Gemba Coach by Michael Ballé

Why don’t middle managers practice A3 thinking? (Part 2)

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 04:00:00 GMT

I believe the key to make your A3 training program more successful is to make sure that it is aligned with lean’s core values – and yes, that will mean tackling your client’s senior management in order to make sure the right prerequisites are in place:

Challenge: how do you phrase middle managers’ missions in terms of problems to solve rather than solutions to apply? If you haven’t got this right, none of the rest is very relevant. Are the challenges clearly expressed? How many challenges are detailed individually? You must clarify minimal job roles. A middle manager typically has operational task as well as project tasks. What are the simplest, most freauent operational task they have to perform? What is the ONE priority project they have to focus on? By clarifying a MINIMUM role, the manager can have better results in their day-to-day, not screw up the reporting as well as have time/energy (even enthusiasm?) to focus on the problem you’ve asked them to solve.
Genchi Genbutsu: having a clear and commonly understood plan of policy deployment is critical. Having senior managers commit to a calendar of gemba visits, to see what the project is doing at the value-adding workplace level (rather than disembodied reports) is the most powerful way to gain traction. This behavior shows the organization that this project is a priority, that you’re interested in their results and how they go about it. Furthermore, the gmeba visits are likely to have a strong modeling effect on the middle-manager himself or herself who (we can hope) might eventually pick up the practice.
Kaizen: in mainstream management, many solutions are formulated in terms of optimization: what we have doesn’t work, so let’s break it and refurbish it optimally. Unfortunately, the same problems existing now usually carry over to the “optimized” solution, and so nothing much is ultimately achieved beyond leaving a lot of investment dollars on the table. Kaizen’s focus is on improvement – which means asking middle managers to improve the current situation rather than optimize it. This might sound like semantics, but it has a disproportionate impact on the nature of countermeasures sought, and their concrete implementation.
Teamwork: most middle-managers need the most help is in developing relationships with other managers to carry their projects through. In your A3 training program, make sure this is explicitly addressed: A3 owners are asked to identify upfront who else they need to work on the A3 with. They need to be supported in creating individual relationships that improve their ability to work with others in the organization. This can be one of your largest contributions to the organization as a whole. A great place to start for this is the Job Relations training in TWI (http://www.lean.org/Workshops/WorkshopDescription.cfm?WorkshopId=63)
Respect: in the end, respect is precisely what A3 training should address. “Respect” at work is usually understand as giving clear goals, holding employees accountable, treating people fairly, being polite and respectful and so on. All very good, but a far cry from the lean notion of respect. Lean respect is about asking people what problems they encounter in the way they do their job, what they believe the causes are, what should be done about it, how they would know if the problem is solved and so on. This is not about fixing things per se. This is about building mutual trust by better understanding what people see in their jobs and taking responsibility to work with them to make things better. Respect is precisely what A3 training should teach middle-managers, and what will make such a difference to the business as a whole.

As a trainer, the challenge often is to turn tables around and respect trainee’s contribution to the organization, before teaching them different. Successful training rests on understanding the current zone of autonomy of the person, visualizing what they should be autonomous on, and building the stepping stones to get there, to help them cross that river. Rigorous analysis is hard for middle managers because it goes against their incentive system as well as require information they don’t have access to. The question therefore is: how does your training program address their difficulties before teaching them how to solve problems with others.

Get the whole story. Read Part 1.

Why don’t middle managers practice A3 thinking?

Tue, 28 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Dear Gemba Coach,

I’m a lean consultant, and have been hired by a large service organization to develop an A3 problem-solving training program for their middle-management. Why is it so hard to engage middle-managers in rigorous analysis? It’s not that they don’t understand the concepts or that they don’t feel it could help. They often just don’t seem to get it. How can I do my work here?

Are you solving the right problem? We need to start here, because while I don’t know what your client organization is like, it's crucial that your approach be based on how it looks from its middle manager’s point of view. What do they see if you stand in their shoes and look through their eyes?

