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What Six Lean Experts – and Me – Have to Say About Kaizen

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Friends of the KaiZone

Recently, I was asked to guest post by fellow Lean blogger and Friend of TheKaiZone, Eric Raio, on his Factory Solutions blog.  Eric posed the following question to six of the world’s foremost Lean authors and thought leaders . . . and me, too:

What is one low-hanging fruit you can solve with kaizen?

You can find my thoughts below, and for the article in its entirety, be sure to check out Eric’s site at Factorysolutions.com.

Kaizen: Beware the Low-Hanging Fruit

Almost all new kaizen programs begin with the search for the proverbial low-hanging fruit, and understandably so.  It just makes sense that we start by reaping the biggest reward for the least amount of effort, doesn’t it?  Perhaps not.  While the low-hanging fruit might seem enticing, caution must be exercised not to become dependent on the high-reward, low-effort model of improvement.  Allow me to explain. [Read more…]

 

Agile Kaizen: Speeding Up Continuous Improvement

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Friends of the KaiZoneIn the first ever edition of Friends of The KaiZone, we are honored to welcome Jens R. Woinowski as a special guest contributor.

Jens R. Woinowski of LeanSelf.org

Jens R. Woinowski has been in the IT business for more than 20 years and is currently quality and risk manager at a major IT company. While studying and applying lean principles as part of his job, Woinowski discovered that lean management principles were as relevant in personal life as in business. In his blog Lean Self he shares insights of this discovery to the public.

One core principle of Lean is continuous improvement. While in theory the idea is simple and tools like A3s support it, the reality is much more complicated. As long as non-trivial processes are involved, the risk of slow or failed improvement is high. Agile Kaizen, which is suggested in this post, may be the answer to speed up and raise the chances of sustainable change.

What is broken continuous improvement?

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If you have seen enough continuous improvement activities in real life, you may have seen this anti-pattern:

[Read more…]

 

Kaizen: The Cure for Big Problem Syndrome

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Picture1How do you eat an elephant?  Of course the answer is one bite at a time.  But now answer a slightly different question . . . What would your organization’s strategy be for eating an elephant?  Still many, small bites?  Likely not.  Most organizations are hungry and impatient.  They need sustenance and they need it now.  The elephant is one mammoth morsel , and eating it demands an overly-complicated, ultra-expensive, ultra-high-speed, custom elephant-eating doohickey contracted out to the lowest-bidder.  It’s the anti-kaizen approach.

What is Kaizen

If you’re part of the typical organization, chances are that you have a distorted understanding of the true meaning of kaizen.  Many view kaizen as a rigorous, multi-day, workshop where a dysfunctional cross-functional team is locked in a room until the sticky notes have all been stuck and the implementation plan looks impressive enough to sell to the executive team, only to be forgotten about once every one returns to their day job.  That is not kaizen; that is a kaizen event.  There is a difference, and it’s not trivial.

Kaizen is a philosophy.  Kaizen is a mindset.  Kaizen is a way of thinking.  Kaizen engages everybody, not the chosen few picked to attend an event.  Kaizen addresses the problems we face every day, not just the few that get the attention of the most senior levels of management.  Whereas the traditional improvement strategies dictate a focus on only the biggest problems plaguing an organization, the foundation of the kaizen approach is one of continuous improvement achieved through many, small, rapid cycles of learning.

Given that time, money and resources are always in short supply, the ruthless prioritization of just the biggest problems seems only logical.  However, a deeper analysis of the approach reveals it to be the underlying cause of many systemic issues that plague traditional organizations.  I call it Big Problem Syndrome and it has three primary symptoms.

Underdeveloped People

Big problems syndrome consumes tremendous quantities of time and resources.  Because of the massive time commitment required, there must be a separation between those working towards the solutions to the big problems, and those that do the work.

