Can't get no dissatisfaction

The light works in my girlfriend's kitchen.

I bet the light works in your kitchen and you don't even think about it. Well the strip light in this kitchen hasn't worked properly for ages. For the want of 99 pence worth of a new starter, we have both been getting up on a chair to fiddle with the old starter to make the fluorescent bulb flicker and come on and stay on. We just hadn't quite got round to going to an electrical shop to get the starter. So up on a chair every time we wanted to turn on the kitchen light. We even took to leaving the light on all evening when we left the kitchen so that if we popped back to make some tea, we didn't have to get on the chair again to turn the light on again. Talk about a work-around.

The thing is we got used to it. After a while, getting up on a chair to make the light come on didn't seem so much trouble. We forgot that it was a bother. It became the way things were done.

I recall way back when, working for an investment back as an analyst messing with dozens of Access databases and Excel spreadsheets. One day I had to add an extra calculation to the daily work which would have meant a couple of days effort to update the Access database. Instead, because the trader wanted it that day, I exported the data to Excel, wrote a quick and dirty calculation in an hour, ran the calculation and then reimported the results to the database to continue the day's work. This extra procedure added 90 minutes to my day, every day.

I continued that extra step for months. I forgot that it was slow and cumbersome. I got used to it.

It took six months before it started to bug me and I got so bored of the extra step that I spent the two days implementing the calculation in Access. After that the calculation whizzed along in the blink of an eye. Those two days spent right at the start would have saved me 24 working days over the six months I waited. In fact the two days of work would have paid for themselves in only eleven days.

In order to implement change, big or small, you need some negative emotions. You need to be dissatisfied, bored, shocked, appalled, angry and critical. If you are tolerant, accepting, placid and content with your lot, nothing will happen. This is why change agents are always searching for the "burning platform" so they can get people to jump instead of having to push them off a "quite comfortable thank you" platform.

For an evening, the newly fixed light was a revelation. "Wow! We don't have to climb on the chair to turn the light on! Amazing!!" How sad that we take joy in things working as they always should have done. I recall my boss at the bank giving me a pat on the back for rewriting the calculation to save that 90 minutes a day.

A vision of a better way is nice and shiny, but how about a bit of tedium and rage to get us not just to where we should be, but beyond, to where we couldn't dream of? If only we could stop being so accepting of the messy, awful, boring, infuriating status quo.

Get moving. Get some dissatisfaction.

Best,

Rob

Jim Womack Reflects

In Jim Womack's latest e-letter he describes a visit to the Arsenale in Venice where they pioneered flow systems in building war ships way back in the 15th century. All this looking backward made him wonder why Lean is not more widespread than it is. Reflecting on the spread of Lean he says,

...we haven't combined all of these tools and management methods in more than a few organizations.

Trouble is that the reasons why Lean hasn't been taken up as much as Jim and I would both like is hidden in that very sentence. Also from the e-letter,

It seems to me that we have already achieved several things of lasting value:

• We have transferred and adapted lean process tools for production, product development, supplier management, and customer support to a wide range of industries in a wide range of countries.
• We have experimented with all of the management tools - policy deployment, A3 analysis, and standardized management with kaizen - that are needed to introduce and sustain these process tools.

Again, the reasons for the low take up compared to the potential of Lean, are right there in those two very telling paragraphs.

The problem is the tools.

The best thing Womack and Jones ever wrote was the title of the book that came after The Machine That Changed the World. That book was called Lean Thinking. The title emphasised thinking (more than the book, I might add). This is the thing that people need to focus on. The tools are a red herring. It is the way that management and staff think that determines how they see they systems they work in and so how they try to change them.

Looking at work through a filter of a set of tools means that is what you see. If all you know is 5S, kanban, heijunka, poke yoke, work cells, supermarket pull systems, value stream mapping etc., then every problem is seen as an opportunity to apply one of these tools.

Every problem is instead an opportunity to learn. Every thing that is working badly is an opportunity to understand better how to improve.

Taiichi Ohno, the father of the Toyota production system, said, "don't codify method". He meant don't give things names, don't invent tools. When people ask me, "Which tool should we start with?", I ask them to guess which tool Toyota started with. The answer is they didn't start with a tool because they didn't have any. They started to understand their system and to develop solutions to the problems they encountered. These solutions have become codified as the Lean tools. Even the book Learning to See by Mike Rother, which has another promising title, is simply another description of how to apply a set of tools. It should be titled Learning to See Which Tool to Apply.

Jim Womack is in a considerable position of power in the Lean community and the trouble is that instead of reflecting and coming to the useful conclusion that he needs to drop the tools approach instead he is actually trying to extend it by inventing Lean Management Tools to patch up the poor effectiveness of the original Lean tools.

When the tools don't work, using more of them won't help matters.

Best,

Rob