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visit MIT OpenCourseWare at ocw.mit.edu. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Let's
move on to our next module of the day, which called
People: The Heart of Lean. What people who
have studied Lean and the Toyota production
system in general have found is that there's
two major aspects of these kinds of systems. One is this kind of
just-in-time production that we typically see,
and which we talked about in the new balance plant tour. But the second and
equally important component of these
kinds of systems is the respect-for-human
system that exists. And you heard, again in
our new balance plant tour you heard Claudio talk
about the immense respect that they have for
their employees and how employee involvement
is valued and encouraged in his organization. Now the trouble is
for a lot of folks, and engineers in particular, is
we think about the people part to the problem and
we sometimes sees these as really challenging. And this is a quote from a
gentleman at Northrop Grumman who's fairly high
in their management, and he sums it up very nicely
by saying "the soft stuff is the hard stuff." The soft stuff, which is
usually thought of as the people issues, is often seen
as some of the hardest challenges in an organization. He's very true. But it's one of
those important items to work on when you think about
making an organization lean. So in this section
on people we want to have you achieve the
following three learning objectives. The first is to
be able to explain why people are key to improving
productivity and organization. The second is to
make you realize that effective communication,
shared goals, and knowledge, and mutual respect lead
to improved organizational performance. And third, we'd like you
to be able to participate as a member of a team
in order to achieve a productive and
positive outcome. So to get us kicked
off on this discussion, I'd like you to
think and reflect on the most important things
that contribute to your job satisfaction. So whether you're a student
or whether you're currently working, think about what it is
that makes you very satisfied with your job. And I'd like to ask
for some volunteers to tell me first of all, what's
the most important thing? Let's start off with that. I'm going to start to
make a list on the board. AUDIENCE: Maybe feeling like
you've made a difference at the end of the day. Whether it be to the
customers or to the staff that you work with. ANNALISA WEIGEL: What else? Yes. AUDIENCE: Felt like
I've learned something. OK, I've going to
put something up. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Learning. Great. AUDIENCE: Having control
over the outcomes you're responsible for. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Yes. AUDIENCE: I'd say having
room for creativity. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Creativity. In the back. AUDIENCE: Feeling
respected or valued. ANNALISA WEIGEL: What else? Yes. AUDIENCE: Making
connections with individuals and the community at large. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Connection. So it's the relationships with
your co-workers, customers, everybody? AUDIENCE: Yeah, with my
patients and med students that I work with, but also
connecting with the needs of the community in general. I guess with my colleagues, too. Though that seems secondary. ANNALISA WEIGEL: What else? Yes? AUDIENCE: Acknowledgement
of a job well done. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Yes? AUDIENCE: I think a job you can
work to your full potential. ANNALISA WEIGEL: OK. Anything else? AUDIENCE: Responsibility. ANNALISA WEIGEL: OK. In the back. Yes. AUDIENCE: I don't require that,
but the financial incentives. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Financial
incentive, salary? AUDIENCE: Yeah. Make money. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Let's
call that what it is. Salary. Great. We've all got to eat. Go ahead. AUDIENCE: Having the time to
do my job right the first time and feeling like I
didn't wallow away in errors throughout the day. ANNALISA WEIGEL:
So adequate time. What else? AUDIENCE: Working hours. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Your hours. So take a look at the
list we have here. And think if the most important
thing that contributes to your own job satisfaction
isn't on this list, and you'd like to
raise your hand and tell us about
it, that'll be great. we'll add it to the list. Otherwise we might
start to winnow it down. AUDIENCE: Lack of stress. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Stress
free environment. AUDIENCE: Or reduced stress. ANNALISA WEIGEL:
OK, so low stress. Reduced stress. Susan? AUDIENCE: Being part of a team. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Yes, in back. AUDIENCE: It's sort
of related to hours, but work-family balance. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Yes. AUDIENCE: Feedback. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Feedback
from your supervisor? OK. Great. Do we have any-- one more
burning last suggestion? Matteis? AUDIENCE: Environment. Working environment. ANNALISA WEIGEL: OK, so
take a read through these and what I'd like
to ask you to do now is each person take a voting
strip of dots they should be distributed on your table. What I'll ask you to
do is just come up to the board and place one dot
next to each of your top three items. So you get to vote for 3 as
the most important things that contribute to your
job satisfaction. So when you're ready,
just head up to the board and place your dots on the line. And, yes, you do have to vote
for three separate items. You can't put all your three
dots on one particular row. So go ahead when you're
ready just come up. [SIDE CONVERSATIONS] ANNALISA WEIGEL: Has everybody
had a chance to vote? Very good. All right, let's see where
our top vote getters were. So it looks like work-family
balance is up there, as is making a difference. Let's see. So looks like salary gets up
