Someday this will be a textbook case for what not to do in extending your supply chain to the edges of the globe in the pursuit of low piece prices or offsets against sales of airplanes to the countries supplying parts. The 787 aircraft is many months behind schedule and in no small part due to supply chain woes. The piece price cost savings may still put them ahead in traditional accounting, but not for long if they continue losing orders to airlines who haven't taken delivery, have been hit hard by the economic crisis, and are forced to cancel orders. It's hard to put a price on orders lost because you couldn't ship them on time. You can't make that up on volume.

A bit of million dollar consulting advice I will offer up as a public service: here is where a company like Toyota would put as much of their lean supply chain as technically possible.

Image courtesy of Google.

From the WSJ article:

When Boeing first rolled out plans for its Dreamliner, it said that it was reinventing the way it builds commercial airplanes. Instead of manufacturing most of the plane at its Everett, Wash., facility, many parts would be made by suppliers around the world. The parts then would be shipped to Boeing's plant for final assembly.

Boeing, however, quickly discovered that keeping track of the different suppliers -- and keeping the whole project on schedule -- was more difficult than it had anticipated. Delays accumulated, and the plane is now two years behind schedule.

It was not the first time such a supply chain reinvention turned out to be a blunder. And by definition it was not a reinvention (unless we mean "making something that's already been made, again"). I fear this won't be the last time this blunder is "reinvented".

This was what Deming would call tampering: not kaizen - improvement based on a standard - nor innovation. It was an idea dreamed up as a result of consultant briefings and number-crunching, far, far removed from the gemba. In fact, this sort of thing has been tried before, long ago by a far more advanced lean thinker: Henry Ford. There is an abandoned industrial city in the middle of the Amazon jungle called Fordilandia. The Ford Motor Company built a city in the middle of the Brazilian Amazon in an attempt to supply their own rubber for tires, circumventing the established source of British Malayan rubber. How did that work out? Not so well. It's an interesting story, I recommend reading about it.

Fordilandia photos courtesy of Guilherme Carvalho's collection on Panoramio.

Henry Ford was a lean manufacturing visionary. He vertically integrated his supply chain and made great advances in industrial productivity. How did he go so wrong in this Amazon venture? One word: gemba. He didn't get enough of it. Like Boeing executives who made the decision to fly airplane parts from all over the world to Washington State, Henry Ford never went to see the Fordilandia site in Amazon for himself. One of the tenets of lean thought is genchi genbutsu or "go see the real thing" with your own eyes. For'd's rubber plantation gemba was totally unsuited for rubber production, the local workforce culture completely not adapted to Ford's method of labor management, and they failed to notice that the midday heat did not make the most motivating working conditions. Henry Ford never visited Brazil. He never went to gemba, and he paid the price.

Boeing can still pull their supply chain together. The world is not such a big place and no supply chain is so complex that it can't be simplified. But first, they need to get a firm grip - on their heads - and get their feet to the gemba with all speed.

When Toyota was making its first forays into manufacturing in North America, it approached GM to co-manage what would become NUMMI. The Fremont site reopened for production in 1984 and has run as a paragon of lean manufacturing and collaborative management in what was formerly dysfunctional factory. NUMMI won many awards for productivity and quality, ranking among the top Toyota plants in North America. Economic circumstances and the bankruptcy of the GM half of the joint venture notwithstanding, NUMMI was a great success and all of the people involved should be proud.

Much can be said from GM's failure to learn more from Toyota through this joint venture, but this is not the time or place to refresh that discussion. Instead, let's salute NUMMI at their best. A good place to start is an article about Lean at NUMMI from Manufacturing Engineering magazine in 2005. Mark Rosenthal who blogs as The Lean Thinker featured an article by Gipsie Ranney back in January titled Remembering NUMMI, a poignantly prescient title, perhaps. For a personal experience of touring and seeing the lean production system at work, visit Mark Graban's Lean blog for a six part series of NUMMI Tour Tales.

For an in-depth study on how Toyota approached the joint venture at NUMMI, the paper titled Evaluating A Joint Venture: NUMMI at Age 20 by Edwin and Mitsuko Duerr at San Francisco State University is highly recommended. They credit the success of the venture to the emphasis Toyota placed on the following five factors:

1. developing cooperative management-labor relations;


2. careful selection and extensive training of workers;


3. stressing teamwork and responsibility of the individual to the work group;


4. putting safety and quality first, assigning the responsibility for safety and quality to each worker, and giving them the authority to assure it; and


5. implementing Toyota's 'lean production system' upon the foundation of the first four key factors.

In other words, Toyota simply applied the basics of management. This is a moment that will test Toyota's new President Akio Toyoda. He has stated a return to Toyota's roots and core values, a "back to basics" if you will. Placing people at the center of their business plan has always been a basic precept at Toyota. Over the next weeks and months, we will see whether a profit pinch will cause them to make less fortunate decisions or whether Toyota is able to put their money where their mouth is in order to invest in NUMMI, the surrounding community and the long-term future.

