How can firing people be part of developing people?

Can you explain how you reconcile the principles of "developing people" and "firing people," especially in light of the challenges illustrated in your book The Lean Manager? Why, on the other hand, does Toyota try to keep its employees as long as it can?

Well, this is an excellent question, and a thorny topic, so let’s think deeply and discuss it step by step.

First of all, no company, not even Toyota, assumes that everyone will fit with its management style. Toyota does try to retain people as long as it can. But so do most companies. And contrary to popular belief, Toyota never actually promises employment for life. What it does that is unusual is make a commitment not to fire people as a key value, and to be especially careful about this regarding capacity problems. In other words, reducing headcount to compensate for volume drops is not an acceptable lean answer. Instead Toyota will address other root causes.

In terms of how individuals adapt to a company, let's go to the gemba and follow a new hire. Typically, any new employee follows a fairly predictable emotional pattern. First, the honeymoon: they're pleased to have been hired, and everyone is pleased to see a new face, so all is honky-dory. In act two there is a disenchantment period as the company's values and habits clash with the new person's values and habits. This we can observe particularly well when someone gets poached out of Toyota to work in a traditional system. This is often a difficult period both for the company, and the newbie. At some stage, some incident will come to a head, forcing the new person to bow to the company culture, adapting his or her attitudes and behavior to the company - or resign in anger (or be pushed out). After that, the emotional conflict will reach a state of equilibrium. The person's motivation will have climbed to a peak at first, then crashed to an all time low, and then the person will either exit or continue at the company and motivation will go back up and stabilize.

What happens in a lean transformation as described in The Lean Manager? In this story we see a new boss plow forward with lean habits and values. He insists that the organization adapt to his way of working and not the other way around. Not surprisingly, matters don't always go smoothly.

The First Hurdle
Be warned: lean will cause conflict. Let's visualize a company in an industry far from hotbeds of lean fanatics. Say they make concrete elements for construction projects, and have huge yards full of inventory of pre-cast elements, with a few large pieces of equipment to make them. A new general manager who has been doing lean for 20 years comes in to change how things work. What's going to happen?

First, the new boss is likely to introduce kaizen events and rudimentary visual management on the floor right away. That's because lean emphasizes that people try something first, and discuss it second. It's a way to force the pace of learning, and can be a rude shock to people who are used to discussion first, and then - maybe - trying it out. So the first confrontation is likely to be about (1) the capacity of people to do what they're asked although it's different than what they're used to and (2) the ability to learn from this new activity. Some people never pass this first hurdle.

In our concrete elements company, the initial experiments could very well include reorganizing the yard to establish visual stock control (we're talking massive elements which can only be moved by forklift), implementing five S in the production areas (this in a dusty, wet environment) and posting key indicators. It could also mean doing kaizen exercises with workers who have never done so before. Not surprisingly, first attempts won't go easily, and not surprisingly, most managers will be reluctant to throw themselves in that particular pool of cold water. Still, that’s the name of the game.

Bear in mind that while some people might resist a method they find high-handed, they may be very good at what they do. On the other hand, others will find it easier to just say yes, but not be particularly good at their jobs. So, if possible, withhold judgment about people at this point. The only ones to consider parting with are those who are neither good at their job nor willing to try the lean exercises. At some point you will have to part ways. Remember that you are not simply removing obstacles to progress - you are removing the damage that these people have on others' goodwill and motivation at a critical stage where everyone is running on hope but little actual experience.

Healthy Tension
At the next stage of the transformation, most managers will have agreed to do some kaizen and have some elements of workplace visual management in place. There will be a great deal of variance in terms of performance and process improvement. The biggest factors separating those who show progress and those who don’t are the common sense of the manager in evaluating possible options to improve and their individual capacity to involve and engage people and take them along. Leadership, so to speak. What happens to managers who are not making progress? They’re in a tough spot because they have agreed to use the lean tools, but are failing to use them smartly. In this case, your job is to help them succeed in getting it right.

Bear in mind that everything goes wrong, all the time, in a lean environment. Good lean plants are more effective and more efficient - but they don't appear this way to the naked eye. That's because systems force problems to surface. If there is enough healthy tension in the shop floor management system you'll see problems everywhere: boxes without kanban cards (because the batch size is really tight), bad parts in quality red bin areas (because every bad part is isolated and investigated right away), stopped lines (rather than continue with a problem) and so on. As a manager, performing in a lean environment means being able to keep people engaged and focused in a workplace that sends "please take care of me NOW!" signals all over the place. Truly, this is not for everyone.

