, I’m  co-founder of the Lean Learning Center. Since December of last year, our team started to share their ideas through blog posts in the Center’s website.

I’ve also contributed some articles and here are some of what we have:

• Don’t let accounting be your excuse – 04.05.12
• How to react when you find something out of place in 5S – 01.28.12
• Startups need process too! – 12.30.11

And here are some of the other posts from Andy Carlino, Susan Pleasant, and Jim Sonderman:

• Creativity–An Intended Consequence – 04.09.12 – Andy Carlino
• What are “supermarkets”? – 03.21.12 – Susan Pleasant
• Making the Transition from “Lean Is Extra Work” to “Lean Is How I Work” – 03.08.12 – Susan Pleasant
• Look for The Noise – 02.23.12 – Andy Carlino
• Where Do I Start? – 01.30.12 – Susan Pleasant
• Define a Clear Vision of the Ideal State – 01.30.12 – Jim Sonderman
• Promoting Employee Engagement–A Cautionary Tale – 12.22.11 – Andy Carlino

Subscribe on our website to stay tuned. I will of course continue to blog here

If you’re using A3 problem solving in any way, or plan to in the future, you might like to check out my latest eBook on the subject.

 

Process improvement is process improvement, right?

Many people who get immersed in process improvement practices have such a focus on improving the process, that we don’t know when to pull up on the reigns and consider whether it’s the right approach.

For example, I’ve noticed several situations lately at clients that I’m coaching of people working on process improvement when the process wasn’t the real problem. For example, I heard the following: “our old process really wasn’t that bad, we just weren’t following it.”

If that were the problem statement, process could be the answer if a bad process was the reason people weren’t following it. But that wasn’t the case. In some cases, people lacked awareness of the process. For others, they lacked the process being given a priority by the leadership of the organization. For still others, they lacked the skill to deliver the process. Yet despite all of these truer root causes, the team diligently set about trying to make the process better.

To be fair, any process can be made better. None of this could be considered wasted effort. But without other actions and improvements, it would never yield the improvements desired.

Before rushing ahead with a process mapping and improvement effort, consider some of the following questions. Some of these may seem basic, but yet I see people not thinking these basics through. If our process was much better than it is today, would it yield the performance gains we desire? How much better is today’s best process compared to ours? What else besides our process might be holding us back? How much better could we get just by executing our current process with more discipline?

Please understand that one of the last things I want to do is give people excuses for not doing process improvements. But since the objective of process improvement is to improve results, then we better be darn sure this is what we are going to accomplish.

Reflection question: How do you know when working on the process is what’s going to yield the desired results?

 

Where are your executive offices? And how do they affect the engagement of the organization?

In the early 1990s, Chrysler built the Chrysler Technology Center. The design was intended to help communication. Each floor was dedicated to a different platform: minivan, large car, small car. Vertically, their functional focus on design, such as body or engine, would be aligned. Therefore, if you were a small car engine person and had a question for the large car platform, you literally could just walk up a floor and start poking around. I worked there during this time and did exactly that. The executive offices were right in the middle, and there was easy access. I’m not saying it was open-door policy, but executives like Bob Lutz, Francois Castaing, and my co-founder at the Lean Learning Center, Denny Pawley, were easy to find and were very visible throughout the building.

Then as I left, they built “the tower”. It was a tall building attached at the end of one of the spurs of the building. All the executives moved into the top floor of the tower.

Fiat CEO and now Chrysler CEO Sergio Marchionne changed all that – he closed down the executive offices in the tower and moved himself and the rest of the team back to the center of action. This 60 Minutes segment includes that story and other aspects of Sergio’s leadership.

What happens when executives, or any leader for that matter, is too far removed from the action? It’s a two-way street of information sharing that gets closed down. The visibility of that leader is lost. And their access to what is truly going on in the organization is hindered. They only get what is brought to them. That often is highly-filtered.

At one my clients, the Vice President of Operations would visit one of his sites where the only conference room was on the second floor. He would show up, have one meeting after another with only 10 or 15 minutes in between. That was enough time to get another cup of coffee, but never enough to go out onto the floor. He then built a workstation at the intersection of all activity on that site’s shop floor. When he now went to visit, that’s where all the meetings took place. He was almost always on the floor, and he was able to (a) be much more visible and (b) understand much more clearly what is really going on.

CEO Pauk Akers did something similar in his organization, with a mobile office that allows him to go anywhere in the site to accomplish his work. Here’s a video of his efforts:

Reflection question: How has location helped you connect to the organization, or how has it become a barrier? What other barriers get in the way of that connection?

We talk about the application of lean thinking to your personal work in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean. Pick up a copy today:

 

Experimentation is at the core of lean improvement. It is what PDCA: Plan Do Check Act is all about. It’s what drives learning, and knowledge development.

But what happens when you’re experimenting outside the boundaries of known experience and knowledge. We build knowledge and experience from our own experiments, but that knowledge is less useful when you’re operating outside the boundaries of your own experiences, or outside the boundaries of any experience.

This is like asking someone why they think they would make a good President – there is no job that compares to this, or prepares you for this. Yes, going from hotel front desk clerk would be a slightly bigger jump than going from Governor to President. But either way, you are operating well outside the boundaries of your experience. This is likely what contributes to the rapid visible aging most Presidents seem to experience.

It is also a helpful perspective when looking at the most recent banking / financial crisis. Who could really know what would happen if they let the banks fail? Or let the autos go bankrupt? Theories abound, but there is little empirical evidence to tell how you to model what would actually happen.