I continue to benefit from the use of my Agile kanban board, if nothing else to keep my supposedly most important tasks in front of me (or behind me as it were, per layout of the office). I have faith and confidence that using this method persistently and diligently, I can build better working habits. Many questions still remain as to how to visualize the work, progress of work and problems with the work more effectively. One very simple question arose from a suggestion one of the readers had to add a "Done" column: do we really need a "done" column?

The Agile kanban board I use has no "done" column. When a task is complete, the tile is erased and recycled (attached to a blank area under the kanban board work area). This tile is then available to be assigned another task value. It could be a major task or something small. In a sense the tiles are like currency or a token, in the same way that the printing of traditional kanban cards in manufacturing are tightly controlled, much like money.

When something is done, presumably some value is created or realized downstream. From the point of view of the task board, the important thing is that capacity has been freed to add another task. The question of capacity is only loosely understood at this point, since there may be a lot of lost or hidden capacity inherent in my way of working. Hopefully the use of the Agile kanban board will ferret all of this out.

I consulted an old friend about the "done" column as it turns out that though our careers diverge, we share a timely interests in the Agile kanban board. David Moles is currently the Agile project lead at his software development company in Switzerland. The photo above is the Agile kanban he uses at his company. Here is David's take on the "done" column:

The "done" column is an interesting question. I hadn't really considered it till now, but I think you're right to turn the question around. Why (five times?) do we have a "done" column?

In a Scrum process (and that's still basically what we're doing here, though borrowing ideas from the Agile Kanban guys as I assimilate them) you work in "sprints" of say three weeks. For each sprint you set a sprint goal (deliver features x, y, and z) and break it down into tasks. At the end of the sprint you deliver the completed work to the (possibly internal) customer, the "done" tasks come off the board, and you start again. So I suspect "done" really means something like "ready for delivery."

David Anderson's team doesn't use sprints -- they prioritize the "to do" tasks every Monday and, if I understand / remember correctly, they just deliver each feature as it's completed. There's an "In Production" column on the taskboards pictured in his slide deck but it seems as though it's mostly empty, and I'm not sure what it's for.

There's a psychological benefit to having a pile of cards on the right-hand side of the board -- "look at all the work we're getting done!" But after reading your blog for a couple of years, I'm suspicious of this. Isn't a pile-up of cards in the final stage still a pile-up of cards, and an indication of some kind of bottleneck? "Ready for delivery" is a lot like "in inventory", isn't it? And we all know that a full warehouse shouldn't make you feel comfortable, rather the reverse.

I suspect that an ideal system a "done" column shouldn't be necessary -- done = delivered to the customer = off the board.

Oh, and the skull is "dead", meaning "for some reason we decided not to do this after all." Like the "done" column, it may or may not be necessary and is probably of mostly psychological value.

Having a "done" column makes sense if there is a downstream team that is actively pulling tasks off of that column to begin their work. In that sense it would be much like a supermarket area in manufacturing terms. Having a stockpile of finished work to feel good about... it's human nature but not too lean.

David Moles is also a published science fiction author and a witty blogger. Check him out at Chrononaut.

This is a quote from Robert McCurry, former Executive VP of Toyota Motor Sales. It's a great quote which captures in broad brushstrokes some of the essential characteristics of successful lean companies: long-term thinking, a focus on developing people, and kaizen. At the same time, to companies struggling with short-term challenges, these words can seem like happy talk. Many of us feel like we need to take action now, ideally not at the cost of the long-term, people or quality but to see results today. This is a delicate balance. We need to think long-term, but act each day with urgency.

This has to begin with leadership. From Jeffrey Liker's book The Toyota Way:

The biggest crisis a company faces is when the leaders believe there is no crisis or do not feel a passionate sense of urgency to continuously improve the way they work.

Although by no means a full checklist on a sense of urgency, at a minimum I would ask the following of FC's leadership:

• Do we have a clear and articulated vision of "the ideal"?
• Do we have a firm grasp of our current situation based on facts we have confirmed with our own eyes?
• Do we have a sufficiently strong consensus on the problem (the gap between ideal and current state) so that we can begin breaking down this problem into actionable chunks?

Harvard Prof and author John Kotter places creating a sense of urgency as job #1 in a successful transformation in his Why Transformations Fail:

1. Establish a sense of urgency
2. Form a powerful guiding coalition
3. Create a vision
4. Communicate the vision
5. Empower others to act on the vision
6. Plan for and create short-term wins
7. Consolidate improvements and sustain
8. Institutionalize the new approaches

We could view this as a high-level road map for implementing lean or any other major transformation. "It's all about the people" and "it's all about leadership" if we consider that steps 1 - 5 are PLAN in the PDCA cycle, all related to change management and getting the mindset right. Step 6 is the DO or implementation as a pilot, step 7 is the CHECK and 8 is the ACT.

