Lean Tools And Techniques
And therein lies the crux — say Norman, Anton and Zamir — of where Lean is headed. “25 years ago we were trying to understand the Lean tools and techniques. Now we must bank this knowledge,” tells Norman. Though the ...
Lean Tools And Techniques
TRACC Publications Editor, Deborah New, interviews Professor Norman Faull — Chairperson of the Lean Institute Africa (LIA), Dr Anton Grutter — Director of Learning Development at LIA, and Zamir Brey — Medical Doctor and PHD candidate at the Graduate School of Business, University of Cape Town.
Image belongs to CCIIn a recent YouTube video, Jim Womack was asked “what comes after Lean?” to which he replied: “Nothing. Because all this is about, is how people work together collaboratively to try to create more value and correct perfect value with less and less. And so this is a long, long human story that we’re involved in that goes back at least 500 years of people thinking about that… It doesn’t end, because the fundamental problem doesn’t go away; and the problem is that the world always needs more value, and the waste is getting in the way of value. We happen to give it a label for this time — which is Lean.”
TRACC integrative improvement experts concur. In a recent onTRACC article, Kevin Whelan said that the concept of Lean hasn’t changed. However, “even though the vocabulary is the same, the way people talk about these concepts has changed. There is a definite move towards understanding Lean as more of an end-to-end demand-driven value chain improvement approach. In the early days of Lean it was thought to be a good tool to improve manufacturing processes. While that is still true today, Lean is now more widely used across the entire end-to-end demand-driven value chain. In essence, Lean is all encompassing.”
Looking back at the last 25 years of Lean, Norman Faull says “we’ve learnt nothing! 25 years ago we knew that Lean had an impact, and we didn’t know how to sustain it, but we knew that it works. Today, we still know it works, and we still don’t know how to sustain it.
The biggest challenge facing Lean was well put by Gary L. Convis and Jeffrey Liker in their recent book The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership when they said that TPS does not result in enthusiastic, compliant, effective teamwork. TPS is the effect of compliant, enthusiastic, effective teamwork. In essence, Lean isn’t a tool, it’s an effect.
And therein lies the crux — say Norman, Anton and Zamir — of where Lean is headed. “25 years ago we were trying to understand the Lean tools and techniques. Now we must bank this knowledge,” tells Norman. Though the techniques and tools are certainly still vital, there’s an entire foundational layer of behavioural best practices that are centred on leadership. Let’s take a simple 5S activity to illustrate the point: working on the second ‘S’, Seiton (Set in order), team members will move all unnecessary items out of the work area, and take steps to find the ideal place for everything that is to be used in that area. In this way, team members would be using the Lean tool (5S) to improve the workplace. But how did they know what to do? Where did they learn about it? And what will motivate them to keep their workspace ‘set in order’ in the future? In essence, how do we get people to behave differently (the effect)? Ensuring people sustain these Lean best practices is our biggest challenge, and Norman believes we should look to leadership as an ideal enabler of sustaining Lean.
Norman uses this analogy: If you plant a few fruit trees in an open field with a view of farming, and then leave these trees to fend for themselves, they’ll likely wither and die. However, if you spent time nurturing the trees, watering them, giving them fertiliser, and teaching others how to plant more trees and care for them too, you’ll end up with a well operating fruit farm! In Lean, we’re learning that leadership is no longer about planting trees and ordering everybody else to plant one too. It’s about teaching everybody about the tremendous value of disciplined watering and nurturing of the trees. This mentor-like leadership style would see team members feel the reward of being empowered with knowledge and understanding about the farming processes and the greater goal. Once they understand, and take meaning from what they are doing, their efforts are sure to — pardon the pun — bear fruit.
This is where the foundational layer of behavioural best practices comes into play. George Davidson, Manufacturing Director of Toyota, coined a phrase which springs to mind here: thinking people. He said that TPS is a system for creating thinking people, and when you know that the intention is to create thinking people, it guides the way you do everything, even the way you’d implement a simple 5S activity. In recent years, just as empowered consumers are driving demand, employees’ voices must be heard too. This is a real leadership paradigm shift where good leaders need to transform ‘from cop to coach’. Says Norman, “Good leaders are people who make the ‘why’ clear in such a way that listeners not only find it easy to comply, but they want to comply because the compliance makes sense.”
This leadership style leads us to the question, “are these good leaders born or created?” Norman believes it’s a combination of nature and nurture. “I think that as implementers of Lean we’re going to get smarter when it comes to being able to discern more and more in entry-level cadres of recruits — how to direct, mentor and shape these leaders.”
Even though Lean tools and techniques haven’t changed, if we want to focus on sustainability (keeping the trees productive), we need to look towards leadership skills, how leaders develop and instil those skills in their successors, and how they help to change and shape the behaviour of their direct-report employees so that best practises become the new way they do their jobs.