The people who run the process are seldomly engaged in the problem solving efforts.  Their mental focus is limited to the tasks needed to do the work, rather than being leveraged as an asset for improving how the work is performed.  Because idle minds are not developing minds, the human capacity to learn and improve is almost completely wasted in these individuals.  Rather than being developed to add value, the front line staff is reduced to just another cost on the balance sheet to be reduced or eliminated.

Those engaged in solving of the big problems do not fare much better.  We achieve personal development through many, many cycles of practice and feedback that drives us to a new way of thinking.  By focusing only on a few, large problems, the opportunities to receive the feedback required to complete the cycles of learning are severely limited.  Even worse, long timelines delay the receipt of any feedback that is generated for weeks, months or even years.   As such, the few opportunities for learning that do exist are absent of the context necessary to change the learner’s established patterns of thinking.

The result, in both cases, is a failure to develop our greatest asset.

Poor Process Knowledge

Organizations are defined by the processes that they perform.  Therefore, the level of knowledge and understanding we have of our processes governs our ability, for example, to adapt to changes in the environment, to better meet the needs of our customers, to improve our operational performance, or to take advantage of new opportunities.

Our process knowledge changes in two general ways: 1.) from the experience gained over time from operating and maintaining the current process, and 2.) from observing the effects of changes to the process.  While knowledge is universally gained through experience, not all process changes add to our understanding.

In the book Thinking, Fast and Slow, Nobel Prize winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman establishes the following about the human condition:

A general limitation of the human mind is its imperfect ability to reconstruct past states of knowledge.  Once you adopt a new view of the world (or any part of it), you immediately lose much of your ability to recall what you used to believe before your mind changed.

Large problems yield similarly large and complex solutions.  Rather than improving from the current state of our processes, our tendency is to create an entirely new process state to address the big problems.  In doing so, not only do we lose much of the knowledge that existed in the past state, but we are unable to learn from the conversion to the new current state process.

When multiple variables change in a short period of time, it becomes difficult, if not impossible to isolate the effect of individual changes.  Thus, even if the results after the changes show an improvement over the past state, we have lost the opportunity to understand what has driven the improvement.  Consequently, we know less about our processes after the changes than we did before, which puts us at a significant disadvantage when facing future problems that may arise, or when trying to drive further improvements to the process.

Conversely, the kaizen approach allows us to improve one step at a time from a single current state.  Our view of the world does not change, it is only refined from our progress, and thus there is no loss of knowledge along the way.   On the contrary, because small changes isolate the effects of individual variables in our processes, the changes create a deeper understanding the more that we improve.

In visual terms, the blue line below represents the kaizen approach to knowledge generation; the red line represents big problem syndrome.

20140424 - Graph

The graph illustrates how Big Problem Syndrome destroys process knowledge and inhibits learning, making it difficult for organizations to adapt and grow.

A Culture of Fear

One of the biggest advantages of the kaizen approach to improvement is the lack of risk involved.  The approach allows us to progress toward sizable goals by taking many, small steps very quickly.  And although failure is an inevitable consequence of progress; when we fail while taking a small step, the impact to the organization is just that, small.  Moreover, because of the experimental nature of the improvement cycles and the generally short timelines, failure occurs quickly, allowing us to course correct on the path to our ultimate goals.

Big problems, however, inherently carry more risk and amplify the impact of failure.  Armies of resources need to be committed, massive amounts of money have to be spent, and eons of time will be inevitably be consumed.  Big Problem Syndrome forces organizations to go “all in”, and as a consequence, failures can be catastrophic.  The most significant penalty, however, is not one that affects the balance sheet; it is the culture of the organization that is most severely impacted.

How do typical organizations react to major failures?  The finger gets pointed, strict policies are implemented, and people are cast away, all to ensure that history never again repeats itself.  Failure must no longer be tolerated.  Not only do these actions accomplish little in the way of improving future organizational performance, they create a culture where people fear failure.