The conventional wisdom is that at least 80% of the leadership team need to be removed safely from their comfort zone. We all strive for comfort, but in the comfort zone there is no sense of urgency. Leaders especially must venture out of this zone in order to lead. Safely, because otherwise they will find themselves in the fear zone and fight their way back to the comfort zone - not a productive use of leadership energy. Organizations that make it through a crisis emerge stronger and it is part of a leader's role to guide their team deliberately and safely through these fires.

According to Kotter, having a sense of urgency is at the top of the list for success or failure of a transformation effort. Yet a crisis (a gap that triggers a sense of urgency) is a relative thing, a question of how you perceive your circumstance. How do we measure whether we have a necessary sense of urgency?

What do you think? Please share your views and insights on the subject of how to gauge an organization's sense of urgency.

At least that's how a Wired magazine article by Chris Anderson titled Tech Is Too Cheap to Meter: It's Time to Manage for Abundance, Not Scarcity starts out. As someone who spends the majority of their time thinking about ways to waste less and help others do the same, I don't find that notion funny at all.

The point of the article is one that has been made before: due to the very low cost of entry in online media, the traditional business models are being shaken up. What was previously a traditional economy of scarcity is now one of abundance. This sounds eerily like the pre-dotcom bubble New Economy. The fundamentals of economics don't change, just like the laws of nature. Unlike natural laws, laws of economics are often made up by people, and later proven wrong.

Speaking of nature, the article's author seems to think that nature is wasteful. This puts him in opposition with great thinkers such as Aristotle who said,"Nature does nothing uselessly" and also the astronomer Johannes Kepler who said, "Nature uses as little as possible of anything." Nature is quite elegant, frugal, and beautiful. Waste is ugly.

On the other hand, Chris Anderson thinks that humans are uniquely NOT wasteful. That came as a surprise to me:

Our brains seem wired to resist waste, but we are relatively unique in nature for this. Mammals have the fewest offspring in the animal kingdom, and as a result we invest enormous time and care in protecting each one so that it can reach adulthood. The death of a single human is a tragedy, one that survivors sometimes never recover from, and we prize the individual life above all.

As a result, we have a very developed sense of the morality of waste. We feel bad about the unloved toy or the uneaten food. Sometimes this is for good reason, because we understand the greater social cost of profligacy, but often it's just because our mammalian brains are programmed that way.

I haven't heard of animals in the wild killing thousands of buffalo only to leave their carcasses wasting to rot on the plains, or cutting off shark's fins for soup and throwing back the shark to die, or polluting their own habitat or that of the animals that neighbor them in the interest of pursuits not essential to their survival. Yet humans do these things in abundance. Humans may have a morality of waste, but as far as I know, we are the only animals with morality, period. In my experience humans are often quite unaware of the waste around them unless they are faced with personal scarcity and hunger. That is one of the reasons the theme and the language of this article disturbs me. The author continues:

However, the rest of nature doesn't work like that. A bluefin tuna can release 10 million fertilized eggs in a spawning season. Perhaps 10 of them will hatch and make it to adulthood. A million die for every one that survives.

A chart in the article shows that it takes one million fertilized eggs from a blue fin tuna to result in one viable offspring, while for humans it is 1.26. The author doesn't explain what happens to the other 999,999 tuna eggs. I always thought that they were eaten by prey or died in other ways before maturing. If so, nature isn't wasting these eggs at all but rather using them as a resource: food for other fishes. Perhaps a study of biology will show that this is not waste, but a necessary birth population based on a yield factor.

In jumping from fish eggs to electronic entertainment, the author finds firmer ground:

What this boils down to is the difference between abundance- and scarcity-based business models. If you're controlling a scarce resource, like the prime-time broadcast schedule, you have to be discriminating.

Scarcity of a resource makes people frugal, and less likely to take chances.

But if you're tapping into an abundant resource, you can afford to take chances, since the cost of failure is so low.

Abundance allows you to fail with less risk. The author's meme that technology is too cheap to meter does not ring true to me because it does not take into account the total cost of manufacturing, operating, and disposing of this technology. However, the central idea of abundance versus scarcity has relevance to the notion of continuous improvement itself. If we say that "ideas are too cheap to meter" we can encourage more creativity and problem solving. Our capacity for creative thought and invention is one of the most underutilized and most abundant resources. We need to encounter scarcity before we begin to use it. Taiichi Ohno said, "Your wits don't work until you feel the squeeze."

Waste exits if there is a customer or consumer who values a resource. Waste exists not merely when a consumer feels a pang of guilt, but when a resource is not respected. An infinite resource may not have a recognized value, until it is missed. Those of us who live in parts of the world without a lot of sunlight appreciate the sun only after the summer months have passed into autumn and winter. Yet holistically, the sun is vitally important to our health and life. If we looked carefully enough the same is probably true of any resource. It may not be possible to waste an infinite resource, but in order to come into being all resources by definition consume something: energy, time, space - physically or in our heads.

