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Mark Rosenthal
Published: Wednesday, May 9, 2018 - 12:02 A couple of weeks ago I posed the question, “Are you overproducing improvements?” and compared a typical improvement “blitz” with a large monument machine that produces in large batches. I’d like to dive a little deeper into some of the paradoxes and implications of 1:1 flow of anything, improvements included. In the classic seven wastes context, overproduction is making something faster than your customer needs it. In practical terms, this means that the cycle time of the producing process is faster than the cycle time of the consuming process, and the producing process keeps making output after a queue has built up above a predetermined “stop point.” If the cycle times are matched, then as an item is completed by the upstream process, it is consumed by the downstream process. If the upstream process is cycling faster, then there must be an accumulation of work in progress (WIP) in the middle, and that accumulation must be dealt with. Further, those accumulated items are not yet verified as fit for use by the downstream process that uses them. The way this applies to my “big improvement machine” metaphor is that we are generating “improvement ideas” faster than we can test and incorporate them into the process. No matter how good your solution or idea, it is just an academic exercise until it is anchored as an organizational norm. The rate limit on improvement is established by how quickly people can absorb changes to their daily, habitual routine. Implementing and testing small changes one by one is generally faster than trying to make one big change all at once. When we do one big change, it is usually a lot of small changes. I hear, “We don’t have time to experiment,” but when I ask what really happens if a big change is made, what I hear almost every time is “We had to spend considerable time getting things working.” Why? Because no matter how well the big change was thought through, once you are actually trying it, the real problems will come up. Key point No. 1. Don’t waste time trying to develop paper solutions to every problem you can imagine. Instead, “go real” with enough of the new process to start revealing the real issues as quickly as possible. In other words, the sooner you start actively learning vs. trying to design perfection, the quicker you’ll get something working. Your other objective here is to develop the skill within the organization to test and anchor changes quickly, as a matter of routine. This will take time. When we see a high-performance organization making rapid, big changes, what we are typically seeing is making small changes even more rapidly. The company has learned, through practice over time, how to do this. It isn’t reasonable to expect any organization to immediately know how to do this. Key point No. 2. If managers or professional change agents (internal or external consultants, for example) are telling people exactly what to do, this learning is not taking place. It’s critical for employees to develop this learning skill, and they are only going to do it if they can practice. Learning something new always involves doing it slowly, and poorly, at first. If your internal or external consultants are serving you, their primary focus is on developing this basic competence. Their secondary focus is on getting the changes into place. This is the only approach that actually strengthens the organization’s capability. The same is true for an operational manager who “gets” lean, but tries to just direct people to implement the perfect flow. It will work pretty well for a while. But think about how you (the operational manager) learned this stuff: Likely you learned it by making mistakes and figuring things out. If you don’t give your people a chance to learn for themselves, you limit the organization in two ways: Think about what you want your people to be capable of doing without your help, and make sure you are giving them direction that requires them to practice doing those things. It will likely be different than telling them what their layout should look like. Coming back to the original metaphor, if you want fast changes to last, you have to work on speeding up the organization’s cycle time for testing improvement ideas. Part of this is going to involve making that activity an inherent and deliberate part of the daily work, not a special exception to daily work. Part of that is going to be paying attention to how people are working on testing their ideas. Improvement kata and coaching kata are one way to learn how to deliberately structure this work so that learning takes place. Like any exponential curve, progress seems painfully slow at first. Don’t let that fool you. Be patient; do this right, and the organization will slingshot itself past where you would be with a linear approach. Small changes applied smoothly and continuously become big changes very quickly. First published Nov. 29, 2017, on The Lean Thinker. Quality Digest does not charge readers for its content. We believe that industry news is important for you to do your job, and Quality Digest supports businesses of all types. However, someone has to pay for this content. And that’s where advertising comes in. Most people consider ads a nuisance, but they do serve a useful function besides allowing media companies to stay afloat. They keep you aware of new products and services relevant to your industry. All ads in Quality Digest apply directly to products and services that most of our readers need. You won’t see automobile or health supplement ads. So please consider turning off your ad blocker for our site. Thanks, Mark Rosenthal is an experienced lean manufacturing/quality director and manager with more than 20 years of experience implementing continuous improvement in diverse organizations. He brings deep understanding of the Toyota Production System and a proven ability to see any organization’s potential. Rosenthal is a change agent who facilitates the process of discovery to quickly make an impact on the way people think, enabling them to cut to the core issues and get things moving by engaging the entire team to develop solutions that affect the bottom line. Overproduction vs. Fast Improvement Cycles
Small changes applied continuously become big changes very quickly
What is overproduction, really?
Small changes don’t mean slow changes
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast
• They will never be any better than you.
• They will wait to do what they are told because that is what you are teaching them to do.Improve your cycle time for change
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Mark Rosenthal
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Comments
Sound strategy
As with all things, Murphy's Law is operative! Field Marshall Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, Chief of the Prussian General Staff, defined this concept quite well in his "On Strategy"....
“The material and moral consequences of every major battle are so far reaching that they usually bring about a completely altered situation, a new basis for the adoption of new measures. One cannot be at all sure that any operational plan will survive the first encounter with the main body of the enemy. Only a layman could suppose that the development of a campaign represents the strict application of a prior concept that has been worked out in every detail and followed through to the very end.
Certainly the commander in chief will keep his great objective continuously in mind, undisturbed by the vicissitudes of events. But the path on which he hopes to reach it can never be firmly established in advance. Throughout the campaign he must make a series of decisions on the basis of situations that cannot be foreseen. The successive acts of war are thus not premeditated designs, but on the contrary are spontaneous acts guided by military measures. Everything depends on penetrating the uncertainty of veiled situations to evaluate the facts, to clarify the unknown, to make decisions rapidly, and then carry them out with strength and consistency.”