there, too as our top three. Excellent, so I think it's
making a difference by quite a few lengths there, work
family balance, and then salary. So let's see how some of
your answers as a class compared to some studies
that have been done. And this is just
one sample that's actually been done by Boeing. It's some of their employee
satisfaction surveys. And what you see here
on the chart is-- the x-axis here and the
placement of these items shows the correlation or
the strength of association with a high performance
work environment. Really, the things that
are making employees perform really well. And you'll see things
like encouraged to come up with new and
better ways to do things, involving them in decisions,
improving my skills or learning as we
called it here in class, conditions allow me
to be productive. We also talked about that. Someone made that suggestion. These are all things that
have a much higher correlation with having high performance
work environment than things on this side. And notice pay is sort of
farthest from people's job satisfaction. So it just really
goes to show you it's not just what you pay
people and then job security. But it's a lot of these
other important satisfaction items that contributes to people
really doing a productive job. Now there are several
different theories about how workers
are productive. They relate to the brainstorming
that we've been doing. The first is usually
called Theory X and it was one of the
original management theories and it's based on the premise
that workers don't like to work so they must be made to work. So you have to enforce harsh
rules and lots of motivation to get them to overcome
this general human desire to not work. Yes? AUDIENCE: I have a thought. As you got salary
and paid, I think why this one might
be a bit different is because on the
average, I guess that the bulk of the workers
are already paid good enough to take care of themselves and
their families and all of that. So if you're paying someone
a salary that is not able to take care of himself,
or not able to pay his bills, I don't think it
won't be an issue. I think that this might
not be a very good example, because if we look at the
average pay and the lowest pay they get, it might be
something very tangible. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Sure. And I think I would
agree with you. That's a function of
some base level of pay. And perhaps one of the reasons
why salary sometimes shows up in this environment is
more important than on some of these other surveys
that have been done is because we have a number of
students in the room, right. Raise your hand if
you're a student. If you're not being
paid much of anything. And hence, if salary is
really important to you. But as you suggest, when
you go out in the workforce and you are earning a
salary and putting food on the table is not
as concerning for you as it might be when you're not
getting salary as a student, some of these other items
really become important. So after a while
if you're trying to create a high performing
work organization, it's not so much
increasing people's pay as it is focusing on
making sure there are all of these other conditions. And sometimes people think it's
easier to just pay people more and that doing this is harder
but it pays off much higher. All right, so back to
our worker theories, which comes into play a bit
with your comment as well. So we started at early
management theory with Theory X. So
then to counter that after a little while
of experimenting with it they really came upon
Theory Y, which is reflected in Elton Mayo's work. Where they said, no,
actually workers-- if you just make them
happy then they're going to be really productive. So this theory out
of that was born the whole focus
on human resources and human relations
in the workplace and trying to create
a happy workplace. So that was about 1920,
and then around the turn of this century,
we have expressed by Dick Kleine at John
Deere, his thought is that a productive
worker is a happy worker. So we've got these three
different competing theories. Of those three, which
do you think most aligns with a Lean way of thinking? How many people think it's
the first theory, Theory X? How many people think
it's the middle one? How many people think
it's the last one? Very good. That's the way we think, too. We think that Dick
Kleine's thought about a productive
worker being happy worker really is the
way that things are. And to try to illustrate some
of the links between employee productivity and
company performance, we want to take a case study
here on Southwest Airlines. And just to give you some
brief background on Southwest as a company and
put them in context, they are one of the best-- well they really are
the best performance of the major US
domestic airlines. And you can see their
profitability metric here on the chart. Southwest is in blue, which
is far above the red, which is an aggregate of all the
major domestic airlines and their profitability over
the past couple of decades. And in addition, Southwest
has made an operating profit every year for over 30 years. Now this is a big
achievement for an airline. No one else has this record and
many, many times, many years, many airlines are at a net loss. A few more items
about Southwest, they are one of the
safest airlines around. They did have a very
homogeneous fleet until they merged
with AirTran, and that simplifies some of their
training and maintenance and logistics items. They have never laid
off any employees even after the events of 9/11. They are the most highly
unionized US airline, even though there's
some perceptions out there that there's
no unions on Southwest. Because, after all,
those Southwest employees are so happy and the company
is doing so good surely they don't have unions. That's not true at all. They're highly unionized they
have a point-to-point, which is different than a
hub-and-spoke route structure. And many of the other
