When a person is undergoing significant change, five things are necessary to adapt successfully to the change:
A clear vision of how the situation will be after the change
Time to absorb the new vision
Time to adjust behaviors
Coping mechanisms to manage the stress of change
Time to ponder the meaning of the change, and to internalize and own the change
People are more likely to do things that move them toward a goal if they clearly imagine what their world will be like after the change is successfully accomplished. This mental adjustment needs to be imagined in positive terms, not in the dread scenarios we often create in our minds. Helping employees shift their mental context from today’s problems to tomorrow’s successes is the role of a Lean Champion.
Successful change is hinged on a picture of a desirable future. Vision can provide both a corporate sense of being and a sense of enduring purpose. While incorporating a measure of today's success, vision transcends day-to-day issues. And, by providing meaning in both the present and the future, vision can empower and encourage leaders and followers to implement change.
An unclear change vision can derail the transformation of a company. Without a sensible vision, change efforts can dissolve into a list of confusing projects that take the organization in the wrong direction. Efforts without a clear vision are bound to fail, even if plans, directives, procedures, programs, goals, and deadlines are properly laid out. The many details of transformation can confuse or alienate employees unless they have a clear understanding of where they are being led. It is important that the vision be easy to communicate.
A change vision should be compelling enough to motivate fundamental rethinking at all levels of the company. However, it should not be impossible to realize. If the change vision is difficult to attain then it will have no credibility, and change will never take place.
According to John P. Kotter, the success of a company's transformation process depends on how easily and quickly the leader communicates the change vision to his employees and on how readily the employees understand and take an interest in the vision.
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.
"Progress cannot be generated when we are satisfied with existing situations.." — Taiichi Ohno
You can’t move forward if you don’t grow and you can’t grow if you never leave your comfort zone. When possible, give your employees challenging assignments. Help them prepare by providing them a safe environment to learn from the mistakes that they are bound to make. Making a change requires a leap of faith. Taking that leap of faith is risky, and people will only take active steps toward the unknown if they genuinely believe – and perhaps more importantly, feel – that the risks of standing still are greater than those of moving forward in a new direction. Making a change takes lots of leaps of faith.
Leaders who protect the status quo through control must surrender to change in order to secure the future for their organization. Don’t be the leader who rewards herd mentality, and me too thinking. Don’t be the leader who encourages people not to fail or not to take risks. Be the leader who both models and gives permission to do the exact opposite of the aforementioned – be a leader who leads.
Moving beyond our comfort zones is how we can best learn and grow. The challenge is to resist our normal human instinct to seek comfort rather that discomfort. The key is to continually push beyond the comfort zone and drive continuous improvement to develop and strengthen your Lean thinking.
I have been sharing thoughts for a while, now it is your turn. I wan to hear your feedback on some questions that I have been pondering. Many Lean transformations stories start with a burning platform. The term is used to describe an extremely urgent or compelling business situation in order to convey, in the strongest terms, the need for change. The crisis may already exist and just needs to be highlighted. Using this process, you can get people's attention and build awareness of the need for change very quickly. We have all heard of them. Typically is has to do with a company going out of business (poor financial results) if they don't improve. So my question is this: Does a Lean Transformation need a "burning platform" to be successful? And, what happens when the company improves and the burning platform is out, how do you keep the pressure on. I'd like to hear your feedback and experience with burning platforms.
Last week I was able to join GBMP’s 12th Annual Northeast Lean Conference in Worcester, MA. The theme was on the tacit nature of implementing Lean, the importance of tying together the technical and social sides of Lean, the significance of management’s involvement and the ability of organizations to sustain the gains. I thought I would share a few highlights from this year's conference. The first presenter was Art Byrne who was instrumental in the Lean transformation at the company where I work. Art has transformed many businesses over his career and shared his formula which he described in he book Lean Turnaround. He found Lean was a strategy to run a business focusing on eliminating waste to deliver more customer value. A key element in his approach was Kaizen which is still done today at Wiremold (25 years later). Kaizen is powerful because it is key training vehicle to teach new thinking and gets everyone on board. Art explained the importance of moving from batch to flow production (where you work to takt time, 1 piece at a time, using standard work, via the pull of customer demand). I really liked his comment to all these black belts today: "
We are running a company not a karate class."
Another great speaker was Eric Dickson, CEO of UMass Healthcare, who shared a power message on strategy and Lean transformation. He claims many organizations spend very little time on the things that will really transform their business (ie. Strategy). Their are 5 points of emphasis in his approach:
1) Establish a pre-defined goal and then run experiments (kaizen)
2) Let the people doing work do experiments
3) Standard work leads to improvement
4) Transparency creates the necessary tension for improvement (share metrics and plans)
4) Framework for Performance excellence (how the management system is executed)
With the back drop of saving lives (healthcare) he shared a compelling vision for all.