The trouble with this notion that waste is relative to our sense of scarcity is that it allows us to be as wasteful as the most abundant and least conscious one or group of us who is able to dominate the discussion. That only works for those who have access to or are effectively able to exploit those resources. If by this human-centered definition, everyone had everything they needed in abundance, then would there be no more waste?

Even in the case of a resource such as internet broadcast bandwidth where this is practically true there is a lot of time being spent, possibly wasted, on creating information and uploaded to the internet. These consumes people's time to make and to watch. It consumes energy to power the servers, routers, computers and monitors. It is far from free. Viewed narrowly as the cost to broadcast a piece of video on the internet, for example, we can say that it is free. But there is a definite cost, and the jury is out how much lower or higher this cost is from the model of the past.

The keen awareness of waste and the recognition of waste as a bad thing help motivate us to improve our world around us. It is true that often when there is abundance there is a lack of a sense of urgency to change the status quo. While great art and cultures have flourished under civilizations enjoying abundance, the lack of motivation towards improvement has often led to decadence and decline.

The funny thing about waste is that it's everywhere if you only look, but truly not there if you don't. Without human perceptions of time, space, value and morality there is no such thing as waste. But alas, we exist, and waste is with us. The French poet Baudelaire left us with the words, "The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." Let's not let our thinking about abundance be the equivalent of waste's greatest trick.

The far right column is now simply "Delegated to". There were two tiles in the header previously, but one will suffice. The new rule is that there is no limit to the number of tiles that can be placed here. Theoretically, with 10-minutes per follow-up e-mail per day the limit is around 50 items per 500 minute work day, but in reality the space won't fit more than 7 in one column, 14 if doubled up, with very little space for notes on the board itself. I will be perfectly happy to dedicate more space on the board to delegated tasks: the day when all 20 items are in that column will be the day when I have successfully worked myself out of a job.

Right away I saw the need for some prioritization and categorization system. But I din't have all day to figure this out. Taking David J Anderson's advice, I kept it simple. I used materials close at hand: color white board markers. There are three categories of tasks on the board. The green indicates near or mid-term revenue-generating tasks. The blue indicate long-term or company-building tasks. The red are any of the above which are urgent or overdue. This allows me to always work on the red things first, then the green, then the blue. There is a risk that I will never get to the blue tasks, granted. We shall see.

I spent no more than 4 hours working the items on this board today. As a result, there were:

Movers = 3 (green, red x2); Items done = 2 (green, red); New items = 1 (blue)

So in terms of net reduction of tiles on the board, my output for the day was two. Who knows if that is good or bad, but it's a provisional standard. There were quite a few small changes made during the day as I was learning to use this agile kanban method.

The limit of all WIP items on the board is 20. The only reason for this is that the two dry erase panels were cut into a total of 24 pieces, and there are 4 used as headers for the columns. This is somewhat arbitrary but we need to start somewhere. It will take a few months of experimentation and measuring the trend of the lead times to complete items in order to see whether the number of tiles has an effect either way. Total allowable work in process in the second column from the left by the same name has now been reduced from 4 to 3, a 25% improvement! But seriously, having room below the top three items was just a way to cheat, to let things jump the queue to allow for cherry-picking and more task-switching. So I nixed that.

Limiting it to 3 pieces of WIP, and taking John Santomer's advice on marking the dates directly on the tiles has freed up room to the right of the tiles in the Work in Process column. This has proven useful as an area for working notes. It is used to break down the project (tiles) into smaller tasks. In fact what I call Work Items on the left column are all projects of some size and any single one could be managed through a traditional 3-column Scheduled-Working-Done agile kanban task board.

Summary of kaizens to my agile kanban board on day 1:

Color-coded prioritization scheme in trial. If these categories survive, the next step is to set a desired output level for each and then set limits for each one based on some balanced measurement of productivity and lead time.

Tiles now include start dates. At such times that they are completed, that date will be written below and the elapsed time recorded in a document TBD.

Work in process section redesigned, There are now three sections to limit WIP to 3 and to create space for writing task details.

Total cash spent on implementing these ideas: zero

I will try this out for a few more days and report new findings. Please keep the suggestions and questions coming. It has been very helpful so far.

Inspired by the examples I've found on the internet, and perennially challenged by a task board that is full and growing, I decided to give Agile kanban a try. I have a nice 48 inch wide magnetic whiteboard which until today was just used to write down tasks, attach documents by magnet, and otherwise manage my WIP. The only rules were that I would add things to the board and look at it each day. Being large and heavy, it doesn't travel well so when on the road the key items for the week go with me in my Moleskine. Inevitably, the list in the Moleskine grows rather than shrinks by the end of the trip.

I bought and cut up dry erase tiles, 12 inch x 12 inch, available in a 2 pack fo r$12.99. On the foam backing I attached business card-sized adhesive magnets. This freed me from paper, and also gave me the ability to move these tiles around on the board as needed simply by picking them up and attaching them magnetically within another column.

