Creating A Continuous Improvement Culture

good morning everyone and welcome to creating a continuous improvement culture my name is Karen Martin and I'm suffering from a little bit of a summertime cold here so hopefully my voice will hold out for the whole webinar and I'd like to first of all welcome all of you from across the globe some of you are up very very early I do see a hello here from New Zealand and some of you are up very late so thank you so much to all of you from across the globe I hope that this ends up being a webinar that is a bit life-changing or organizational life-changing so if you would like to subscribe to any of my newsletters or blogs please feel free to do so with this URL link at the bottom of the screen and that gives you a monthly newsletter with all kinds of newsy information as well as upcoming webinars and you can also choose to subscribe to my blog which is not very frequent I wish I had more time to write blogs but I don't so let's just get right into it I am a coach facilitator consultant trainer it's a lot of titles but I am NOT a traditional consultant and most of us that do lean transformation work are not traditional consultants in that we don't go into organisations and tell them what to do rather we go in and we teach people how to see what we see think how we think and make changes that are the changes that they need to make based on their processes they are the experts so I do anything from my whole team does anything from all kinds of training we do full-on lien certificate programs and also just very small one-day workshops to deepen learning in a particular area and then we also lead improvement facilitate things like value stream mapping Kaizen events and we also coach a whole lot teaching people how to coach through a three problem solving and any other kinds of you know improvement methodologies that people are using to teach everyone how to be a more effective coach and I teach at the University of California San Diego where we have a wonderful Lean Enterprise program although it's very tough for anyone who's not local to go to because its weekly and it's from 1 to 6 p.m. so it doesn't work well for flying in and out of town also I'm the author of one book alone the outstanding organization was just one a Shingo Prize which was quite nice and then three books that I've co-authored with my cost rolling or latest one is coming out in the fall actually may slip until November because we have some tricky graphics that were figuring out how to fit into a six by nine business book format and then the other two that some of you are very familiar with metric space process mapping and the Kaizen event planner upcoming webinars next month we have how outstanding is your organization and what this is going to be based on is an organizational assessment I created that's not a big you know intense academically scientifically proven assessment rather it's an assessment that can start dialog and start prioritizing where you need to look in your organization and work to shore up your foundation so you can be more successful with improvement and then in October it'll be the first of many webinars we'll be having in the next 12 months on value stream mapping because Mike and my book will be coming out in the fall and this will be the the inaugural that webinar on value stream mapping and that book is currently for available for pre-order if you'd like and then in October I'm going to try a new format or I tried it once before and it was pretty successful but it's an open forum where I'm not going to have a bunch of PowerPoint fact I'll probably have like three slides it's going to be based on your questions and what you need help with in the area of improvement facilitation and coaching so when you register for that webinar if you'll please either supply questions right then and there that you might be wrestling with or you can email me you know throughout the period from when you register until the webinar and ask questions and the more specific the questions that are the better general questions are tough to answer because it's so situational after the webinar some of you asked about recordings yes yes yes recordings are everywhere you can check them out on Vimeo which tends to have the highest resolution of all the different sites there on YouTube now that YouTube allows me to upload longer format there on SlideShare now that slide sure also has video as well as materials and they're on my website in the webinar area and then the materials are always available on SlideShare after the webinars as well so please feel free to take these webinars and you can pull a team of people together in a conference room and show them pass them on to your friends and family I mean they're there free for a reason I want everyone to learn and be able to spread the word pay it forward so today what we're going to talk about are the four conditions that I feel all organizations need to establish in order to be able to create a continuous improvement culture so it doesn't just happen it's not just magic and it doesn't happen by sheer force there has to be these fundamental conditions that you put in place that will enable continuous improvement to thrive and to grow and then I'd like to talk to very briefly about what continuous improvement really looks and feels like because I don't believe most of us have ever been in a true continuous improvement organization and it makes it tough to know what to aim for when you don't know what it might look or feel like and then finally let's talk a little bit about how to sell leadership on the behaviors and skill development needs that everyone has that's going to enable you to get to that continuous improvement culture because this is really the six million dollar question we've been at improvement for a long long time and we haven't really seen a whole host of organizations emerge that have great continuous improvement cultures so let's explore diving in most of you probably know the word Kaizen and know what it means you basically change for the better what I'd like to suggest is that the US translation of continuous improvement needs to have a little deeper meaning or philosophical roots to it which implies that it really becomes a way of life you know continuous improvement I don't believe is something you choose to do only when there's a fire raging or only when someone says to it is how you operate day in and day out it's literally a value system so to the extent that continuous improvement is still viewed in organizations as a object here or there or you know just an improvement when there's a compelling need that's never going to get an organization to that cultural your Nirvana that really is continuous improvement it has to become a way of life and frankly it has to become a way of life for every single individual in the organization so you can have pockets of continuous improvement and I'd like to just you know start out right now by saying please don't feel that if your CEO or your senior leadership team just doesn't buy into this that there's nothing you can do and you should turn off this webinar right now that is not true you can create these wonderful islands of continuous improvement wherever you sit and to me any improvement is better than no improvement so why not make work as as fulfilling as possible and as easy as possible by creating these little pockets of continuous improvement wherever you can what I see happening in some organizations is that once those pockets are discovered and people start hearing about it then it does start becoming a bit contagious and so to the extent that you can create those pockets you can spread it actually throughout the organization ideally it's top down and the whole senior leadership team really really believes in continuous improvement in every you know cell in their body every core of their fiber but if you don't have that that doesn't mean that you can't create some pretty and amazing examples of continuous improvement in your organization and the larger your organization the more likely it is that you can pull that off so one of the most fundamental things I've been thinking about and seeing and studying in all these years of doing improvement you know 25 plus years now is that one of the fundamental flaws in our thinking and behaving has been that improvement is somehow this other thing that we do it's not part of doing the work and to the extent that it remains this other thing it will never get integrated the way it needs to into the DNA of an organization and will never develop the types of cultures that really are needed to become truly outstanding so this webinar is going to take a look at what you need to do to embed that level of improvement into the DNA by having