There is little to be learned from success, and much to be learned from failure.  We expect success, and when things go as expected, it only confirms what we already knew.  However, when things do not go as expected, we are presented with an opportunity to learn something new.  Risk is a component of any worthwhile goal, however, when we fear the failure of not achieving our goals, our natural response is to seek the comfort of the status quo.  Not only does learning come to a standstill, but creativity suffers, innovators quit innovating, and we simply stop trying to do anything different than what we’ve always done.

Overcoming Big Problem Syndrome

If Big Problem Syndrome is a disease, then kaizen is the cure.  Recall that kaizen is a state of mind and therefore, to overcome Big Problem Syndrome, we must change the way we think about improvement.  Here are three ways in which we can shift our thinking to embrace the kaizen approach:

  • Believe in the power of many, small improvements.  Big problems do not necessarily yield big results.   By solving many, small problems quickly, organizations can approach equally large goals one step at a time, rather than in a single, blind leap. The kaizen approach leverages the knowledge that we have gained from taking all of the previous steps to identify the step that must be taken next.  In doing so, the level of improvement that we achieve is compounding, accelerating the speed at which the goals of the organization are reached.    To start small, we must simply cast an inquisitive eye on the tasks we perform every day.  We must look for the obstacles we jump over, the workarounds we create and the wastes we ignore and start eliminating them one-by-one.
  • See failure as an opportunity.  Failure is a byproduct of progress.  Small problems, however, result in small failures.  When failures are small, they are much easier to treat as opportunities for learning and development.  When small failures do occur, resist the urge to name, blame and shame.  Instead, celebrate the effort and reflect on how we would think differently when approaching the same problem in the future.
  • Involve everybody, every day.  Kaizen is not just about involving select individuals in intermittent events outside of their “day job”.  Kaizen is about engaging everybody, every day as part of the way that we work.  The best way to start is with yourself.  Commit to eliminating waste in the work that you do and carve out the time as needed.  Support others in doing the same.  Celebrate early successes – and failures – and refine the underlying organizational practices to create an environment where improvement can flourish.

Changing our thinking is never easy, but it is necessary to Overcome Big Problem Syndrome.  Consider the penalty of not changing: underdeveloped and underutilized people; lack of understanding, an inability to learn, and failure to adapt to a changing world; and poor organizational culture where we fear failure and cling to the status quo.  Maybe kaizen is difficult, but simply look around.  It’s better than the alternative.  Unless, of course, you’re an elephant.

 

Leanable Moment #3: How I Added 7 Years to My Life in Just 3 Months

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How I Used Lean Thinking to Add 7 Years to My Life

Leanable Moments take you inside my home life to show you how I apply Lean thinking to real-world problems.  Each Leanable Moment is presented in A3 format – simply click the image to enlarge – and includes discussion focusing on the finer points of the problem solving process – the type of things they don’t necessarily teach you in Lean training!  Each discussion will conclude with a summary of key lessons learned, going beyond the boundaries of just one problem to take the waste out of life.

I will not soon forget the roller coaster ride that was the year 2013 for me.  Suffice it is to say that it had its share of ups: my wife and I welcomed our third child to the world and I changed companies to take a major step forward in my career; and downs: I’m commuting 60 miles every day into Northern New Jersey due to a change in job location, and I spent 6 months recovering from a minor knee operation due to an allergic reaction and an infection.  When the December holidays finally allowed for some much needed relaxation, I took the time to reflect on 2013.  Despite the peaks and valleys, I was proud for all that my family and I had accomplished in 2013 and the outlook for 2014 seemed bright.  Then I looked in the mirror.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, the bulbous face staring back dictated to me the novella of my 2013 in an instant.   I invested a great deal of energy throughout the year in managing through the seemingly constant change.  Unbeknownst to me until that moment, the price I paid was my health.  Fortunately, the approaching New Year provided just the impetus I needed to set things in a different direction.  Unfortunately, of those people who commit to a New Year’s resolution, only 8% reach their goals. For the non-statisticians out there, those aren’t very good odds!

