Daily Kaizen

It’s often my drive home that new insights take shape, as the interplay of work unwinding from my mind mixes with content from the day’s news. A recent NPR Marketplace segment (link below) focused on the steady decline of middle income jobs in America produced one such thought.

http://marketplace.publicradio.org/display/web/2010/10/25/pm-future-jobs-working-class-recession/

One gentleman interviewed, Charles Hayes, shared the story: “The manufacturing facility of the future will employ two people. One will be a man, and one will be a dog. And the man will be there to feed the dog. And the dog will be there to make sure the man doesn’t touch the equipment”

The segment went on to describe the hourglass shape of the job market; top and bottom incomes growing, while the middle shrinks.

Another person interview, Raghuram Rajan, mentioned: “In a competitive world, there are no safe jobs. Every job in some sense has to continuously be reinvented. Unfortunately that’s the truth.”

It was this last comment that pulled me from my semi-dazed I-5 N drive.

As lean consultants we often face a negative / adversarial perception as the driver of a process that will eliminate jobs (the catalyst for the feared future state the first gentlemen described). However, the last comment helped me frame a reality I’ve known emotionally, but couldn’t articulate as concisely as the gentleman interviewed.

The reality is that the world is not stagnant, but instead constantly changing. Technology has and will continue to increase this rate of change. In our current American culture there is still a strong sense of a job type being there for a lifetime, if not longer. This culture implies a stagnant world where jobs can remain as they are.

That reality may have never existed, and increasingly doesn’t due to the flattening of our world. However, our business culture has often perpetuated this myth.

For me, respect for people means that we’re honest about the continuous change of the world, and jobs, instead of providing a false security of stagnant stability that is later ripped away with lay-offs, outsourcing, and other sudden changes.

What became clear for me as I listened that evening is that a higher form of respect is to be truthful about the constant change we live in, and to mirror that constant change in our work. Respect is to put in place and sustain a system that allows employees to always know what the true customer wants, make the gap between that need and the current state visible, and provide the principles and tools that allow employees to close that gap with their own hearts and minds.

Popularity: 62% [?]

Regardless of which side people sit on in the healthcare reform debate, the one thing most rational people all seem to agree on is that healthcare is far too complex. From a patient trying to understand what services are covered from what are not, what out of pocket expenses one could expect to pay per diagnosis, to sorting out as a Health Plan what policies and procedures are compliant w/ Medicare guidelines, it is no wonder we find ourselves in a national crisis of political, economic, and social proportions. I know I’m often confused, trying to de-mystify why things work the way they do, and I work in healthcare!

While many lean folks commonly believe overproduction is the single most deadly waste, it has been my experience (albeit in healthcare service sector) the waste of complexity is far more sinister. First, complexity is more subtle; it’s what drives many of the other wastes like overproduction, rework, and search/wait times. It becomes a multiplier of variation simply because front line staff performing the work often resort to heroic acts without the right consistent and repeatable process. Second, complexity is widespread in healthcare with not only an abundance of guidelines for providers, but also many gaps in how to interpret those guidelines. Complexity directly impacts our patients from a quality standpoint as errors occur and time wasted.

In a recent kaizen event I attended, a group of Hospice nurses was tasked with attacking the waste of complexity in documenting patient visits – a Medicare requirement. This was a classic example of regulatory guidelines provided, but no explicit guidance on the method to achieve those guidelines. It was taking one RN 2 hours just to document one visit – a real source of their frustration. By week’s end, this team had consolidated all required documentation into 2 basic categories, creating standard templates to avoid the guesswork and searching. It was so rewarding to see how excited they were to pilot the simplified formats.

Helping teams frame complex problems into basic components that everyone can understand is one of the most valuable skills that leaders and consultants alike can perform. This is not easy as there is a tendency to over-complicate, overproduce, get stuck or diverge, then lose sight or misapply efforts to solve the original problem. Just think about the gains to healthcare, if people (hint – politicians) could back out of the ideological gridlock and start by simplifying the complex.

Popularity: 31% [?]