improvement become part of doing the work this is essential it has to be just the way you operate it is a way of life so if we look back to the roots of this there were several books published in the 80s that really got us thinking about continuous improvement in a deeper way at EEG Ono's workplace management has just been re-released as a hundredth birthday edition highly recommended if any of you are serious about improvement I just started reading it and it's really been fascinating to go back to the roots of the Toyota Production system to the architect behind it and look at his fundamental beliefs and then W Edwards Deming you know his out of the crisis book also talks about the core values and the core kind of environmental or the conditions that you have to create in order to have true engagement by all employees which is of course continuous improvement and then Masaaki Imai of course the father of Kaizen he's the one that in 1986 put the master book out in Kaizen so I'm a believer if you're going to be serious about this kind of work you really have to read the classics in order to get deep into some of the forefathers of our time on what their beliefs really were now if you want to look at something a little more modern than what we've got our I say four key group of books there's many many out there but four key books on more of the daily Kaizen you know my I have a book on Kaizen at plan Kaizen events the Kaizen event planner but that's not what I'm talking about in terms of daily Kaizen and it becoming part of doing the work on Toyota kata my brother's a powerful book on how managers need to be turned into more coaches and be able to get everyone engaged in PDCA as he calls it I call PDS PDSA I'll talk a little bit about that in just a minute that book is a very good one as well as these two idea books that are by norm boudic and and Dean Schroeder Nell and Robinson and then Marc grabens book if you're in health care is wonderful about how to embed Kaizen daily Kaizen into the healthcare industry and actually it's a good book for any industry not just healthcare it's a very good book so let's take a look now at the roots of lean which is the Toyota Production system or the Toyota business management system it all started with the Toyota way not Jeff likers Toyota Way but Toyota's Toyota way that they released in 2001 and the Toyota Way if you'll notice down here in this graphic has two pillars continuous improvement and respect for people those are the core values and core core you know foundational pillars of the whole lean a way of thinking and behaving so if you look at Kaizen one of the things that's important to remember that when Toyota wood started talking about this pillar and of continuous improvement and what Kaizen really is it says improving business operations continuously always driving for innovation and evolution and I think this has got lost innovation and evolution is not pure problem-solving it's not only fighting fires in fact it's everything but fighting fires it's taking that bar once you've got pretty decent performance and raising it up and up and up and getting better and better and better and striving striving striving for a new target condition a new one another one a higher one a better one a faster one and so one of the things that has happened is that you know most organizations are you know fairly fraught with problems and so a lot of our improvement focus has been on solving problems and we're not able to get through the problems quickly enough in order to get to true innovation and evolution and we have to get through these problems more quickly which means being more serious and more focused on the problems so that we can get into that more innovation evolution thing that's what takes companies to the next level and really separates them from their competition because they're just so dang good and they're learning and improving so dang fast that no one can keep up with them that is what true continuous improvement is so the relentless pursuit of perfection has somehow gotten lost in the dust as I see it in many of the organization's I work with and many of the people I talked with that you know we're not working even towards perfection because we can't even get the baseline fixed and so you know organizations have to rethink the difference between working in the business and working on the business so working on the business has to be every bit as much of a goal as working in the business and working on the business if it becomes part of doing the business the two start merging and that's when you get true magic is when those two start merging so continuous improvement really is having these new little ideas being generated every single day by everyone every day everywhere in the organization and those ideas are not just you know thrown on a wall like spaghetti to see if it sticks they're put through their paces there they're generated then they're tested and then based on the findings of those tests are refined and then they're implemented so that everything is being put through some sort of a scientific process other than the absolute most obvious kinds of improvement so for example let's say that you see someone who's not or not operating an ergonomically safe way they're reaching stooping stretching pulling you know whatever they're doing and that just you know isn't safe so it's obvious if you need to move something from point A to point B than it needs to be moved and that doesn't need to necessarily be put through its scientific methodology paces but for other things whether either could be multiple root causes for something that's not quite you know working the way it should be or for things that involve other people and will affect upstream or downstream suppliers or customers then it needs to be put through a little bit of a rigger a little rigorous process in order to make sure that it's the best solution or the best countermeasure for everyone involved so that new ideas everywhere has to happen so how do we make that happen this is true continuous improvement when you never ever settle and you're constantly looking to raise that bar a team of Six Sigma black belts or green belts a team of lean champions a team of well-intended managers that have a good improvement mindset are not going to pull this off they cannot pull it off there's not enough bandwidth to do it you have to get every single person in the organization thinking this way and it all starts with one person spreading the word and starting to get this kind of thinking across the organization so let's talk about the end state for a moment and then we'll figure out how do we build to that what is the end state look like what does continuous improvement actually look and feel like especially if some of us have never been in that kind of an environment well welcome to Menlo innovations if you haven't heard of Menlo innovations you'll be hearing a lot more of them because CEO rich Sheridan who is a magical CEO and should be cloned has a new book that's going to be coming out at the end of the year over the first part of next recalled joy Inc as incorporated and Menlo innovations as an organization I was introduced to many years ago when I was first starting the outstanding organization and they are one of only a few organizations I profile my book and consider to be outstanding on literally every front and one of the things that they do give free tours and then some paid towards it depends on what what you're looking for I highly recommend you go visit them because it is worth even if it's a paid tour it is worth every penny you spend to get the magic of this organization every single person in this organization is truly authorized to make improvement but all those people in that organization have been developed they've been given guidance throughout their stay from the interview process through their stay they have boundaries also they know what they can do and what they can't do so there's not a whole lot of what a lot of managers and a lot of senior leaders especially fear is if you give people the authority to make change you'll have anarchy on your hands well anarchy doesn't occur when you've got clear boundaries and when you're developing people in the right way and not just suddenly turning people loose to do whatever they want so one of the things I was with a client last week and one of the things that I heard from the middle managers and some director levels is that they were really concerned because they had tried to release the you know loosen up the reins a little bit and give people a little bit of authority to make change but then when people were making the kinds of change that really wasn't in line with some of the business goals and objectives the managers and directors