This is a brand new experiment so the basic idea is to limit WIP. My inbox was already full to bursting, so before anything further is added to my to-do list, I will need to move them towards the right into "work in progress" or to "delegated". When things are done, they will come off of the board and the tile will be erased for reuse. It's also clear at a glance that I am not delegating enough, and this is a combination of improvements needed in communication with the team, making sure people have the skills needed to take tasks off of my board, and making a habit to follow up each day. The blue arrow on the top right of the board is a reminder for me to start each day by following up and / or delegating items to others, and then proceed to the "waiting for" section to see if I can get anything unstuck and off of the board, then onto the actual work of the day. When there is a gap above the blue line, another task can be added. I am permitting myself to multi-task between 3 projects at any one time at this point.

The diagonal lines are there mostly to prevent me from cheating and adding more tiles to that space, and for now also show the "started / completed" dates to give an idea of how long something has been in work. The items below the blue line represent quick "do today" items and we will have to see how many are allowed there each day. Not everything will make it to this board, since making telephone calls or answering questions are not development tasks that belong on an Agile kanban board.

Open questions and remaining issues to be resolved in using this new Agile kanban board:

Defining the unit of work. Since this is brand new I did not make an attempt to categorize items by size or complexity. They are certainly not all equal. A few slow movers could prevent smaller projects from getting done, and this is real life. Hopefully this visualization will help projects move along quicker and the unit of work question will be less important. It's just blue electrical tape so if changes are needed to this board to accommodate separate streams by size of task, it will be easy.

Defining the limit of WIP. The limit set currently is arbitrary. This will have to be tested. WIP of one seems unreasonable due to the interrelationship between projects and the anecdotal benefit of capturing ideas and using the learning in one development project in another. This requires switching between projects and some loss of time, but I think this loss is the price of learning.

Measurement of performance. I have no good benchmark of personal productivity in the development area. This is something I will need to develop and tie to the volume and speed at which these tiles are being turned, or flowed through the Agile kanban process.

I haven't done a lot of reading on this and though it was best to try it since I'm guessing that the development work I do differs quite a bit from software development. If you are a a veteran at agile kanban compared to me, please let me know if you have any hints or key points to making this work.

Kanban was born nearly 60 years ago. It's creator, Taiichi Ohno, intended kanban to combat the evil overlord Overproduction, Mother of All Wastes and her Minions of WIP. The battle is far from won. During those six decades kanban has been through some amazing adventures.

Kanban Gains Superpowers

Pokayoke has the power to prevent mistakes. Jiodka frees people to run machines intelligently, rather than be run by them. Heijunka has the power to take choppy demand and smooth it out. Kaizen has the power to make infinite small improvements. All of these players and their many friends bring order and harmony to a production system. Yet one stands above them all: kanban.

Kanban was endowed with three major powers. First is the the power to instruct the production of goods. Within the Toyota Production System and its imitators, only the kanban has the power to cause things to be made. Second is the power to instruct the movement of goods. Like its first power, kanban can cause things to be moved. Third and perhaps most important, kanban can motivate people towards continuous improvement by reducing its own size. Within a kanban system, the less kanban there is, the more improvement is needed. Like a true hero, the power of kanban increases as it diminishes its own presence. Amazing.

Kanban vs. the Communists

From the beginning, the powers of kanban were awesome. Overproduction was stopped in its tracks, Work In Process (WIP) was slashed, and various hidden wastes were exposed and removed through continuous improvement. Almost immediately kanban extended its reach outside of Toyota, the enterprise within which it was born, to its suppliers.

But there was no way that such drastic action would go unnoticed in Japan, the Land of Wa (harmony). A Japanese communist party member accused Toyota of using kanban to make unreasonable demands on suppliers to deliver products right away. Taiichi Ohno was summoned to the Japanese parliament to testify in defense of Toyota's use of the cards to order suppliers to make deliveries of parts. In the end, the Japanese equivalent of the Fair Trade Commission instructed OEMs to limit the fluctuation of actual monthly orders to suppliers by no more than 10% from the firm monthly orders placed in advance.

Perhaps kanban was becoming too powerful. The government needed step in to curb kanban's powers, or at least insure they were always used for good. It was a lesson learned. None of the others, not pokayoke, not jidoka, no tkaizen have been called to testify in front of the government, or to face down the communists.

Kanban: the Fickle Hero

But for all its powers kanban was at times fickle. To kanban, jidoka, SMED and pokayoke were just sidekicks, enablers. Kanban treated both 5S and Visual Controls as givens rather than equals. Kaizen may be an equal partner to kanban, but in private kanban lorded over kaizen because of its power to motivate others to improve. While these various players toiled away at making improvements and building systems, kanban expected that their work was all foundation building for the kanban system. Kanban never said a word of thanks, nor asked for one.

