Discover ‘flow’ to build scale 

Nov 28, 2019 | Leadership, Lean, Operations

The notion of ‘flow,’ or as we call it, ‘In the zone,’ is a psychological state first articulated by psychologist Mihaly Csikenmihali, published outside academic circles in his 1990 book ‘Flow: the psychology of optimal experience’.

From time to time, most of us experience ‘flow’ in our lives.

Those rare times when deeply immersed in a task, when energy and concentration are together forming a focus and delivering a rolling output, that makes the time seem to compress and fly. The level and quality of output when in such a state is surprising to us, even  astonishing. 

I wonder if there is a collective noun that describes such a state to a group?. It would apply when a group of individuals are so closely working as one, but using their individual skills simultaneously, and cumulatively, such that the collective output is greater than the sum of its parts.

How does a group go about achieving this state of flow?

It takes engagement, focus, alignment around a common purpose, and preparation. The output when it happens, is amazing.

Einstein must have been in an extended state of flow during his 1905 ‘miracle year,’ when he wrote four papers that together formed much of the foundation of modern physics.

He did  not achieve this by himself, although he was not known outside a small group of friends. He was working full time in the Swiss  patents office in Bern, these seminal papers were his ‘side-gig.’ He was not able to access the supposedly best minds in the fields he was thinking about, as he could not get a job in a university, so he walked and discussed with his few close friends and colleagues, and significantly his first wife, herself a substantial mathematician.

There must have been some degree of collective ‘intellectual flow’ present in that time, the state where collective and collaborative activity delivers compounding outcomes, leading to those seminal papers.  

Every enterprise should strive for ‘Flow’ in their activities. The flow of processes, such that everything happens predictably, smoothly, to a predetermined cadence, building on itself, delivering a compounding outcome.

This applies as much to innovation activity, and strategy development and implementation,  as it does to the mundane processes that we need to have happen every day to keep the doors open.

Can you see any sign of ‘flow’ in your enterprise?

 

Header credit: Lucidpanther via Flikr

How to measure ‘Flow’ through a process.

How to measure ‘Flow’ through a process.

Oct 23, 2019 | Lean, OE, Operations

The word ‘Flow’ has a few differing meanings, but all imply the smooth transition from one place to another.

To improve operational efficiency, as well as the productivity of a process, the best way to go about it is to remove the sources of interruption to the smooth flow of the product or service from one point to another.

In some cases, the results of the interruption will be obvious, a build-up of WIP waiting for the opportunity to move forward, and its sibling, lack of product to move into a waiting machine, or part of a process. In others, it will not be so obvious, and often takes time to isolate and address.

Fortunately, the metrics of ‘Flow’ are simple, there are only two:

Throughput.

Cycle time.

How much moves from one point to the next, and how long does it take.

These metrics can be applied to a whole process, and parts of the process. Usually an improvement starts with the former, and as investigation proceeds, it digs into individual stages in the process, removing interruptions progressively, starting with the biggest, which may in itself have several components.

Tracking and making transparent these two measures, while having those involved take responsibility for continuous improvement is where the productivity gold lies hidden.

Tracking can be achieved by some sort of digital visual display, now everywhere, and/or the original and perhaps still best way, with Kanban cards (which means in Japanese ‘visual signal’) that follow the process, step by step. Utilising both achieves the benefit of both wide transparency, and individual responsibility.

In its simplest form, the metrics track time and delivery.

The example above in the header shows, in period 1, 8 units were delivered, period 2, 10 units, and so on.

The time will be whatever is appropriate to the process being measured, as will the units.

It may be minutes, days, weeks, whatever is appropriate.

This may represent the total process, or a small part of it. In the latter case, it will usually be sensible to add a column between each of the process stages to capture the WIP, the reduction of which is almost always the best place to start when optimising the flow through a multi stage process.

When you need an experienced head to assist you think your way through this seemingly simple idea, give me a call.

The cost of preventing errors

The cost of preventing errors

Sep 18, 2019 | Change, Lean, Management

 

Prevention of waste is a core tenet of lean thinking, and has been systematically used to optimise processes of all types.

However, it is not universally useful.

Prevention of errors in an existing process is one thing, you have the process established, and can map the manner in which the process is applied, and the outcomes achieved. However, when dealing with a new product, or process, things are a little different.