LEI's John Shook shared the Lean Transformation Framework they use when working with companies, divisions, and individuals. Practice does not make perfect it makes permanent. Perfect practice can make perfect permanent. Deliberate practice explains a substantial amount of performance variance. We need to design the entire work experience that individuals experience. The framework consists:
1.Purpose – align around the problem to solve
2.Designing, doing and improving the work
3.Develop capability, develop people
4.Management system – leader behavior
5.Basic Thinking Here is a video describing LEI's Lean Transformation Framework.
Mike Orzen gave a thoughtful talk on creating a path to Lean. He claims 90% of transformations fail primarily because: •Leadership delegates change •Middle management is not onboard •Lack of shared vision •Unrealistic expectations/little patience/time is not allocated •Key systems that drive the right behavior are not in place Mike took a look at the top 3 Lean models: 1) Shingo 2) Toyota Way 4P 3) LEI transformation model to see how they compare. All have in common: •Foundation of culture, long term vision and value mindset •Focus on continous process improvements •Respect for people and development of capabilities •Continuous learning through structured problem solving, reflection, and kaizen This suggests a pathway to Lean that all can use to transform their company. There were many more great breakout sessions and lots of opportunity to network and connect with many great Lean thinkers and implementers alike. This is one of my favorite conferences. Next year's conference will be held September 19-20, 2017 in Worcester, MA. The theme is on the integration of tools and culture. Mark your calendar so you don't miss out on a great opportunity.
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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.
"I think of innovation along a continuum of 1) basic problem solving to keep the train on the tracks, 2) continuous improvement to make the tracks work better and better and 3) innovation to question whether tracks are needed at all." — John Shook
"Innovation is a popular – and important – concept," writes LEI Chairman and CEO John Shook. What is it?
An innovation is anything that is novel and valuable. Novel means new. Especially a new idea or method or something that has a “process” piece to it. Valuable – the link here with lean thinking is clear – means that someone, anyone perceives the new thing/method/process as having value. value from the perceiver’s perspective.
Lean thinking itself was an innovation (new and valuable) and an improvement over what preceded it (and what still exists in so many places) that contains within itself the means of further innovation and improvement. Consider the role of innovation in the work we do. We think of the iPhone as a tremendous innovation, like the internet, the automobile and now autonomous driving. But, the actualization of each of these, the underappreciated enabler that propelled them to change our lives was, first of all, the many technical innovations that preceded them (no iPhone without iPod, without Macintosh, without Apple II…). The innovation in the work to be done entailed in bringing these innovations to life is also important. Here’s an animation that tries to tell that story.
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.
"Practice the philosophy of continuous improvement. Get a little bit better every single day." — Brian Tracy
Continuous improvement is about small changes on a daily basis to make your job easier. Small step-by-step improvements are more effective over time than occasional kaizen bursts, and have a significantly greater impact on the organization culture - creating an environment of involvement and improvement. Making one small change is both rewarding to the person making the change and if communicated to others can lead to a widespread adoption of the improvement and the possibility that someone will improve on what has already been improved. There's no telling what might occur if this were the everyday habit of all team members. In a Lean enterprise a strategy of making small, incremental improvements every day, rather than trying to find a monumental improvement once or twice a year equates to a colossal competitive advantage over time and competitors cannot copy these compounded small improvements. Paul Akers at Fastcap knows this better than anyone. In a recent video he shows the power of the 2 second improvement.
How do you embrace small daily improvements at your company?
As a child our parents teach us to be nice to people. Treat people with respect. "Respect for People" is one of two key element in Lean thinking we have learned from Toyota. I have learned from my own personal Lean journey that many organizations fall short in this area. It generally is not from a lack of trying but from fully understanding respect for people. It is more than being nice.
Respect for people can be defined by the following 6 elements:
Don't Trouble Your Customer - Your customer is anyone who consumes your work or decisions - Relentlessly analyze and change to stop troubling customers - Don't force people to do wasteful work - Don't give them defects - Don't make them wait - Don't impose wishful thinking on them - Don't overload them
Develop People and Then Build Products - Managers act as teachers, no directors - Mentor people closely, for years, in engineering and problem solving - Teach people to analyze root causes and make problems visible; then they discover how to improve
Managers "Walk the Talk" - Managers understand and act on the goal of "eliminating waste" and continuous improvement in there own actions and decisions - and employees see this
Teams and Individuals Evolve Their Own Practices and Improvements - Management challenges people to change and may ask what to improve - Empower the worker - Workers learn problem solving and reflection skills - Workers decide how to improve
Develop Teams - Team work, not group work is part of culture - Everybody is part of a team
Build Partners - Form long relationships based on trust - Help partners improve and stay profitable
From this definition or understanding of respect for people you can see it is much more encompassing. There are a number of ways to show respect for people in your organization. A good place to start is with learning. Knowledge and the proper application makes continuous improvement possible. Just be sure to practice respect for people in all your continuous improvement efforts.