As you continue with a lean implementation new challenges will emerge. After managers have learned to use lean tools to improve their processes, they will inevitably fail at the next stage: developing their subordinates' ability and initiative to take ownership of the lean tools. This typically happens when a manager becomes proficient at process and quality improvement but loses sight of people development. His people learn to respond quickly to whatever he's focused on, at the cost of abandoning the broader system. This type of manager hasn’t developed the leadership strength of seeing the whole. Now, this is a person you most definitely want to keep yet will probably lose. This person has shown a gift for getting things done, and will probably be lured to an environment where he can score more easy gains without having to deeply change his personal beliefs.

Remember, when it comes to training and retaining skilled lean managers, Toyota has been at this game much longer and understands it much better. They are scrupulous when it comes to hiring people. The number of people they interview just to fill one position is absurdly high compared to common practices. Toyota still loses a lot of middle-managers outside Japan. This is not because they're weak managers, but because they get poached, or find the strain of working for Toyota exhausting, or they get frustrated with the slow progress moving up the ranks (in Japan, many stay within the Toyota Keiretsu but move to suppliers).

In order to avoid a mismatch between a lean culture and the kind of managers we seek, what would be the broad criteria to recognize lean-oriented people who you don’t know well? In general, we can outline three main traits:

1) A spirit of self-development: lean is ultimately a learning system. Teachers can teach, but students need to want to learn. The first thing to look for is whether the person shows a penchant for autonomous self-development. This is easy to spot because they'll talk to you about instances where they were wrong yet persevered until they finally got better at it.

2) To be at ease with getting things done in uncertain conditions and not giving up easily. This is harder to see without seeing the person work, but easy to test. Set a challenge for the person and look for whether they quickly turn the problem into practical things to try (tomorrow, without investment) and whether they keep at it even though their first tries don’t work out as expected.

3) The knack of working with people (and getting them to work). They must be able to get things done while accepting other people's input and get them engaged in paying attention to whatever is at hand as well. This is different from just getting along, and, ultimately can be nurtured in true lean leadership, but is important from the start. Unfortunately, this is hardest to spot from the outset, and the most challenging to teach people as they develop.

No Room
Note that this list doesn't talk about getting results, or planning and commanding, nor even communication or networking. At the end of the day, lean is a knowledge development approach to business, and accordingly, the most prized character traits are the aptitude to develop oneself and then coach others.

So, how do you reconcile "develop people" and "fire people"? The crux of the matter is that to develop people they have to want to develop themselves. There's no getting around that basic fact. There's no room for people who don't show this quality in a lean organization. Some individuals may be smart, proficient, and sympathetic, yet refuse any attempt at self-development. They will not practice kaizen. They will not self-measure. They will not accept that they're wrong half the time - just like anyone else. Sooner or later, you’ll have to let them go. Keeping such people within a lean environment is both harmful to the others and to themselves because it makes them miserable. Whether you actually fire them or whether they leave is a matter of circumstances more than anything else (more people leave in The Lean Manager than actually get fired).

Another way of looking at this is that when you're committed to the lean way, you aim to develop everyone, and that you will fail to do so. Firing anyone counts as a failure, yet these are to be expected. Hopefully, you will learn from every one of them so such situations happen less frequently in the future. Firing or losing anyone reveals the gap with the standard, which would be to develop every employee. Time for kaizen on our own leadership abilities.

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Where do I start?

Dear Gemba Coach,

I'm the operations manager of a healthcare training company. We conduct technical training to nurses in hospitals. The president does the commercial part, and I run the operations, which is now an office of seven that coordinates the paperwork with hospitals, the logistics of getting trainers (mostly independents) to the right place, and other HR, books, and admin issues. This last year has been very difficult, and there is a worrying increase of complaints about the central team. We've had some inquiries about "lean healthcare," so the president and I are investigating the topic. She's reading The Lean Manager and I attended your webinar. It sounds very good, but very manufacturing oriented. Where should I start?