Middle managers struggle with a unique set of roadblocks to productive problem-solving and kaizen. Many of the middle managers I’ve worked with were once excellent front-line managers. And now they no longer manage teams, they manage teams of teams. Once they could simply direct someone to do this or that. Now that they have to go through one or several managers and team leaders it’s not so simple. Additionally, they have to implement strategies they haven’t created or defined, often for unknown reasons. To make matters worse, these middle managers are held accountable to report and in fact control performance numbers, regardless of whether they have any real influence on them or not. Not a comfortable place to be.

Let’s try to view this problem more directly from the gemba of the middle manager. I’ve observed three key areas that touch upon the A3 gap:

Reporting: The first survival skill is understanding and nurturing the reporting systems. Nobody wants a senior executive to suddenly asks for a figure they don’t know—especially when that number isn’t a crucial one to their daily operations. Yet political considerations frequently place them in that position. That’s because mainstream organizations are built around their reporting system, following a (forgive my geeky metaphor) Star Trek model in which all the information flows to the control room where all the big decisions are made. This is very different from a Star Wars “gemba” approach where you see the pilot constantly running all around the ship to figure out what’s really happening. The middle-manager is an essential part of this architecture, so Lord help him or her if she hasn’t done her reporting properly, or twisted operational arms in delivering the appropriate figures.

Project-management: The second survival skill of a middle-manager is to be able to develop allies across the board, other middle-managers, frontline managers and technical experts, to keep their projects moving. In order to execute strategy, middle-managers are given “missions” to run, usually mid-to-large scale projects that more often than not reach beyond organizational functional borders. This requires the political acumen to develop allies who keep people working on key tasks beyond their routine roles, particularly when unexpected snags occur. Every middle-manager competes with other middle-managers for teams’ time and attention. In one smallish non-profit organizations we got all the middle managers together with the CEO (no more than six of them), they counted a total of seventy live “change” projects on top of the day-to-day work of the organization. Just counting the projects gave them pause. The middle-managers knew they were not making any headway. The CEO had no idea that he had created this situation.

Coordinating the teams they’re in charge of. Kicking the can to the next office is not a workaround for a middle-manager, it’s a survival skill to live to fight another day. In practice, this often means ensuring that whatever new rule that has been cooked up by some specialist function will be implemented. It means dealing with the ups and down of team motivation and fighting the endless turf-wars of unclear boundaries with other areas. It means deftly handling the occasional individual crises which inevitably crop up without revealing this to top management. It’s no wonder that many middle-managers feel they have put out daily fires with their arms tied behind their back.

So is it any surprise that middle managers stumble with the daily demands of clean A3 thinking and problem-solving? In a complex organization they face daily problems caused by politics, opaque reporting systems, and weak spans of control. Middle managers must manage people over whom they have no direct power, who have other more pressing responsibilities, who are naturally skeptical to new orders, and who naturally resist. I’ve seen how A3 problem-solving can help people and teams frame problems and work through them with great clarity and power. But let’s also sum up the challenges when middle managers apply this approach:

Step 1: Clarify the Problem

Consider the ultimate goal and the current situation and visualize the gap between current work and the ideal situation.

Yes, but:

I’ve been asked to implement this project or policy, I’m not sure what the ultimate goal is nor what the current condition really is.

Step 2: Break down the problem

Breakdown large problems into smaller, more concrete problems and clarify quantitatively the point of cause at the gemba to prioritize which problem we will tackle first.

Yes, but:

I’ve been given a rollout implementation plan to apply in every department. What I need is agreement from frontline managers they will proceed with roll out, not a million reasons why they won’t.

Step 3: Target Setting

Set challenging short-term targets to get to the goal step by step.

Yes, but:

How can I build buy-in if the very first step is too challenging? I need to move carefully, and make sure others don’t find the early step too challenging, or they’ll flat out refuse.

Step 4: Root cause analysis

Thoroughly investigate the process involved in order to clarify the root cause by asking why? What is actually happening? How do you know that? Why do you think that is?

Yes, but:

Now you really want me to rile people and get their hackles up! Besides, I know the root cause, I’ve always said that so-and-so has been the problem from the start. But I can’t start grilling people like that and question their professionalism. I’ll lose them completely.