Whatever I was going to do, I knew it had to be different than the way most people approach their New Year’s resolution.  But how?  How would I start to understand the underlying causes of my poor health?  How would I set meaningful goals that would keep me on the path to my true north destination?  How would I develop habits of wellness and commit to a long-term healthy lifestyle?  Exactly how does someone who preaches the value of Lean thinking for a living – and not to mention operates a Lean blog purely as a hobby – attempt to improve his health?  Good guess!

In the above A3, you’ll find the story of how I applied Lean thinking to set the foundation for a long-term healthy lifestyle, using a simple strategy to add years to my life with minimal effort.

<WARNING!  Awful cliché approaching!>  You could say, I used Lean to get lean!

I warned you . . .

The Target Condition

With the growing pains of a new job, nearly two-and-a-half hours of daily commuting time and three children under the age of four, the operative word for my wellness strategy would be: SIMPLE  SIMPLER    SIMPLEST.  Because of my current lifestyle, I needed to challenge myself to define the simplest possible approach for improving my health, allowing me to meet my goals with minimal additional effort on my part.  Any strategy that required a significant outlay of time, money or effort would – simply – not succeed.

I started by doing some soul searching to better define what healthy really meant to me.  I was able to boil my personal wellness needs down to three priorities:

  • Lose Weight.  An obvious choice, but an important one.  Excess weight has been shown in countless studies to increase our risks of major health problems including heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer.   However, determining an ideal (target) body weight, requires more than just the number on the scale.  Body composition, the amount of body fat relative to lean body mass, is also of critical importance.  Therefore, I used this reference to set my weight loss goals of 171 lbs. at 15% body fat by the end of 2014.
  • Build Strength.  Despite being an athlete for most nearly all of my pre-college life, I’ve always been somewhat of a weakling.  Ten years of working in an office sapped what little strength I had built in my earlier years.   A lack of stability was likely the underlying cause of the back and knee pain I had been experiencing for the past few years.  Not to mention, building a little muscle was a very important customer requirement (from my wife).    I chose a very simple exercise, the bench press, to monitor my gains in strength.  As I had never before in my life been able to bench press more than 165 lbs., I set a target goal of 185 lbs. by the end of 2014.
  • Protect My Heart.  Although nearly all body parts are important a family history of cardiovascular disease amongst my grandparents placed my heart at the top of my priority list.  I used blood pressure as my primary measure of heart health, targeting a value of below 120/80 by the end of 2014.

The Current Condition

On 29-Dec-2013, I recorded the baseline for each of my targeted metrics.  My very own current condition put into perspective exactly how bad my health truly had become.  For my height, my starting weight of 204.3 pounds and 31% body fat put me in the overweight category, on the verge of obesity.   My strength had been reduced significantly since I remembered from my college days, with a one-rep max bench press of only 135 pounds .  However, of particular concern was my blood pressure.  Three readings averaged out to 140/86, which translates to a cardiovascular state somewhere between prehypertension and stage 1 hypertension.  I was at serious risk for developing heart disease later in life.

To see the bigger picture, however, I placed my data into a life expectancy calculator developed by the University of Pennsylvania.  Living well into my 80s has always been a given in the back of my mind; the data, however, predicted otherwise.  My life expectancy was a mere 78.75 years.

Cause Analysis

To simplify the analysis, I didn’t evaluate every potential cause for my lack of wellness.  Instead, I focused the analysis on just the critical few factors.  It was no surprise that at a high level, my unhealthy behavior was rooted in a failure to eat properly and a lack of exercise.  However, I was surprised to learn that the same cycle of events was at the foundation of both issues.  After several days of self-observation, I learned that I tended to eat poorly – in terms of quality and quantity of food – at times of the day when I was feeling particularly tired or stressed.  I knew I was eating the wrong kinds of food, but I chose to anyway because I sought the comfort of food to take my mind off of the negative feelings I was experiencing in that moment.  It was as if the stress of life depleted the energy that I needed to make better decisions about the foods that I ate.

