Is Respect for People a Pre-condition for Lean?

In the Executive Forum that closed out this year's LPPDE, One idea hit me like a thunderbolt: you can't do lean - any lean, but especially lean product development - without respect for people.

When I thought back over five years' of clients - the ones who'd been able to make the most of lean vs. the ones who struggled, and the ones who drank in knowledge vs. the ones who spent more time arguing than trying - the leadership's respect for people was the differentiating factor.

Respect for people doesn't mean molly-coddling them. Respect for people means believing that they are capable, competent people with the capacity for growth and the desire to do good work, and then accepting nothing less than the best from them. It means valuing the knowledge and experience they have gained through working in the trenches, close to the value stream.

I can teach the skills that maximize value and eliminate waste in product development, and I can help the leadership support, model, coach and reinforce the practices of lean product development.

But if an organization views people as simply expense, then nothing I can do will help them become leaner.

Lean product development requires a certain level of trust between product development leadership and the engineers, technicians and testers who actually get products out the door. Lean leadership also requires healthy respect for the knowledge created in the lowest levels of the company - the experienced line worker who knows how to keep a machine running, the customer service agent who knows how to calm an angry customer and the technician who can spot manufacturing problems within ten seconds of looking at the CAD models.

If that trust is broken, if that respect for knowledge is missing or if the leadership believes that experienced resources can be as readily replaced as light bulbs, then people will not share what they know, and they will not try to change things for the better. It's hard work, and they have no reason to do it if they believe that their efforts are not valued.

One time, I heard second-hand that a company's CEO had stated that there was no reason why an engineer should make more than $80,000 per year. . .for a company that made complex, high-precision devices for a dynamic market.

If company leadership is incapable of recognizing that their product developers are the ones to whom they have entrusted their company's future and then treating the developers accordingly, then they have problems I can't help them with.

But if a company's leadership has an appreciation for the value of the knowledge that their experienced workforce has built and a determination to help the workers use that knowledge to grow themselves while they grow the company, then lean can achieve dramatic, lasting results.

Continuous Flow in Lean Consulting Part 2

In Part 1 of this post, I outlined the problem that I observe: the way we conduct lean consulting reinforces an event-oriented view of lean that leaves a lot of value on the table.

My personal mission is to create the freedom to innovate, by eliminating all the stuff that gets in the way.

In most PD organizations, there is a lot of stuff in the way: big stuff, like rigid phase gate processes, and small stuff, like difficulties retrieving essential information on a daily basis. It all clogs up the flow of innovation.

It takes daily, continuous effort to get all that stuff out of the way. We humans are masters at grooving the things we do every day, even when those things directly impede the flow of our work. It takes effort to change, even when there is immediate benefit. One training event or one goal setting session is not going to create change.

I've never been satisfied with an event-driven model of consulting, and I've attempted to fix it by providing unlimited access via phone and email for all of my clients as a part of every engagement. As a result, at least my clients never feel like they're on a meter with me.

Still, I think that doesn't go far enough. The business model of consulting, as long as it's based upon face to face meetings, trainings and events, is not continuous or just-in-time enough to be as effective as it can be during a lean transformation.

So how do we make consulting services more continuous? Here are six principles for continuous flow consulting:

1. Become trusted mentors and advisors, not trainers or analysts.



2. Cut the "batch size" for trainings and other learning experiences.



3. Spend less time in face to face meetings, and do much more over the phone and over the Internet, using the richest media available, on shorter time cycles.



4. Provide multiple ways to connect, and lower the barriers to connection.



5. Provide ways for clients to pull your knowledge when they need it, rather than on a time schedule that's dependent upon the consultant's availability.



6. Bring clients together to form communities so that they can provide support for each other around their common goals.

Just this week, I took a major step towards building my own continuous flow consulting model.

I launched a Knowledge Supermarket around lean product development. It's called the Lean Development Resource Center, and it's available here: www.leantechnologydevelopment.com

The site will give my clients and other lean product development practitioners the ability to pull knowledge from me when they need it. I have a wealth of materials in my personal library from seven years of lean product development consulting and fifteen years of product development work that does no one any good if it's on my hard drive and in my head.

