Continuous Flow Lean Consulting: The Trusted Advisor

This is the third post in a series about moving towards a continuous flow model for providing outside assistance to companies that want to become leaner.

In my last post, I posited a series of principles of continuous flow consulting. Here's #1: Become trusted mentors and advisors, not trainers or analysts.

To understand the role of the trusted advisor vs. the role of a trainer, one needs to know the difference between tacit knowledge and explicit knowledge. Explicit knowledge is written down: training materials, reports, statistics. Tacit knowledge is all the stuff that we gain through hands on experience. One can read everything that's been written about how to climb a mountain, but to master mountaineering, one has to climb mountains, preferably under the tutelage of an experienced climb leader. There's no substitute.

Training is great at delivering explicit knowledge - things like "What is a kanban system?" and "What does PDCA stand for?" Analysis is terrific at making meaning out of explicit data, such as analyzing control charts for improvement opportunities. Event-driven lean is mostly about transferring explicit knowledge about specific tools.

These events are not as good for helping organizations as they adapt lean principles to their own organizations: constructing a kanban system or using PDCA on a daily basis outside of the classroom. There is a tremendous amount of tacit knowledge involved in learning how to use lean principles where they can do the most good, and in building a lean culture of systematic problem-solvers.

Training is still important in the early days of a lean transformation, when there is a tremendous amount of explicit knowledge to transfer, and when workshop exercises can begin the process of building that direct experience that leads to a lean culture. As the newly minted lean company masters the basics, we run out of explicit material pretty quickly, and the need for mentoring quickly takes over.

A mentor guides the mentee through hands-on experiences that go to the source, helps them see the current situation more clearly by asking good questions, and provides advice that is rooted in experience. It is the way we transfer tacit knowledge.

We can only mentor effectively in the context of an on-going relationship that involves more than a visit once a month. We have to be engaged with each other at the moment when the mentee has a need or the mentor has an opportunity to deepen understanding. That takes trust and some time, but less time than holding events that make changes that have no sticking power.

The mastery of tacit knowledge with the help of a trusted advisor is the difference between having a kanban system or a knowledge supermarket and being a lean organization.