Step 5: Develop countermeasures

Draw up alternative countermeasures that address the root cause (as many as you can), and evaluate which is the most likely to succeed on a variety of factors such as lead-time, quality, cost etc.

Yes, but:

What I foremost need is joint agreement to do simple things. If I start looking into different alternatives, I’ll just confuse them all, and they’ll use it as an excuse not to do anything.

Step 6: See countermeasures through

Set up the right (visual) reporting so that every one involved can see progress and obstacles can be tackled one by one as they appear.

Yes, but:

More reporting? Don’t you think we have enough as it is? Do you realize how hard it is to change anything to the reporting system? Oh, I see, you want me to set up a parallel reporting system on the wall – is that it? Good luck with that!

Step 7: Monitor results and processes

Evaluate both the overall results as well as the processes used and share this evaluation with all involved.

Yes, but:

I’m doing this already – we are tracking the implementation of the action plan and sharing this with everyone through e-mail. We are at above 80% on most items – but you and I both know what that means about task completion. At least it keeps senior management off my back.

Step 8: Standardize successful processes

Figure out what conditions are needed to make sure the new process will stick and share the standardized process with other people and divisions.

Yes, but:

Isn’t that precisely what we’re trying to do in the first place? Why go through all the 7 steps and not do that from the start? That’s what we’re already doing.

I personally feel that training middle-managers to A3 problem solving is totally the right thing to do in order to, in David Verbles terms, “lead from the middle” and I’ve witnessed many successes of this first hand.

But I also understand your predicament. Let’s start by reflecting more on the challenges of middle-managers. In my experience, these are smart, moderately ambitious people in difficult jobs. They perfectly understand what A3 problem should do but, by and large, fail to see how that applies to their situation, and how it would make things better for them.

Next week: 5 keys to make sure the A3 training program connects with middle managers.

Why Are There So Many Points of View About What Lean Is?

Sat, 04 May 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Dear Gemba Coach,

I’ve been interested in lean for over two years now, and can’t quite understand why after 20 years there are still so many points of view, and no apparent single message under the lean banner. What are your views on this?

That’s an interesting question – I’ve been thinking it over and the answer is both simple and complicated – it’s like asking “why can’t all scientists agree once and for all?” Taiichi Ohno, the chief architect of what we call lean thinking, was explicitly based on the scientific mindset, which has profound implications. But before we get there, let me argue that all lean views do share a number of common values or, more practically, stable preferences:

They prefer satisfying customers rather than following the organization’s path of least resistance.
They prefer going to the gemba to see for themselves rather than reading reports in an office.
They prefer seeking to maximize the value-adding part of any work rather than accepting that some waste is the price to pay for doing business.
They prefer making work flow smoothly rather than accepting accumulations caused by the optimization of local resources.
They prefer pulling work at customer takt time rather than pushing work according to what the central MRP decides is best to optimize machine use.
They prefer developing people’s autonomy by teaching them how to master standards rather than ask them to follow procedures and let them find their way by themselves
They prefer encouraging individual initiative through step-by-step improvement rather than seek one-time performance jumps through reorganization or modernization investments.
They prefer teamwork by teaching every person to solve problems with their colleagues to requiring a show of “team spirit” by “fitting in” and keeping one’s nose clean.
They prefer small, flexible equipment to large fast machines.
Etc.

My list is by no means exhaustive, and could be expressed in a different way, but I hope that it is demonstrative – these preferences are quite marked and do define the lean field to a large extent. In any work conversations, you can fit people’s positions one way or the other quite easily.

It Depends

When it comes down to specifics, however, I agree, the answer you’ll get from any experienced lean person is most likely “it depends.” Because it does depend. For instance, I was yesterday with a Toyota supplier who was arguing with the Toyota engineers, making the case for a welding process that was cheaper and had many side-advantages, but did create a few occasional defects. The Toyota chaps were adamant that they wanted another welding process that they knew made no defects, but was more expensive and unwieldy. On the one hand, they pushed for their preference for “don’t accept defectives, don’t make defectives, don’t pass on defectives,” and on the other they had to face the practicalities of the situation – I still don’t know how this will play out.