airlines in the US operate on a hub-and-spoke
route structure. You can think of it
a little bit more like a batch and cue
and continuous flow. A little bit different. They consistently offer
some of the lowest fares that are around. They're liked by investors
and employees and customers, I should say. And so you might ask
what makes Southwest so successful in its business. And Professor Jody Hoffer
Gittell in her book The Southwest Airlines Way
which resulted out of her PhD work here at MIT,
she argues it's because of Southwest's
organizational competency. And it's characterized by
shared goals, shared knowledge, and mutual respect. And she calls these three
things relational coordination. And she says that shared goals
helps the employees to align and prioritize
the organization's success over doing their job or
succeeding at just their job. The second item of
relational coordination is this element of
shared knowledge. So if everybody has the
same kind of knowledge, then you have visibility
of the overall work process and not just your
little part on it. So you can help see the linkages
between what you're doing and what someone
else is doing and be able to create overall a more
efficient and effective system. And lastly, this third element
of relational coordination is mutual respect. And that helps to reduce some
of the barriers between employee groups and helps them
cooperate more effectively to get the job done. And all these three elements
of relational coordination really couldn't
happen if it weren't for the underlying practice
of effective communication. This effective communication
is particularly one where people are
communicating about the problem itself and not really
worried about assigning blame when something bad goes wrong. So if you think in your
own work environment, you may be able to
think about some people that you interact
with perhaps who are very good at thinking
just about the problem and trying to separate
the people out from it. And then you may
also know some people who tend to focus more on
blaming somebody when something goes wrong and not really
focusing on what went wrong and how we can fix it. But really who might
be responsible for it. That's not as effective
communication as we could be. Other elements of what makes
communication effective? Frequent, timely, open, honest. Very, very simple description. Not as easy to achieve, but very
simple to try to understand. Now when an organization
has very high relational coordination,
professor Hoffer Gittell found that high levels of
relational coordination do correlate with
performance for the airlines that she's studied. And this graph shows you
some composite measure of airline performance. On the x, she took many
different things into account, including on time
departures, fewer lost bags, things like that. And then she has
relational coordination as measured by another amalgam of
a bunch of different measures that she created
in her research. And each of these
dots is a number of different airlines
in different locations around the country. There are two here
shown from Southwest and the others are for three
other different airlines. But you see the general trend. As we increase
relational coordination we tend to see the aggregate
performance increase. So we've seen how relational
coordination works and increases
performance in airlines, but you can apply
this concept well beyond the domain of airlines. And it really applies, she
says, in any setting where there is task interdependence. So there may be hand-offs
that take place requiring feedback and iterations. Or where there is
uncertainty and there has to be continual adjustment
of plans and updating. Or where there are
time constraints, and so you can't just wait
while you try to fix a problem. Now I want you to
think about what you think of when your
careers are going to unfold and the kinds of industries
you all anticipate being in, and tell me if you
think you are ever going to spend your time in
an organization that does not have one or more of
these elements in it. I suspect not. I suspect you're all
going to find yourself in organizations where
these are critical elements. And so this notion of
relational coordination is one that would
translate equally well into any environment
where these items exist. So one example is
health care, obviously. Another one that we talk
about is product development. Product development is done by
different kinds of engineers, typically. Lots of hand-offs. Lots of uncertainties. Lots of time constraints. And I'm sure that you can
think of many other situations. Any come to mind? Yes, Fabrice. AUDIENCE: Government programs. Where the government
invests in an industry to develop something and all
of the sudden you have said, and then everybody has
something different. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Excellent. Yeah. Great example. There's lots of different
products being developed under those circumstances. All right well let's look at one
particular example translating relational coordination into
another particular environment. Professor Hoffer Gittell
then went and said, well let me see if this
really does translate into other environments. And so she went and studied
health care environments to see if these same elements
of relational coordination correlated with
elements of performance. And just as you saw
with the airline chart, the same kind of pattern starts
to appear in the health care industry here. So it's not only do we
suspect that this notion of relational
coordination translates. We actually have
yet another study in another domain,
which does show that we see increased levels
of performance with increased instances of relational
coordination. So in order to achieve
relational coordination, professor Hoffer Gittell looked
at various practices that were in place at Southwest Airlines. And she identified and
codified 10 different ones that underlied being able to
create an environment where there was good relational