Wow. Good question. This is not so easy to reply to without actually seeing your operations, but let's start with the basics. First, however, a warning: if you want to do it right, lean requires a fundamental commitment to improving your delivery process as opposed to just getting the work done. If you feel improvement is something you'll do after you've done everything else, you will fail, as have countless others. Sorry to be blunt about this, but this is the single greatest difficulty in lean, and it requires a large mental shift. Your role as an operations manager is not to make sure the trainers are at the right place at the right time and all the paperwork is filled in correctly. Your most important job is improving every day the processes that leads to the trainers being at the right place at the right time, and the contracts filled in right first time and on time, and, I imagine, the feedback evaluations analyzed and passed back and so on.

What does this commitment mean in practice? To start with: an hour of your time per day. You can stop reading now if this sounds crazy. In fact, we'd probably need two hours to get started, but I realize there are only so many hours in the day and you're probably already going home late. The promise is that if this daily hour is used right, the total amount of time you spend at the office should go down. But not just at first, so you will have to make some hard calls and postpone some other work in order to focus on your fist steps in establishing a lean culture.

If you're still reading, what shall we use this precious hour for? You mention seven members of staff in your office. You will use this hour by spending 15 minutes with each member of staff (including the receptionist). Spend this time doing an individual interview with each of them every two days. These fifteen minutes will happen at their desk, in their office, cubicle or in the open plan.

Next, you'll make a small investment in a paperboard for each staff member, which you'll install next to their desk. This will be the "lean" work area.

Once both of these essentials have been set up, the best way to start lean is by carrying out a number of self-study exercises. You'll have to do step-by-step exercises with each person, with a focus on the person himself or herself: their personality, their competence, and their own sources of motivation. It is key to remember that every one is different and to treat every one as an individual. Before you start, I have to warn you that you'll find some individuals easier to work with, and some more difficult (the faces are probably already flashing through your mind). A key principle of lean is that we assume long-term relationships at work, so finding a way to work with everybody, no matter how difficult, is our own managerial problem. End of story. So buckle up, and simply accept that it will be easier with the people you get on fine with, and more difficult with the others. Getting the exercises going with everybody remains our target, whatever happens.

The first exercise is to ask each staff member to list what it is they actually do, and for whom. One of the difficulties of office work, compared to manufacturing, is that any one person does a huge variety of small tasks for many different "customers" (as opposed to producing a small number of parts for the next step in the process). This is further complicated by the fact that few office people consider the persons who use their work as their customers. They can be colleagues, or other admin staff at the hospital, or pesky, pain-in-the-neck diva trainers with a string of unreasonable demands. All of these parties are in fact customers of the process - in other words, partners, both of whom have to participate to get the work right.

In any case, the first step is to list the services we provide to whom. You use your fifteen minutes to:

1. Short chitchat about how they are, all well? Ready to start, etc.

2. Explain the exercise: list what we do for whom.

3. List a few of the most obvious tasks with their customers to start with.

4. Ask them to continue and tell them you’ll come back to check in two days time.

On your second visit, look over that list, and point out omissions and clarifications. If the work has not been completed carefully, it's okay to repeat this exercise until it's well done, to explain again, saying that you expect better in two days time when you'll have a look again. In lean, we assume that it the associate hasn't learned, the manager hasn't taught. In other words, if they're not complying with the exercise it's our problem. Either they haven't understood, or they've not bothered. In both cases, this needs to be addressed patiently, but firmly: you are coming back.

If the list is clear, complete, and sensible, you can move on to the second exercise: sketching out a rough process. Take the most obvious service and customer, a new flip-chart page, and sketch out the sequence of steps needed to deliver this service. This is not always obvious when people have never thought about their job that way. The other problem is that in many cases other people intervene at certain steps, which needs to be clarified. The criteria are that the list of step should clearly indicate each next step to provide the service. A temp, for instance, would not be able to know what the tasks are and how to do the job, but by reading this list, they should see clearly which next step they've got to do to complete the work.