To watch the video a Post-webinar Interview with Jim Womack about Lean Gemba Walks, by Jim Womack (Founder and Senior Advisor, Lean Enterprise Institute)
Image belongs to CCIIn a recent YouTube video, Jim Womack was asked “what comes after Lean?” to which he replied: “Nothing. Because all this is about, is how people work together collaboratively to try to create more value and correct perfect value with less and less. And so this is a long, long human story that we’re involved in that goes back at least 500 years of people thinking about that… It doesn’t end, because the fundamental problem doesn’t go away; and the problem is that the world always needs more value, and the waste is getting in the way of value. We happen to give it a label for this time — which is Lean.”
TRACC integrative improvement experts concur. In a recent onTRACC article, Kevin Whelan said that the concept of Lean hasn’t changed. However, “even though the vocabulary is the same, the way people talk about these concepts has changed. There is a definite move towards understanding Lean as more of an end-to-end demand-driven value chain improvement approach. In the early days of Lean it was thought to be a good tool to improve manufacturing processes. While that is still true today, Lean is now more widely used across the entire end-to-end demand-driven value chain. In essence, Lean is all encompassing.”
Looking back at the last 25 years of Lean, Norman Faull says “we’ve learnt nothing! 25 years ago we knew that Lean had an impact, and we didn’t know how to sustain it, but we knew that it works. Today, we still know it works, and we still don’t know how to sustain it.
The biggest challenge facing Lean was well put by Gary L. Convis and Jeffrey Liker in their recent book The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership when they said that TPS does not result in enthusiastic, compliant, effective teamwork. TPS is the effect of compliant, enthusiastic, effective teamwork. In essence, Lean isn’t a tool, it’s an effect.
And therein lies the crux — say Norman, Anton and Zamir — of where Lean is headed. “25 years ago we were trying to understand the Lean tools and techniques. Now we must bank this knowledge,” tells Norman. Though the techniques and tools are certainly still vital, there’s an entire foundational layer of behavioural best practices that are centred on leadership. Let’s take a simple 5S activity to illustrate the point: working on the second ‘S’, Seiton (Set in order), team members will move all unnecessary items out of the work area, and take steps to find the ideal place for everything that is to be used in that area. In this way, team members would be using the Lean tool (5S) to improve the workplace. But how did they know what to do? Where did they learn about it? And what will motivate them to keep their workspace ‘set in order’ in the future? In essence, how do we get people to behave differently (the effect)? Ensuring people sustain these Lean best practices is our biggest challenge, and Norman believes we should look to leadership as an ideal enabler of sustaining Lean.
Norman uses this analogy: If you plant a few fruit trees in an open field with a view of farming, and then leave these trees to fend for themselves, they’ll likely wither and die. However, if you spent time nurturing the trees, watering them, giving them fertiliser, and teaching others how to plant more trees and care for them too, you’ll end up with a well operating fruit farm! In Lean, we’re learning that leadership is no longer about planting trees and ordering everybody else to plant one too. It’s about teaching everybody about the tremendous value of disciplined watering and nurturing of the trees. This mentor-like leadership style would see team members feel the reward of being empowered with knowledge and understanding about the farming processes and the greater goal. Once they understand, and take meaning from what they are doing, their efforts are sure to — pardon the pun — bear fruit.
This is where the foundational layer of behavioural best practices comes into play. George Davidson, Manufacturing Director of Toyota, coined a phrase which springs to mind here: thinking people. He said that TPS is a system for creating thinking people, and when you know that the intention is to create thinking people, it guides the way you do everything, even the way you’d implement a simple 5S activity. In recent years, just as empowered consumers are driving demand, employees’ voices must be heard too. This is a real leadership paradigm shift where good leaders need to transform ‘from cop to coach’. Says Norman, “Good leaders are people who make the ‘why’ clear in such a way that listeners not only find it easy to comply, but they want to comply because the compliance makes sense.”
This leadership style leads us to the question, “are these good leaders born or created?” Norman believes it’s a combination of nature and nurture. “I think that as implementers of Lean we’re going to get smarter when it comes to being able to discern more and more in entry-level cadres of recruits — how to direct, mentor and shape these leaders.”
Even though Lean tools and techniques haven’t changed, if we want to focus on sustainability (keeping the trees productive), we need to look towards leadership skills, how leaders develop and instil those skills in their successors, and how they help to change and shape the behaviour of their direct-report employees so that best practises become the new way they do their jobs.
To watch the video a Post-webinar Interview with Jim Womack about Lean Gemba Walks, by Jim Womack (Founder and Senior Advisor, Lean Enterprise Institute)
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