Five Lean Lesson from a Hockey Coach on Saturday Morning

Many of you know this time a year I spend a lot of time at an ice rink coaching hockey. It is a sport I have played all my life and coaching provides an opportunity for my kids and others to have the same experience (hopefully). As a coach you can’t help but feel a sense of instilling good behaviors in your players. While you might be teaching specific skills and helping them understand the strategies of the game I think the opportunities to teach life lessons are the most important.

In my experience I liken this to the way a Lean Sensei (champion, mentor, teacher) coaches continuous improvement thinking. They don’t focus on the tools necessarily but rather the approach or method of problem solving. It is this that provides a valuable foundation of Lean thinking from which you can address any situation.

On a long drive back from a game as the season is winding down I got to thinking about the lessons I hope my players take with them through life. Many of these lessons are the same that I and others try to instill in the organizations we work with. So in no particular order here are five lessons that apply to sports and Lean:

1. Never give up. Sports have lots of highs and lows throughout the game. Perseverance is necessary to turn a bad situation into a good situation. When your team is behind never give up or you will be defeated. Lots of teams come from behind to win.
Lean also needs perseverance to get you through the difficult bumps in the road along the way to improvement.

2. Practice. Practice. Practice. All sports teams practice in order to improve. The key to their practices is to focus on basic skills for game situations. This high speed sport is much about reading and reacting so you must practice with intensity if you want to play with intensity.
In your organization you may not necessarily call it practice but you certainly experiment. This experimentation is what prepares us to solve more and more complex problems.

3. The power of teamwork. Hockey is not an individual sport it requires every member of the team to play their part to win. It also requires everyone to be at their best. Open communication and chemistry are an essential part of teamwork.
We all have roles in our organizations but it is the power of teamwork that makes our endeavors successful. It takes everyone working together on a common goal to be successful in Lean.

4. The value of hard work and sacrifice. Undoubtedly it takes a lot of hard work and sacrifice along the way to get to the elite levels of the game. But this makes winning so much sweeter in the end.
Lean takes lots of hard work as well but it makes wins you get much more pleasurable. It is this hard work that creates customer value and makes your organization competitive in the market place.

5. Winning requires a positive attitude. There are a lot of things out of our control and adversity is part of the challenge but how we react is up to us. The right attitude can keep you moving forward. Never dwell on what you did wrong but what you need to do better for the next game.
Lean requires a willingness to try something new to improve our workplace. Fix what bugs us. Make work easier.

I am reminded of a great quote from Mark Messier at the 2007 Hockey Hall of Fame Induction Ceremony:

"For all of us that have children in minor hockey, it's not about becoming a professional athlete, it's about the journey and about what you learn along the way and the life lessons that you get from playing an incredible game."

Even if you’re not a hockey fan like me, I hope you’re able to take some of these life lessons from ice hockey and apply them to your experiences. I think these are lessons we can all use especially in a continuous improvement environment. What do you think?

Lean Quote: Leadership is All About People

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Leadership is all about people. It is not about organizations. It is not about plans. It is not about strategies. It is all about people--motivating people to get the job done. You have to be people-centered." — Colin Powell

When you hear the word “leadership” what comes to mind? There are numerous definitions of leadership. For me leadership is ultimately about creating a way for people to contribute to making something extraordinary happen. Effective leadership comes down to people. It is about the ability to successfully engage and maximize all human resources for the attainment that vision.

In keeping with this idea that leadership is about people, there are 6 qualities of leadership starting with the letter P:

Principles - You have to have a moral compass as a leader. It starts with basic beliefs and values. It's important to make clear to the people in the organization what those are, so you're transparent. They have to be consistent with the values of the organization, or there will be a problem.

Perspective - That's an ability to dream, visioning that leads to strategies. It starts with a broader view of the world you live in. It's about value to the consumer.

Passion – It is not style. There are a lot of different styles -- charismatic, quiet, confident. But it all comes down to this motivating sense of commitment to what you do. Vince Lombardi said “the difference between success and failure is energy … fired with enthusiasm.”

Perseverance - That's sticking with it through the good times and the bad times -- mostly the bad. It means picking yourself up every day to go after it.

Plan – It's great that you have a dream and a vision but how are you getting there? If people see that you have a passionate purpose but get the feeling that there's now way you'll get there, how likely are they to buy into it? Not very to say the least. Build a plan and use it.