You use your fifteen minutes to:

1. Chitchat about how they feel about the exercise and look at the work they've done since last meeting.

2. Explain that you want a sequence of next steps for every service.

3. Do it with them on the most obvious job they do.

4. Ask them to continue and tell them you'll come back to check in two days time.

When your colleagues have clarified at least the key steps of their main work processes, you are ready to begin the lean work in earnest. Pick one process for each of your colleagues, and ask them to draw the key steps on top of a new paperboard page. Then, and that's when you can expect conflict, ask them to diligently write down every instance where: someone complains (customer or colleague), where the step could not be achieved right at the first attempt, and it had to be postponed, or something had to be fixed in any way. At this stage, it's important not to hurry to "improve" errors but to study in detail what goes right or what goes wrong. The important thing at this stage is NOT to improve the process right away; but to clarify with the staff member what you exactly mean by "doing the work right" and "doing the work wrong." You use your five minutes to:

1. Chitchat about how the previous day went.

2. Look at specific instance of things that didn't work out quite right.

3. Take one, and ask the staff member: "show me" to look into the detail of the situation.

4. Ask them to write down any instance of the same pattern occurring.

Congratulations: you're doing lean. Yes, I know, this sound fairly different from all the complex stuff in the lean books, but nevertheless, this is the heart of lean, and Toyota’s very starting point: recognizing problems as they occur.

The next step is to help your colleagues solve these problems. At this stage you have to watch out for off-the-cuff solutions shifting the blame to someone else. The point of the exercise is to teach staff members to solve their own problems. So: (1) no investment, (2) together think more deeply about what the problem really is until the solution becomes obvious, so we can try it immediately.

In my experience of service work, if you truly spend your one-on-one time with each member of staff, you'll find that they’re expert at getting things done in the end, but not in any organized fashion - hence the focus on "next step." But more likely than not, you'll be horrified by their attitude and responses to other people involved in the process. In service more than in any other work, it’s critical to remember that there are two key elements to doing any task: the work itself, and the relationship. Partners will tolerate almost any unpleasantness if things work out fine first time (after all, there is little scope for aggravation). But if things repeatedly go wrong, and on top of it all, the people are unresponsive or rude, it feels too much like adding insult to injury and it gets people really riled. Since you run a training outfit, you probably know all about these issues, and it's well worth thinking about an individualized training plan for your staff members in how to speak with partners in difficult situations. Quick response with a little empathy usually goes a long long way in defusing tense situations - but it needs to be addressed forcefully.

Is that all there is to lean? Of course not, not by a long stretch. The next step, once you’ve got a handle on recognizing individual problems and immediately helping staff members to solve them to return close to the "ideal" sequence of steps, is getting people together for a day's "kaizen event." The idea here is to focus on processes that overlap several people. Usually, work gets stuck in piles while one is doing something else, which creates a lot of unnecessary waiting time for customers and partners, and keeps problems from being discovered as work moves from one desk to the other, pile by pile.

How to use this one day with your team?

1. Pick one job that overlaps several people's work.

2. Invite all the participants in the process (including external partners).

3. Use post-it notes to get the team to draw the process as it should happen.

4. Identify main process gaps (this should be easier if you've worked for a few weeks with each member of staff on understanding what a problem is).

5. Spot operations that add no direct value to the outcome. The usual criteria, is what the customer would not be ready to pay for - how do we know: ask a customer!

6. Come up with a number of experiments we can try to eliminate, combine, rearrange, and simplify the process steps.

7. Follow up in your daily 15 minutes.

At this stage, you're working on recognition and solving of individual task level problems, as well as understanding end-to-end process problems that involve several people and boundary issues. You've started the two main building blocks of lean. The remaining task that still needs to be set to finish your launch, is a test method to see whether you're progressing or not. This is an essential part of lean. The easiest place to start is to pick up the phone and/or organize lunches with the customers of your processes and ask them to tell you how they feel about the work done by your team.

Here are three broad questions you can weave into the conversations:

1. What is your general impression of our team - better, worse, same?

2. What would be the three main things you’d like us to improve on to make your job easier?

3. Do you have specific instances of situations you’d like us to fix?

This should get you started. I hope it helps! One last word: I started with a word of caution, and will end with one. What do you, as a manager, look for from these exercises? Beyond strengthening your individual work relationship with your staff, you should be looking to clarify your own models or theories about what makes the job perform or not. We usually have vague, implicit theories about what makes things work or not (usually centered on people stereotypes). Your part of the lean work is to write down these theories (don't share them, this is for yourself.) You've probably heard that lean is a matter of applying the scientific method to work, but wonder what this means in practice. Well, once you've written down your criteria for a process to have good outcomes, start looking for cases where this doesn't apply. Specifically, look for instances where your criteria were fulfilled, and yet the outcome still wasn't great, as well as instances where the outcome was great, but one of your criteria didn’t check out. These "anomalies" are the source of learning: by exploring them in detail, you will progressively enrich and complete your theories about work, and touch the ultimate goal of lean, which is to get every one to think deeply about what they do on the job. Please don't hesitate to comment on my response and let me know whether this has helped or not.