Similarly, stress and lack of energy became the scapegoat for my lack of exercise.  I knew that I should be exercising regularly; however, when the opportunity presented itself, I would choose not to and convince myself that I was either too busy or that I didn’t have the energy.  I didn’t have the energy because I was not exercising; I was not exercising because I didn’t have the energy.  It was a vicious cycle.

Why wasn’t I eating well?  Why wasn’t I exercising more?  The underlying root causes in both cases were strikingly similar.  Major life changes in the past year had significantly increased the level of stress in my life, which sapped my willpower and led me to make poor health decisions. <conclusion>

Countermeasures

Experience told me that I needed to address the root cause of the problem in order to improve my situation.  However, my strategy for improvement required that I identify the simplest possible strategy for improving my health.  So, when I first started to look for opportunities to address the root cause of the problem, my increased stress levels, I had difficulty finding non-complex solutions.  The stresses had accumulated due to major life changes, like a new job and a growing family; short of packing up and moving the family closer to work– anything but a simple solution – I needed to look for other plans of attack.

Instead, I considered a different component of the root cause statement: ways in which I could improve the choices I made in relation to food and exercise.  Initially, improving my willpower to make better health decisions seemed as big of a challenge as reducing my stress; certainly, it did not seem a simple solution could be effective.  That is, until I researched the topic by reading the book The Willpower Instinct by Kelly McGonigal.  Two very important pieces of information about willpower ultimately allowed me to identify a very simple solution to my poor health decisions:

  1. Willpower works just like a muscle in your body.  It has a finite capacity to do work, and becomes depleted with repeated use.  In other words, the more we try to resist temptation in general, the weaker our willpower becomes.
  2. When it comes to seeking food to reduce stress, it’s not the food itself that provides the reward;  it’s the anticipation of the bad food that creates the craving.    Similarly, when it comes time to exercise, it isn’t the exercise itself that we seek to avoid; it was the anticipation of the exercise that drives us to prioritize other activities – like eating bad food!

Making bad health decisions is obviously bad for our health.  But by resisting temptation and making good health choices, we strain our willpower “muscle”, making it more likely that we will eventually give in to our cravings.  It’s no wonder that most attempts to become healthy fail over time!  So how did I overcome my limited ability to resist making bad decisions?  By simplifying.   Instead of attempting to improve my willpower and rely on good decision making, I created a system in which I eliminated the decisions and the anticipation altogether.   I created standardized work for a healthy lifestyle.

Each day, I greet the morning with a green smoothie, which I prepared fresh the previous evening.  Mid-morning, I snack on a stash of organic nuts and dried fruits that I maintain in a convenient location to keep my energy high until the ding on my phone reminds me it’s time for my noon workout.  That is, the workout I blocked off on my calendar, just like the countless meetings that I can’t seem to avoid.  I follow the gym with a pre-made salad topped with grilled chicken or sushi if I’m feeling exotic.  A piece of fresh fruit mid-afternoon tides me over until dinner, which has been scheduled and prepared ahead of time by my wife.  Soon, it’s time for bed and the start of a new day.  Time to repeat the cycle all over again.  And again. And again.

Standardization has nearly eliminated the temptations that previously drove me to eat poorly and to skip the gym.  Healthy habits are now no more a choice for me than getting dressed or taking a shower.  I do not question whether I can squeeze them into a busy day and I do not look to substitute less healthy activities in their place.  They are, simply, what I do as part of my day.  And because I no longer rely on willpower to overcome bad decisions, my defenses against an infrequent craving are much stronger, and my commitment does not waver over time.

Am I perfect?  No.  I am still human after all.  I still have an occasional treat that wouldn’t exactly be considered healthy.  The major difference is now I choose to do so because I want to, not because I have to.