coordination, which then led to having very
good performance outcomes. And you can read them here. There in your notes. Lead with credibility
and caring. Hire and training for relational
competence, and not just for other factors. Bridging the work-family divide. Recognizing that
that's something important for employees. Measuring performance broadly. Making unions your partners. Building relationships
with your suppliers. Keeping jobs flexible
at the boundaries. In addition, creating
boundaries spanners who are crossing different
parts of the organization. Using conflicts to
build relationships and to learn and grow. And investing in
front line leadership. That's not the leadership at
the C-suite of the organization, but those who are right on the
front lines of, for Southwest, maintaining your planes,
manning the gates and interacting with
customers and so on. And then the outcomes that
professor Hoffer Gittell found relational coordination
leads to is higher reliability. This was judged for airlines
by better on time performance and fewer lost bags. As well as greater customer
satisfaction and shorter turnaround time, which is
really important in an industry like air transportation, where
you have very expensive capital assets. And the more time they're
used, the greater return you're getting on
them, and the more time they sit idle at the gate while
they're waiting to be cleaned and you're offloading
and onloading passengers, it's not generating any
revenue for the organization. To turn to an example
from health care, this reflects back on that
chart that I showed you two slides ago with
the coordination between relational
coordination and performance. It hypothesizes that
if we were able to make a 100% improvement in
various work practices that underlie relational
coordination in hospitals-- so if we were to double our measure
of relational coordination our improvement in
these work practices-- we would have an
almost 50% increase in relational coordination,
which would then lead to significant increases
in patient satisfaction and decreases in
the length of stay. Which are all very good
things because these are what hospitals and health
care settings tend to measure, right health care folks? You're probably
measured on those. It's also interesting
to me to note that, well, just because we increase
our relational coordination doesn't necessarily
mean we're going to increase people's freedom
from pain or their mobility. This is a joint unit
that was studied in this particular focus area. Because these are
really more related to the types of treatment
that you're giving, but these are elements that
are really being measured in the hospital setting. So just to conclude our
discussion about Southwest and the power of workforce
productivity, some of the benefits
that you see, we've got bigger revenues
that are generated from not only
satisfied customers but better utilized
capital assets here. And we have reduced costs
from lower employee turnover. If they're productive and
satisfied and not having people sit idle. Wasted human resources. It's a very bad thing. And lastly, increased
productivity leads to happy, satisfied
employees, which leads to more increased
productivity, which leads to more happy,
satisfied employees. A very virtuous circle. So now we'd like to turn from
our case example of Southwest and linking employee
satisfaction, essentially, and productivity to now
talking about working in teams and thinking about how teams
can better work together. And to start that off we want
to do some active learning. We're going to have
a class debate. So the objective
here is you're going to have a time
constraint, and you're going to have to articulate
a clear and concise message on one side of the
debate or the other. That's your overall objective. But while you're
doing that, we want you to observe a couple of
things about the team dynamics. We want you to think about
how differing viewpoints in your team affect their work. We want you think about
the processes used for your group decision making. And lastly, we want you to think
about how completing the task depends upon the
personal feelings of your group and the process. So there's two
things you're doing. One is you're making
this argument. And two, you're stepping back
and observing the whole process while it happens and taking
notes on both of those. All right so here is our debate. So the early bird
may get the worm, but it's a second mouse
that gets the cheese. So the birds proposition
here in this debate, putting it in a Lean context,
early adopters of lean thinking gain the greatest
competitive advantage. But then there's another
side of the debate that goes something like this. That the second followers,
people who are not the first, the second followers
of lean thinking gain the greatest
competitive advantage. So either of those
points could be true. And we're going to
assign the tables to be various points of view. And you're going to have to
argue for one of these two different propositions. So I'm going to go
and assign tables. I'm actually going
to make you birds. Mice. Birds. Mice. And birds in the back. And what do you
have to do, is I'm going to give you
eight minutes to work on formulating a 60 second
or less argument in support of the proposition
you've been assigned. And you also then have
to come up with a 30 second or less rebuttal. Because the format is going to
go you get to make your point. The birds make their point,
then the mice make their point, then the birds get to rebut,
and then the mice get to rebut. So you have to write two things. Your proposition and
then your rebuttal. And they can take no
more than 60 seconds. And you have eight minutes
in which to formulate both. And then we're going to have
each team do one or the other. You won't know which
until we get time and then we'll kind of roll dice and
see who gets assigned what. All right, any questions
about the task asked of you? All right, great. Go to it. I'll give you eight