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Lean and Financials

Dear Gemba Coach,

During the webinar, you mentioned the importance of quantifying the financial impacts of lean efforts before introducing the system. This is a very common obstacle. Please go into more details about how to do this.

This is indeed a common problem, and a difficult one to solve because it reflects deep differences in management assumptions. For the past century or so, there have been two fundamental ways to assess the value of investing in new tools, projects, products, and even improvement programs. The prevailing view has been the orthodoxy of Return On Investment (ROI). While there are multiple ways to assess the value of our capital, ROI dictates that the clear choice is to invest in that which promises the most profitable return based on current calculations. There is nothing inherently wrong with the idea - in theory. In practice, of course, returns are often hard to evaluate and invariably wildly wrong. Moreover, few people care how the returns are achieved as long as the numbers are met. This first approach is very powerful because it provides clear and simple criteria to follow. No need to examine core assumptions deeply.

The alternative position recognizes that some processes and activities have to be in place regardless of how they affect the ROI. The direct ROI of these activities (which can be legal, or safety, or deal with long-term planning, or other intangible matters) is hard to evaluate, but every one will agree that they create value for the company in the long-term, in everything from disaster avoidance to better operations. Many organizational development programs in the past fall on this side of the mountain. They often involve comical efforts to quantify results in terms of ROI to fit in with managerial biases. Unfortunately, many lean initiatives are treated this way because of lack of a better option. But seriously: try quantifying the ROI on a "5S" campaign. If someone here has succeeded, please let me know so we can share how it’s done.

Lean thinking takes a third approach. Performance and process are linked. They are the two sides of a same coin, the back and the front of the same hand. This approach does not come naturally to people, so we must train ourselves to mentally keep performance and process connected in every lean activity we do. In fact, many of Taichi Ohno's writings center around the link between production methods and costs - he actually rants against the fact that accounting methods often hide the true cost of things.

What would be these essential connections? One can think of four explicit ones:

1. Quality and sales


2. Production method and costs


3. Lead-time and cash


4. Kaizen and capex

Quality and sales is an odd connection. While this link is proved every day that higher quality products sell more, it’s still very hard to get people to fully invest in quality. It's a tough subject, as Toyota veteran Tatsuhiko Yoshimura points out, J.D. Power's 2006 IQS difference between Cadillac and Lexus is 99.2% customers satisfied with Cadillac versus 99.4% for Lexus. An apparently minimal difference in perceived quality still makes a huge impact at the point of purchasing: customers will respond very differently to these two scores. His explanation for this gap is not so much in the big problems, because it's easy to mobilize resources and people to solve them (again, ROI thinking) but all the small one-off issues which require another approach, that of standardized work with constant questioning and challenging. Clearly, if there’s one lesson to take away from Toyota’s success it is that product quality can bring competitors to their knees.

One of the reasons that lean outperforms other management approaches is that product quality is free - paid for by process excellence. In other words the extra value provided to customers in product quality comes out of a lean process whereas competitors have to add costs (quality firewalls, rework, control, etc.) to deliver the same quality. Since they have to follow suit to compete, their costs increase and they land in real trouble. In other words, competitors carry some common costs (materials, bought out parts, labor, equipment, overhead, etc.), but the production method accounts for an overlayer of cost - the plum around the nut, to take the lean image.

The single-piece-flow at takt time method of production affects costs in three main ways:

1. Quality build into the process, so no big batches of defectives parts to check and rework


2. Leveling of processes, so no over-resourcing processes to cope with the peak use of the process


3. Making waste visible, so taking out all unnecessary operations (i.e., unnecessary use of labor, equipment and materials) by "leaning" processes day after day.

Thirdly, after sales and costs, lean is strongly connected with cash. On the numbers side, the link between inventories and cash is more intuitive, but recently, I heard an investment fund manager remark that everybody knows that carrying 28 days of inventory is way too much for an automotive supplier in terms of cash weight (which affects the equity structure), and yet knowing this doesn't help companies to reduce their inventories. This is a realistic but surprising statement considering how long lean inventory reduction methods have been around. Beyond the inventory numbers, the lean link is about reducing the lead-time between the moment of investment on one hand and collecting the money on the other: product planning, design, procurement of equipment and tools, production, distribution and then sales. There is far more to lead-time reduction than just cutting those inventories, but they're still a good place to start with. In any case, lead-time and cash-in-hand are tightly linked.