Like a temperamental artist who wants just the right type of bottled water and sandwiches in his dressing room, kanban said "I will only work for you if once the workplace is clean and visually organized, quality is reliable, lot sizes are small and a logistics system is in place to support me." Kanban would not do the heavy lifting for you. Kanban would let you know when you're failing, but may not always come to the rescue. Kanban is a powerful but fickle hero, relied on at your own risk.

Kanban on the Global Stage

In the 1980s Taiichi Ohno was invited to the USA to speak about the Toyota Production System. Unfortunately the organizers confused kanban, the most noticeable feature of TPS, for the system itself. Kanban stole the show, overshadowing the shadowing even the system it was designed to enable. This was not what its creator Taiichi Ohno intended.

As kanban took the global stage with hubris, inevitably its powers were misunderstood or misdirected. Without the protection of the limits on demand signal fluctuation, OEMs abused suppliers with what can be best described as quasi-kanban. Kanban saw its name sullied by impostors and imitators. Even when kanban was called to use its powers, too often it was pressed into service without the support of its friends pokayoke, SMED, heijunka, visual controls and 5S. Even when they were nearby, they were prevented from working as a team.

Kanban of 1,000 Disguises

Kanban's powers were weakened as much was lost in translation. In order to effectively combat overproduction in its new and vastly diverging environments, kanban adopted a thousand disguises. Some were more effective than others. Each time kanban answered the call to battle overproduction, it seemed it was in a different form: a lamp, a card, a square on the floor, a box, a cart.

Kanban continues to be misunderstood even today, with many unsure of which is the true face of kanban. But the battles rages on against the evils of overproduction.

Kanban and the Builders of Invisible WIP

Early in the 21st century, kanban found an unexpected band of allies. These people were prolific builders of invisible but deadly WIP. They were software developers. Appearing not as information traveling with the manufactured work product itself but rather represented on a task board, kanban works tirelessly to control even the invisible WIP of lines of code.

Once again, kanban added a new form to its one thousand disguises in order to combat overproduction in on a new battlefield.

Yes We Kanban

Today Kanban finds itself in an uneasy but increasingly important alliance with the Coders through the Limited WIP Society. Flying the banner of kanban's creator and genius production system designer Taiichi Ohno, kanban has found a common aim with this league of mad scientists: to ultimately defeat WIP and it's overlord Overproduction.

How much progress will kanban's alter-ego of Agile Kanban make in exercising its three superpowers across the software development world? Only time will tell.

Kanban Meets Dr. Bahri the Lean Dentist

Kanban may have met its match in Dr. Bahri, the pioneering practitioner of lean dentistry. Dr. Bahri has applied the powers of kanban to instruct the work that dentists and dental hygienists do, to instruct the movement of patients, and to motivate continuous improvement. Wouldn't it be ironic if six decades into an amazing career, kanban goes for some dental work and finds the power of kanban applied to fixing its teeth?

The villains of overproduction, push and WIP never sleep. The amazing adventures of kanban continue...

What are these principles and philosophies? Focus on the customer, improvement never ends, make problems visible, go see for yourself, involve everyone and their ideas, remove waste from all processes, and so forth. These ideas apply equally well to all situations. The one thing I took away from this particular article was a quote by Toyota President Katsuaki Watanabe during a recent speech:

"There is no such thing as wasteful work in this world. It is either one or the other: work or waste."

It has now been three months since we launched Gemba Academy - the online learning center for continuous improvement. Each month we add new videos, quizzes, self-study materials and forum discussions. The School of Lean is currently available with 33 videos, or more than 7 hours of viewing plus many more hours of reading and self-test quizzes.

In addition to the Introduction to Lean, the 10 Commandments of Improvement, 5S Workplace Productivity and Transforming Your Value Streams courses we have now added nine videos in The 7 Deadly Wastes set. Based on customer feedback, these videos feature actual factory scenes as examples of each of the 7 types of waste.

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In Part I: Creating a Lean Practice, Dr. Bahri shares his story, the 24-year journey of learning which began with the simple thought about his dentistry practice, "I wonder if other people have found a better way to do it?" With the aim of reducing patient waiting time, Dr. Bahri embarked on a personal learning journey, fearlessly tackling lean tools such as takt time, kanban, heijunka, changeover reduction and pioneering their application to dentistry. During this process, he learns as many of us have:

More important than mastering the tools, we were learning how to think as a team about our daily work.

As his understanding of the lean system grew, Dr. Bahri realized that "a dental practice is not unlike a factory" and pursued one-patient flow, as he puts it providing our patients with the correct treatment they need, when they need it, in the right quantity that they need it, while eliminating anything that interrupts or delays this flow. Dr. Bahri credits this focus on one-piece flow as the beginning of real improvement in his business.

The photos and illustrations within Part I of this book are presented neatly, with a summary at chapter end of lean manufacturing concepts and their dental practice equivalents. The first 34 pages of the book by themselves are an excellent introduction to lean. These pages dive right into the thick of Dr. Bahri & team's lean dental practice but never strays too deeply into jargon to leave the beginner unsure of what they are reading.