Partnerships - Seek co-operative working relationships both internally between functions and externally with suppliers and customers. Seek to use teams, not individuals. Seek to build trust. Create win-win solutions.

While there are people who seem to be naturally endowed with more leadership abilities than others, I believe that people can learn to become leaders by concentrating on improving these particular leadership skills.

Building Your Change Muscle

Change is hard; even if you want to change. If you don’t think so try changing the way you fold your arms. Many times, the actual change is not the real problem; instead, we feel frustrated when we can’t find meaning in our new situation. Impatience and a longing for certainty also get in the way of the natural process of change. Some people are better at it than others because they’ve learned some simple strategies for changing, but also because they’ve built up their change muscle.

What’s a change muscle? It’s the muscle we use for creating changes in our lives, and like our physical muscles, it is weak if you haven’t trained it. Our change muscle is there to help us adapt; we all have this ability.

Like any muscle, the change muscle is strengthened through consistent use. Every time you are faced with a change and move through it, you are activating this part of yourself. The principles for growing your change muscle are similar to growing regular muscles. Here are 5 ways to improve your ability to deal with change using the exercising of muscle analogy:

Start small. If you try to lift too much weight at first, you’ll have bad form and could injure yourself and therefore won’t last long. But if you start small (or lighter weights), you can learn how to lift and you’ll be more likely to stick with it. The change muscle is the same: start with one small change at first. You may want to do more, but if you do more, you’re much more likely to fail in the long run.

Train regularly. Some people will go to the gym for a week, then stop, then start again in a few months. This is a waste of time, and no progress will be seen. You have to do it regularly to see progress. Same with the change muscle: do it daily, make it routine. You’ll get stronger and stronger with regular training. Don’t start big, then fail after 1-2 weeks, then start again later. Regular repetition is the key.

Increase load gradually. If you don’t increase the weights, you don’t get stronger. But if you increase too much, you could get injured. With your change muscle, increase your daily training each week building on what you have learned from the previous days and weeks. You’ll be amazed at how strong your change muscle gets with gradual progressive loading.

Rest. Most people don’t understand the importance of rest when it comes to training. We train, then rest, and we grow. If we don’t rest, we hurt our progress. Growing the change muscle is the same. Resting is like reflection, where you learn as you do. Don’t overload yourself this hurts learning and progress. Make one change, and let yourself stick to your regular routine. This forms a new habit.

Fuel the growth. Aside from rest, fuel is one of the most overlooked aspects of muscle growth. You need sufficient calories for growth, otherwise all the training in the world won’t get you anywhere. So what fuels the growth of the change muscle? Motivation. Find as many ways to motivate yourself as possible: make the change enjoyable, don’t go it alone, create rewards, celebrate small victories, create a chart to see your progress, etc. Motivation is the fuel for growing your change muscle.

Like real muscle your change muscle has memory. You’ll need to learn how to learn from your experience in a way that allows you to tackle the next challenge. Muscle memory makes the process familiar and systematic but you must develop that muscle properly for it to be ready for the challenge.

Facebook’s New Timeline and Dealing With Change

Facebook will soon start requiring people to switch to a new profile format known as Timeline. Timeline is essentially a scrapbook of your whole life on Facebook. It's the most radical change in the history of the site. This news has been greeted with intense emotion in the blogosphere.

Changing the place we call home resonates deeply. Timeline makes us uneasy because we will now be doing openly what we have always done unconsciously. Living in the moment, we do not have the perspective that Timeline offers.

I for one am not too excited about this change. Even as a change agent I am not prepared for the inevitable. This has forced me to think about how we deal with change.

Change is one of the most difficult things for humans to readily accept. Anyone who has worked in or led an organization's transformation understands change is not easy. We are so ingrained in the way that we do things that to do it a new way, or to stop doing something causes us to feel uncomfortable. We equate uncomfortable with wrong, instead of different, and there's a tendency to go back to what was comfortable.

People tend to resist change naturally. There are four common reasons people resist change:

It's unknown –One of life's greatest fears is the unknown. It causes us to resist those things for which we cannot easily discern an outcome.

It's challenging – Change stretches us out of our comfort zone. Some of us like to be stretched more than other people do.

It's uncertain – When we change, we are often introducing untested waters. We prefer certainty.