It's an experiment and as such, I don't know exactly where it's going to end up, but I think this type of thing is a step towards being available for our clients when they need us, and not just when we get on a plane to see them.

Continuous Flow in Lean Consulting, Part 1

In a lean organization, people at all levels of the organization continually engage in systematic problem-solving so that the company and its people eliminate waste and deliver more value ever day.

This is the Holy Grail of lean thinking - the true source of differentiation between the companies that get great results with lean and the ones that get good results initially but find that they can't sustain their gains. It is a universal and continuous flow of innovation that tackles problems from massive to tiny in a spiral of exponentially increasing value creation.

As lean consultants, our job is to support organizations as they develop this internal capacity. I'm beginning to wonder whether or not the way that we tend to do this is as effective as it could be.

Kaizens, mapping sessions, trainings, etc. are all events. As such, they are discontinuous, limited in the number of people engaged, and conducted mainly on the mid-sized problems that lend themselves to this format. Often, they focus on implementing best practices from other lean companies like 5S, kanbans or set-based concurrent engineering, rather than allowing the workers (machinists, engineers, doctors, executives) solve their problems using their own ingenuity.

We don't want to reinvent solutions, and the tools of lean have a demonstrated track record of delivering performance improvements, but the companies who just implement the tools without instilling systematic problem-solving leave so much value on the table. Yet as consultants, we model exactly the kinds of behavior that lead to unsustainable or shallow tool-driven lean programs that generate only limited value.

Our clients need to develop sustainable, continuous flows of systematic problem-solving to maximize their potential. Yet without living with a client for some time, we need to support them.

There must be a better way. In Part 2 of this post, I'll explore some ways to get more continuous flow into our lean consulting work.

In the meantime, I encourage you to check out my two new web class offerings, Lean Product Development Basics and Lean Thinking for the Front End of Product Development.

Lunch with Ken Kreafle of Toyota

I had lunch today with Ken Kreafle, General Manager of Vehicle Production Engineering for Toyota North America, while I was in Northern Kentucky this week. It was a great way to cap off the Association for Manufacturing Excellence’s annual conference.

He defined lean as, among other things, “workers improving their work within their teams.” In other words, lean is not something that someone can do from the outside. Those of us who support lean from the outside can only support the people on the inside as they improve the process.

He strives to remind people that it took sixty years for Toyota to get to the place where it is today (and it’s not perfect by any means). All the “stuff” - 4/5/6S, kanbans, work cells, etc, etc emerged from a process and a culture of relentlessly attacking problems so that they get solved permanently. We can improve our operations and product development by modeling our practices after the tools, but that’s only the tip of the iceberg.

It’s much easier to emulate specific tools and practices than it is to truly empower workers to improve their own work - to give them the tools, set the expectations, manage and reward them so that they come in every day willing and able to solve problems so that the problems don’t come back.

We have it a little easier in product development - after all, we come in to work every day prepared to solve customer problems, and figure out how to meet customer needs more effectively with the next products than we do with our current products.

Still, how many of us have problems that crop up over and over again - always at a time when we don’t have time to do anything more than place another bandaid over them? How many of us stumble at the same places in development over and over because there’s never any time to fix the problems permanently? How many of us spend a lot of energy innovating in areas like checkpoint meetings that add nothing to customer value, sucking time and energy away from the things that drive revenue growth and profitability?

What would we be capable of doing if we rigorously attacked those problems so that we could move on to better problems?

"Let's Choose To Be Among The Winners"

Adam Zak over at Lean Connections has a wonderful post talking about the links between lean thinking and opportunity thinking. Here's a choice snippet:

“A recession creates winners and losers just like a boom,” observed Mauro F. Guillen, a professor of international management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School in BusinessWeek. Let’s choose to be among the winners.

We get enough people thinking like this and we could all emerge from this recession much stronger than before!!