On the other side, I remember another supplier that had put his injection presses in strict flow with assembly, using the press below 50% of its capacity. The Toyota engineers made him change his mind and told him to pull instead, going against the preference for flow – there’s a limit to how much optimization you lose in the name of perfect flow. These two examples highlight that in most practical situations lean thinking really depends of personal evaluations of the situation, and so you’ll get different answers from different people (sometimes different answer from the same person at different times).

Lean thinking is not a religious dogma, it’s scientific thinking applied to business problems, which is why it’s OK in lean that different people have different opinions. Scientific thinking is counter-intuitive. One never learns something new – that works for reading newspapers and chatting with colleagues and friends. Instead, one refine’s one understanding of the world by testing hypotheses and learning to know when they apply, by how much.

As opposed to philosophy, there is no true or false in science – there is likely and unlikely (admittedly, there can be very likely – mostly proven - and very unlikely – mostly disproved). There are no universals but only specific conditions. Similarly, lean thinking’s path to truth is not through learning universal absolutes, but, as Taiichi Ohno framed it, by getting rid of our misconceptions. Most of what we believe is neither right or wrong, it’s right in certain contexts, and wrong in others, and learning is about discovering which is which experimentally.

*Scientific method*	Lean thinking
Observe a phenomenon	Plan: Go to the real place, look carefully, measure how a process performs against known standards
Develop a hypothesis to explain this phenomenon	Plan: Apply lean principles, use lean tools, to list the potential factors generating the gap to standard
Formulate a prediction for that hypothesis	Plan: Confirm these factors one-by-one until you can narrow it down to the most likely cause
Test the prediction	Do: implement a countermeasure to the likely cause and Check: study the countermeasure, measure the effects
Refine the hypothesis	Act: Draw conclusions and refine your understanding of the process

In both approaches, the key is to actively seek where the hypothesis doesn’t fit the facts so well and progressively refine its formulation and the understanding of its conditions (as opposed to try to prove generalities). What makes it work is the commitment to study countermeasure to see how well they work in real life and so to accelerate learning. It’s a tough commitment, and requires real self-discipline. In particular the discipline to realize the first intuitive answer that comes to mind is interesting, but most likely wrong, and it needs to be refined through the PDCA process before becoming meaningful. This discipline essentially distinguishes true lean thinkers from wannabes.

Consequently, every Lean Thinker will have a different response to any given situation. The PDCA process, as with the scientific process, ensures that, through progressive re-statement of hypotheses, people will converge towards areas of confirmed agreement (more likely towards areas of agreement and areas of disagreement, which also mirrors the scientific process). It’s a collective process, just as much as it’s an individual mental effort to commit to it. Over time, you will find topics where there is agreement on a single message (one-piece-flow is about 20% more productive than batching), through repeated experiments by many people, and other subjects where every person holds their own weird notion – that’s OK, it’s precisely how lean thinking is supposed to work. The aim is to develop your deeper thinking, not fill you in with preset conclusions.

Countermeasure to Modern Management

How do we know it works? In companies I know, lean CEOs, like anyone else, work well with some of their directors, and not others. Typically, there will be one or two concrete-head directors who will refuse the gemba visits from the CEO (one way or other) and will not accept the scientific logic of making hypotheses (causes) explicit, or testing them (countermeasures), but will continue to decide according to reasoning they alone know.

Why aren’t CEOs doing something about it? Well, again, lean is not a religion and you don’t burn people for being heretics – you just try to convince them (until both sides feel that enough is enough, that is). Knowing what is what is often difficult in business, but with an extensive approach to go and see it becomes much clearer: most problems in the company are now opened to the eye, with a few areas of opacity. We can therefore see the size of the mistakes originating from these areas.

I have two specific cases in mind. One, the cost of a commercial director selling projects with high revenue but negative (in one case, very negative) margins. Another, the case of the IT director pushing solutions no one really wants. In both cases, we can actually put a $ value on those avoidable errors – and it ranges in the millions. So the gap to budget is clearly visible because now we understand why in parts of the company where the directors subscribe to lean thinking, and can contrast it with the remaining black holes.