were afraid to redirect or to correct you know and and course-correct those people and I said no no you can't be afraid to course-correct now if you haven't given them any boundaries it's a little unfair to start giving them boundaries midway through the process and so you know if you have to do it you have to do it but you need to understand you didn't give them boundaries to begin with and now oopsey you have to give them boundaries now but once you give boundaries it's absolutely a coach's responsibility to allow people to be free to create within those boundaries but then course-correct if they go beyond those boundaries so that's the key to allowing people to generate and and test and implement great ideas is by giving them that kind of development and guidance throughout the whole process so Menlo innovations I'll give you the most extreme case of what you see at Menlo the most extreme case is that any team can decide at the drop of a drop of a hat that they want to move their work area they want to reconfigure their desks reconfigure their chairs re you know reconfigure it's an open space the whole company is open space and so they don't have to ask permission to anybody no one not one person is asked if they can do it they just do it because when you think about it who cares who cares where they sit as long as they get their work done on deadlines high quality it meets their standards they're operating within the the boundaries that they've been given who cares where they sit now that is just blasphemy to most Western organizations and probably some of the organizations across the globe as well that you would just allow people to sit wherever they want to sit but you know it takes a very mature and trusting leadership team to start losing those reins give appropriate guidance and then let people go and what you feel when you walk in the middle of innovations you feel this amazing innovative vibe there's just this energy there's excitement everybody is deeply engaged there's no one playing solitaire I can assure you at Menlo innovations there's no one twiddling their thumbs going I can't wait until five o'clock comes and I can go home they are absolute fully engaged and they are exhausted at the end of their day because they're so productive and they are so fully engaged but they're engaged because they're allowed to do the kinds of things that employees should be allowed to do so more to come there's a ton of YouTube videos on Menlo innovations there's a lot of they vote a couple blogs they're on all the social media a bunch of pictures on Flickr just check out Menlo innovations and start talking about some of the elements that might work for your organization now another one I want to mention of course is the master Toyota where lean comes from and one of the things that you might want to start doing in order to start measuring success so this gets to a couple of your questions when you registered about how do you measure success one of the things I'm a believer in measuring is the number of ideas that are implemented now that does not mean let me be very very clear that does not mean that you implement ideas for the sake of implementing ideas the ideas need to be sound they need to fit within the confines and the boundaries of what you're trying to accomplish as an organization they need to be as tied to business goals as possible you know so the it's not you don't just go for quantity you go for quality but quality count quality ideas is a great way to start seeing the bar going up and and see a trend to where people are feeling more and more comfortable suggesting ideas because they are seeing them implemented and the energy shifts and you move from a very disengaged workforce to a very engaged workforce when you start seeing more and more and more sound ideas being implemented so what does it take to do this let's get into the meat of it all I believe there are four conditions excuse me for one moment I'm going to just do a quick coffee here and I'll be right back okay I'm back so what does it take to create a true continuous improvement culture culture I believe it takes four things it takes will take skill it takes giving Authority that takes giving guidance so let's take them one at a time we'll skill Authority and guidance let's talk with start with will you have to want it let me repeat that you have to want it if you're a team leader you have to want it for your team if you're a supervisor you have to want it for your department or your team if you're director vice president you have to want it for your division if you're present you have to want it for your organization wherever you are you have to want it I see a lot of people talking continuous improvement but when I get into conversation with them I can tell they're not really sure they want it if you're not sure you want it you'll never be hungry enough to go after it you'll never have the intestinal fortitude to go through what you have to go through when you're loosening the reins it's like it's like literally it's like raising a child and I don't mean that in a diminutive way but you have to want a child to be a very highly functioning adult and be self-sufficient in order to parent the correct way you have to every employee in that organization and believe that they deserve to be fully realized and develop their potential as fully as possible and and you have to want that for the entire organization in order to get it so will is not enough alone will alone is not enough but it starts with will you have to want it next you have to develop an interior and trinsic belief this is philosophical stuff here you have to develop it in intrinsic belief that good enough never is there's always a better way you can always raise the bar you can always perform at higher levels good enough never is that has to be a belief people who go to good enough and stop don't have continuous improvement in their DNA and if you have anybody in your improvement ranks or in your management ranks that have that bug if you want to develop a continuous improvement culture ultimately they're going to have to be replaced because I don't believe that that will is something that is something you can develop in people once fear has been removed sometimes you have to remove fear in order for it to reveal itself and for it to emerge but once you remove fear if they don't have that will to continue improving it's not they're never going to get it is my belief in my experience I know that's harsh but that's been my experience the next thing is we have to pass that baton from the elite few to the common many so what I mean by this is organizations that have armies of improvement professionals need to shift the roles and responsibilities of those people from people who do to people who teach from people who do to people who coach from people who do to people who show by example from people who do to people who lead truly lead so the people that have been through improvement programs need to be people who are evolving and they're starting to pass their skills and knowledge to everybody else and is the job of an improvement professional it's the job of a consultant it's the job of every manager is passing that on to everyone else now that does mean that everyone needs to develop a certain set of skills as a fundamental set of skills so we do have to make sure that that's in place as well can't pass the baton if you don't have the skills yourself so one of the things in passing that baton that's another fundamental belief is it the people who do the work are the experts that managers directors vice presidents see sweets are not experts the people who do the work are the experts now all those levels are experts and the work that they do for example someone senior as an expert in doing the annual budget someone who's you know senior is expert in doing visioning you know so they're expert at their domain but people who do the work their domain is the work so there has to be a fundamental belief that people who do the work are the experts which requires a fair amount of humility and it requires you know someone to say you know what just because I lead these people doesn't mean I know what the work should be you know so it's is it you know it requires some maturity and some humility in every individual in order to get this to really play out so then the last thing is is that there needs to be this environment of curiosity created so I don't mean that you know the question why needs to be asked in a judgmental way but rather is asked in a curiosity kind of way and I judge an organization when I walk in based on how many times when I'm in a team-based activity how many times I hear people say well why why not what if and most of the organizations when I first start