Finally, ROI thinking is naturally oriented towards capex - I haven't yet come across a production problem that couldn’t be solved: please just sign the check. The lean attitude here is "use your ideas, not your money". Capex is reserved for new things: new products, new technologies, anything innovative that requires investment. Existing processes must perform at standard levels without re-injection of capital expenditure – which means a lot of kaizen. Furthermore, kaizen thinking will lead you to develop different kinds of equipment, far less costly, more flexible (not in terms of being able to do everything right this minute, but in terms for being re-usable for the next product and easy to change), with smarter, lighter technical solutions – a real big fight in mature lean programs. Also, by using the proper production method to maximize the OEE of existing equipment (and making this equipment easier to changeover) we limit the purchases of new equipment (the extra machine because we feel there is a capacity bottleneck and we really need to ship those parts), and over time, work with a much lover level of new capital expenditure.

Now, none of these four links are self-evident in accountancy method, so it's up to us, lean guys to do our homework in order to convince the hard-nosed finance managers. The first step is usually tracking a list of operational indicators. In The Lean Manager, we use:

1. Sales:


• Customer parts per million (ppm)


• Quality complaints


• Missed-deliveries per million




2. Labor:


• Accident rate


• Internal ppm


• Parts per hour (pph)


• Suggestions




3. Materials


• Supplier ppm


• Supplier mpm




4. Equipment
   
• Overall equipment effectiveness


• Changeover time


• Number of changeovers




5. Inventories


• Total percent of sales


• Days of raw materials


• Days of work-in-process inventory (WIP)


• Days of finished goods

Every company finds its own ways of calculating these in details. The key thing is that they have to fit with the reality of operations.

Now for the hard work: reconciliation. Lean theory has spelled out the four basic relationships, but these need to be fleshed out in your specific case. The indicators typically reflect shop floor conditions: a certain level of implementation of visual management, pull system and kaizen. These indicators also reflect a level of financial performance. The trick now is getting teamwork from the finance functions, the lean office and line management to reconcile and flesh out these relationships - and the relationships are there.

Again, no magic wand. No easy answers, only hard work. However, to me, here's the takeaway. Lean officers often complain that senior managers don't "get it" (true) and that the company's cost accounting is all wrong for lean (also true) and so on, so what can they do. Well, we’re the change agents, so the onus of convincing others is on us. In order to sell our ideas, we need to speak the other person’s language well enough to find common ground. I’m certain that this common ground exists, because I've seen some companies find it (rarely on the whole list but at least on some aspects). So it's up to the lean community to take up the challenge of learning how to establish case-by-case relationships between shop floor "normal conditions" and P&L and balance sheet numbers. If any of you are doing this already, please comment on it, I'd love to hear about it.

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How Do I Convince People to Practice Lean?

Dear Gemba Coach,

I have previous lean experience, and have now joined a large bureaucratic organization. I’m trying to apply the lean approach, but the management team and business culture remains stubbornly public sector in their thinking. Any advice on how to crack this issue?

To start with, I'd recommend that you learn more about the work being done by the Thedacare center for Healthcare Value (you can start by visiting http://www.createhealthcarevalue.com/ CEO John Toussaint is one of the few people to have brought lean to a large bureaucratic organization (in his case, several hospitals), and his experience in this area is enlightening.

Reading about lean is of course the easy part. Doing leanis where it counts. For that let's go to the gemba. Allow me to rephrase your question: how can you convince anyone that your way is the best way, especially when they can use their experience as validation of their approach in this environment? I believe that the best approach to this problem is to examine our models of how people are convinced, and then see if we're going about it the right way.

First of all, to take a philosophical approach (and bear with me, I am French!): can we ever really convince someone else of anything? In terms of changing their deeply-held beliefs by the force of your own argument . . .I believe the answer is overwhelmingly "no." We can force people to do things, but we can't convince them of anything. Only they can do so - people convince themselves, period. So, if we can't convince, how can we influence? How can we get someone to convince themselves? There are five broad paths that achieve this goal. The first is to find out oneself by doing. The second is to be influenced by one's peer group. The third is seeing and understanding. The fourth is to reason it out. There's a fifth path in which one convinces oneself beyond reason - coming to believe something that flows from a deeply held principle. So how can any of these paths work out in the case of trying to convince someone of a lean approach?

