- 10 Common Misconceptions About Lean Manufacturing
- Ten Reasons Why One Piece Flow Will Not Work
- The Best Visual Control in the World
- Give Me 60 Minutes and I'll Give You a Lean Transformation
- Toyota Owes Grandpa Ford
- Look Up from Your Work and Ask: ;Could We Flow This?
- Ouch! Change Hurts
- E-mail 5S
- The Top 5 Reasons for Using Production Preparation Process (3P)
- You've Gotta Go to Gemba More Often Than That!
- 5S Your Desk: And Other Tips for Office Productivity
- Skill Matrix Enables Suggestion System
- Work Content for Line Leads
- Strong Supervision: The Key to Long-term Kaizen
- The Four Elements for Sustaining Kaizen
- Keys to Sustaining 5S
- Top 10 Improvement Tools Named After Lean Sensei
- Intuition, Information and the Toyota Production System
- Nine Rules for Fighting Endless Meetings
- Lean Companies
- Agile Management Blog
- Curious Cat
- DailyKaizen
- Evolving Excellence
- Fashion-Incubator
- Got Boondoggle?
- Lean Blog
- Lean Insider
- Lean Builder
- Lean Reflections
- Lean Six Sigma Academy
- Learn Sigma
- Productivity Cafe
- Reforming Project Management
- Shmula
- The Lean Thinker
- Thinking for a Change
- TPM Log
101 Kaizen Templates: Stand in the CircleThe 60-minute kaizen exercise we call "stand in the circle" originates in the teaching method Taiichi Ohno used which involved a piece of chalk, a circle drawn on the concrete floor, and a manager left to stand in it for hours. Ohno would return to check on what the manager had learned through observation. Woe to the manager who answered "No problems here, sir!" as he was sure to spend some more hours in that circle. In our method we ask the student to stand in one spot on the gemba and find 30 small things that bother them in 30 minutes about the area they are observing. Then they must eliminate at least one of these wastes, nonconformities or unsafe conditions within the next 30 minutes. It is a one-hour kaizen. The template below is useful in keeping track of where you are in your target of finding 30 things. It is also useful in reminding you of what the seven types of waste are. The important thing is that there is intense concentration on finding problems (seeds of improvement). The 30 minute and 30 items is an arbitrary selection which rounds out nicely to 1 hour when combined with the "one thing I will fix" and seems to work well, but feel free to experiment with this format.
Download the template for the Stand in the Circle exercise by clicking on the link or the image above. The best ideas are the small obvious things that you can address right away. These are many, and the quicker these small problems are recognized and removed, the fewer complex and opaque problems there will be. The following is a real life example of a stand in the circle template from a cabinet manufacturer. We have used this template for "themed" stand in the circle activity where the focus in on finding 30 improvements in one area such as safety, quality, environmental or energy wastes. This can be much harder when standing in one spot! Nonetheless the habit of standing in the circle and using this template is well worthwhile, both for developing problem awareness in people and for the practical kaizen result you will gain. By Jon Miller - January 9, 2008 8:26 PM 
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Comments
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I just did this exercise this morning and it really opened my eyes to many improvements. Great post! Dear Jon Thanks for a great post I hope all the subsequent Kaizen Templates are as good and useful as this one. I have been standing in the Ohno circle myself for many years to good effect. Your blog motivated me inspire others to do the same and provided us with a very simple practical way to make this approach systematic and a useful source of potential areas for improvement. One of my Production Managers will create an "Ohno mat" to stand on instead of drawing a circle on the floor. The mat will be located in different positions in the Gemba it will be emblazoned with reminders of the 7 Muda's, Production waste, Environmental and Health & Safety principles. All our line managers will be asked to stand on the Ohno mat for an hour and list up issues solve what they can there and then and seek help from others for problems they can't solve themselves. We are sure that by encouraging all our line managers to stand on the Ohno mat will not only highlight areas for improvement but also develop their observation skills and recognition of problems. Chris, I love the "Ohno mat"! What a great addition to the kaizen toolbox to make stand in the circle more practical. Thanks for sharing! Jon Chris, |