working with them I rarely hear those questions and then you know I work with them to foster those questions and those need to be very commonly asked in every meeting and in every hallway interaction in emails you know it needs to be part of the DNA of questioning out of curiosity well why do we do that well why not well what if that needs to be part of the vernacular and the vocabulary in an organization in order to shift this thinking so again wherever you sit in the organization you can start this tomorrow you can start it this afternoon or tonight or wherever you are across the globe you can start it right away by using these questions within your sphere of influence all right so now let's move on to the skills so skills remember are about development people don't just you know intuitively get skills out of the air doesn't come out of the you know the the sky they have to be developed which takes a fair amount of effort so I put together I did a lot of thinking and I was putting together a list of what do I think are the minimum knowledge and skills people would need to get an organization going you know there's a lot you need but I think that there are some minimum things that would get you going in a very positive way so I thought that at a very minimum people need to understand clearly the difference between value adding and non value-adding work and they need to understand that there are three conditions to eliminate not just one so it's not just muda it's Meera M URI unevenness and overburden as well as waste those of some of some of the forgotten operational conditions that create a fair number of angst in an organization and disengage workers the eight types of waste or seven if you're a purist on eight types of waste are important to know it's very important that everyone developed deep proficiency in PDS a plan do study adjust or PDCA plan-do-check-act including root cause analysis that often gets forgotten that root cause analysis for those problems that aren't super obvious you have to have some fundamental skills and root cause analysis like the five why's and a fishbone diagram at the very least I believe that every single person in the entire organization and I mean this needs to understand the difference between process time and lead time and why percent complete and accurate matters and how to calculate those three process metrics in order to determine if the process is functioning as well as it can and then I also believe that every single person in the organization needs to have a fundamental understanding of process level mapping and process documentation and that's a tall order for many organizations because in many organizations they have not done this level of development but how can you ask people to make improvement if they don't have an idea of what they shouldn't be improving based on so these are what I consider to be some of the fundamentals I'd be curious during the QA to hear if you feel that some of this is overkill or if there are additional ones that I don't have on this list that you feel are also fundamental that would be a really interesting point of discussion so let's talk about PDSA or PDCA um and for those of you who are new the reason why I choose PDSA over PDCA is well detailed in my book the outstanding organization just a short short version of it is that basically study and adjust are linguistically more clear than check and act and so people are more clear on what they should be doing and I find that they are more proficient in using the cycle when the study adjust words are used over check adapt and PDSA was in fact Demings preference not PDCA but we can we can talk about that later all right so clarifying the PDSA cycle so teaching people plan do study adjust isn't enough because for example people don't know necessarily what exactly do you mean my plan and what exactly do you mean by do there's a lot more to plan and do than meets the eye with just those two words so it's important to teach that there are different components so for example in planning the very first thing that people don't do a good job at and need to be taught is critical thinking to define what the problem truly is and the problem is almost always a beginner stated as either a cause or some sort of solution and so getting people to truly identify the problem takes some practice and it takes a good coach who's already proficient in this in order to coach people into that and then for example getting very clear on the current condition people don't always know all the different ways to get clarity on the current condition so a good coach will know how to do that setting a target condition people are often very fearful on how far they should push the envelope and then also this whole idea of so if you're not performing the way you want to perform the way your target is being set then why not what's the root cause for that or the gap why why is the gap there and then and only then do you identify countermeasures so very often if you don't make sure people understand all five of these steps they will only get the first that I'm in the fifth one the identify countermeasure excuse me for one moment okay so they have to get all five of these same with do what to do very often people forget that they need to test they'll just create something and implement it without ever testing it and refining it to make sure if it's the right thing because once you get going on making an improvement you know there is there's often some adjustment that needs to be made based on your findings and then measuring the performance and then stabilizing it monitoring it reflection sharing and all that so PD PD CA PD PD C a PDS a both of these cycles are critical for getting people familiar with what they need to do in order to make true improvement and once the cycle is complete it's not linear it actually is cyclical even though it looks like it's linear here what you want to do is once a new problem erupts if you're not doing just that innovation and evolution is start back up step one again sort all over again and then certainly once you get some stability and you're performing well you start here with setting a new target condition raise the bar and then start through the cycle again for root cause analysis I'd like to suggest something to you you know for years and years I have been teaching well for over 20 years I've been teaching root cause analysis and I've pretty much just focused on these four basic tools there others but these are the ones that are kind of the the more commonly needed um you know design of experiments and things like that is very important when you get very very pesky problems with multiple causes and things like that but these are the four basics well I did two experiments recently that worked out shockingly well I'm going to give you and ask you to do a couple of experiments with this as well because I think sometimes we over complicate things let's go back to PDSA for a second or PDCA when it says conduct root cause and gap analysis a lot of times organizations stop it dead in their tracks before they even get going because they see this as very difficult cumbersome you know they have to do a lot of training below buh blah and I actually used to think that somewhat as well well what I did with these organizations was I decided that I would just say that part of the processing plan is to investigate root cause I gave them nothing I didn't suggest the five why's I didn't suggest cause in fact diagram I didn't teach them anything all I said was dig deep for the root cause and you know what every single time so far I just started this experiment but every single time what they've come up with as a countermeasure or a solution I prefer the term countermeasure has been different after they thought about root cause than what it was before they thought about root cause which tells me that just putting that step in there determine root cause may get us a whole lot further than what we've been with not suggesting anything at all so I'm not suggesting you don't teach the root cause analysis tools in fact I think absolutely as many people in the organization should know how to do root cause analysis as possible in fact you know the CEOs of Toyota have long been known to you know sit down when they're talking with senior executives and start with an out of fishbone diagram and using the fishbone diagram to in fact you know Goethe walk through high level problems so you know it's something that everyone should be proficient in but for your average frontline person if you don't have time to put them or budget to put them through a training program just tell them to start thinking about root cause and see what happens you know it's not quite as scientific but it's beats not doing it at all