Lean Challenge for Management
True Lean Value can be achieved if our business culture overcomes the urge to professionalize and compartmentalize Lean practice.
Chuck Fellows brings forty years of experience in international manufacturing, purchasing, government regulation, logistics and small business development to his endeavors. As a consultant and trainer for the last ten years he has assessed needs and developed and implemented workshops for individuals with an entrepreneurial desire to succeed. His interest and application of Lean Manufacturing principles and practices began over thirty years ago, before the term "Lean" was created, on a stamping plant fender line in Ford's Rouge complex. Chuck developed and implemented custom workshops and training programs for the ISO 9000 Standard, Quality initiatives and leadership development. These efforts crossed traditional corporate and geographic boundaries, and included the top executives from organization around the globe. He believes that teaching, sharing knowledge, and gently challenging paradigms, is the most effective way to overcome the competitive challenges that businesses face.
True Lean Value
"True Lean Value" can be achieved if our business culture overcomes the urge to professionalize and compartmentalize Lean practice. To succeed, management must be prepared to set aside significant internal 'knowledge' of conventional success ("this is what got us here"), and seriously question many of their fundamental models for business practice.
One inescapable conclusion drawn from studying the work of Frederick Taylor is that previous students of scientific management took what they understood and could easily implement, and ignored all the rest. In fact, they ignored the real purpose of "Scientific Management," leaving it hidden between the pages of a book.
In this article, I hope to stimulate some discussion of why Lean practitioners can encounter resistance and failure within organizations and why some succeed so brilliantly. It's about management's approach to organizational change both for the organization and for themselves as individuals. One of the keys is a real understanding of what Taylor meant.
Business leadership in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries has accomplished truly remarkable things. We have created a global economy of unprecedented wealth and vitality. Look forward from today and the potential is mind-boggling.
The internal combustion engine is on the verge of being dethroned. "Talking wires" are being replaced by digits traveling in the ether. Computers are getting faster and smaller. Medical science is breaking new ground every day. Global communication between individuals is exploding. Society itself has increased its ability to absorb change in thinking and behavior.
Assessing the 'Model' of Success
Much of this success is due to the efforts of a group loosely identified as "management". Likewise, many of the difficulties being encountered are products of that success. Those that led the charge used a very old and stable business model.
Businesses have succeeded using this model as it evolved over time. It's easy to understand how many can say, "Why fool with success"? If top down control models work, why should they change? The historical model has been tinkered with and revised substantially over the years. Nonetheless, 'costs' are still king and 'controllers' continue to rule with a sharp pencil. That old model has become entrenched as the paradigm of business practice.
The human impact of that successful business model is invisible, a set and agreed upon way of thinking and perceiving the world. It operates without our knowing and has been so effective that we really are unaware of its influence on everything we think, do and say.
Our very survival has been dependent upon control, repetition and sticking to the game plan! Yes, we have shifted and changed tactics in that long march through business history but we have not really altered the 'command and control' paradigm that has served us so well.
Theories on the Bookshelf
In today's search for better ways to conduct business, we have cycled through many theories and initiatives:
Frederick Taylor's time and motion studies, mass production, specialization of labor and equipment, Douglas McGregor's Theory X and Theory Y, management by objectives, quality control circles, employee involvement, automation, robotics, Peter Drucker's enlightened guidance, Ed Deming's Statistical Quality Control and Total Quality Management, Theory of Constraints, CRM, shareholder value and Six Sigma.
All these theories have initially met with resistance and skepticism, then surged forward with enthusiasm, and ended up as another neglected chapter in the management toolkit. Each is still with us, absorbed into collective behaviour and enshrined in the curriculum of business schools.
You'll notice that Lean practice is not on this list. That's because Lean resists easy categorization and shelving in the dusty row of books on business theory. It truly is a management challenge. It places us in direct confrontation with the past success of 'command and control' culture.
Lean has a Very Different Impact
Lean is an opportunity for significant positive change that challenges us to question established practice and to 'learn by doing' rather than by rote. And, perhaps surprisingly, the majority of the ideas required for success come from the people that do the work. Management must see its role in a different light and be willing to teach, coach and step aside to observe as progress unfolds before their eyes. This is actually a way of viewing and practicing management that Fredrick Taylor believed in and that is rarely acknowledged.