There is no known path towards an outcome, you are in effect telling the future, and that is an occupation with a high failure rate.

In order to tell the future with anything approaching an acceptable level of certainty, you need to experiment, try things, see what works, ask customers, deploy the ‘Lean start-up’ type mentality to the development of the process.

This means there will be many false starts, errors, failures, or more accurately, opportunities to learn.

Established businesses often do not accept errors. Promotion, salary reviews, and all the other trappings of corporate success are usually based on not making mistakes, so guess what, nobody tries anything new that just might not work, just in case.

An effort to remove these errors will end up costing more, as the implication is that the product or process will be developed until it is seen as ‘Completed’ before launching. As we know, not all new products work, so the losses involved in such an exercise can be huge

Remember ‘New Coke,’ the new improved taste of new coke that nearly destroyed the brand? With the benefit of hindsight, it was obviously a dumb idea, but at the time, I am sure Coke management had market research coming out their ears that confirmed this was a great idea. Pity they did  not pick a small test area, and put the change into the market, similar to a Minimum Viable Product, (MVP) to see what Coke consumers in real life rather than is some contrived market research environment said. Such a ‘waste’ would have saved them many millions of dollars, and being head of the queue in the greatest marketing blunder of all time list.

The lesson here is to encourage experimentation, each being an opportunity to learn, and improve your fortune telling skills, substituting small errors that do not compromise the business, for the big blunders that will.

 

 

 

How to get really big, important stuff done, and win!

How to get really big, important stuff done, and win!

Sep 16, 2019 | Lean, Operations

40 years of observing business and life, success and failure, has led me back to a conclusion that smarter people than me reached thousands of years ago, and winners in all sorts of fields keep using today.

Follow the process.

Achieving big goals is what we are all pushed to do, but often it is overwhelming, simply too big to contemplate, so mostly we hide, in our own particular way. We watch in wonder while others achieve their big goals, and put that success down to luck, circumstances, or a dozen other things.

We would be wrong.

Whenever you see someone achieve a big goal, they have done so by applying discipline, and following a process. They have broken the big goal progressively into smaller more manageable chunks, until they are concentrating just on what is in front of them, right now. Get that right, embed it into the ‘muscle memory’ and then move to the next one, which is an incremental and cumulative movement towards the big goal.

Several of my children were successful elite level athletes. While the big goal was always there, in the background, providing a reason why they were working so hard, what they concentrated on, every day, was what was in front of them.

Another set of reps of a specific move that provided another brick in the foundation of their performance, as they cumulatively built the wall.

The chaos that exists in all our lives, the big things we face can similarly be broken down into simple, progressive steps to be taken. Simple is not easy, simple is in fact very hard, but necessary.  Break down the difficult big thing into its component  parts, and tackle each one in turn, succeed at it, and move on to the next one.

Improving productivity of a factory process is no different.

Break down every job into its component parts, and get done the one in front of you.

As I work with factory management, one of the best ways to improve without trying to make the big changes all at once which leaves people out, is to have a daily ‘WOT’ meeting, (What’s On Today). Depending on the factory, it may be the whole staff, or it may be individual work cells, the process is the same. Agree the priorities for today, ensure the resources needed are available, and do it, knowing the other parts of the process are doing the same thing, and they all feed into each other.

Excellence is just a matter of steps, excelling at, and continuously improving each one along the way before moving on to the next.

When it comes to getting stuff done, distraction, disorder, and uncertainty leads to failure.

A process is something that goes from A to Z, we lose the game when we focus on Z, forgetting the B to Y steps in the middle.

Play what is in front of you, without losing sight of the wider context, the next step, and overall objective. 

 

 

 

What is the most universal and useful management tool of all?

What is the most universal and useful management tool of all?

Oct 15, 2018 | Lean, Management, Operations

Easy question. ‘5 whys’.

5 Whys was first articulated by Toyota’s architect of the TPS, Taiichi Ohno in the 50’s, but it was not new.

Anyone who has had children has been on the receiving end of a form of the ‘5 whys’ from about two and a half years old, to 6 or 7, by which time they have learnt  that the question is not always appreciated or answered fully, so they stop asking.

The process is deceptively  simple, keep asking ‘Why’ until you get to the root cause of the problem, well past the symptoms, so it can be fixed, and the problem not recur.

