Ask uninformed managers about the benefit of lean management and they will say cutting costs and inventory reduction.  Ask deeply engaged lean managers, and they will say culture and value. They’re both right! In this workshop, Jean Cunningham, a recognized pioneer in lean accounting, will show you the connection between lean management principles and 5 critical improvements in financial performance.  

Jean will share examples from each of the 5 areas and show you how to use “the profit model,” a visual template for describing to colleagues, team members, and senior leaders how specific lean efforts positively affect bottom-line drivers.

You’ll learn:

• How to apply the profit model to your specific situation.
• How to explain the ways that lean management actually accelerates improved financial performance.
• On a deeper level, how lean is not just about cost cutting and savings, but about growth.
• What short and long-term financial outcomes to expect from the changes being made.
• How to more effectively describe lean management’s positive financial impact whether you are a manager, financial professional, executive, or lean leader at any level.

When you make sub-sea remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) that install and maintain underwater oil wells and infrastructure, you have to contend with ocean turbulence. But you don’t have to put up with process turbulence in new product development.

So when FMC Technologies Schilling Robotics began applying lean principles to product development a year ago, it didn’t aim for goals like lower costs or less time. It wanted less rework, less warranty issues, less nonproductive time on the job site – in other words – less turbulence -- a smoother, more predictable launch schedule.

At this session Dave and Schilling engineers will give you a mid-project update on how the effort is progressing as they approach the key milestone of a prototype hardware test. You’ll also learn:

• How the “turbulence” in this new product launch compares to past ones.  
• What experiments the launch team ran – and what happened.
• How team members use an obeya room and a weekly meeting to drive alignment through the enterprise – and why this is superior to the “whiteboard meetings” of the past.
• How team members use a plan-do-check-adjust loop to continually improve the flow of the obeya meeting.
• The product launch roles of key tools such as set-based design, user experience interviews, A3 thinking, kaizen, and process flow mapping.
• How engineering is involved with manufacturing floor kaizen.
• How LEI’s Lean Product and Process Development group is helping.

Big company systems and structures were developed in and optimized for the Industrial Age. But, we’re no longer in the Industrial Age.  Markets are volatile, customers more agile, and companies face increased uncertainty. To survive, we must understand customers better and move faster. This is true from the frontlines to the C-suite and from product innovation to internal processes. Lean Innovation provides a new way of working to reduce uncertainty and develop deep customer insights.

In this session, Brant will cover the basics of Lean Innovation, what acting like a startup really means, and how to protect your core business, while discovering how to create new value for customers. You’ll learn:

• What is “entrepreneurial spirit”
• Why are startup skills necessary in established companies now; what’s different about today.
• What are the particular challenges big companies face.
• How to overcome the challenges.
• How to balance learning with execution throughout the enterprise.

You’ll understand how to develop empathy and design purpose-built experiments to gain deep customer insights and reduce risk in developing new value for customers. You’ll also cover specific, actionable steps to spread this new way of working.

Designed for people who are looking for new paths of growth and who believe in innovating the business itself, this session will benefit senior leaders, product professionals, operational specialists, and innovators.

You have to have a compelling reason to get people to change. Regardless of industry; relationship building, message delivery, and connecting with the process are critical to success and are key factors in establishing trust and credibility. This is especially true in a nonprofit like the San Diego Zoo Global. And while you may not hear the word lean in any of their facilities, you can certainly see it in the culture.

When you are the lone continuous improvement person in your organization, you don’t want to be thought of as ‘the problem solver,’ you want to create problem solvers. Creating problem solvers makes change sustainable as you cannot be everywhere at the same time. Jeff Foster, director of performance improvement at the San Diego Zoo Global has developed a simple system for spreading the trust, credibility, and learning generated from solving problems together with other departments, by breaking through silos and cross utilization.

And it all starts with communication. Jeff has developed 8 ways to approach people about making change, from appealing to their passions with animal care givers, to fueling the data need for the data-driven executives.

You will learn:

• The importance of soft skills, trust, and getting your hands dirty
• The power and leverage of credible influence
• 8 ways to engage with different personality types
• How to introduce lean tools to people who have not heard of lean
• How to spread the benefits of a successful project across any functional departments
• How to maintain gains through continued follow up, communication, and staying focused on true north

Effective leadership requires a dual focus: achieve great results through great behavior. Fostering the right behavior in others requires solid relationships built on trust, respect, transparency, and consistency. The results you need to achieve can only be reached through the efforts of your people. As people learn new skills and build with leaders a workplace that supports the courage and vulnerability required to learn, practice, and master the core practices of leading with respect, results and healthy relationships with workers, customers, and suppliers are natural outcomes.

