Creating A KAIZEN Lean Culture

Overview

Effective KAIZEN Lean Enterprises are highly successful at turning knowledge into action. There has to be timely and productive application of the KAIZEN Lean methods that are learned. To do this, an organization also has to address its culturally stimulated wastes and change the behaviors and attitudes that create these wastes.

To that end, successful KAIZEN Lean companies grow their in-house resources for Lean leadership, change management, coaching and implementation. By investing in these skills for their KAIZEN Lean Leaders, management ensures fast and effective Lean implementation as well as sustainable bottom line gains.

Objective

Enhance the skills and effectiveness of the KAIZEN Lean pilot team in building buy-in, sustainable behavioral and cultural change as well as dealing with resistance.

Approach

• Hands-on interactive training involving practice sessions and feedback


• Each participant creates a Personal Learning and Application Plan


• Case studies of best practices


• Troubleshooting problem solving with the group


• Closely tied to the group’s needs in leading successful Lean Implementation

Introducing the Cultural Value Stream (CVS©) Process

KAIZEN Institute Lean Advisors Inc. (KILA)’s Cultural Value Stream (CVS©) process helps organizations change deep-seated waste-producing behavioral habits and enables a culture that supports and expedites successful Lean implementation. Everyone starts to focus his or her energies outside of the ‘silo’ and on the customer. This is crucial in eliminating both operational and culturally stimulated ‘wastes’ in the system.

Why CVS© is Important

It’s the people who make KAIZEN Lean implementation work or make it fail. Building buy-in and shared responsibility for implementing the Future State is critical to creating a KAIZEN Lean Enterprise. Behaviors can be changed and the waste that has been created by your organization’s culture can be minimized or eliminated.

Using CVS© processes, you can work with your current staff to create a highly productive, dynamic team who will achieve and sustain KAIZEN Lean improvements over the long term.

CVS© Objectives for KAIZEN Lean Teams

• Create sustainable KAIZEN Lean buy-In – team and interdepartmental cooperation is improved to productively achieve the KAIZEN Lean Future State


• Create efficient Information flow that is fast, effective, accurate and two-way


• Build more skills in managing ‘up’, ‘across’ and ‘down’ to achieve the KAIZEN Lean Future State


• Stimulate innovation in the workplace – build confidence for taking new approaches to old problems


• Manage resistance and internal conflicts by identifying and working with behaviors, attitudes and beliefs


• Improve the organizational culture to one of mutual respect, openness, shared responsibility, and heightened productivity


• Use both qualitative and quantitative measures of success to track the people side of KAIZEN Lean implementation


• Transfer the skills for coaching and mentoring KAIZEN Lean culture to employees, both in HR and the operational line, so that in-house resources can sustain the process and Lean becomes a way of life.

Sample Measures of Return

• Teams improve effectiveness in meeting the organization’s business goals


• Improved speed and success of KAIZEN Lean implementation


• Improved customer focus and elimination of the waste of ‘conflicting priorities’


• Improved bottom-up, top-down, and group communication flow


• More multi-level, cross functional cooperation in organizational problem solving, innovation, and productivity


• Increased culture of responsibility; less finger pointing, more productive, forward-looking attitudes and responses


• Reduction of conflicts at both the interpersonal and group level


• Elimination of the waste of rework in repeated efforts to create shared buy-in for projects and new ideas


• Elimination of other culturally stimulated wastes such as: too many meetings, failure to focus on the customer, departments that function like fortresses or ‘silos’, information ‘hoarders’, time wasting gossip, poor quality information, slow pace, stop-start processes, too many approvals, too much work in progress, and too many good ideas not implemented