minutes on the clock. All right, time's up. So now everybody's got their
proposal or proposition and their rebuttal formulated. So we're going to have each. The birds and the mice are
going to give their proposals and then we're going
to hear the rebuttals. And since I don't have
the right number of dice to roll for each of situations,
I'm just going to pick. So I'm going to ask this
table, you guys are birds? OK. I'm going to ask you
to do your proposition. And you are birds
in the back, too? I'll ask you to do
your proposition. So we'll hear same
thing from both teams. And I'll ask remainder birds
that you guys do the rebuttal. And then I'll ask this
team over here, mice? I'll ask you to do
the proposition, and I'll ask this mouse
team to do the rebuttal. All right. So let's have the
birds go first. So we'll hear the two
bird propositions. Go ahead. And I've got you on the clock. AUDIENCE: So, we
think it's a good idea to start early because
it's a continuous process, and takes time to implement
and to change your company's culture. So we're talking about
five years earlier. So the sooner you get
started, the sooner you can realize your gains. You can use creativity
to create the standard before other people
really define it for you. If you start early and you find
you run into some challenges, then you have time to go back
and change things and make it more efficient or
choose a different path. You can establish a reputation
as being innovative, which will not only
encourage people to invest in your company but
may also excite your employees. Because they'll just be excited
about being on the leading edge of something. And then it takes time to
change the culture of a company, so that's also a good
advantage of starting early. ANNALISA WEIGEL: OK. And just a few
sentences to spare. Good job. Let's have the other
proposition for birds. And please speak up so
everybody can hear you. AUDIENCE: Well, I'm going
to start with the graph that we have here. So this is time, and
this is productivity. And if you start with
this company right here, which would be the
early bird adopting Lean and they improve their
productivity and their employee satisfaction and
their efficiency, there is virtually no way
that this second company that starts at a later time
can ever catch up to it. And while they start
their innovations, we're moving on to
our next innovations after we've already
established some brand loyalty and got customer allegiance. We've had the market edge. At some point, the
market gets saturated and we've already reached it,
like this graph shows you. The same thing that our
colleagues were saying is that because it
takes five years and it's not just an end street. If we have ongoing
continuous improvement, that it's something
that continues moving on indefinitely in the future. In our patients, we have better
recruitment and retention of satisfied employees. Our end product is
better and we can respond to customer's needs-- ANNALISA WEIGEL: Times up. AUDIENCE: --quickly. ANNALISA WEIGEL: OK. Thank you. All right let's go to our mice. AUDIENCE: So, the
first to make it work in a sense of the risk
of failure and squander time and resources. Once a plan has been implemented
that is advantageous, you see that the stated
inefficiencies of that process can be corrected,
redrafted, and implemented. Gain a competitive advantage. Also by starting up
later, the standard had already been established. And that way the
implementation time is less. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Very good. Very efficient. Much less than 60 seconds. All right, now we've
heard arguments on both sides of the case. So let's hear some rebuttals. So the mice just went. So let's hear the
bird's rebuttal to the mouse's proposition. AUDIENCE: So, certainly
the mice proposed that they would learn
from bird's mistakes. But so much of Lean is specific
to individual enterprises as it relates to local
politics, the culture that enterprise has
in its space that we think that it's very specific. And what we learn in, say,
BI might not necessarily be directly transferable
to working with medicine. It defends the bird. And our second point is that
by not being an early adopter, you're kind of adding
some more time. You're kind of just sitting
around and waiting and existing in a culture of efficiency that
is doing harm to health care patients, potentially. And that's just
unacceptable when you know that there is better
ways of operating on the daily. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Very good. No pun intended. All right, let's
hear the rebuttal to the mouse's proposition. AUDIENCE: So for the mice, it's
better to be the second adapter because you have an easier
time getting buy in. And that's one of the biggest
hurdles, because people see how it's worked in other
industries, other companies, so they say, Oh, we can do this. You can also pick and
choose what you want and what you think
will work best for your specific situation. You also have more
experts to learn from because you can tap into
the resources and the knowledge of the other companies
and see what failed. And it's always the first
time that takes the most. And then you're starting
from a higher point so you can more easily
reach and even surpass the point of the birds. AUDIENCE: And just
to add to that, they shared with us a
graph showing production. Today we learned that the
US auto industry compared to the Japan auto industry. As 1947, Japan [LOUD LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: In the space
of about 40 years, they have way overtaken
the US industry. So this is a clear example
that there's always room to overtake. ANNALISA WEIGEL: All
right, and that's actually your 60 seconds. OK. Very good. Excellent. So I'm glad that this has
inspired some fires in you. So now that you've heard
both sides of the argument, I actually would like you
to step aside from your team propositions regardless
of what you're asked to argue for
your teams and I want you to think about the
