Lean in any language

I'm struck by something I read in Lean Retail (Simon G Fauser, 2007).Describing the difference between Lean Management and Kaizen (Japanese continuous improvement), the author explains that the differences reflect differences in social organisation in the Western and Japanese cultures. The West values individual contribution; in Japan the inidividual is sublimated to the group.

In the early 1990's, I attended a week-long Kaizen event at a manufacturing plant in East Texas. The event was hosted by a US consulting firm, and they had invited former Toyota Production managers to lead Kaizen teams. It was a fascinating experience, not least because I was able to witness the explosive culture clash between the East Texas plant managers and the Japanese consultants. (By Thursday, the plant manager was bravely attempting to defuse the situation and prevent a mass walk-out by line managers and supervisors.) On the sidelines, it appeared to me that the plant's real issue was the wholesale dismantling and replacement of their processes by outsiders. They experienced huge changes (and equally impressive gains, by the way) with no appreciation by these outsiders that what was ripped out represented the cumulative contribution of those managers and supervisors over long periods of time. The fact that some of the outsiders were from a different culture became the touchpoint. No doubt the consulting style of the Japanese was quite different from that of the US consultants -- who were much less direct, and more considerate communicators. But xenophobia played no small part in the scapegoating; it was convenient for externalizing the frustration and hurt feelings that arose out of the project. As we left the site at the end of the week, the plant staff were threatening darkly that they intended to undo all of the Kaizen work, which would have resulted in significant financial loss to the company.

However, I couldn't see that the process methodology, or how we went about performing Kaizen, or the decisions made, were influenced by culture. In fact, that's what I liked about the process: it was data-driven and completely logical. An experiment conducted in Tokyo looks the same if it's replicated in Tucson. I found this refreshing, since most business management practices are completely culture-dependant. The challenge in any business process is how to make it work with multiple people (it's not a process if everyone does his own thing). It has to be quantifiable; it has to be replicable regardless the individuals who perform it. That's the crux: you must create a mechanistic process that is manifested only within a social, human context. Values and social norms inform only one aspect of Lean or Kaizen: gaining buy-in necessary for a successful implementation.

For engineers and anlysts, that's always the rub. I like my chances of getting a machine to run a new sequence smoothly better than getting a team to do the same.

Chicken Feed

I’ve been thinking about motivation recently. An article this week in the NY Times (Mixed Results on Paying City Students to Pass Tests, 8/19/08) reports that efforts to pay students to score well on Advanced Placement tests resulted in more test takers, but few passing the test. An article in DC Velocity (The Secret to Going “Lean”, Pat Kelley and Ron Hounsell) argues the position of motivating the workforce by paying them for increased performance. (Rather alarmingly, the article suggests the best way is to reward individual performance – which makes me wonder what kind of process improvement that is supposed to encourage?) But overall, their argument is of a piece with the perceived wisdom that money motivates. Businesses believe this absolutely, evidenced by their executive pay structures.

But does money really motivate? Certainly pay that is perceived to be unfair de-motivates, but the inverse isn’t necessarily true. The Brafmans in their book Sway lay out a compelling argument that indeed money doesn’t motivate people to do what you want them to do, and can produce quite the opposite (and seemingly irrational) response. The NYC high school results prove their point: the promise of a cash reward motivated more students to try (that is, take the test), but was ineffective to motivate the behaviors that are necessary to succeeding on the test. So in the workplace: if we want to inspire teams to achieve breakthrough performance, perhaps we need to think outside the perceived wisdom.

In fact, I witnessed this just yesterday in a meeting with the DC staff. Speaking to the point of personal and professional growth, I mentioned off-hand my expectation that work was more than a paycheck – my hope is that everyone has an opportunity to grow professionally, benefit personally, and make a tangible contribution. I was unprepared for the enthusiastic response from the group to the ‘more than a paycheck’ comment; it resonated with them more than I could have expected. Now, I have no doubt that everyone in the room wants more money from his job, and I too want to see them make more money as a result of growing the business and professional growth. But motivation is more complex than feeding the chicken more pellets, although strangely we like to think of ourselves that way.

Same as it ever was

Interesting story today in Technology Review, "How (Not) to Fix a Flaw." MIT students found security flaws in the Boston subway payment system, and they did what appears to be the honorable thing: rather than exploit it, they documented their discovery and attempted to bring it to the attention of others. The transit authority would prefer to keep it quiet while they try to fix the problem, so they moved to censor the students. So, desire for control confronts the threat of disclosure.

