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.

Lean Thinking in a Cloud of Dust

A comment from Goran Gustaffson, a professor at Chalmers University in Gothenburg, Sweden who was scheduled to attend LPPDE this week:

An interesting observation is that the decision to stop air traffic in Europe is very un-lean in that it rests on assumptions rather than on facts. The only reason for grounding all these planes seems to be early computer simulations that showed alarming results of what volcanic ash could to do an airplane.

However, real tests now during the weekend with numerous planes from British Airways, Air France, Dutch KLM and German Lufthansa which have been flown through the ash clouds at different altitudes have not confirmed any of this. On the contrary; they didn't show any problems or damage at all to the planes.

My guess is that the computer simulations were carried out with data for the ash which is relevant for harder and more abrasive particles than are produced by this Icelandic volcano. Safety always comes first of course, and the decision to stop air traffic was probably a wise one in the beginning when we didn't have any data.

However, given the enormous economic losses that we have already suffered and which are easily estimated it is remarkable that the air traffic safety authorities didn't commence test flights and physical examination of the ash right away in order to verify their simulations. It is very worrying in itself, I think, if they trust computer simulations to the extent that they don't feel they need to justify them by physical tests, facts and observations. So a lesson from this chaos is perhaps that it can be VERY expensive not to be lean ...

Well, our history with airliners flying through volcanic ash has been a series of harrowing near-misses: planes that lost thousands of feet in altitude before regaining their engines. I think the authorities based their first reactions on the best combination of practical experience and data that they had. If I had gathered that data in my first LOOK, ASK and MODEL steps, I wouldn't volunteer to be on the first test flight during DISCUSS and ACT!

But LAMDA is a cycle, and waiting for the ash to disperse on its own is probably not a good idea - history also shows that this volcano could erupt for a year or more. I agree with Professor Gustaffson that they could have begun to develop physical models and conduct test flights much sooner. They needed to confirm their assumptions that the ash from this specific volcano was harmful to the engines. From the media reports, it seems like the airlines have undertaken test flights on their own in exasperation - it would be better done as a coordinated effort with standard protocols for the test flights to make it easier to correlate the data across airlines.

I can see a series of LAMDA cycles to gradually increase the risk as the authorities gather more evidence: fly test planes that they then dismantle to check for damage, then commence with air freight traffic if that goes well, and then add passenger traffic if there have been no incidents after a reasonable trial period. As a passenger, I would want to see those kinds of precautions in place before I was willing to risk my loved ones or myself. Safety is a key driver of customer value for the airlines.

Still, that's easy for me to say from my ocean-view suite on Hilton Head Island. If I had been stranded in a faraway place, running out of money and patience, I may be willing to take on more risk to get home.

LPPDE and the Volcano: The Power of the Last Responsible Moment

Event planning is a lot like product development in the sense that no matter how good the plan may be, the unexpected always happens.

Still no one could have guessed that the 2010 Lean Product & Process Development Exchange on Hilton Head Island would feel the effects of a volcanic eruption over 3,400 miles away!

Until Friday, I had felt great pleasure in knowing that over 20% of our attendees would come from outside the United States - 19 of them from Europe. That's when we learned that the volcanic eruption in Iceland had closed all European air space for the foreseeable future, leaving our European friends unable to get here for the conference.

This is one of those times when I appreciate the power of delaying decisions until the last responsible moment - and pushing that moment as late as possible.

Before I alerted my event planner, she had already taken steps to limit the impact on the conference. She negotiated with the hotel to eliminate cancellation fees, reduced catering counts and adjusted room set-ups. Friday was the last day we could lower our counts without penalty - three business days before the start of the event.

Some hotels ask for five business days, and some venues will not allow groups to lower numbers as long as thirty days out. When we negotiated our contract with the hotel, our event planner pushed hard to get these dates delayed to get as close to the day of the event as possible, conceding on other things to gain this flexibility. I'm grateful for that flexibility now - it frees up cash to explore alternatives for delivering as much value as we can to our colleagues who aren't here.

For example, that decision freed up money that we may invest in some equipment and a service to provide live audio and/or video streams.

Our last responsible moment to converge on that decision is about fifty hours away, when we finalize the A/V set up for the general sessions on Tuesday night. We have a set of alternatives and a convergence plan that gets us to a go-no go decision in time to execute it. If we've got a good solution in the set, I'm confident that we'll find it. Without the ability to adjust our other plans so quickly and easily, the event staff would not have had the resources to even consider this option now.

Not every product development program has to deal with a volcanic eruption, but we can all benefit from a little investment up front to preserve flexibility we'll need later to do the right thing for our customers.

Best.Customer.Complaint.Letter.Ever.

How would you like to get this letter in your in box on Monday morning?

REF: Mumbai to Heathrow 7th December 2008

Here's a sample:

It appears to be in an evidence bag from the scene of a crime. A CRIME AGAINST BLOODY COOKING. Either that or some sort of back-street underground cookie, purchased off a gun-toting maniac high on his own supply of yeast. You certainly wouldn’t want to be caught carrying one of these through customs. Imagine biting into a piece of brass Richard. That would be softer on the teeth than the specimen above.