arguments and the rebuttals that you did here. And think about which
side of the argument seemed more convincing
to you personally. So if you could take
out your green cards and your yellow
cards, I'd like you to think if you really believe
the bird argument or the mouse argument. So if you feel you
believe the bird argument, raise up a green card. And if you feel you
believe the mouse argument, raise up the yellow card. Go ahead raise it up. We just want to get
a sense of the room. [LAUGHTER] ANNALISA WEIGEL: Do we have
everybody making a decision? Somebody lost the green cards. All right, so it looks
like-- look around. We've got more green
cards than yellow cards. But still, we got maybe
4 to 1 green to yellow. So it seems like
overall you all feel that the bird argument,
the early adopters of Lean, have the greatest
competitive advantage. And there's no right
and wrong to this, and it's largely dependent
on your context and situation and there may be circumstances
where it's better for an organization to wait. The organization is, say, in
the middle of big transition to a new product. That just might not be
the right time to start. It may not be advantageous
for them to think about being an early adopter. But there are certainly
are lots of advantages for an organization who's ready
to adopt Lean to adopt it. So you might say that if
you're ready, if you're able, if it's a good time and
if you don't adopt Lean, that's not so good. Right? But necessarily being
an early adopter doesn't have to help
you but it certainly can be a very good thing
for an organization. So now let's turn from
thinking about the outcome of this debate and whether
you thought about yourself as a bird or a mouse. Let's think about
the team experience itself, which was
the other element I asked you to
reflect upon as you're going through this exercise. So think about
this common dilemma that we find ourselves
in when we're working in teams of your
personal views versus the team views. Think about your
exercise here, was there adapting that you did or
was there compromising you saw taking place in the team? How were the personal feelings,
attitudes, and perceptions of others handled? How did you feel
was handled for you? Did you feel anybody
else maybe being uncomfortable in that situation? What about the
wordings of statements? Did you, as a team, argue
about how you worded things? Did that make a difference? What was the process
used for your group to decide and
discuss and present? Was there a process? Did you think about it? How did it unfold? And how satisfied were
you with the team outcome? And I'd like to take maybe
three minutes for each group to discuss it
within their group. And then we'll take
one or two minutes to kind of give some open
commentary on these issues as you discuss
them in your group. If I can have everybody's
attention, please. We'll get back to sharing our
discussions with the class so we can all benefit from
the table discussions. Table discussions
are a great way to get more people
talking at once. So if we just had
a class discussion, we would get one fifth
the kind of conversation that we get going on
with all the tables. So now I'd like to hear though,
about some of the richness of the conversations you had. So first on items of the dilemma
of the personal versus team views. Which tables felt
that they experienced some of those things? Yes? AUDIENCE: Well at
the start, I sort of had a different opinion
from the rest of the team. Because we were assigned to a
particular side of the coin. We just had to work together. We didn't-- ten seconds I was
convinced I was in the group. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Tory? AUDIENCE: I think we came
to a very similar conclusion of saying had it been maybe
a topic like politics, where everybody has a view but
you're just meeting people and you want to be
respectful of other people. So you might have had
a little more conflict. Whereas here, since we
were given our conclusion, everyone was just
trying to quickly find ways to support that
conclusion together. ANNALISA WEIGEL: And
this table over here? Where you guys had an even
split of yellows and greens in your personal votes? AUDIENCE: No. AUDIENCE: We were all yellow. [LAUGHTER] AUDIENCE: We worked so well
together that we were actually, truly, convinced. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Excellent. Let's talk about the
process that you used. We just had a big lecture on
process before this, right? And seeing life as a process. What process did you use? AUDIENCE: We had a good process. I mean, everyone had to give
their opinion initially. We had input from everyone
before coming to a consensus. So it wasn't like
someone just came up with the final solution. I mean, we have to listen to
everybody's point of view. And maybe because our
group is small, maybe it was more effective,
we were able to come to a very quick conclusion
based on different input from everyone. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Other
reflections on process? AUDIENCE: I guess it was
not explicitly delineated, but we split up our time into
three different sections. One was just anyone who just
chimed in with their own answer supporting the case. Two was looking and
anticipating rebuttals, and three was just
writing it all down. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Excellent. And did you come up with
a written statement? AUDIENCE: Yeah, we did. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Excellent. [CLASS TWITTERING] ANNALISA WEIGEL: How
about your satisfaction with the team outcomes. Anybody unsatisfied or
satisfied with the team outcome? I'm going to hazard
a guess on balance. People seemed
satisfied because there wasn't a lot of
storming out of the room and yelling and shouting. But, if you had any complaints
however small about your team outcomes. If you wanted to voice that. AUDIENCE: Don't get me wrong. We were mice, but by
the time we were done, we were all pretty much
