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.

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. 

 

 

 

How do you crete a documented ‘Flow’ in your processes?

How do you crete a documented ‘Flow’ in your processes?

Aug 5, 2019 | Management, Operations

 

‘Flow’ evolves as a completed task is handed over to the next stage, or person, automatically, with no error, in an entirely predictable manner.

When seeking to build flow into a system, there needs to  be a lot of detailed and logical thought put into the individual actions that need to take place in order to complete the activity, stage, and whole job.

There needs to be a list of the individual actions that are required, that are checked off.

Nothing too adventurous here.

If you boarded a plane and saw that the pilot was running through his preflight checks from memory, rather than a clipboard held by the copilot, you would be justified to feel nervous. In the case of a light plane, the pilot will use a clipboard himself, and physically check items off the list.  This post will have been edited several times, but it is only the use of the ‘speak’ tool that will root out the small inevitable errors of grammar, syntax, and spelling that I make. Even then, some sneak through.

We all miss things, our mind sees what it wants to see because it makes assumptions about what should be there, and just ‘sees’ it.

The easiest way to write out a sequence of actions in sufficient detail for it to be a contributor to the creation of ‘Flow’,  is to assume you are writing them for  your grandmother who has advancing Alzheimer’s, and for whom  every action has to be articulated in detail and in sequence. This should deliver a simple, logical flow, that is easily communicated and used.

A caution: Never assume because a process has been articulated in this way, and seems to work well, that there is no room for further revision and improvement.

Improvement can only occur in a stable environment, and documenting the flow is a key step in the ongoing challenge of improvement. 

The 2 simple questions, which when answered, will improve everything

The 2 simple questions, which when answered, will improve everything

Apr 17, 2019 | Leadership, Operations

There is a very simple, elegant way of improving anything, from a complex factory production line to something more personal, like improving your tennis. 

Determine the constraints, and remove them progressively. It is the key to improvement, that can become a continuous process.

Imagine a production line with three machines through which every product must pass consecutively to complete the transformation. The first has a capacity of 3 tonnes/day, the second 5 tonnes, and the third, 10 tonnes.

The capacity of the system is 3 tonnes/day, it is constrained by machine 1, and spending any resources improving machines 2 and 3 will be an absolute waste beyond the routine maintenance required to keep them working. It does not matter how much you spend on machines 2 and 3, machine 1 remains the system constraint.

This simple observation forms the basis of improvement, best articulated in the book ‘The Goal‘ in which Eli Goldratt articulated his Theory of Constraints almost 40 years ago.

The theory of constraints, summarised is: ‘Any system with a goal has one limit at a time, and worrying about anything other than that one limit is a waste of resources’

Many have still not got the memo.

The two simple questions:

  1. What is the current constraint?
  2. What is the best way to address the constraint?

If you go back to the example, adding a tonne/day to machine 1 increases the capacity of the system dramatically, while adding the same tonne to machine 2 or 3 makes no difference at all to the capacity.

I play tennis, a  great game for life, but I am now 40 years past my best. However, recently I played a match against someone who was clearly a much better player than me, and won. While a surprise to most, (including me)  it was simple. He had a poor backhand, and no matter how good his serve, forehand, and volley, so long as I could reach his backhand, I was in with a chance on every point. That was his constraint, to the point where even a minor improvement in his backhand would see him beat me easily.

Any business system can be analysed in the same way, and doing so enables the most productive allocation of resources to be made.

However, business is far more complicated than a game of tennis. There are functional silos, personal agendas, and ingrained behaviours that have to be navigated, and they are rarely as obvious as a dodgy backhand.

The system for identifying them however is the same: observation combined with data.

The first part of any StrategyAudit assignment is to do a diagnostic, of which the identification of constraints to improved performance is a key component. It normally breaks down into a number of common high level or ‘cultural’ and strategic buckets, shaped over time by the leadership of the enterprise:

  • Priority and task management
  • Knowledge management
  • Customer focus and management
  • Continuous improvement and Innovation management

These are then further broken into more functionally oriented constraints, Marketing, Sales, Operational, HR, and so on.

The constraints in these functional areas should be identified, prioritised, and progressively addressed. The hidden constraint at this stage is the necessity for cross functional collaboration, as constraints in one area impact on the constraints in others, and inevitably, behaviours emerge to accommodate.

Back to the simple example.

If the sales function has the ability to sell that 3 tonnes/day of production across a range of differing products that all go through the same three machines, the constraint will no longer be just the 3 tonnes/day on machine 1. It will be the changeover times required on machine 1 between runs of differing products, which reduces the capacity of the machine.

The obvious solution, almost always followed, is to do longer runs of each product to maximise the ‘up-time’ on machine 1,  and sell from inventory. However, this solution does not address the constraint, it just consumes extra resources (working capital and storage space) to  work around it. Customers suffer with extended delivery lead times driven by the less flexible production scheduling necessary, and drift away. The much better solution is to reduce the changeover times on the machine, while resisting the strident calls from the Sales Manager to invest in greater capacity as a means to shorten delivery lead times. While continually reducing changeover times does have a limit, at which investment may be required, in my experience, it is almost always the quickest, and cheapest way to generate ‘extra’ capacity.

When one of your constraints is existing management practise and culture, give someone who has the necessary experience to address the challenges a call.

 

 

Time can only be productive, or wasted. Which will it be?

Time can only be productive, or wasted. Which will it be?

Feb 27, 2019 | Customers, Marketing, Operations

Time is our only truly non renewable asset, and it is absolutely finite. Therefore it makes sense to use it as wisely as possible.

In a management context, in measuring a process, time has two dimensions.

  • Clock time. Start to finish, how long does a task take to go from one end of the process to another.
  • Event time. How long does it take to go through the activities necessary to complete the process.

It might take a bank 3 days to process your loan application, clock time, but the event time may only be the few minutes it takes to check your credit history, current income and automatically calculate your ability to repay the loan. Event time.

In most cases, customers are only aware of the clock time, and when it extends beyond what they think is reasonable, they become cranky with you.

The difference between the two is the opportunity for improvement, and to ensure customers only get cranky with your competitors.