The first path, and probably the most convincing, is doing the thing oneself. This is very powerful because our brains work full time at convincing us that we're right and that we're okay (the only people truly realistic about themselves are the chronically depressed). So, the moment you've invested time in something, your brain will tell you that you were right to do so, and that it was the right thing to do (hence, others should do it as well). Consequently, the high road to convincing a manager to look further into lean is to get them to participate in kaizen workshops - more than one if possible. For this tack to work you've got to 1) prep them carefully and 2) make sure the kaizen event they participate in is positive (good coach, good team) and demonstrative. If they're not wowed by the kaizen event, forget about that person and move to the next.

One reason change often takes place when driven from the top is that you can't force someone to change their mind, but you can force them to act in a new way. This is the principle of "forced conversion", which, unhappily, has many historical precedents. As your boss, I can't convince you to believe in (or understand) lean, but I can certainly force you to apply some of the lean tools. Chances are that by applying them, you'll bring yourself to change your mind one step at a time also. Further chances are that if you remain unconvinced, and I continue to insist you apply the tools, you'll choose to find work elsewhere, because it's really uncomfortable to be at loggerheads with one's boss. For many middle-managers, the path of least resistance is to pretend to do lean by carrying out a few "meeting room" activities, such as value stream mapping exercises without ever changing the process, or minimal 5S activity, and other sorts of window dressing in the plant or the office. Don't knock it. Even a small step is a step, and gives you a base on which to build a discussion. The real difficulty is when they won't do . . . anything.

On this topic as well, senior managers are also in charge of the incentive scheme in place in the company. Let's not forget that this is a heavyweight argument, and having a bonus scheme skewed towards lean results does act as a powerful convincer (no accidents, 50% reduction in quality complaints, 25% inventory reduction, 15% productivity improvement in two years, typically). One word of caution though, experience shows that if you put in place such an incentive system, the immediate reaction of many, not surprisingly, is to try to "game" the system. They will continue with the old behavior while finding ways to hit the new goals. We've all got many examples of the funny, or not-so-funny situation this can trigger, and how creative people can be at doing anything but the lean thing. As a rule of thumb, for any incentive scheme, I check the three "Cs" of confidence: am I confident I can achieve this? Am I confident that if I do, I will get the proposed reward? Am I confident that the proposed reward will actually satisfy me? As you can see, applying this rule of thumb to lean involvement can be tricky indeed.

The second path to convincing oneself is being influenced by one's peer group. Think about casual Friday, if you have this in your company. You might have reasons why you enjoy wearing your suit - it's a protection (you wear it as an armor between you and the job), it's easy to pick in the morning (you've got your attire well organized), etc. Now comes casual Friday where everyone must show up in semi-casual clothes. You decide that this is silly and come to work with your usual suit jacket and skirt, but every one else, including your boss, is in jeans and checkered shirt, and they all look at you with something between an indulgent grin and a smirk. You won't make that mistake twice. Lean works the same. Imagine that one team has turned around an operation, making it leaner and leaner. You like the performance numbers so you want it to spread to the rest of the organization. What do you do? 1) You split up the team and send each member as an emissary to another operation or division for them to do the missionary work or 2) you ask them to install a good replacement team, and, as a team, you give them a second operation to turn around. The first option might seem much faster, but it's also much riskier. The "lean" person on the team will suddenly find herself or himself surrounded by non-lean colleagues, which raises the odds that they'll soon drop the lean ball for fear of having their peer group turn against them. On the other hand, installing a good replacement team might seem a lot slower, but it’s money in the bank. The team (the peer group) will only get stronger and stronger, be demonstrative, and train lean people all at the same time. The tortoise will beat the hare every time. When you're trying to convince someone of doing lean, be mindful of their peer group and try to create opportunities for them to meet people they'd consider to be peers doing lean. Dragging them with you to a lean conference is a good first step, not for what they'll learn, but so that they find themselves surrounded with committed managers who take this lean thing seriously.

The third path is somewhere in between the two first, and the one probably most sought after by people to trying to convince others to do lean. It's show and tell. The idea is that if you demonstrate a powerful example of lean, the person will convince himself or herself it's worth a try. Historically, this third path does not have a good track record in lean, and visiting "benchmark" lean factories, offices or companies, has a poor conversion hit rate. It works better within one's own organization (if not, different context invalidates the experience easily). But here, let's apply lean to one self. Is what you have to show really lean? Or is it something you're convinced of that you've passed off as leaner?