What makes lean unique is that it is the only full-fledged alternative to the “modern management” invented by Alfred Sloan in the previous century. Lean is a full business system with:

A lean theory of strategy: choosing the customers one wants to pursue, accelerate the delivery flow and improve value, sell at market price, and make your margin by better managing costs.
A lean HR theory: customer satisfaction is the key to growth; employee satisfaction is the key to customer satisfaction; fulfilling jobs is the key to employee satisfaction; developing engagement (through kaizen), involvement (through teamwork) and autonomy (through standards) is the key to employee satisfaction.
A lean organizational theory: structure functions around knowledge production and pull value through value stream with a pull system; the management line solves its own problems and improves its own processes.
A lean financial theory: sales growth is a function of built-in-quality; cash growth is a function of reducing lead-time; profitability growth is a function of eliminating waste; capex utilization is a function of better understanding flexibility, autonomation, and technical minimum solutions.
A lean supply chain theory: integrate suppliers by pulling parts and innovations in win-win long-term relationships
A lean leadership theory: develop more leaders by teaching them to put customers first, go and see, ask “why?” and show respect.
A lean managerial theory: visualize activities; formulate problems; seek root cause; study countermeasures.
And so on…

But this entire paradigm is one in which the ultimate aim is not getting you to apply lean rules, but to get you to deliberately practice PDCA in order to deepen your own understanding of your job, business and industry.

Lean is a big tent, to borrow John Shook’s image, and so it should be. To answer directly your question, everyone in lean has their own perspective on lean because they are expressly encouraged to do so: formulating your own hypotheses is par for the course. The clincher is whether you relate your own ideas of lean to those expressed by those who have come before, in order to seek a deeper understanding of lean, or whether you fixate on your personal understanding and dismiss everyone else’s.

Each Lean Thinker is supposed to have his or her own take on lean. But each Lean Thinker is also supposed to constantly amend their views on the basis of the deep lean tradition as well as new evidence. Learning is a collaborative activity between teacher and student. In any paradigm based on learning, the teacher has the responsibility to teach, but the student must take the responsibility to learn. As the old joke goes, how many lean senseis does it take to change a light bulb? The answer is just one, but the light bulb has to really want to change.

Why Does Our Recognition Program Just Feel So Bad?

Thu, 25 Apr 2013 04:00:00 GMT

Dear Gemba Coach

My company has put an employee of the month program and other related efforts to reward good behavior. So why does it feel so bad?

First of all, sorry to hear the recognition program doesn’t feel good. I don’t know what the specifics of your case are, but this is not uncommon. I remember visiting a company that the CEO claimed to be completely value-driven. They talked about servant leadership and all that jazz, their company values were stenciled on the walls. And yet the atmosphere felt awful. No one would look you in the eye, everywhere you looked were grim faces, and when you talked to people, they would gripe about every problem as someone else’s fault.

I probably caught them on a bad day, but, indeed, human motivation and satisfaction at work is a topic where, as Chris Argyris pointed out long ago, the gap between espoused theory (what people say they believe in) and theory in use (what people actually do) can be large and consequential. The best intentions from management can easily have the opposite social effects. Unintended consequences are often a huge factor in this equation, which is why the first part of respecting people as human beings is to accept that to a large degree human beings are complex, often contradictory. Anything that you try to encourage people to subscribe will be affected by this dynamic.

Recognize The Problems with Recognition

Let’s return to lean basics. The starting point with recognition programs, as always, is: what problem are you trying to solve? Any manager worth his salt has a hunch that businesses or organizations are only as strong as the morale of those who work within them. Morale has to do with people’s ability to stick to their goals or with those of their organization, particularly in the face of opposition or hardship. Morale enables employees to give their best to the task at hand and has to do with such intangibles as enthusiasm, confidence or loyalty. Morale is not the same as motivation. Motivation is an individual drive to behave in a certain way, whereas morale has a collective dimension, such as esprit de corps. In this sense, employee-recognition programs are on the shortlist of classic morale-boosting measures. They’re meant to kill two birds with one stone by motivating employees through visible recognition – giving them something to strive for – as well as increasing the sense of belonging and fellowship within the company.