Leading with respect involves awareness of our focus and intention, and how well we are connecting with people to create an environment of mutual trust and sustained high levels of performance. If you are a lean champion, CI professional, organizational development practioner, manager, or senior leader, check out this fast-paced, experiential session, with lean practitioner Mike Orzen, to discover:

• The 7 core practices of how to lead with respect, introduced in the book, Lead with Respect, a novel of lean practice -

1. Go and See for Yourself
2. Create Meaningful Challenge
3. Effective Listening
4. Teaching and Coaching
5. Supporting Others
6. Fostering Teamwork
7. Learning as a Leader

• Why leading with respect is essential to a successful transformation.
• Why true leading with respect is often misunderstood.
• What respect looks like in practice at work.
• How respect positively impacts people to drive lasting change.
• Vivid examples and experiences that bring lean leadership from intellectual understanding to daily behaviors.

Due to its stable growth, Toys “R” Us was facing challenges with its supply chain performance, including:

• Market pressure to be fast, innovative, and flexible (especially during the holiday rush).
• A reactive culture.
• Increasing customer expectations such as free shipping, smaller lead times, greater SKU selection, and better quality.
• Unsustained corporate tools and initiatives.

Learn how this retailer engaged it’s supply chain organization in lean thinking, applied problem solving, and end-to-end supply chain collaboration with 1,800+ managers and frontline team members, resulting in:

• A road map to continuous culture transformation with purpose clarity, proactive leadership, lean learning, cross-functional collaboration, and supply chain-wide problem solving
• A reduction in total supply chain cost.
• The foundation to build the right management systems and continue its fast-paced growth while improving satisfaction, margins, efficiency, and competitive advantage

By attending this learning session, you’ll start to see your organization and teams differently, while having a deeper understanding of lean thinking and the power of people.

Whether it’s your email inbox bursting at the seams or the need to make decisions against a backdrop of increasing complexity and uncertainty, leadership in 2017 requires focus and clarity, flexibility, and creativity. Yet 66% of employees report difficulty focusing on tasks at work because of stress, which has been called the “health epidemic of the 21st century” by the World Health Organization and is estimated to cost American businesses some $300 billion a year.

There’s been an explosion of research showing how mindfulness meditation, the practice of cultivating deliberate, focused attention on the present moment, improves focus, attention, and other skills necessary for high performance, while reducing stress and anxiety. It’s no surprise that from sports teams to corporate boardrooms, manufacturing floors to operating rooms, organizations and individuals around the world are joining the mindfulness movement to optimize performance at work and happiness in life.

In this experiential and interactive workshop, you’ll learn:

• What mindfulness is - and isn’t.
• The hard science and research supporting the business and health benefits of mindfulness, including how it contributes to brain health.
• How mindfulness supports coaching and problem-solving helping you step back and explore if your team has identified a workable solution – and then go even further – were the right questions asked in the first place?
• How mindfulness naturally leads to greater respect for people, a pillar of successful lean transformations.
• How Amy and Mark have benefitted professionally and personally from practicing mindfulness.

You’ll return to work able to:

• Increase your focus, flexibility, concentration, and clarity by practicing attention training exercises.
• Better manage difficult emotions, triggers, and stress, to improve your decision-making.
• Improve team communication by applying tools like mindful listening and thoughtful inquiry.

Whether we're in business, government, or healthcare, we tend to seek to optimize our processes, but no team can be optimized while the individual team members remain in a state of chaos. Unclear direction, overwork, lack of collaboration, and process fatigue can weigh down individuals and teams, causing sluggish performance, increased defects, and low morale.

This 90-minute class will introduce lean principles and tools to better manage personal and project work so it circumvents chaos, communication breakdowns, and low morale. Creator of Personal Kanban, Jim Benson, author for of the Shingo Award-winning book Personal Kanban: Mapping Work | Navigating Life, will introduce this lean tool to understand, plan, and act on the options available to us, our teams, and our organizations.

The course will discuss:

• The System of Profound Knowledge
• Understand systems thinking, variation, and psychology as they apply to knowledge work.
• Personal Kanban as a Personal Framework
• Discover Personal Kanban as a framework for understanding value-stream maps, work-in-process limits, and cognitive theories such as single-loop and double-loop learning.
• Visualizing Work
• Learn the benefits of using a visual system for work completion, quality, reporting, collaboration, and peace of mind. We cover value-stream mapping and the identification of work item types resulting in the creation of your own Personal Kanban.
• Limiting Work-in-Process
• Learn how to visualize the impacts of overwork, multitasking, context switching, and repetitive tasks. We discuss the Lean concept of flow, valuing completion with quality over simply starting tasks.
• The Psychology of Work
• Recognize the impacts of overwork, multitasking, context switching, and repetition on knowledge workers, as well as cognitive biases that impact effectiveness and planning.