In a previous life managing a manufacturing business, we had a recurring problem with an automatic box erector that seemed intractable despite huge efforts. The whole line stopped every time the erector spat the dummy, causing serious production losses.

While it took months to find the right cause, after chasing a lot of rabbits down holes, we finally nailed it using 5 why.

  1. Why did the erector jam?

One of the arms was out of alignment to the flat box

  1. Why was the arm out of alignment?

One of the flat box ends was slightly crooked

  1. Why was the box end crooked?

The box end was slightly out of specification

  1. Why was the box end out of specification?

The purchasing manager had changed suppliers for a significant saving, and the new suppliers actual operational control allowed variations outside the erectors demanding requirements,  resulting in an occasional  mechanised  ‘dummy-spit’.

This example in fact only took us ‘4 whys,’ but the trick was to ask the right questions  in the first place, in the right sequence. This took us several months and cost a huge amount in lost production, and maintenance resources as we eliminated possible causes of the problem before anyone thought to examine if a 1 mm variation outside the spec of the flat box size was significant.

Once identified that it was, the problem was quickly fixed by moving back to the previous supplier with whom we had encountered  no problems.

Subsequently, we evolved a process that used 5 whys as a matter of course in search of improvements in the factory, and later, admin processes, and found that our problem resolution times dropped dramatically.

The process is pretty simple, just challenging to implement:

  • Institute a ‘5 whys’ meeting in response to a problem.
  • Invite (read insist) everyone involved and/or affected by the problem to attend the meeting.
  • Agree a ‘chairman’ for the problem who will take overall responsibility.
  • Proceed to ask ‘Why’ until you get to the root cause of the issue. It almost never takes more than 5 ‘whys’ hence the name. This step can take time and often takes several meetings as possible answers to the ‘why’ are considered.
  • Assign responsibility to install, test and validate the solution
  • Document and disseminate the solution which has been broken into a written process to ensure compliance, or easier further investigation should a similar problem arise.

The whole objective is to get to the root cause of  the problem, a process that is applicable not just in industry, but in your life, when you think about it.

 

 

 

Diagram courtesy Mindtools.com

Why Operational improvement and change initiatives usually fail.

Why Operational improvement and change initiatives usually fail.

Aug 2, 2017 | Change, Leadership, Lean, Operations

How do you make short term operational and process improvements ‘stick’ for the long term?

Most change initiatives fail to deliver on their early promise. You get some short term improvement, some changes made, but the effectiveness of the process dwindles with time.

I often see failed improvement initiatives, usually labelled ‘Lean” or ‘6 Sigma’ by those involved, that leave a pile of paper, some awareness and knowledge, and from time to time some useful results, but nothing like the promises of the expensive consultants as they signed you up.

Why is that?

Nobody goes into a change process expecting it to fail

In my observation, the single most common reason these initiatives fail is because they ignore one of the basic tenets of Lean: respect for people.

Lean gets a start because management sees problems they have failed to solve, or do not know how to solve. So they bring in some Lean consultants who reach into the tool box and come out with some of the common tools, go through an education process, implement, and get some quick and sometimes impressive wins, and victory is declared. After that declaration, the focus moves elsewhere,  and the process slowly deteriorates.

Why is that?

Everyone was so committed, excited at the early results, the consultants were paid a shedload, so it should have worked.

In 30 years of doing this stuff, there is always one dominant reason they fail.

The initiative is top down, not bottom up.

Those at the top see problems manifest in the P&L. Their motivations are financial, operational and strategic. They talk about alignment, and people being the most valuable asset, then ignore them.

By contrast, building initiative from the bottom, asking those doing the work how to improve it, then giving them the tools to improve, and rewarding them with acknowledgement as well as a more secure job and maybe a pay rise, is where the action is.

However, for managers, they are trained to see their job as managing. Having some stuff bubbling up from the factory that has not gone through the formal approval processes and subjected to the discipline of  the accountants mandatory NPV  and ROI analysis is uncomfortable and challenging to their authority as managers.

This is where the distinction between managers and leaders comes in.

Managers, usually unwittingly, kill off the grass roots enthusiasm to make their workplace safer, more interesting, and more productive because it makes them uncomfortable, less in control.  By imposing rules, they interrupt the productive flow evident in successful initiatives. By contrast,  leaders encourage and promote the ambiguity that sometimes results, and works with it.

Which are you, Manager or Leader?