That’s the theory anyway. Unfortunately, like many measures directed at affecting people’s state of mind, it can easily turn into management wishful thinking. The lean take on such programs would be to start from the operator’s perspective: how does a worker look at any such effort? What would be our test method? Think of yourself faced with any proposed reward system. To buy into it you need to figure out:

Eligibility: am I up for it? You need to believe you are eligible for this reward, that it indeed concerns you.
Confidence: am I up to it? You also need to feel confident that what you’re asked to do is the right thing to do and that you’re confident you can do it.
Trust: am I likely to be rewarded? If you do perform, you need to be confident that there will be a reward and that you are likely to get it.
Satisfaction: should I care? Finally, you need to be convinced that the reward will actually make a difference to you, that you will be satisfied by it enough to care.

As you can see, it’s very easy to construe the program in radically different ways:

		Buy in	Opt out
Eligibility	It’s easy to participate – I see what they’re looking for and I clearly fit the bill		This stuff ain’t for me, it’s reserved for the managers’ pets.
Confidence	That’s what I need to do. Good idea. Sure I can.		Why would I want to do that in the first place? I could never do that.
Trust	Even if I don’t get the reward this time, I will next. Joe was rewarded, and for good reason – now I know what to do better.		Even if I did what they wanted, I would never get the reward – I know what they’re like.
Satisfaction	Look at that, it’s really nice. Cool!		Look at that, it’s pitiful. Who do they take me for?

Compounding the difficulty, a recognition program is typically more a pat on the back than a hard cash reward . For it to work, the person giving the pat on the back must be respected by the employee. All in all, recognition programs aim to engage staff in certain behaviors, by recognizing their efforts publicly and by reinforcing the feeling of being part of a team. The risk is that they disengage people by coming across as a management raindance to reward brownnosers for playing the game well in pretending to do whatever absurd management thing top dogs have demanded as a sign of loyalty.

Many Losers

There’s no secret trick for addressing morale. Lean thinking explicitly considers that employee satisfaction is the key to customer satisfaction. The lean approach to employee satisfaction is to provide employees fulfilling work, secure working conditions and fair treatment. A large part of this comes down to managers creating the right workplace conditions. Employee’s part is to:

Follow safety rules
Master standardized work
Call out abnormalities
Be involved in kaizen efforts
Make suggestions

From that point of view, holding recognition events and awards makes a lot of sense, but something as vague as “employee of the month” feels abstract—that the criteria for this is a challenge to define it in a way that aligns with desired actions. To fulfill the eligibility, confidence, trust, and satisfaction criteria, the more specific the award the better. You must also make sure that evaluation is against hard targets, not soft appreciation. Any hint of favoritism or exclusion will simply backfire and turn your award system into what you seem to describe (for instance, “employee of the month” is hard to quantify against a specific goal.)

Awards are always tricky: on the one hand they’re an excellent way to reinforce the direction you wish to go by placing role models on a podium, on the other, every award creates a single winner and many losers. If you have any recognition award system in place, make sure you fit it within a PDCA structure that checks how you’re doing against your goals in creating the awards. After each recognition event, find a way to estimate whether you’ve affected:

Task significance: do people (beyond the person receiving the award) consider the activity rewarded more significant to themselves and the company, equally significant or less significant?
Empowerment: do people feel empowered by the event? Do they feel that they have the autonomy to make a difference? Or do they feel disenfranchised and victims of a stifling and unfair system?
Mutual trust: do people feel they belong to a common tribe, with a common destiny and trust in capable leaders? Or do they feel they are in a me-against-them zero sum game and that the only way to move forward is to look out for number one and/or curry favor with management?

At the end of the day any award system or recognition event is a celebration of belonging to the same company and sharing a commonality of fate – which is a large part of morale, over and beyond individual motivation. As such, people will interpret the award system according to their prior feelings towards the company: do they respect the management giving the award? Do they enjoy working with their colleagues? Do they feel they’re treated fairly by the company as a whole? Does the company represent a larger project they want to be part of?

The answers to such questions make a large difference to how the award system is perceived by whom it means to recognize. To paraphrase a retired general: if leaders are competent and troops are confident then morale is good – and the award program should work as planned. If not, beware of setting up any such system.