Lean involves change and change, after all, is silently feared and rejected by most of us. We are told that change is the essence of progress and we attend programs on change management throwing the word around like confetti at a wedding.
But true change is slow and often requires a crisis to make happen. Most activities conventionally labeled as change are actually the application of tools in superficial ways that are easily acquired and discarded.
Profound change is the result of numerous, often unrelated, tiny, or small changes in human behavior and thinking, intertwined with other events. It is this slow, evolving change that alters the way we think and perceive our world. An old proverb states, "Fish discover water last." and the change in our way of seeing our work is unnoticed until we step back and reflect upon where we were and where we are going.
Lean can be like that, once the tools have been applied to a real work situation. Until we actually 'do' the work of changing how we 'see' we never really knew how many steps were involved in a process, nor were we aware of the amount of waste we created while doing our best. 'Seeing' truly is 'believing'.
Why? We live in a culture of comfort zones, places inside our heads where 'command and control' reactions are prized above all. We have been taught this from the earliest age within the various social structures of our community. Until we 'see' differently we will continue to use the old paradigm, often 'blindly' until the problems become so great that we are forced by crisis to take a new 'look' at our ways of work.
Crisis and Response
Yet when faced with a crisis, our emotional responses take over and thinking patterns are surrendered to that primordial part of our brain, the reflex 'survival' instinct.
The current crises of business we have recently encountered have driven our thinking processes into the quest for mere survival. Our community of business reverts to familiar patterns of slash and burn in an effort to support slim or non-existent profit margins. Firing staff, cutting back on future development, selling off components and reducing inventories are the typical reactions to difficult times. Most recently, financial manipulation has been exposed for the world to see, and react to with dismay and loss of trust.
These behaviors are not unique to the business community. Business activities of the early twentieth century were adopted as the "model" that works, and have permeated the very fiber of our being. Response patterns in politics and education echo this retreat into survival thinking. And so we blindly follow the mental lead of 'command and control' that served so well in past times of unbounded chaotic growth and social extremes.
Why not Change our Approach?
It's not easy to recognize or accept that the way we behave is so predictable, and despite its prior success, so wasteful and even destructive in today's world.
For management, just the thought of listening to the advice and counsel of the person working the line or the office clerk can be an unsettling experience. Yet it has happened; remember "Management by Walking Around?" The gurus of this tool failed to mention that sincerity cannot be faked, and most efforts were thin and insincere, focused on chatter instead of substance.
It is so much easier to tell people what to do and expect them to do it. All this listening, understanding and empathy stuff seems too mushy, and really just a waste of time. Surely success is the result of applying our powers to stimulate and dictate a solution to those who are less intellectually motivated or endowed. This is 'command and control', our old paradigm again, that pesky misinterpretation of Taylor's work!
The Rules of Engagement Have Changed
But today's stakes are much higher than we perceive. The rules of engagement changed and they are now changing continuously.
The goal is to 'see', for the first time, that it is our automatic behaviors and responses that push us into the "command and control" mode. In practicing Lean successfully management must open the path for collaboration and problem solving that involves the whole enterprise.
The tough part for management is that self-awareness must come before changes in awareness of the enterprise and its purpose. Lacking this self-knowledge (how do I act, respond, work with others) our efforts to lead an organization, from any level, will retreat to the safety of the 'comfort zone'; the same place that has led us to our current crisis.
For Management it's Personal
This management awareness is the first step towards the achievement of "True Lean Value." It is the first and the toughest part of a Lean transformation that will put your organization on the path to greater success and profit.
Warning! What you see and hear may not please you.
Your own thinking may begin to move to places outside the 'comfort zone' you have been so well trained to live within.
Before you begin the Lean journey, examine and understand the true nature of your work life. Recognize that your own mind supports repeated cycles of 'command and control' for each new business challenge and that this can be closing you off from new solutions that are available in the people around you.
We have gotten to this place because of our best efforts. We must honestly evaluate those efforts, and the thinking that created them - are they as useful today? What risks do I take in changing my way of seeing the work at hand? What rewards do I stand to reap for these change efforts?
Lean Practice is as simple as changing the way you see your work processes and beginning to do that work in a fresh way side by side with your employees and colleagues. This may sound difficult, but for companies that have committed to the Lean journey, the work has reaped huge rewards.
The challenge of Lean for management is clear: look around you with new eyes. The solutions are there: they are not what you have done before, they can come from people who will surprise you, but the results will be glorious!