To be convincing on this lean approach, first challenge yourself. On your lean example:

1) Are issues singled out one at a time and tackled through a team PDCA?

2) Is performance measured in a demonstrative way? Do they have clear results?

3) Do people have a clear understanding of the current situation and can they describe their target in terms of performance and process?

4) Do they have a clear theory about what goes on, and how to test it?

5) Do they progress by trying one thing at a time, and learning from it?

6) Do they own the improvements? Do they feel engaged and enthused?

Bear in mind that if they're not convinced to start with, showing them lean "stuff" (Value Stream Maps, Visual Management Boards, Kanbans, etc.) will not convince them. For the demonstration to be, well, demonstrative, it needs to make sense in their terms. The usual management framework is ROI, so your demonstration must show clearly what are the financial returns and what was the investment. As we all know, lean doesn't naturally work that way, so that's quite a challenge.

The fourth path is to reason it out. Smart people will make up their mind even without hands-on experience or "know it when I see it" evidence by reasoning things out until they are convinced their reasoning is correct. On this front, we lean guys have been the most remiss. Most of our explanations are lean-consistent: they tend to assume that people have accepted basic lean premises such as value streams, kaizen and people involvement. Our arguments tend clarify our understanding of lean and reinforce our own conviction, but rarely to bridge the gap with managers from the non-lean world of managing-by-numbers reporting, "throw it over the wall" functional silos and management-by-objectives. On this topic, I can recommend McKinsey's book Journey To Lean by John Drew, Blair McCallum and Stefan Roggenhofer as a serious attempt to bridge the gap between financial indicators such as ROCE and lean issues. I firmly believe that all of us in the lean field would benefit from better understanding financial ratios and budgetary mechanics, to be able to speak more convincingly to hard-nosed, financial driven managers.

Finally, the fifth path, convincing oneself of lean because it fits with profound personal beliefs, is more frequent than one would think. One CEO I work with got into lean because it appealed to his own work ethic in terms of Respect-for-people and he had not hitherto found any management approach that addressed that issue in such a thorough and systematic manner. Another CEO I work with got interested in lean because of his prior commitment to the Organizational Learning movement, disenchantment with the lack of practicality of many of the OD proposals, and enthusiasm for lean as a practical, applicable system of organizational learning. Both of these CEOs are outstanding persons with very strong work ethics, and I am privileged to work with both of them. The one drawback of using values as a basis for lean is that as lean is a consistent system, a structured method, and some aspects will work well with pre-existing values, while some will not. To take a gemba example, it's common practice to get employee participation by allowing employees to manage their own working hours, to increase responsibility and commitment by letting people be better in their personal lives. However, this flatly contradicts the lean approach to stable teams, where, as in a sports match, all players start at the same time, quit at the same time and take their breaks at the same time to maximize their team game. In another case, I've seen several plant managers previously convinced by the theory of constraint's focus on bottlenecks who’d happily put injection presses in flow with assembly, losing 50% OEE in the process, for the sake of "flow." Still, deeply held values are powerful, and demonstrating how lean fits with someone's pre-existing values can make a convincing case.

The upshot of this discussion is that there is no one best way to convince one person. Success remains the most convincing argument in all dimensions: success in getting someone to try, success amongst a peer group, success in demonstrative business cases, success in clear reasoning and success in fitting with values. Because no two people are the same, if we're serious about convincing others, we'll apply lean to ourselves and start a PDCA example. The fist step will be giving ourselves a target list of who we want to convince by when, and flesh out, say in one short scenario, a description of what exactly we have in mind by "convinced". We can then draw a plan for every person, and test our theories about what convinces them case by case. Then check and reflect.

This is an excellent question, and thank you for asking it, because this is precisely the sort of issue that confronts anybody doing lean for real in their company. On the others hand, such topics have rarely been studied in depth, other than through swapping anecdotes and cafeteria debates. I've outlined my five-factor theory of convincing someone, but am keen to hear of any case where something else happened and the theory doesn’t apply. Convincing is such an important part of our lean role, that I am convinced (no pun intended) that we need to learn a whole lot more about how to convince. Please let me know what you think!

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