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Collective Ignorance: On the Razor’s Edge

July 7, 2014 by Joel A. Gross Leave a Comment

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Tweetable Tips from @TheKaiZone brings you quick-hit, high-impact lessons to improve your lean practice.  The learning is short, sweet – and best of all – sharable!  And if you find the tips to be useful, simply use the ‘”Click to Tweet” link within the post to share the learning with others!  

Famous ‘Razors’ in Human History

william-of-ockham1852:  Despite meeting his end more than 500 years prior, William of Ockham becomes the namesake for Occam’s Razor, the principle that guides us, in true K.I.S.S. fashion, to avoid complicating theories with additional assumptions when a simpler explanation will fit the observations.

 

Razor Ramon1992: Scott Hall, a.k.a. Razor Ramon, makes his professional wrestling debut.  In more than four years with the World Wrestling Federation, he wins 4 championships and shows the world what happens when you mess with the bad guy.

 

 

mach-3-blades-8

2003: Gillette debuts the M3 Power, the 432nd incarnation in the Mach 3 line of shaving products.  At a time when the shaving experience couldn’t get any less enjoyable, the M3 Power was the first razor to feature an annoying battery-powered hum and finger-numbing vibration.

 

OK, so outside of an occasional reference to Occam’s Razor, the ‘razors’ on this list have not had much of an impact within the Lean community.  Well, my friends, that’s all about to change.  Move over Occam.  There’s a new razor in town. [Read more…]

 

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Filed Under: The KaiZone Way, Tweetable Tips Tagged With: blame, hanlon's razor, just culture, occham's razor, respect for people

The Bucket Model: 3 Steps to Become a Productivity Master

June 18, 2014 by Joel A. Gross Leave a Comment

Tips for Increasing Personal Productivity and Time ManagementPersonal Productivity Pointers give you the tips and tricks that productivity masters use to get more things done.  Using Lean thinking to keep your ideas and your outputs flowing, you’ll turn your to-do list into a to-done list.  It’s like a shot of espresso for your daily grind.

Want to know the secret to making the most of your capacity for personal productivity?  Get a bucket!

Yes, you read that correctly.  A bucket.  Not what you were expecting?  Allow me to explain.  Although there is not much to be learned form the bucket itself, masters of productivity know that it’s how you fill the bucket that counts.

[Read more…]

 

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Filed Under: Personal Productivity, The KaiZone Way Tagged With: bucket model, mindsets, personal productivity

Acting Ourselves to a New Way of Thinking

June 11, 2014 by Joel A. Gross 2 Comments

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Every month, Tweetable Tips from @TheKaiZone brings you a quick-hit, high-impact lesson to improve your lean practice.  The learning is short, sweet – and best of all – sharable!  And if you find the tips to be useful, simply use the ‘”Click to Tweet” link within the post to share the learning with others!  

Conventional wisdom tells us that, if we want to change what we do, we need to first change how we think about those things.  It is a commonly held belief that our thoughts dictate our actions.  Therefore, as Lean practitioners, we spend a great deal of time and energy attempting to influence the thinking of others in order to drive changes in their behaviors.  The problem, as is often the case in the Lean world, is that conventional wisdom is wrong.  Dead wrong.

Take for example, health behavior.  We all know that we should eat healthy and exercise; but how well do these thoughts lead to changes in our behavior?  Obviously, not as well as most of us would hope.  According to the field of behavioral psychology, we are all subject to an “intention-behavior gap” that causes a significant discrepancy between what we intend to do and what we actually do.  While the underlying causes of the intention-behavior gap are not fully understood, research has identified several factors that narrow the gap, creating a stronger correlation between our actions and our thinking.

Research suggests that we can close the intention-behavior gap by increasing self-efficacy (the extent to which we believe we can complete a task or achieve a goal) and through the planning and execution of our actions.  In other words, behavior change occurs by believing that we can change, and then by simply taking planned action.  In this model of behavior, the gap does not close because our thinking drives changes in our actions, it closes because the outcomes of our actions, relative to our expectations, changes our thinking.