Of all the elements of a Lean Management system in my experience there is none more difficult to master then Strategy Deployment also known as Hoshin Kanri.  A consultant I used to work with once said that if Strategy Deployment does not drive you totally crazy you are not doing it right.  While he was kidding at the time that he made this comment there is a lot of truth in this statement.  Strategy Deployment creates a level of transparency, problem awareness and discipline that does not exists without this system.  Problems and sacred cows that have nagged an organization for years suddenly become very visible and with the discipline of check cycle what once was only talked about “offline” now becomes public.  It becomes much more difficult for leadership to take the easy route that leads to work avoidance.  This puts a lot more pressure on leadership to solve the problems, because for the first time we have clearly named the problems and they keep coming up. 

For organizations that want to have transformational improvement Strategy Deployment is an essential tool, but because of all the reasons I listed above it is very hard to get right.  Here is a list of several of the challenges we have faced over the last couple of years as we have experimented with this system:

• As work becomes much more visible leaders often feel like they are being “judged” which can lead to disengagement.  Problems are only considered “gold” if leaders act appropriately when they are discovered. 
• The system quickly makes far more problems visible then an organization can solve.  This can lead to a feeling of being overwhelmed and paralysis if an organization does not get good at prioritization quickly.  The good news is that this also helps keep the organization humble.  The more you understand about the process the more you understand how bad you are at managing the process
• Support and measurement systems that do not support Lean processes become visible.  Often the rules and policies of these systems are slow to change since people are so vested in the current state.  This can become very frustrating and even disengaging if the organization is slow to act.  We have become painfully aware of many of these systems, yet, often it feels like we are unwilling to go far enough to change them. 
• It is easy for the organization to get excited and then overextended in terms of resourcing.  Our Strategy Deployment system has helped us become far more confident in executing improvement then we were in the past.  In 2006 when we began the process we had serious performance gaps and did not know what to do.  In 2010, we still have performance gaps, but instead of not knowing what to do, we are trying to do too much.

For all of the reasons listed above it is easy to see what organizations struggle with Strategy Deployment.  As our CFO (a great Lean leader) often says: “it sure was easier doing management in the old way. I could just cut the budget.”   I am glad, that while it often has driven us crazy we have not wandered too far off the path.  I just hope is it not always so hard.

Popularity: 26% [?]

A recent European trip brought me face to face with many more security lines than I’d like. Although on vacation, it was difficult not to notice the variation between some European security processes / equipment set-ups and those of TSA.

I can’t prove causality between my wait time, general frustration level and the processes used, but my hypothesis is that there was a strong correlation.

One European equipment set-up example grabbed me with its simplicity and effectiveness. Before I share that, the picture directly below is a sight I saw often in the US; a TSA agent refilling the inventory of scanner bins from the end of the scan to the front were they are needed.

In my 8 flights from Seattle to Europe and back I waited several times, or was held up by others waiting, for these bins to be refilled. At other times, the TSA agents coming against the flow of passengers to bring the batch to the front slowed the movement of my line.

When I finally arrived at the end of the scanner, scrambling to put my jacket, shoes, belt, and watch on – wile trying not to lose sight of my wallet and cell phone, I was often confused as to what to do with my bin. The bin graveyards at the end of the line indicated to me that I was not the only one confused.

The question can certainly be asked: why can’t there be a system that doesn’t require the bins? This is certainly a good one. However, leaving that question aside, the countermeasure in place at the Venice Marco Polo Airport seemed an effective improvement.

As you can see below, above the scanner is an eye-level rack for the bins that is set at a slight slope back toward the front. The visual simplicity of the rack clearly indicates to travelers where the bin should be grabbed at the beginning, and placed at the end. Further, gravity moves the bins from the end point to the point of use – eliminating the need for security agents to manually transfer them. Instead of a one way street, here in Venice a closed loop exists in which the bins can be grabbed at the point of us, used for their purpose through the scanner, and easily and safely placed back into the rack to serve a future traveler.

The particular morning this picture was taken, we were running late and confused on where the gate was. However, getting through security was a steady flow – markedly different then the wait / rush / recover experience that TSA most often is.

We arrived at our gate with plenty of time! The 45 minute delay to board, and then 30 minutes on the tarmac before take-off you ask? The timeliness of European flights in comparison to those in the US is a different story.

Popularity: 27% [?]