that's been my experience recently so I'd like to just throw that out there for you to try all right so we now have will skill and were to Authority so people have to be given the authority to make change it's not enough to have the will to become a continuous improvement culture and it's not enough to build skills they have to be given the authority or they will they won't do it so I have empowerment on this slide crossed out because I despise the word empowerment is a word that has gotten so overused and it's so squishy that a lot of people don't even know what it means when you look up in the dictionary it actually is fairly it's fairly close to Authority but it hasn't necessarily carried that kind of weight in the business world so I like to use the word Authority it's very clear no one can debate what it means and is word that definitely has a bit of a charge and it sometimes scares leaders when you say we're giving people the authority but this is where you become a teacher in helping them understand wait a minute we're not going to have anarchy we're not going to give people the authority to do whatever the heck they want this is all going to be in a controlled fashion and it's going to better the business that's what it's all about so when you talk about giving authority I like to look at processes and work itself from many different levels from a very very macro level and we talk about value streams across a whole organization different product families or service families that you have as far as what you're delivering whether it's a good or a service to a customer and then each value stream is comprised of very many processes and in each process is combined in very many steps so you're getting more micro and more clothes into the Wiis and close to where the work is done as you move down this degree of granularity so there needs to be a clear line in the sand and those have you been on webinars before I've heard me say this between leadership in the front lines and that authority needs to be clearly granted at the right level so leadership absolutely has the authority and should be playing around in the space of vision setting large goals I call it you know though what strategy what needs to happen so that is leadership's role and value stream mapping happens to be one tool you can use for that but that's where leadership shines and that's where leadership should spend the bulk of their time where the frontlines shine is when you get down into the steps to get work done this is getting into the micro perspective and this is tactics tactics on how you execute a strategy the how how do we do work so this needs to be where the baton is being passed down to the front lines and there begin being given authority to determine the specific way work will be done within a certain set of parameters so again leadership can set the parameters but they can't say both what and how that's what strips people of any ability to be creative and innovative and it gets people disengaged and dulls thinking and and it doesn't do anything beneficial for an organization so getting more clear on the two spectrums the two kind of ends of the spectrum of an organization helps and then middle managers kind of straddle that line between those two so one of the things that's important and I see this a lot whenever I'm working with new organizations is that just giving people authority isn't nothin of either so we'll enough is not going to do it skill enough is not going to do it and authority enough is not going to do it what you may have to do especially if they have experience which most people do of not being able to do anything and not being able to suggest not being able to make improvement is you're going to have to draw them out believe me many people have had many bosses that there is no way in heck they're going to risk coming out and making a suggestion that they're gonna get beaten down again if they have a history of getting beaten down and a lot of people and organizations have had a lot of history that we're not even familiar with so when I'm in Kaizen teams for example very often there'll be one person on the team that you can tell they're just afraid to suggest anything because they have a history of getting slapped not literally but figuratively and so you know you have to make them feel safe and it takes a while and not everyone hat gets that comfort level at the same pace so this is something where you have to have a lot of patience and a lot of encouragement and you have to allow people the ability to kind of warm up to the fact that they're now being given this freedom it's almost like now think about someone being in prison for many many years and they're suddenly let out you know they're there's behavioral changes that go on with you in prison that you don't just turn off when you walk out that door and you know you're free man or woman so you have to think about the same kind of things you have to you know free up these people and unleash their creative potential again if they've been shut down now one warning big warning if you have anyone in your organization who talks the talk and doesn't walk the walk and tells people they're safe and beats them down the minute they have a suggestion you're done you have just shot that whole idea in the foot so middle managers need a fair amount of shaping and guidance and coaching in order to get them to the place where they're going to be trusted advisors and trusted coaches with their own teams and you have to be very very aware of that okay so we have a will skill Authority and now guidance what exactly do we have to do to give people the guidance so that they'll be effective in making a continuous improvement well they have to be given boundaries and they have to be taught those are the two things so one of the things that I like to talk about is freedom with boundaries so what you want to do is leadership's role and a manager's role would be to find the boundaries within which someone has to operate in making improvement so it could be for example capital expenditures you can't go over X dollars it could be something on policy wise although policies absolutely should be challenged when you're making improvement it could be something in terms of a particular customer group so there may be a customer group that you know you're in the in the works of you're shoring up a stronger relationship and you don't want to do anything to change what that customer group is experiencing on a day-to-day basis with your organization or something like that but whatever it might be giving people boundaries is helpful and then giving them freedom within that so picture that you're building a fence in the backyard and then you're going to put the people that are going to make improvement into that backyard and allow them to do whatever they want within those boundaries as long as you're meeting excuse me laws regulations and the boundaries that have been given to them they should be free to do whatever they want this is how you start spreading continuous improvement across the organization and you don't get anarchy which is every leaders fear the other thing I want to suggest is that this doesn't happen overnight so if people have been given a red light and now you want to turn that on and you want it you want to give them the go to start making improvement you may see that they're going to be very cautious at first and it's and you may want to even have you know a stronger hold on what those boundaries are initially until they're trained on what really matters to the business what matters to the customer what can't you do to a customer what can you do to a customer what a customers want what do they not want there's all those things that people need to be trained and developed to think in the way that benefits the organization on the customers while they're making improvement and not everyone has had that kind of you know experience and so it takes a while to train them and teach them know that so you might move to a yellow light before you get to a green light but once you get to a green light then you should have fewer boundaries because people just know what they can and can't do and it's part of its embedded into the DNA of the culture so in the end of the day what the essential element to creating a continuous improvement culture is is that the supervisors and managers especially but also directors vice presidents all the way up the chain have to become process managers and improvement coaches so when lean and Six Sigma entered the four and we started developing all these belt like specialty people this didn't necessarily serve continuous improvement well because it it put a lot of organizations in a place of thinking that those people would manage the processes