Therefore, the next time you are tasked with driving change at an individual, team or organizational level, focus on creating the right actions, routines and habits in those affected, rather than by influencing the prevailing beliefs or thinking.  And remember,

It’s easier to act ourselves to a new way of thinking than think ourselves to a new way of acting

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Filed Under: The KaiZone Way, Tweetable Tips Tagged With: behavior change, change management, lean thinking, tweetable tips

The Pareto Problem

June 2, 2014 by Joel A. Gross 2 Comments

The Giving Tree

The world, according to Vilfredo Pareto:

 At the bottom of the wealth curve, men and women starve and children die young. In the broad middle of the curve all is turmoil and motion: people rising and falling, climbing by talent or luck and falling by alcoholism, tuberculosis and other kinds of unfitness. At the very top sit the elite of the elite, who control wealth and power for a time – until they are unseated through revolution or upheaval by a new aristocratic class. There is no progress in human history. Democracy is a fraud. Human nature is primitive, emotional, unyielding. The smarter, abler, stronger, and shrewder take the lion’s share. The weak starve, lest society become degenerate: One can compare the social body to the human body, which will promptly perish if prevented from eliminating toxins.

Mr. Pareto was many things: an engineer, a sociologist, a political scientist, an economist, a philosopher, a mathematician and an all-around mega-mind.  However, an optimist he was not.  His scathing observations on the unequal distribution of wealth and power throughout human history would fuel the emergence of the Fascist party, inspiring would-be dictator Benito Mussolini on his rise to power in Italy.

Pareto is perhaps best known in today’s world for his association with the 80-20 Rule.  Near the dawn of the 20th century, Pareto developed a mathematical formula based on the observation that, throughout human history, about 20% of the people tended to control 80% of the total wealth.  In the late 1940’s, business management consultant Dr. Joseph Juran discovered Pareto’s work and used it to evangelize a strategy for quality improvement based on his observation that 80% of defects  tend to come from only 20% the sources.  He would name his idea the Pareto Principle.

Today, Pareto Principle, has evolved from a simple quality improvement strategy to a popular and widely-adopted philosophy for the conduct of business and even for life. Pareto thinking dictates that by focusing our efforts on the critical few inputs (the 20%), we maximize the impact of our efforts by generating – or eliminating – the majority of the outputs (the other 80%).  Ironically, in stark contrast to its namesake, it’s an idea that has endured because of the optimism it creates, and not because of its effectiveness as a management philosophy.

In the world of continuous improvement, the Pareto Principle is pervasive, as is evidenced by the widespread use of its graphical representation, the Pareto Chart.  While it’s certainly appealing to hope for the existence of, in Juran’s words, the “critical few and the trivial many”, it is simply not an effective or desirable strategy for sustainable improvement.  Here are three ways in which Pareto thinking may be undermining your improvement efforts:

 Pareto Promotes Paralysis

There’s a little-known corollary to the Pareto Principle, which I have dubbed the Pareto Chart Principle based on my real world observations on how we tend to apply Pareto thinking.  Please refer to the figure below.

Pareto Chart Principle

The Pareto Chart Principle states that, when creating a Pareto Chart to assist in solving a problem, we spend:

  • 80% of our time making the graph
  • 10% of our time analyzing the results
  • 5% of our time denying that the bars could all be the same height
  • 3% of our time cursing the damn bars for all being the same height
  • 1.5% of our time making the case that the data were meaningless to begin with.

And after all of that, the remaining time is what we typically devote to taking action to improve the situation.  For your convenience, I have colored the bars in Figure 1: red indicates non-value added work and green indicates value-added work.  Please don’t strain yourself looking for the value-added work.

In my experience, it is not uncommon to see organizations take weeks or even months to collect and analyze the data required to construct a meaningful Pareto analysis.  Why do we invest so much time?  We do it to make sure that we are only working on the critical few inputs – those that are creating 80% of the problems.  In other words, we try to save time by wasting time.

But here’s the catch.  If the Pareto problem is indeed true, there’s an 80% chance that any problem we address will be caused by the critical few that we seek.  Why waste weeks or months performing an analysis that would only tell us what we would be highly likely – 80% to be exact – to discover by taking action at the onset of a problem?  And even if we would spend time working on lower priority problems, that time is still value-added and contributes to our learning and the development of our people.

Unless the analysis can be done on the gemba in real-time, ditch the Pareto chart. Save time and add value by maintaining a bias toward action.