agreed on the bird view. AUDIENCE: I think we started
out with the bird view. We forced ourselves to
go to our mice view, and then we came
back to bird view. AUDIENCE: Because as
soon as we started talking about a rebuttal
we realized, yeah. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Which
is why good debate teams work on their rebuttals a lot. OK so let's use this
exercise then to jump off into our last segment of
slides here in our people module focusing on team
elements and team skills. And this chart is our
transition to just remind us how people are the heart of Lean. Because we have the tasks, which
are what the people are doing. And you all just had a
task in your exercise. The processes are how people
are doing their tasks. And we talked about what
your process may or may not have been. But it's all about the people. The people are doing the tasks. The people are
doing the process. And they set within various
organization structures that are what enable them to
do their processes and tasks. And that's all embedded in
a particular organization's culture, which has attributes
about it that further influence and enable a person's ability
to do their tasks and processes. Many of the work that
people do are in teams and they're collaborating. And there's really three
elements of collaboration. There's not just the
thing you're doing, but there's how you're
doing it and then there's this thing we call affect, which
is the feelings about the work. And this is what
the people bring to. And it's based on your
prior experiences. It's based on the
culture that you sit in, organizational,
national, ethnic, et cetera, on your own biases that you
bring to what you're doing. And it's also based on
your current experience and where you are. And it's both the process
as well as the feelings or the affect that
are supporting the task actually getting done. When you're
collaborating in teams, and you're bringing all these
elements together of process, task, and affect. There's a lot of benefits
to collaboration. You get-- I think most of you
would recognize these-- you get more ideas, new ideas,
multiple areas of expertise to bring to bear on the problem. Work is shared. It should result in some
stronger problem solving abilities and should improve
things like design work and other kind of
creative tasks. But there's also a lot of
challenges that are involved in collaborating with teams. And I'm sure you've
all run into some of those over the course of
your school and work time. So what are some
of the challenges you run into when you're
trying to collaborate? AUDIENCE: The workload
isn't shared evenly. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Not shared
evenly in a workload. What else? AUDIENCE: I think diversity
can bring new ideas. But if our group size
was larger, I mean, it's hard to accommodate
everyone's ideas. So somebody might
view that, oh my ideas didn't get into the process. ANNALISA WEIGEL: So it can
be inefficient and unwieldy? AUDIENCE: Yeah. AUDIENCE: It takes
time to develop a consensus in a big team. ANNALISA WEIGEL:
More time consuming. Yes. AUDIENCE: We were talking
about how as we go in, the people that we're working
with may not be skilled. May not know how to work
in this sort of model. That they're used to just
being told what to do. I see that on a micro
level with patients, but also if you try
and ask your staff to be more of a contributor,
and be more responsible and also take on
more credit, they may be like, what are
you talking about? I punch in, I punch out. I'm not a member in that way. So you have to retrain them. ANNALISA WEIGEL:
People just may not have the skills to collaborate
in teams that they need. Either by training or
just by expectations. These are some of the
common challenges. I'll just list for you on
the rest of the slide ones that we think are
prominent as well. Different goals and values. We just talked about
not being skilled in it or practiced in it. Sometimes you run
into ego issues and people are defensive
about their particular work or their ideas. Their preconceived notions that
get in the way of teamwork. And then there's
differing work styles that you try to bring
together in a team and that can be
counterproductive to your efficiency. Or maybe somebody worked in
a bad team situation before and that's just really hindering
their ability to work together productively in future teams. So then, with all
these challenges how do you meet them? What are some of your thoughts? AUDIENCE: I think
setting out ahead of time what the expectations
of teamwork are, and just kind
of lay out for people how do you work with a team? Like respect others. Listen first, speak later. Things like that. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Excellent. So clear rules and education. AUDIENCE: I think shared
knowledge and shared goals can add a lot to the
relational coordination, because this is how you
share your goals with others and try to convince them to
come to the same conclusion. Otherwise, I mean, everyone
feels that I had my own ideas. AUDIENCE: Something important. The diagrams you always
show about collaboration, is always-- the puzzle pieces
always fit perfectly, which I think is a misrepresentation. You have to accept that puzzle
pieces won't fit perfectly, and there's someone who's going
to make a decision in the end. And if there is a culture
of mutual respect, the person making the decision
will respect the people that brought in
suggestions and vice versa and that's just
the nature of life. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Establishing
that expectation is important. AUDIENCE: Things
like ongoing training and starting off
with something small that you can have an obvious,
tangible result with guaranteed success. So that they can learn the
process and feel good about it. And then keep continuously
doing ongoing training over time to improve their ability
to do it and remind them. ANNALISA WEIGEL: Excellent. Again really excellent ideas. Let me spell out