It's unpopular – The resistance to change is universal. Change invites animosity and tension.

However, our fears of change can be managed with the following suggestions:

Suggestion 1: Keep people informed. Communicate as much as you know about what is happening as a result of the change. One of the major reasons people resist change is fear of the unknown. If you communicate and keep them informed, you put this fear to rest.

Suggestion 2: Answer the "What's in it for Me?" question. This suggestion is similar to Suggestion 1. Generally people will accept change when they see a personal benefit. . Assist people in identifying what the change will do for them.

Suggestion 3: Empower people to become part of the change. There are several reasons people resist change, one of which is fear. Help people identify how the change will influence them, benefit them, and improve their present situations.

Suggestion 4: Help people assimilate to the change. Once people begin to experience change, help them assimilate to it by reinforcing the personal benefits they're gaining.

All new things stir emotion, as the most adventurous of us hold tightly to our moorings. While we wait to see how significant the impact of Timeline really is, we are wondering what to hope for. In a time of anxiety, it can be comforting to survey the impact of small changes. One thing, for sure, that is contributing to our unease about Timeline: it would have been nice to be asked.

Why Must We Sell Quality

In ASQ President, Paul Borawski’s blog post this month he asks how do you sell quality. My first thought is why must we sell quality. If you define quality as satisfying your customer and taking pride in what you do can we not expect this as a given. What does this say about the culture of an organization where this is not expected nor encouraged?

For me there are two uncompromising principles we must engrain into everything we do:
1) Safety first – Nothing is so important that we can’t take the time to do it safely.
2) Build in Quality – Quality cannot be inspected into a product therefore we must build quality activities into our processes.

Selling implies we must persuade the value of quality. The benefits of which are well known:

• Poor quality increases defects found by customers therefore increasing labor costs on identifying and correcting these defects. Defects are expensive to fix, and the later in the process they are detected, the more costly they are to fix.
• Poor quality increases your baseline costs. If an organization releases poor quality, it will likely need a large number of support representatives to help with customer issues. These dedicated expenses cut into time and money spent on new development.
• Releasing poor quality causes delays with customers and lost revenue. Once doubt creeps into the minds of customers, they may delay purchasing new releases, allowing others to gain the business.
• Poor quality diminishes your reputation and market share. Your brand and its reputation is your most valuable asset. In today’s highly connected environment, it is easy for a few dissatisfied customers to spread negative reviews.

After safety, quality must be the organization’s highest priority. In lean manufacturing one of the principles we teach is to build in quality. Many think it is only about eliminating waste but that is too minimalistic. Quality issues result in all sorts of waste. Waste in logging defects. And waste in fixing them. As a result, lean principles specifically seek to address this point.

Philip Crosby coined the phrase "quality is free", meaning that the absence or lack of quality is costly to an organization, e.g., in money spent on doing things wrong, over, or inefficiently. Conversely, spending money to improve quality, e.g., to reduce waste or improve efficiency, saves money in the long run.

I am not naïve enough to think this a given. Leaders must make a long-term commitment to quality improvement. It is the managers' policies and actions that indicate their commitment to quality. Individual leaders must set an example by providing consistent, focused leadership in this area.

Quality is obviously extremely important, or you inevitably create all sorts of waste further down the line. We must build quality in. Build it in as early as possible in the process to avoid quality issues materializing. And build it in throughout the entire development process, not just at the end.

In my opinion successful businesses are those that not only sell quality to their employees but make it part of the culture or what they do daily. The organization must make quality a top priority for everyone in the company, from top managers to the workers building product. The final product and goal of the organization is creating value for consumers.



I’m part of the ASQ Influential Voices program. While I receive an honorarium from ASQ for my commitment, the thoughts and opinions expressed on my blog are my own.

Lean Quote: Making Better Decisions

On Fridays I will post a Lean related Quote. Throughout our lifetimes many people touch our lives and leave us with words of wisdom. These can both be a source of new learning and also a point to pause and reflect upon lessons we have learned. Within Lean active learning is an important aspect on this journey because without learning we can not improve.

"Making good decisions is a crucial skill at every level." — Peter Drucker

Decision making is an essential part of business in all organizations. In traditional companies this power is typically held by few managers at the top of the organizational ladder. Lean companies however strive to empower their employees to make decisions at all levels through access to data, knowledge of evaluation methods, and defined standard processes. Nevertheless, decisions are necessary in all organizations and the following these guidelines can be beneficial.