In Part II: Leading the Transformation there are several key lessons within its 10 brief pages. Dr. Bahri writes about the importance of establishing the proper mindset, agreeing on base definitions with his team, self-study as a leader to gain sufficiently deep understanding to lead the change, and the importance of a collaborative approach to making change happen. Thinking things through with his staffed helped Dr. Bahri because, "I knew they saw opportunities for improvement in our work that I could not always see." It takes humility for a leader to ask, truly listen, and then respect the ideas of subordinates. For the leader who is a learner this is easier.

The most important quote in the book for me as I constantly face the doubts and challenges from creative and non-manufacturing people on the applicability of process discipline to their work was when Dr. Bahri wrote:

Implementation essentially means asking your employees to continually change their lives at work, and be happy about it. Lean has given me the practical tool that I needed to keep myself and my staff constantly intellectually stimulated.

In Part III: Discovering the Principles of Lean Leadership spends nearly half of the book sharing his personal learning journey including the people, books and ideas that influenced him. These are all presented concisely enough to invite the reader to further self-study and learning. Worth noting is the space Dr. Bahri commits to describing his personal approach to respect for people and how he puts this into practice.

Early in the book, Dr. Bahri writes:

Selflessly helping each other when needed, in the amount needed, is at the heart of just-in-time.

This small book is packed with value and will surely help the reader in understanding lean, how to communicate it, how to affect change as a leader and how to grow personally through the process. It's just right.

Follow the Learning is available for purchase from the Lean Enterprise Institute.

As always, thank you for your questions, comments and improvement suggestions. Today one of our readers shared via email a challenge with getting people engaged in kaizen. Whether it is an improvement suggestion system, a software system to track customer inquiries or a new forum for peer-to-peer communication, the success of any good idea is 95% dependent on how engaged people are with it and not the quality of the idea itself. For the people who have caught the kaizen bug it can be particularly frustrating to face people who cannot see that the solution to their problems is right in front of them for the taking. However, part of the problem in gaining full engagement from people can be due to the passion and conviction that the promoters of kaizen have. Sometimes we need to back off and make some space. Just as world class material and information flow systems are triggered by pull and not push, the flow of kaizen ideas and actions should be based on pull.

Find a way to make it their idea. There is a saying "people support what they create" and this is very true. When people generate or help to develop an idea they are more likely to be engaged and to support it. Many times the kaizen leader has a great idea, or sees a golden opportunity to apply a textbook lean concept to a process. The people working in that process may not see it that way. Rather than fight over an idea, grapple with resistance and cause people to disengage from kaizen it is best to clarify and agree on the problem and ask them for ideas. Even if it is 30% wrong, let them try it.

I remember one instance when the veteran mechanic in an aerospace firm was so used to not having their idea heard that it took him some time to realize that we were actually listening to them. When we said, "OK, let's try your idea" they had to stop arguing, and there was a slightly comical and awkward moment when he nearly argued with us against his own idea.

Frame all actions as experiments and not permanent or irreversible changes This allows people to think that they are not really changing something, only "trying it". In fact if the method is demonstrably better, it may become the new way. It is not meant as a trick but rather a reassurance that we will take people's input each step along the way. The short path of kaizen is to "blitz" or make changes so fast that there is no time for resistance. While this may look exciting on a Friday afternoon, the feeling doesn't always survive Monday. The long path is a path built on a series of experiments. Different situations call for both approaches.

When we told the mechanic in the example above, "Try it. If the kaizen doesn't work, we can immediately put it back to the way it was" they were suspicious but saw that there was no choice but to give their idea a try. The result was not half bad, and he liked part of the change and did not want it put back to the old way. Soon he was taking the lead in making small changes that were not completely in line with the lean concept but were better than before. We got the ball rolling. We spent some time praising their 17% productivity improvement and then challenged them to 50% improvement. It was not long until this person was asking his colleagues about lean methods others were using to get to 50% improvement.

Be open to admitting you are wrong. Many kaizen leaders are so used to fighting to make positive changes that we become fighters. Even when we are wrong, we may be fighting out of habit. Even when we are right, sometimes it is good to let the other side win a few. Integrity and credibility require us to do what is in the best interest of the customer and the people who do the work, not necessarily what the textbook tells us or what we learned in class or online. Only after being right a time or two (the experiment worked), admitting that we were wrong, and being open to the ideas of others do you earn the respect to say "now let's try it my way".

Get on the same side of the problem. If possible this is really the first place to start. However people often take "trying to get on the same side of the problem" to mean "pull the other to my side" and that does not work unless the other side uncrosses their arms first. So it is best to try some things first together to demonstrate that you are on their side, or even better that both of you are on the customer's side, and then expand on the common ground. It is really not necessary to fight if both sides of the argument are trying to solve the same issue, be it cost, safety, quality, or delivery. It is just a question of not arguing about how, but of trying something.