Surfers tend to take a loose, relaxed attitude toward work so imagine the reaction when lean practitioner Sammy Obara introduced surfing school instructors near San Diego to the idea of having curriculum standards with precise specifications, outcomes, and timing. They were skeptical to say the least.

"The culture was averse to a standardized approach" not only to pre-instruction steps like uniformly processing registrations but to timing the pace of instruction, Obara said. "For example, they didn't want to wear watches because they believed they could manage just as well by watching the sun.

But Sammy was able to get the laid-back culture to accept basic lean concepts that cut wait times, increased student surfing time, expanded class capacity, and ultimately, boosted revenue. Dude, imagine what Sammy can do for you and your team!

You’ll learn:

• How to apply the 4 elements that constitute lean management’s DNA: 

1. Standards with precise specifications, establishing content, timing, outcome.
2. Connections between processes, must be unambiguous.
3. Pathways: Information and material with a direct and clear pathway between processes.
4. Root cause analysis of all problems at the lowest possible level.

• How a lean culture helps you to involve associates in a continuous improvement initiative with less effort and more engagement.
• How to prepare your organization’s existing cultural to embrace lean changes with these critical first steps.
• How to make the changes stick, including “behind-the-scenes” examples from Toyota about how it promotes a kaizen culture internally. 
• The most common mistakes that will cause your lean effort to wipe out.

If you and your team don’t like fixing the same problems over and over, come learn how TaylorMade-adidas Golf stopped such rework and its frustration by applying the potent A3 problem-solving method.

Chad, Kevin, and a guest A3 user will share their first-hand experiences with this powerful communication and problem-solving process. They’ll detail the A3 approach at TaylorMade-adidas Golf and the positive impact it continues to have on its management system, leadership behaviors, customer engagement, and culture. You’ll learn:

• How concisely identifying, framing, and describing a problem on a single sheet of A3 paper ended a “shotgun” problem-solving approach of jumping to conclusions and implementing solutions that couldn’t be sustained for the long term.
• The positive impact that the A3 process has on all aspects of the Lean Transformation Framework and company culture.
• The benefits of how A3 management creates a common language for kaizen events and a common approach for problem solving.
• Reasons why managers and executives love the approach.
• How the A3 process helps managers and employees ask better questions while encouraging a coaching relationship.
• The implementation approach used and challenges faced along the way.

In this unique Learning Session, the 365 Café team will explain how they have applied lean in a pure service environment. The Barcelona-based 365 Cafe is a chain of little cafés and bakeries with one production center supporting all 78 of them. After applying lean in the bread and pastry factory, Team365 quickly realized that it could apply the same approach to every shop.

Lean techniques have allowed the company to not only grow in a competitive market, but to beat the competition on service, quality, and price, applying such methods as pull systems, supermarket management, standardized work, A3s, and visual management of the entire supply chain. 

You will learn:

• How stock in shops and facilities was drastically reduced by 50 to 80%.
• How productivity was increased without working more.
• How leader standard work was implemented.
• How visual management in the shop was established.
• What the team has learned after one year into a formal hoshin process.
• How the unique “zero space for waste” policy works in both facilities and shops.

Learn the secret to replicating the cultural DNA of discipline and accountability used by leadership at Toyota and how to apply it when you return to work. Tracey and Ernie Richardson, both veterans of Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky and authors of the new book Toyota’s Engagement Equation, will reveal what they learned from years of working with Toyota trainers and managers.

They'll show you:

• How to apply SDCA (Standardize – Do – Check – Act) to create standards and accountability where they don’t exist in processes. (SDCA is a necessary pre-cursor to PDCA and an indispensable element of true kaizen.)
• How to play your part in creating the cultural DNA of discipline and accountability with a formula for developing leader standardized work.
• How to grasp the importance of E? (Everyday-Everybody-Engaged) in changing and sustaining a continuous improvement culture.
• How to weave an 8-step problem-solving process into PDCA so team members spot abnormalities at a glance. 
• What you absolutely must do to prevent a gemba walk from becoming a workplace “tour.”
• How to “grasp the situation” and frame problems correctly in order to do PDCA effectively – and how you and others -- regardless of function -- must measure the success or shortcomings of lean activities. 
• How to manage “large scope” (world hunger) type problems with the A3 process.

More Learning Sessions to be announced!