and improve the processes and everybody else could just do the work so those people who work on the business while the rest of the people would work in the business and that's not the way it works that's not the way you develop a continuous improvement culture so now we need to just you know course-correct and get supervisors and managers especially highly proficient in managing processes understanding what a process is what isn't how it should work what the key performance indicators are how to document it how to have visuals in place that help manage it I mean all of those things are important and they need to develop a lot of coaching savvy for helping free up that creative potential in their staffs so learning how to coach improvement and how to get people you know excited about and making suggestions and continuously improving day in and day out that is the job of the supervisor and manager not an improvement team visuals are a big part of this and this takes again you know some some works and development to get supervisors and managers to understand not only what matters what are the key performance indicators that they should be looking at but also you know how to best visually depict them and how to manage those visuals so for example a lot of people will not know what constitutes success and you have to help them define that and then all of the improvement that continues to prove that their teams are doing should most of it should be kind of focused on making those improvements based on whatever the targets are that you're hoping to reach now some of it could be a little outside of that you know like I mentioned economic developments before in improvements you know those are things that are necessarily directly tied to process performance but just our common sense and make good sense for the health and well-being of all employees and possibly for customers as well so you know there's that but you you really want to spend the bulk of your improvement tied directly to the direction that you're trying to head in that way you get much greater bang for your buck and people will take improvement seriously when they see that it's actually moving the needle in the right direction so I'd like to do now is just talk for a moment about daily Kaizen or continuous improvement versus breakthrough Kaizen because I don't want to leave breakthrough Kaizen out but this whole webinar has been pretty much not talking about breakthrough Kaizen or kaizoku as its as its pronounced in in spelled so kaizoku is you know severe and dramatic change and so there are many different ways to still get improvement through other means that's not your daily continuous improvement like for example I'm a huge believer that every organization every division every department needs to have a strategy deployment plan that's improvement based that has a clear definition of what's going to be done that year when's it going to start when's it going to be done who owns it who's going to be involved this is my version of an X matrix some of you may be familiar with X matrices I actually don't find the traditional X matrix that we learned in hoshin kanri to be as intuitive as I would like for most of my clients this has worked a little bit better so this is improvement that can happen by very many means and most of these types of improvements are actually projects that that are on strategy deployment plans for the year most of them are pretty big you know multiple months and so there are they are projects I also am a huge believer in value stream mapping as evidenced by my new book coming out with my Gloucester lien III think that value stream maps have been underused as a strategic improvement tool and having improvement continuous improvement be pointed toward the future value stream map future state value stream map so that's another way that you can tie your continuous improvement to something larger a larger strategy is by tying it to a future state value stream map and I'm assuming that a future state value stream map is one that's going to take anywhere from three to six months maybe even nine months maybe at the worst case a year to fully realize but at least three months so they're not you know process level maps they are truly value stream maps and then the third area is tying improvement to a 3s for those of you that are familiar with a3 management you know with problem solving using a coaching model and using a report methodology in order to reflect the learning and be a dialogue starter for the learning a3 management is another thing where once you get over to the implementation side then you can have a lot of continuous improvement occurring that's supporting the a3 so it it is ideally tied to something larger than just like oh let's do this let's do that because what you don't want to do is end up having you know drive-by Kies ends or random acts of cayenne that don't tie to anything that's important to the business you can do some of that but you don't want to do all of that because otherwise you know people won't ever see the improvement and they'll poopoo improvement because of that take one more little quick break here for a cost a second okay I'm back so at the end of the day whatever you're going to do you have to go through some stages in order to get mastery and to get this truly embed into the DNA of your organization and it's going to start with talking about it and just getting people aware and it's going to end with people just doing it and it's just part of how you operate like Menlo innovations like Toyota you know it's just how you operate and it just takes steps to get there so one of the things that you have to think about is the more you can start the faster you can start and the more you can start getting those those ideas those numbers adding up this idea was implemented this idea was implemented you're counting those ideas that are again sound ideas not ideas for ideas sake sound ideas the more you're going to get practice doing this and the more it's going to become infectious and people are going to start doing it and the more leaders will release the reins more because they will become more trusting the more the employees will come up with better and better ideas because they're becoming more trusting so it's rebuilding this whole wonderful work environment of trust that enables this to really work and it you can turn around even the most entrenched fear-based organization with the right will the right leadership the right skill development and the right levels of authority being practiced you can definitely turn around even you know the kind of worst-case scenario organization and then most of you probably seen this before but I just wanted to point this out again that you know again we want to get into this point of unconscious competence where you're just doing things because everyone's doing things well not even thinking about it so you start with unconscious incompetence where you don't even know that you're not good at something and then you work your way into being aware that you're not that good at it because you're learning and you're seeing the Delta or the difference between you know what's good and what's not good and then you get to where you have to concentrate very very hard but you're getting competent and then you get to where you don't have to concentrate at all ultimately you are extremely competent so that's the progression that you go for and again with continuous improvement you just have to start doing it and get it happening getting those little PDSA PDCA cycles going every single day all over the organization in order to get it to just become the way you operate to where most organizations that are very PDSA centric don't even talk about it hardly ever talk about it because it's just how they operate um so that's how you get this into the unconscious competence mode so no matter where you sit in the organization you can start right away with a couple of things first look at your own development make sure that you personally every single person on this webinar needs to make sure that you know and you have high levels of proficiency in the improvement basics and if you don't do an honest assessment if you if you aren't highly skilled in one area identify it and put a plan together for getting highly skilled in that area start asking why why not and what if ask it every single time that it makes sense to ask it every encounter every meeting and if people ask you why you're asking that explain to them why you're asking that and that stuff becomes infectious it can start spreading just like you know a new term will you know come out like not remember how not came out and make these people we're saying it and it became infectious or what's the new one now right estimate right