Pareto Tells Us Only What Used to Be

As Mr. Shigeo Shingo wrote, when solving problems,

“We need to remember that neither the past, nor the future, is written in stone.” ~Shigeo Shingo

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All things, problems and processes included, change with time.  Problems do not exist in isolation, waiting to be picked off one-by-one.  Problems are connected, interdependent and layered; when we solve one problem we uncover new ones and the effects produce new and different outcomes.

Remember that a Pareto analysis provides only a snapshot in time.  For all intents and purposes, it presents a view of the world that no longer exists.  And the longer that it has been since the data were captured, the less accurate the image becomes.

Although some processes change faster than others, remember that the only truly accurate view of reality is now.  Focus on solving today’s problem, because there is no guarantee that yesterday’s problems will be tomorrow’s problems.

Pareto Thinking is Myopic

Perhaps the greatest flaw in Pareto thinking is its tendency to make us short-sighted.  All too often, in seeking the critical few, what we are actually looking for are the quick-wins and the low-hanging fruit.  We chase the biggest bang for our buck, but we fail to realize that the fruit will eventually be picked clean, and the quick wins won’t always be so quick.  This approach to improvement only works in the short-term.  To fight clichés with cliché, what happens when the going gets tough?  Unfortunately, the tough and the not-so-tough alike all get going.  And not in a good way.

What inevitably occurs is the downfall of short-term continuous improvement strategies, and the pattern is very predictable.

Short Term Improvement Cycle

Because we fail to develop the requisite skills in our people to address increasingly more complex problems, the initial results generated by quick wins are not sustainable.  And in the absence of a long-term management commitment, the pattern continues until the very program itself is questioned and ultimately follows suit.

We often fail to realize that Lean is about the people and the journey more than it is the results.  Along the way, it is the concept of True North that provides direction for our actions.  Long-term commitment to continuous improvement requires the endless the pursuit of our True North ideals.  On the path to True North, all problems must eventually be solved.  Do not waste time going around problems to figure out which one to solve first; take the long-term view of addressing each problem as it is encountered, learning from it, and moving on to the next.

Conclusion

Think twice the next time you have the urge to create a Pareto chart to address your problems.  Pareto thinking prevents us from taking action by telling us what we would have been likely to discover by taking action in the first place; it keeps us looking backwards, rather than looking to the future and staying ahead of our problems.  And it contributes to the short-term thinking that hinders our learning and the development of our people.

Perhaps the greatest condemnation of the Pareto Principle came from Dr. Juran himself.  Citing the tendency for organizations to ignore the other 80% of causes, Juran actually changed his terminology from “the vital few and the trivial many” to “the vital few and the useful many”.  Indeed the other 80% is useful, as it represents our level of commitment towards improvement. Only when we commit to addressing the whole of our problems over a long time horizon do we truly commit to continuous improvement.

P.S. My very LEANable Wife recently started a blog, asimplyenchantinglife.com where she will be linking to some of the posts that I write here at The KaiZone in order to put her own spin on how they can be applied within the home.  Read her take on the Pareto Problem here.  And do subscribe to her blog for more great Lean @ Home content.

 

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Filed Under: The KaiZone Way, The Lean Learning Journey Tagged With: improvement strategy, low-hanging fruit, pareto charts, problem solving, quick wins, shingo

THE QUESTION: How Will You Make Time for Improvement?

May 19, 2014 by Joel A. Gross 1 Comment

hourglass

Can you hear that?  Listen closely.

It starts off quite softly.  It’s just a whisper.  Certainly, no one is threatened by a whisper.  But as the journey begins, it grows.  The rumble is ominous.  Slowly, but yet suddenly, it becomes undeniable.  Everyone hears it; they can almost feel it.  It echoes far and wide, piercing the airwaves from the shop floor to the C-suite.  Left unaddressed, it has the power to end the journey before it can ever really begin.

It is a question.  No, it is THE QUESTION.  And in due time, every organization on the path to True North will have to answer:  How will you make time for improvement?

A few weeks ago, a version of THE QUESTION was posted on the Lean Edge:

As CEO of my company I have a grasp of lean and have experienced it in my career, but now that I’m CEO, I find it difficult to ask my people to make time for improvement work. They’re already completely busy doing their regular work. Moreover, this company is in the outdoor sports industry, and many people join these companies because they want time to climb, backpack, canoe, etc., and I’m reluctant to ask them to work more hours and sacrifice time for these activities. Any advice?