Verify and Standardize

Thanks to Lean thinking, and in particular the rigorous pursuit of simplicity, I am living a truly healthy lifestyle for the first time in my life.  But don’t take my word for it.  Let’s look at the data:

Table of metrics to monitor weight loss, strength and cardiovascular health.

The weight loss of 17.3 pounds does not tell the whole story.  Based on the reduction in body fat from 31% to 22%, I’ve actually lost 22.2 pounds of fat and gained 4.9 pounds of lean mass.

The increase in muscle has driven an even greater increase in strength, as I have already exceeded my year-end goal in the bench press by 20 lbs.  I’ve even been forced to increase my year-end goal from 185 pounds to 250 pounds.

The improved diet and frequent exercise also delivered a significant reduction in my blood pressure, bringing me down well into the healthy range.

Of all the numbers, however, the change in Life expectancy was by far the most impactful to me.  With the simple changes I have been able to make over just the last 3 months, I have added the equivalent of 7.5 years on to my life!

To ensure that I continue to make progress towards my goals, I check the status of my personal metrics on a weekly basis: every Saturday morning before breakfast.  Moreover, as a means of holding myself accountable, I will provide quarterly updates here on TheKaiZone.com .

Lessons Learned

  • Relentlessly pursue simplicity when addressing a complex problem.  One of my favorite Lean authors, Pascal Dennis, recently published a series of articles entitled Strategy Deployment and Dieting (see Part 1 and Part 2) noting that, when it comes to strategy, “more companies die from over-eating than from starvation”.  Strategies must be simple if we as humans are to internalize them.  Large, complex strategies do nothing but alienate and frustrate the people who must execute them, and are generally not sustainable in the long-term.
  • A few small changes can be transformational.  By making a few minor tweaks to my daily routine, I added 7.5 years to my life in just 3 months.  Large, slow and ineffective solutions (like fad diets or the projects that constitute the portfolios of most organizations) are necessary when we do not take the time to learn and lack understanding of the current condition.  Simple and effective solutions arise from a firm grasp on the problem we are attempting to address and its underlying causes.   This is the true spirit of kaizen and spreading this thinking is the mission of TheKaiZone.

Have you solved a problem in a unique or innovative way that you would like to contribute to Leanable Moments?  Simply click here or use the Contact the KaiZone link at the top of the page and tell me about it!

 

Why You Should Jump to Solutions

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Fail. Shcool. Order is important in Lean thinking.

Is Order Important?

Dsteipe waht rasreech form Carbgmdie Uinretvisy may laed you to bleevie . . . we learn at a very young age that order is important.   First we crawl, then we walk, then we run.  Ready, Set . . . wait for it . . . Go!   I before e (except after c, but that’s neither here nor there).    In life, when we do things in the wrong order, the results can be downright disastrous – at least if you are an unsuspecting trombone player.

By definition (literally), processes are governed by the rules of order:

Definition of a Process

In the Lean world, improvement is a process, which means that the order of steps when solving a problem is critical, right?  Isn’t that why we follow Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA)?  Lean thinking requires that we first identify the problem or opportunity.  Next, we understand the root cause.  Only then do we even begin to think about solutions.  In fact, according to Mark Graban’s Lean Blog, bucking of the established order represents the two biggest errors we make when solving problems.

If all of this seems obvious to you, I’m going to warn you in advance.  The following statement contains controversial advice and may not be suitable for all Lean practitioners:  When solving problems, I deliberately choose not follow the established order.  In fact, I start by jumping right to solutions.  And you should, too!

What is the Value that Lean Thinking Adds?

As I’ve previously established, Lean thinking is a cognitively demanding effort that consumes a large amount of our available budget of energy.  Furthermore, it takes a significant investment of time to thoroughly break down a problem and to drill down to root cause, instead of jumping into action.  Despite the substantial upfront outlay of time and energy required, we willingly pay the cost because we believe it will be returned in the form of more effective and more efficient problem solving.