Seems like someone didn't pay enough attention to the customer value stream for a passenger on an intercontinental flight. . .

Post-Toyota Lean: Eliminating The Mirage of Culture

In my early days as a lean consultant, I could really only talk about what I had learned about Toyota and what I had experienced myself in my work for HP.

When talking about Toyota to a skeptical audience, I would inevitably hear two things: 1) We're not a car company. 2) We're not Japanese.

The first is easy to dispatch: "I don't think that you can become Toyota. I think you can become the Toyota of your industry: deeply respected, even revered for your ability to make products that delight both customers and shareholders."

As far as culture goes, that's always been a smokescreen. Toyota did nothing more or less than deeply understand their systems and seek to optimize them. I agree that their culture probably gave them greater ability to do this than most Western companies would have had, but that doesn't mean that we can't benefit from their knowledge about manufacturing systems or product design.

But they themselves demonstrated that the "Japanese culture issue" was a mirage when they took over the NUMMI plant in Fremont, CA and turned it around in the 1980s - and even more so recently when they allowed ambition to overshadow their commitment to customer value, proving that their culture and history did not grant them immunity from the laws of physics.

Fortunately, we're nearing the 20th anniversary of the release of the book The Machine That Changed the World, and that book did indeed change the world. Today, we find exemplary examples of lean manufacturing, lean office and lean product development on every continent, in such a wide variety of cultures and industries that the criticisms I used to receive are now laughable.

At some point along the way we learned that lean was never about Toyota, and it was never about Japan. It was always about the passion we share for creating customer value, eliminating waste and enriching ourselves in the process, both materially and as people.

Post-Toyota Lean: A Conversation with Doc Hall

I've received a number of private messages about my last post on Toyota.

Then yesterday, I had a great conversation with Robert "Doc" Hall, one of the founding members of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence.

Doc shared his ideas about "post-Toyota lean" - the idea that we now have a lot of history with implementing lean manufacturing techniques and lean thinking. One would think that we would have learned some things about how to do it well outside of Toyota!

This idea intrigues me because on the product development side, there are some companies doing things that look awfully "lean" but who have no connection to the Toyota Product Development System.

Google is one of the most visible examples, with its creative use of technology to support rapid learning cycles on new features, the way that it avoids overload by giving engineers "personal time" to work on ideas of their own, and its willingness to pursue multiple alternatives at once.

What makes a product development organization lean? Here is my definition: "Product developers systematically solving problems permanently to maximize (value - waste) across the entire system."

Meanwhile, Doc Hall has taken a hard look at how new economic pressures will change the world of business: climate change, limits to growth and resource constraints. The opportunities will continue to be rich, but the goals will be different: conservation not excess, sustainability not growth-at-all-costs, a more balanced set of metrics than simple financial results.

Doc calls this model Compression. He has a fantastic electronic mind map that visualizes his thinking.

In the post-Toyota lean world, we have much to learn from companies like PortionPac Chemicals that seek to systematically maximize (value - waste) across the global system.

What About Toyota?

We lean consultants have had to answer many embarrassing questions about Toyota's recent performance since their massive recalls were announced earlier this year. How could this have happened to the company that embraced Taichi Ohno, and then revolutionized how we think about cost and quality?

An article in the current issue of BusinessWeek, "The Humbling of Toyota" explains what went wrong under the leadership of Fujio Cho (1999-2005) and Katsuaki Watanabe (2005-2009): rapid expansion and aggressive cost-cutting that strained the company's celebrated systems to the breaking point.

Jim Press, once the only North American on Toyota's board, spared no words in describing the damage:

"The root cause of their problems is that the company was hijacked, some years ago, by anti-[Toyoda] family, financially oriented pirates," Press charged in a recent interview with Bloomberg News. . .The financial pirates, he said, "didn't have the character necessary to maintain a customer-first focus."

The company has already taken action. In June of 2009, Akio Toyoda, the grandson of Toyota Motor Corporation's founder, took over in a move that seemed to point towards a restoration of Toyota's core values and a return to the company's cultural traditions.

The good news/bad news for them is that their systems are built from the ground up to respond. When Watanabe was in charge, he wanted cost-cutting and that's what he got. Now that Toyota realizes how foolish that path was, it will not take long to restore the quality of their designs.

However, it will take years to restore Toyota's image with the public. They spent decades building a highly profitable business based upon cars that were solidly built and long lasting, if not the flashiest. The financial pirates threw that reputation overboard in a quest for fast growth and higher profits.

In the meantime, what do we lean consultants do? It's pushing us to do what we should have been doing already for at least the last five years: Stop holding up Toyota as the shining city on the hill, perfect and therefore unattainable.

Instead, we should spend more time drawing upon the experiences from companies in a wide range of industries where lean thinking has produced dramatic performance gains.

The Power of a Knowledge Supermarket: The Queen Susan Shawl

Last time, I described Ravelry as a public knowledge supermarket for knitters. This time, I want to share a major achievement that would not be possible without this knowledge supermarket.