THE QUESTION invited many responses from amongst the absolute best and brightest Lean thinkers in existence today.  Do read each response in its entirety . . . that is, if you can find the time.

  • Tracey Richardson: If you don’t have time to do it right first time, when will you have time to do it over?
  • Jeff Liker: The key is to learn to level the workload for improvement
  • Karen Martin: Start the conversation
  • Mark Graban: No time for improvement? Then find time
  • Jon Miller: No Time for Kaizen? Check Your Assumptions
  • Sammy Obara: Continuous improvement is more than repetitive improvement
  • Dave Meier: In Toyota improvement ideas and efforts were expected but voluntary
  • Art Smalley: This is honestly more about leadership than lean
  • Pascal Dennis: Kaizen is the work
  • Michael Ballé: Lean is the strategy!
  • Dan Jones: Finding Time For Improvements
  • Mike Rother: Next Generation Lean Practice

Although each author does present a slightly different argument, there is a general consensus around a few key points which I summarize below:

  • In the current state, organizations find time to do the work, yet assume (or choose) that they have no additional time to improve the work.
  • There is much time wasted in how the work is done now, which is time that could and should be used to improve the work.
  • Leaders must see that improving the work is a priority, is not optional, and needs to be part of how the work is done.
  • Therefore, leaders must choose to find or make time available for improvement or suffer the consequences of failing to keep pace with an ever-changing world and falling behind the competition.

Admittedly, I have no business finding fault with any of the much esteemed Lean thought leaders above.  However, after reading through their collective responses, I feel that further dialogue on the topic is warranted.  My primary concern stems from a principle that practitioners of “real Lean” already know all too well: there are no shortcuts on the journey to Lean.

Many of the authors suggest that those who lack time for improvement do so because of a choice that they have made – or have not made – or that they have not sufficiently prioritized doing otherwise.  I do not disagree with these points.  However, although it may not have been the message the authors were intending to deliver – although, upon scrutinizing the arguments several times, I cannot help but to believe that some did – readers may be led to believe that improving upon the current condition is simply a matter of making better choices or setting clearer priorities.  Unfortunately, however, this line of logic does not hold, and Mr. Rother even goes so far to provide a short clip that explains why not.

Repeat after me.  There are no shortcuts on the journey to lean.

Although the desire to dedicate time for improvement may start with choice, commitment and alignment of priorities, the actual time will not simply follow suit.  Eliminating what we don’t want, will not necessarily get us what we do want; rather, we need to actively pursue what it is that we desire.  We need to frame THE QUESTION in the same way that we would any other organizational imperative:  as a challenge which should be approached with a thorough understanding of the current condition in conjunction with many, many cycles of learning.  I tip my cap again to Mr. Rother for providing this framework for improvement.

When we approach THE QUESTION not as a question, but as an organizational challenge, it becomes clear that there is no single, simple solution.  The actions that can be taken to dedicate time for improvement are prescribed by the current condition of the organization through the practice of PDCA at the leadership level.  As Mr. Liker has recently written, “Since Plan-Do-Check-Act is the process needed to carry out sustainable improvement at all levels, it requires skilled practitioners at all levels—from the C-suite to the working level.”  The process for improvement should not be different in the board room than it is on the shop floor.  Therefore, THE QUESTION provides perhaps the single greatest opportunity for leaders to practice and develop the same skills that are required throughout the rest organization: Plan, Do, Check, Adjust – and repeat.

Indeed, THE QUESTION for organizations on the path to Lean is how will you make time for improvement?  Leaders of these organizations need to be aware that they alone must answer THE QUESTION, but that the answers will not come easy. The journey may start with choice, and commitment and prioritization, but the distance can only be covered one step at a time through many cycles of learning and understanding.  In this way, leaders do not walk their own path; rather, the shared approach to improvement unites all individuals across all levels of an organization on the same Lean journey.

According to John Maxwell, “a leader is one who knows the way, goes the way, and shows the way”.  The leader who does not answer THE QUESTION, who does not make time for improvement, risks falling behind, while the organization sets its own course.  Know that it may be difficult or even impossible to catch back up.  After all, there are no shortcuts on the journey to Lean.

 

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Filed Under: Leading on the Path, The KaiZone Way Tagged With: improvement, journey, leadership, the question, time

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