Each and every PDCA cycle presents the opportunity to learn on two different levels.  When we attempt to solve a problem, we can learn both about the problem itself, and also about the methods we use.  For the vast majority of problems, we dedicate most of our effort to the former and very little time to consider the latter.  In time and with plenty of practice, Lean thinking becomes second nature to us.  Eventually, we cease to ever question the process.  We take it at face value and it simply becomes what we do and how we think.  The value-add is a given.  But, is it truly?  How do you know?  What proof do you have?  If we never turn an inquisitive eye towards the process of Lean thinking, can we really be certain that the ends justify the means?

The best way I see to truly understand the value-add of the Lean problem solving process is to treat each problem as scientific evaluation of the methodology itself.  Consequently, by stating the proposed solutions prior to the application of Lean thinking, we create a control for the experiment that allows us to test whether or not the rigors of the PDCA cycle contribute significantly to the outcomes of our problem solving efforts.  Therefore, I start by jumping to solutions precisely to show the folly of jumping to solutions.  I start in the Act phase, to demonstrate that we should first Plan, Do and Check.  I break the established order to prove that problem solving is a process of thinking in which the order contributes greatly to the outcomes.

So, What Are the Outcomes?

For the last five years, I’ve started nearly every single project, workshop and kaizen event with the same question:

If we were to take action based only upon what we know right now, what would we do?

I note the response and never speak of it again until after the PDCA cycle has yielded the final action plan.  After the application of Lean thinking, we reflect on the actions that were proposed at the beginning of the initiative; in that moment, the effects of Lean thinking are placed in to sharp relief, becoming apparent to all.  In the last 5 years, I’ve asked teams and individuals to jump to solutions on over 50 occasions.  Lean thinking has resulted in significant changes to the originally proposed course of action in more than 75% of opportunities.

To put that into context, consider that the pre-PDCA actions were not contributed by individuals with little knowledge about the problem or process.  These were deliberately constructed teams of individuals, selected specifically because of their subject matter and process expertise.  These were people with years of collective experience, most of whom worked directly with the processes of interest on a daily basis.  Despite the massive breadth and depth of knowledge within the teams involved, Lean thinking drove significantly different outcomes in more than 75% of problems investigated! 

What Can We Learn from the Other 25%?

It should not come as a surprise that, for a finite number of instances, the actions required to counter a problem were well understood prior to the use of the PDCA methodology.  When taken together, these instances share a critical few commonalities which provide great insight into how they were able to be well-understood without the deliberate application of Lean thinking.

  • The problems were observable to the human eye.
  • There was little distance in time or space between the observation of the problem (symptom detection) and the cause of the problem.
  • The environment in which the problems occurred was repeatable and predictable.

Collectively, these three characteristics do not cast doubt on the value that Lean thinking provides, but rather the management of the organization.  Think of it this way: if a problem is readily observable, with a cause that provides timely feedback all within a highly repeatable and predictable environment, why hasn’t it already been solved?  In these cases, Lean thinking is still the correct answer, but to a very different and much more fundamental question for the organization.

Why Should You Jump to Solutions?

Five years of research has proven to me, unequivocally, that the process of Lean thinking adds value.  Many would view my study as a failure; five years of effort to prove something that was already widely accepted as fact seems like a less-than-successful outcome.  However, the question for me was not one of yes (the thinking adds value) vs. no (the thinking does not add value), but to what extent.

Changing the way people think is difficult and stressful work, but it is necessary for Lean thinking to truly transform an organization.  When I am facing resistance from the targets of a change, or when I publicly challenge the mandates of a well-respected leader, or when I’m perceived as a roadblock to a team that just wants to take action, I need to believe in the strength of my convictions beyond a shadow of a doubt.  That is why I jump to solutions.  Because I believe fully in the power and in the value of Lean thinking.  And you should, too.