Sometime in the nineteenth century, a craftswoman in the Shetland Islands created an exquisite shawl. She made it out of over a half million stitches using the finest wool available, and her own deep knowledge of traditional lace knitting technique:



Shetland lace shawls are delicate, and this one was apparently damaged after the photograph was taken. The photo is now in the collection of the Shetland Museum in Lerwick.

Last fall, a Ravelry member called Clarabeasty found the photograph on the museum web site and initiated this exchange on Ravelry:

October 16, 2009
Clarabeasty: Does anyone recognize the border pattern on this piece of lace? Specifically the part that looks like little wreaths and twigs.

Sophiphi137: No, but it is beautiful! I also am now very curious about it.

M1K1: Look again in the Shetland Museum photo library. There is a close up detail of another shawl which has the scalloped (wreath) effect made by placing roses.
You can get a really good look at it by selecting Large Image.
Isn’t it a fabulous effect - softening the straight lines of the zigzags.
Actually this might be the same one you showed above...

fleegle: Wow! That’s the most beautiful border I’ve ever seen…..gets out graph paper immediately….

That exchange kicked off a worldwide effort to bring this shawl back to life, through recreating the pattern. By December, fleegle (AKA Susan) had led a team to the finish line, publishing the pattern in a 73 page comprehensive instruction booklet.

They did not just recreate the shawl - they improved it with modern construction techniques that make the work go faster and refinements to the border and center patterns. Today, there are over 30 knitters working on their own interpretations of this pattern.

Ravelry's knowledge supermarket contributed to this in many ways:

• Provided a place where expert lace knitters could build a shared knowledge base of techniques and libraries of patterns so that the knowledge created was commonly understood, believed to be true and actionable, as they individually developed their craft.


• Built relationships between the primary collaborators so that when this challenge arose, the community was ready for it.


• Provided a platform for sharing their work products (pattern charts, photos of swatches, calculations) - and capturing these work products in process so that future projects like this will be able to benefit from their experiences.


• Allowed the collaborators, who were all doing it for the love of the craft, to pull knowledge and the current state of the work products, when they were next able to turn their attention to the project.

Mature knowledge supermarkets open up all kinds of possibilities for teams. If a virtual team with no connection other than the knowledge supermarket can bring a 150 year old lace back to life, what could your team do?

Ravelry: A Knowledge Supermarket for Knitters

If you are wondering what a fully fleshed out Knowledge Supermarket looks like, find someone in your life who knits and head on over to Ravelry: http://www.ravelry.com This began as a social networking site for knitters, but it has become the best example of a public Knowledge Supermarket that I've seen.

(If you don't have any knitters in your life, I pity you - there's nothing more cozy than handknit cashmere socks - but you can create your own account so that you can poke around - and learn to knit your own socks).

Knitting is a technical craft with hundreds of years' worth of accumulated knowledge about stitch patterns, garment construction, fibers and yarns, and repeatable methods for producing intricate colorwork and texture.

Ravelry's developers have grouped all of this knowledge into the categories that will make this knowledge easy to reuse, provided a powerful search engine and data structures that support knowledge creation and reuse. A simple editing process keeps it all accurate. Meanwhile, the community has populated the libraries and made this a hub of links that bring the entire Internet's accumulation of knowledge available to Ravelry's knitters.

Here is one use case to show how powerful this is:

I find an interesting kind of yarn that I've never seen before, and want to know what I can do with it. On Ravelry, chances are that someone else found the yarn first and put in all the information that's important to me as a knitter - things like how many meters there are per ball of it, and how well it wears - and other knitters have linked their projects they made with this yarn. Ravelry makes some pattern suggestions for me, and I select one. If this is a free pattern, I just download it as a PDF and if not, I purchase it right online first.

If I have my iPhone with me, I can do all of this right in the yarn shop so that I can purchase the right amount of yarn and other supplies for the project, without having to make extra trips.

Now I create a project page that links to all of Ravelry's information about the yarn and the pattern, including the mistakes in the printed version of the pattern and how others have corrected them. I can post pictures of my WIP and my finished garment, then add my own comments about the yarn and pattern to share with the next person who uses them.

Meanwhile, if I encounter a new technique in the pattern, a search by the name of the technique pulls up blog posts, online discussions, photographs and even YouTube videos that demonstrate it for me.

There is no need to reinvent anything in a craft that's been perfected over hundreds of years, and having all that knowledge at our fingertips frees up our creativity for exploring how to use these techniques in new ways.

In my next post, I'll share one amazing project that was only possible because this site's libraries and online community pulls all this knowledge together in one place.

In the meantime, imagine if you had something like this for your key product knowledge inside your company? What would you be able to do that you can't do now?

Guest Post on Contrarian Consulting: Lean Solo

I wrote a guest article last week for Alan Weiss's Contrarian Consulting blog: Lean Solo: Five Reasons Why the Best Solo Consultants Are Inherently Lean.

If you've ever doubted that lean ideas can scale down to a small organization, you should read this article.