some others, some that are duplicate of
what we just discussed and some which are new. So long the lines are
trying to make it explicit and trying to train people
and set expectations, you may want to try to do those
also in writing and not just verbally. Sometimes seeing
things in writing can really help people
understand what's going on. Considering alternate
ideas or solutions and not jumping to
consensus prematurely can be one way to meet the
challenges of collaboration. Paying careful attention to
process is really important. If people understand the process
is very clear and very fair, then when they express opinions
that are counter to what the rest of the group
does want to do, and the group goes in
a different direction, at least that person
has felt that they've had their due process and they
haven't been short changed. The next point voicing
disagreements constructively, directly, and explicitly
is really important. Because you're not
all going to agree except for certain groups in
this particular exercise, where you've all coalesced
on a certain point. But in your work
environments, you are going to have times
when you disagree. And learning how to
do that productively. So that you're focusing
just on the disagreement not on the person that you're
having that disagreement with will help you get to a
solution more productively. Lastly, give positive feedback
directly and explicitly too. So how many times a day
do you say to a colleague, that was a great job. And then think of how many
times you make critical comments about a peer's or colleague's
work or suggestions for improvement. Especially at MIT,
we have a reputation for being a praise
free zone here. Lots of criticism. It's very important
that you also reinforce the positives
in collaboration, because that's going to foster
the team being able to work productively together. Now in organizations,
you're going to find many entities
are organized in teams of various sorts. And this diagram
helps orient you to some of the previous as
well as current structures that we find in a lot of the
complex engineering system kinds of industries. Usually, the organization
is broken down functionally. There may be a design
function, there may be an operations
function, there may be a maintenance function. Or it may be a structure
function, a thermal function, and so on. And it used to be that
groups worked independently, and whenever you had
yo collaborate somehow between, say, function
one and function two, the interface took place
between the top people. But it was usually
the folks down here who were doing all
the work and needed the answers from these people. But they had to work all the
way up through their bosses to communicate with
that person's boss to work all the way
down through the chain. So that's kind of the old style,
the way organizations worked. And then a couple
decades ago, we introduced the concept of
integrated product and process teams, which really took
essentially the folks doing the work down here and
put them into a team so the communication could
happen directly between people who were doing the tasks
and not really up and down a chain of communications. There, it really didn't
matter that this person knew what the question
was that they're asking had to be passed along. They're just relaying it. It's much better if you
can have direct interaction between people. So this kind of an
organization structure has helped increase the
effective communications and the ability for
teams to work together in these complex enterprises
that we see today. But being on an IPT
or an IPPT, you're now asking people who are in
this part of the organization to have teamwork and leadership
skills that they might not have needed to have in our
old kind of organization where the leadership was
largely done at the top. So this helps us
understand why introducing the concepts of
teamwork and leadership and developing
skills around those is really important to
do really from day one. When you join an
organization and not waiting until you get to be
at the top of that org chart. Now teams progress through a
number of different stages. And there is a lot of
literature about this, but in essence when you
first start out with a team there's a lot of challenges
we just discussed and working together. And teams take a
little while to grow from beginning teams
to what we'd really call high performance ones. And the degree of management
necessary for those decreases over time as we get
towards a more high performing team. And their empowerment
and ability to do things increases as well. We find that when we
look at high performing teams in a Lean
environment, they have these attributes about them. And we've mentioned
most of them so far. They have mutual respect
for all people and all jobs. They encourage contribution
by all the team members. We heard Claudio talk about
that in our tour today. Different opinions
are not only valued but they're sought
after and brought out. There is open and honest
communication and feedback. The goals of the
team are aligned. There is continuous improvement
of both the individuals and the team. Always seeking to
do a better job. And there is a high degree
of synergy and cooperation among the members. So if you're striving
to put together a team that is high
performing, you're really trying to work on these
seven particular attributes and try and increase
those for your team. So lastly we'll just
conclude with our chart here. People are the heart of Lean. With our shared
goals, our shared knowledge, mutual respect,
communication, teamwork, and leadership. All the hallmarks of a
high performing Lean team. And by way of summary
from what you've just heard over the past
module on people, I'd like you to take out one
of your white index cards and take out a
pen and write down for us what's the most
important thing you learned from this module on people. And on your way
out to the break, you can drop that on the back
desk so we can take a look.