you know it just it just happened by people saying it and for those of you around the globe I don't know if not or right became something common and you're in your culture or not but it's all the rage here um and then the third thing is to start creating an improvement safe zone so again if you do things in the right spirit you can get away with a lot of you know what would otherwise seem harsh if you do it with the right spirit so if someone suggests something that really isn't within the boundaries of what will make for a good business you know improvement it will get you toward the business goals then there's way to explain to that person that that's not going to work that helps them learn it isn't just shutting them down and that is part of creating that improvement safe zone learning has to be a big L has to be at the center of all of this fourth is if you're not a highly proficient coach and most people are not this is something that I've been working on for the last six years it does not come naturally for especially type A's you have to work at it work at it work at it practice practice practice and then coach some more and then finally and this gets to one of the questions when one of you registered is how do you quantify results it's best if the improvement can be quantified to include some sort of quantification what's what's that improvement really doing for the organization for the customer for the employee for the supplier what's it really doing and if you can use a baseline and the improved state and show that difference that's even more powerful and then broadcast it so a lot of people are getting a lot of improvement in organizations they don't tell anybody and it's critical that you tell as many people as possible in you know a non egocentric kind of way it's just sharing and broadcasting so that people will go hah I want to do that I want to experience that kind of result so broadcasting and selling ones results isn't being arrogant and if it's done in the right spirit and it's absolutely critical because people are dang busy they are really busy and they're not going to necessarily just hear about something excuse me excuse me one second my back um they are not necessarily going to just hear about it through the grapevine I think my voice is starting to give out excuse me all right so just a reminder upcoming webinars I can see those on my website if you'd like and you can register for any of those and then I want to just point out that we have an awful lot of you know different ways to connect on social media and also the books you can take a look at and then what I'd like to do here now is just go into the questions I have questions that people ask first when they register I'm going to go through those first and then go excuse me and then go through the questions that you've been asking throughout the webinar excuse me for one second I'll be right back okay let's try that again alright so first let's go to the questions the first question was a really good one it was about unions and other unique challenges that exist when establishing CI cultures and union work forces here as well say about unions I think that most organizations do a very bad job at entering into improvement in a union union environment because there is nothing more union centric and there is nothing that Jazz's unions more than people having a voice that's what unions are about people having a voice so what happens is people do a really pretty bad job at selling what lean is either that or they do a bad job of selling lean because they're not using lean them the correct way and they aren't really doing continuous improvement so you have to you know again be selling this in the right spirit and then behaving in the right spirit and if you are doing continuous improvement in the right way unions love it love it because it's about giving you know the front line person a voice so I don't think that there's a challenge other than having a face-to-face sit-down dialogue on what it really is and one of the tips I'll give you all is anytime someone expresses cynicism or skepticism I say you know what I'm with you I know that you have a history of not seeing that and proof is going to be in the pudding you have to just come on me come with me get in the car come with me on this ride we're going to take a journey and then at the end of it if you say that's a bunch of bunk you didn't do what you said then bad me but I want you to come in here trust me long enough to go on this ride with me and see that this is indeed different now it needs to be indeed different because you can't make that promise and not fulfill it so that's if you're a Union environment continuous improvement is the way to a wonderful relationship with the Union all right next question companies I work for push return on investment as the metric for gauging CIA activity these continuous improvement activities and cultural effectiveness is this the best metric and are there others I should be looking at so you did hear me talk about the number of ideas that are implemented I'm not a big believer in the whole suggestion box thing I don't think that that's the way to do it especially anonymous suggestion boxes I don't think they work at all but suggestion boards I think work really well where it's very transparent and the person is making the suggestion their names associated with it and if you're not going to implement it there's a reason area where there's explanation on why it can't be implemented and and if it's going to be just delayed for some reason all of that needs to be very transparent and then counting those is a great way now return on investment let's talk about that so if it all depends on the business goals of the organization if the company is in a dire state so let's just say for example that a company is in a marketplace that is eroding and sales are drying up and there's you know some serious concern about how to really keep this organization alive and let's say that expense reduction is indeed part of that that plan then clearly quantifying expense reduction right related to improvement is a wise path because if that's what's going on in that organization that's what matters is is we reducing expenses and so that becomes a wonderful metric to prove the improvement actually is working and all that if quality for example has been an issue and the improvements are being done to improve quality then that becomes the relevant metric to look at and to be able to report on if market share has been an issue then the ability to attract and retain customers becomes a primary metric so I do think it's very situational and I don't believe that we take so return on investment means many things to many people I do not believe that we take people's average salaries the number of people that are involved in something the number of hours are spending on it calculate all of that and that's our cost of doing and compare it to the number of months we're gonna see you know it break even like a two month return or three months returned that I do not believe it you know with that at all because I don't think that you can put the fixed cost of people doing improvement into the bucket of a bottom-line expense reduction for example for an organization so I hope I did a decent job of explaining that it's a big question and I if you want to ask any follow-up questions that are more specific I'd be happy to go a little more specific on that but just generally that's what I would suggest as far as return on investment ROI okay 3 how longs it take to change 125-year culture you know I think it depends very much on the will of the organization and the infrastructure you're putting in place I've seen very entrenched companies turn very fast with new leadership with a new set of vision mission goals you know with a new attitude I've seen I've seen very entrenched companies change very quickly I've also seen companies that you know have on the outside the appearance of being very nimble and and you know kind of hip happenin company not do much at all to make change so I think it just really depends on you know what the will is and the end the situation any of you that have a sphere of influence that's quite small that's one department you can make a huge change very quickly on so I would experiment with that and find out what works what doesn't work and then you know bringing up the ranks that way take it take it up and start talking with people above you how do you recommend broadcasting successes and making them relevant well it's everything from talking about the MIT meetings to if you have any kind of an improvement newsletter or a intranet that you can put things on I'm a huge believer in posting things on a wall and making sure that that type of thing is on