Wasn't it ever so? Every couple days I see a message on my machine that it's looking for 'updates' it thinks are essential. If I ask for more information about why I should install the updates it found, I get a fuzzy explanation that amounts to: Don't worry your little brain about this; we know what's best. How different it would be if instead, the message said "We've found a bug we created in the software you're running. An unassigned variable causes the application to freeze, requiring you to close and restart the application. This patch contains the fix for it." I'd love the honesty, and I'd also, strangely, give the software company more credibility just because they risked owning up to their mistakes. Even if they didn't have a fix, but knew about the problem (as with the subway payment system), wouldn't it make sense to get more minds working on the problem by letting others in on it?

We've gotta assume there are no secrets when a bug exists. Just because you don't acknowledge it, you think no one will notice? People who earn a living exploiting this vanity can only be grateful.

Uncommon sense

A business unit manager and I were talking last week about a process change his team had put in place. The team is convinced their change has improved productivity. Unfortunately, no metric supports that -- in fact, the data say that the process change is much less productive than the previous standard. So where's the disconnect?

The team leader is convinced that his 'common sense' approach will yield improvements. I'm reading the book Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior and it's given me some insight into the dynamic at play. Regardless of education or profession, people are more influenced by behavior and perceived value than they are by quantifiable, objective data when making decisions. This is so obvious and, simultaneously, stunning.

I think about the HR assessment tools that profile how a person makes a decision: fact-based, feelings-based, balanced mix? It's dawning on me that we're probably kidding ourselves, when safety experts, scientists and medical doctors (fact-based jobs if ever there were) have a clear track record of throwing facts to the wind in life-or-death decisions. This is obviously so hard-wired in the human brain that it feels quixotic to tilt against it.

Yet, acknowledging the sway of 'common sense' is necessary to understand what is required to instill the uncommon sense of fact-based decisions. Uncommon sense is artificial, and not natural, but we can still value it over the chaotic natural order of things. Rare things are often more valuable, after all.

What were you thinking?

The subject of whether (or how) our use of technology is changing the way we think is being richly discussed. Since my last post, the New York Times has run several stories that develop the theme more fully.

An article on Internet reading covers the debate on how online reading (particularly by students) stacks up against reading books. I find it striking to hear academics defending online reading’s value: these skills, they argue, will help make the next generation more employable and further, reading books is inefficient: it takes a long time to read a 400-page book and much less to scan summaries or pre-digested opinion about the book. And of course, children themselves prefer it – and, as exasperated parents see it – reading online is preferable to not reading at all.

I wonder what the word ‘reading’ means in this context. Are we simply talking about the ability to interpret written words? We’re certainly not talking about the complex thinking skills required to construct internally the argument or narrative of that 400-page book – which surely are skills that this employer is keenly interested in -- as should every employer of knowledge workers. How is it that we no longer expect our children to read Pride and Prejudice or To Kill a Mockingbird – which are certainly as accessible and relevant today as a generation ago when teens and young adults were expected to read them? (For this I have hard evidence: my 14-year old has not only read these books but savored them.)

This article on reading, and one that appeared in today’s Times , point to another dynamic that I think is worth noting: an increasing expectation of controlling the narrative in one’s own real or creative life. Teens interviewed in the reading article said that they prefer reading online because they can control the narrative (if reading fiction) or the information they receive in non-fiction articles and blogs. An interactive short story site allows readers to change plot points that they don’t like. (Hey – in your version, maybe Romeo and Juliet don’t die after all!) In today’s article, I learned of a new technology tool that allows you to go immediately to voicemail: the recipient thinks you called, but you intentionally go direct to voicemail so that you don’t have to interact with the other person. This is called, I learned, ‘indirect communication,’ which “may be turning some people into digital-era solipsists more interested in broadcasting information than in real time give-and-take.” Interacting with other people opens the possibility of being challenged: maybe the other person has a different viewpoint, heaven forbid! Back in the day, one took that as an opportunity to learn from others, or at least more finely tune one's own argument. I now realize how hopelessly out of date that concept is.

I can only imagine that the logical conclusion to this is a future world much like a wonderful film I saw this week (at the always-challenging Traverse City Film Festival), Sleep Dealers, in which people willingly plug their central nervous system into a corporate network that uses their brains to direct the production of a robotized workforce in other countries. If you’re not interested in using your brain, I suppose it’s a resource that can be commoditized like anything else.