1. Timing. Neither making snap decisions nor always having to “sleep on it” is the best approach to the time factor involved in making decisions. Make your decisions based upon the circumstance and the time available. Within the realm of practicality, give yourself enough time to take the following decision-making steps.

2. Define the problem. Be careful not to confuse symptoms of the problem with the real problem.

3. Identify the options. Try to get at least four alternatives. Since you may be too close to the situation, seek others’ input.

4. Gather the facts. In order to evaluate your options, you must gather the facts about the ramifications of choosing each option. List both the pros and cons of each option.

5. Evaluate the options. Usually this will include a comparison of costs, time required to implement and the expected end result of each option.

6. Choose and put into effect. Key, and often neglected, aspects of implementing decisions are to communicate the decision to the affected parties, outline why the decision was made, why the particular option was picked, what actions are required on their part and what beneficial results are expected.

Not every decision will be right but if you follow these six guidelines you will find you have many more right decisions than wrong decisions. Remember, the only thing worse than a wrong decision is no decision.

Debunking Six Common Misconceptions of Standardized Work

Last week I featured a guest post on standard work as a mechanism for facilitating and empowering improvement. By documenting the current best practice, standardized work forms the baseline for kaizen or continuous improvement. As the standard is improved, the new standard becomes the baseline for further improvements, and so on. Improving standardized work is a never-ending process. Standardized work is one of the most powerful but least used lean tools.

Unfortunately, there are many myths regarding standardized work that if followed create a flawed system. To prevent you from failing into this trap I will attempt to debunk several of these myths.

A common misconception is that ‘standardized’ is assumed to be permanent. This is not the case. It’s just the best way we know how to do the work today. Continuous improvement is always encouraged, once the current best method is understood and practiced in order to establish a stable foundation for further improvement.

Some think employees develop their own standardized work. The initial work standard should be developed by engineers (process owners) working with operators who are part of a team. Group leaders and team leaders then have responsibility for training employees on the standard work and soliciting their input. Once the process is operating at some level of stability, employees are challenged to develop better methods, but the methods are always reviewed by others, including management.

Another common myth about standardized work is that many think of a rigid work environment where workers aren’t required to think. This is totally the opposite as I said above. Operators are part of the creation of the work standard and then are challenged to improve these methods. The standard creates a baseline by which improvement can be measured. Ideas should be discussed with group leaders and considered depending upon the consensus and buy-in from other members and shifts. Once consensus is reached then experimentation can be done to determine the effectiveness of the improvement. If it is deemed an effective change then the standardized work can modified and everyone trained in the new method.

It is also believed that with standard work you will know everything about the job and therefore be able to train anyone to do the job. Standardized work is the process used by operators to define their work method through documentation and visual postings. This is often misinterpreted as a fully detailed description of the work and associated standards. Anyone who has read the standard work sheets would see that the work description explains the work elements in basic terms - not nearly enough information to read and fully understand the job. Job Instruction Training (JIT) is the method commonly used in Lean to transfer complete knowledge of a job to a team member. In my experience anyone who believes that a job is simple enough to distill down to a few sheets of paper underestimates the competency level necessary of their employees.

Another myth is that with standard work and visual postings employees will not deviate from the standard. This couldn’t be further from the truth. There is nothing in standardized work that will prevent deviation by the operator except the visual awareness of others. The visual reference is utilized by management for monitoring adherence to the standard which is done through periodic and regular audits of the standardized work. To ensure compliance to the standard, it’s necessary to poka-yoke or mistake proof the process to prevent deviation and make excursions highly visible.

Lastly, there are those that believe standard work is only for the shop floor. Standard work has been proven effective in many industries from the military to healthcare and everything in between. In particular, I think this is a technique that management teams must adopt. How we run the business should not be any different than how we do business. In my experience, those organizations that use standard work at the management level are more productive and effective.

Standardizing the work adds discipline to the culture, an element that is frequently neglected but essential for Lean to take root. Standardized work is also a learning tool that supports audits, promotes problem solving, and involves team members in developing poka-yokes. While standard work can be an effective foundation for continuous improvement it is important to recognize that it is not a one-stop shop for all that ails you.