a wall again there's a fine line between boasting and communicating so you want to make sure it's not boastful because that's not a pleasing trait um so you know they just yeah broadcasting them any way possible is is the way to go five our division president wants to implement a long term vision where as corporate seeks quarterly results how do I interact with the president and direct reports to ensure buy-in you know I would go absolutely to the more immediate leader in my skirt of influence which would be the division president and I would work directly with a division president if you can get access to him or her and find out what they really want to work on and focus on that that's what I would do I would forget the fact that corporate seeking quarterly results because that president is going to be fighting that battle for you okay one of the things the middle manager can do to drive a lean culture well we've talked a little bit about that but it really is about becoming highly skilled and becoming highly proficient as a coach and having it be part of the work and not a separate activity all right now I'm going to go to your questions thank you for all your registration questions very good um let's see so here's a question your comment regarding innovation drifting off course from the business strategy question is have the strategies been communicated from the CEO through to the custodian and coached on how their work ties into the strategies and the effect they have on the organization I think research show the vast majority of strategies do not make it out of the squeeze c-suites and if it does only one or two levels deep yes that is very true so having clarity on what really matters certainly helps improvement initiatives that you might have and getting it to become the way of life in in strategy deployment one of the features of strategy deployments called catch ball and that's taking you know senior leaders ideas about what matters and having them test those out with the next level down and having a conversation back and forth on what the next level of perception is and then once they get some agreement on that some pretty good consensus on that then that second level takes that list and they bring it down to the next level and they and they go back and forth and by the way catch ball is done throughout the year because there's a habit of going to the gemba or where the work is really done and having these conversations with the worker so everyone's more clued in to what really mad by the time you need to plan for the next fiscal year that in a normal circumstance happening year-round but you can do it very formally when you're starting to put the plan together for the next fiscal year and by the way you don't have to wait for the end of a fiscal year to do this you can start at mid-year so on any of the any of the catch fall activities you do will help spread that that strategy and get the clarity of that strategy throughout the whole organization in a way that actually engages people in creating the strategy and not having it just be dictated down the ranks so to the degree that a company has that yes it absolutely helps continuous improvement um question can you recommend good books on coaching you know I can't if any of you have think have seen any we've been talking about this a lot on in the you know glean circles and you John shook and Mike Rather and me and lean frontiers people Jim huntzinger that have the coaching summit there really isn't a book on lean coaching yet there are there pieces of coaching like it lean uh what's called Toyota culture Mike Hosea's and Jeff like I wrote a book called Toyota culture in that book there's some pieces of coaching in getting the right things done when is it was cold um yeah getting the right things done by Pascal Dennis there's a little bit of coaching in there in um David Myers book lean hang on one second let me look at my shelf is it called lean culture um I can't see my shelf from here I think it's called creating the lean culture that's one coaching yeah Toyota kata definitely Toyota kata yeah thank you Steve Toyota kata has some coaching but there's not a book that is just about coaching and it's the one thing that's missing right now a ling literature um ok next question this refers to process mapping is there any added value to using BPM and methodology instead of traditional swimlanes process flow chart okay first of all swim lanes are not flowcharts swimlanes are different from flowcharts flowcharts have decision trees in them BPMN I don't know what bpmn is of it uh is it Giles if you're still on um if you could please tell me what BPMN methodology is that would be great um and I'll move onto the next question because I don't know Oh business process modeling notation never heard of it I don't know what it is so um sorry um you know I think process level mapping can definitely take lots of different forms I have my methodology is metrics based process mapping that I use I think all process mapping needs to be OS the Wells Fargo standard way I don't know the Wells Fargo standard way sorry um all process mapping I feel needs to have metrics in it not not just process steps so I don't know if yours has that or not and who created that I'm sorry I can't speak to that okay next question I have a confirmation email that the value stream mapping is October 10th but it says October 8th no we change the date on that a while ago and a confirmation email did go out so the the value stream mapping webinar is indeed October 8th um the link on the October 29th webinar ties to the slides for today yes thank you for pointing that out someone else between that a little bit earlier it has been changed any of you who downloaded the materials before say ten ten might want to download them again it has the correct link I am so sorry I don't know how that happened but it did it was the incorrect link okay the next question do you think a lien code should be responsible for the inputs of an activity but not the output that would sit with the process team do you think a lien code should be responsible for the inputs of an activity but not the output would that sit with the process team so I'm not sure I understand the question but let me just say there's a lien coach if it's a lean improvement professional isn't responsible for any of the process at all period the process needs to be the responsibility of the people who are doing the work and managing the work and the baton for managing that process has to be passed almost immediately to the leadership over that area usually a manager level so um I don't I don't know exactly what this means about inputs and outputs but you know the person managing processes would be of course monitoring inputs and outputs quite a bit in order to drive continuous improvement so I don't see any more questions these are all great questions everyone thank you so much if you're writing a question could you please okay well here's one more question just came in in a pocket CI situation which support can we expect for HR people well Y HR people must be involved well here that's a very good question alejandro I think HR has been left out of the improvement game in a pretty significant and not so helpful way pretty destructive way actually because HR can really help leadership start understanding what the role of the frontline person is in making improvement and then helping also get that line between too much bottom too much top-down direction and not enough boundaries so people do have to have boundaries but not dictated direction so they need to be given freedom for what I'm sorry freedom for how but not necessarily be given total freedom for determining what so HR can play a really important role in getting clarity around all of that and helping operations make sure that everyone's role is clear um it can it can really be very very helpful so thank you very much everyone I hope to see you on the next webinar I'm so sorry for a little bit that coughing there I know that's a little annoying to hear but um I did the best and I hope that was helpful and you know start tomorrow go out there go into your sphere of influence and start making continuous improvement become a way of life it's the only way we're going to get organisations truly turned around to become outstanding thank you very much and have a great rest of the evening the day or or the afternoon wherever you are bye-bye

Channel: TKMG, Inc. and TKMG Academy, Inc.

Views: 68,495

Rating: 4.8004751 out of 5

Keywords: lean, six sigma, BPR, reengineering, process improvement, continuous improvement, kaizen, value stream mapping, process design, Toyota, Management

Id: KyhR9hvMlPw

Length: 76min 10sec (4570 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 19 2013