Daniel Coyle, author of The Talent Code, helps us understand this experience though his explanation of the flight simulator. He explores the usefulness of the Link flight simulator. The flight simulation was first designed for pilots, ignored by pilots, turned into a carnival game, and then after high rates of fatal airplane crashes, reapplied toward pilot training. In this case, the impact of failure was severe: it was fatal. But people still struggled appreciating the role of creating safe failure through the flight simulator. Here’s why it was so important:

…spending hours inhabiting the sweet spot at the edge of his capabilities in ways he could never risk in an actual plane.

The point is, you can’t know what’s it’s like to experience the failure and consequently, how to react, without actually experiencing it. So when experimenting, ask yourself:

Is this within the boundaries of our known experiences, or outside?

If outside, what might some of the risks be?

How can we test safely?

Reflection question: How do you know you’re experimenting outside the boundaries of experience?

 

“Failures are not something to be avoided. You want to have them happen as quickly as you can so you can make progress quickly.” – Gordon Moore, co-founder of Intel and creator of Moore’s Law

If we learn more from failure than success, how do we do it in a controlled way and minimize the impact. I like to say that I hope you learn from your failures, but I hope you don’t have to make them all yourself. I certainly feel that way with my 3 children. I try to strike a balance between letting them learn their lesson, and making sure that the lessons they learn don’t harm them too much, either emotionally or physically. “Don’t run on the stairs” is a little different than “don’t stick a fork in that electrical outlet.”

The book The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle, which I recommend, speaks to the role that failure has in talent development well. Here’s a useful excerpt.

Deep practice is built on a paradox: struggling in certain targeted ways—operating at the edges of your ability, where you make mistakes—makes you smarter. Or to put it a slightly different way, experiences where you’re forced to slow down, make errors, and correct them—as you would if you were walking up an ice-covered hill, slipping and stumbling as you go—end up making you swift and graceful without your realizing it.

We believe this applies to the lean journey as well. I’ve never seen a lean journey of all forward steps. I’ve seen two-steps forward, and one-step back, and I’ve seen seven-steps forward and one-step back. But I’ve never seen all forward steps. Failures will occur. That’s why the Lean Learning Center developed a strategy called the Lean Learning Laboratory. In this process, we focus on a small team or process to take an accelerated journey. We call it a learning laboratory for a reason: it’s purpose is learning, and we learn through experimentation. It’s a place to fail, safely. I won’t get into the full structure of the Lean Learning Laboratory approach as that would likely take up a book. We’ve used this strategy many, many times over the past 17 years, as have learned a lot ourselves about how to make it work.

Coyle continues:

Q: Why is targeted, mistake-focused practice so effective? A: Because the best way to build a good circuit is to fire it, attend to mistakes, then fire it again, over and over. Struggle is not an option: it’s a biological requirement. 

But the key challenge is: do you make it safe to fail? That doesn’t mean unconditional failure. That doesn’t mean failure when it really, really, really matters. But this is how talent is developed. And if there is never room for failure, you will need to reach outside the organization for new talent, because your internal talent will be stagnant.

Reflection question: What strategies do you use to allow for safe failure when developing talent?

Develop your own talent through repeated practice of A3 problem solving, and get some input on how to do this deep practice well through my latest ebook, A3 Problem Solving: Applying Lean Thinking.

 

Should you design your process at the 30,000 foot level before the 5 foot level? What level should you focus on? If you only have 3 days to invest in process improvement, do you pick a major process and design at a high level or pick one element and dive into the details?

These are valid questions and should be considered. However, also consider that there is only so much impact you can have at 30,000 feet. Yet many people want to spend a lot of resources and time here. They want the high-level process design to be good.

Here is my conclusion: for many processes, when designing at a high level, the difference between the best and the worst isn’t that different.

When I watch a team going through a engineering change process, or a order receipt process, or a new customer setup process, I see only subtle differences at the high level.

Consider the example of an engineering change process. You decide on a change. You engineer the change. You communicate to purchasing, quality, manufacturing. You validate the information. You update the system. You validate the execution. You launch.

At a high-level, there are plenty of tweaks you could make. You could decide when to make a handoff, or who makes the handoff. But these are only a few design components. That process I explained could be very, very good or very, very poor depending on the details. It’s the details that make a process like this work. It’s the details of what the quality engineer does when they get it, and how they perform those activities. It’s the judgement of manufacturing on the impact of the design change on risks within the process. It’s the completeness and follow-up with the supplier on the communication handoff. This is where the process succeeds or fails, not the high-level design.

This is not an absolute. There is plenty of value in considering high-level design. This is especially when innovation is considered. One process is go to the book store, browse, hope they have what you want, stand in line, buy it, drive home, and start to read it. Another is sit on the couch on your Kindle, search for the book you want, buy it with one click, and start reading it instantly. That’s a major difference at a high level. However, the details still matter greatly when doing this work.

So don’t expect too much from trying to design your process at the 30,000 foot level. Most of the real improvement comes from rolling up your sleeves and getting into the details. Yeah, that’s harder, but that’s what separates great processes from troubling ones.

Reflection question: How do you know in your organization when to work at a high-level versus a detailed-level?

For a quick guide on how to effectively use A3 Problem Solving in your organization, check out my latest ebook A3 Problem Solving: Applying Lean Thinking. You get to set the price – how can you go wrong?