Break the task into smaller ones. When all of the above is done in some cases there may still be no action. Or there may be good initial engagement by the people directly involved in the kaizen, but less as the managers and support groups are asked to implement and complete the system changes needed to make the new method sustainable. Rather than insist that they give resources towards a major project, we may simply need to ask these people "What can you do today?" and the answer may be something extremely small. Thank people for the smallest task they perform towards kaizen. Ask this question every day. Slowly but inevitably you will make progress towards implementing the changes you need, both physically and in the culture. You will also gain a reputation for persistence, and eventually a measure of respect.

None of the above may work for you. Who knows? People are unpredictable. You will have to experiment. I am sure there is at least some small part of it that you can test today.

The first truly modern, manage-by-the-numbers corporation, created by Alfred Sloan in the 1920s, was laid to rest as a viable concept. But what comes next?

Dr. Womack places GM's bankruptcy as the final page in a 30-year lean narrative revolving around the battle of ideas between GM (not lean?) and Toyota (lean). I have only been a conscious part of the lean community for the past 16 years, and much of that spent in aerospace, defense or consumer goods and service industries, so this "David versus Goliath" framing between two automotive giants doesn't ring exactly true. Was there ever any debate or contest between Toyota and GM for the past decade at least in terms of quality, cost, profitability and the underlying strengths of their management systems?

Dr. Womack aptly summarizes GM's weaknesses in three points basically as legacy and compensation costs that are too high and revenues that are too low "partly as a legacy of decades of defective products and partly due to losing the pulse of the public on what the company and its products should mean for customers." Yet the narrative is far from over as Toyota's resilience is being severely tested during this recession as it deals with the hangover from its binge of expansion of the past few years.

The point that the Sloan era is over for GM can be made, and Dr. Womack asks "where is the new Sloan, the leader able to rethink GM's management and purpose and make it relevant to Americans again?" However extending this to an end of an era for the lean community, where there has been a battle of ideas centering around the GM system and the Toyota system, seems a stretch. In the letter, Dr. Womack states:

GM and almost all large manufacturers have now accepted lean as a management theory, although the actual practice is always a struggle.

Really? If by "accepted" we mean people are saying "yes, lean is a management theory" then perhaps so. Both scientists and evangelicals may accept evolution and creationism as theories of species origin, but this is far from saying that there is consensus on the superiority of one over the other or that the debate is over. Based on an adoption rate for lean within industry of something between 5% and 20% of lean practices, we have a long way to go in building awareness and acceptance.

We in the Lean Community therefore find ourselves in the odd position of winning a battle of ideas without actually getting most believers to fully practice their new convictions.

If, as Taiichi Ohno said, "Understanding means doing" can we really say that we have won the "battle of ideas?" In fact, what has the lean community done to win the battle of ideas? The lean management system a.k.a. the Toyota way already existed fully-formed when the so-called lean community formed around this idea and went to battle. This victory seems rather premature and self-congratulatory, and it's link with GM's demise arbitrary. Toyota and GM are just two automotive companies, part of a broader narrative on competitiveness whose outcome was accelerated by the shenanigans of the American financial institutions. Without the financial collapse GM could have held on for perhaps 3-5 years and even inched closer in competitiveness to Toyota as they struggled from overproduction and overcapacity.

So the dramatic events of recent weeks are not a time for self-congratulation. Instead, they are a time for modesty and self-reflection - hansei, if you will - as we all struggle with the economic crisis while trying to re-define our own purpose as a Lean Community for the new era ahead.

If there is a battle of ideas, it is far from won. Lean is all about practice and not about competing management theories. Late in his career Taiichi Ohno repeatedly stressed "pratice, not theory" as he saw academicians studying Toyota's method and attempting to quantify and categorize it. I think he foresaw the danger of reducing the struggle against complacency, self-satisfaction, loss of customer focus and tolerance of small wastes that result from attempting to precisely define and label kaizen and shop floor management. For Taiichi Ohno, Henry Ford and other early practitioners of lean thought it was all about acting with a sense of urgency, with customer focus and improving continuously.

If anything, the "end of an era" simply means that the lean community no longer has General Motors to kick around as the anti-exemplar of a lean enterprise. All efforts in any battle of ideas should be towards helping the opposite side to win by taking the correct path. If this has not happened, we have won no battle. In fact, while lean is important, such a battle of ideas is not what really matters in times of tumultuous change like today. What's next for lean? It's high time that we broadened the discussion beyond automobiles, manufacturing, or even the corporate world. We need to turn the discussion towards solving problems for our customers towards how we can help the people who work at GM or people who are otherwise struggling, regardless of whether they are lean-minded.

I have never been in a kaizen promotion office (KPO) but have worked with and round them for many years. At worst the KPO is a coordination, preparation, basic training and follow up function that acts as a buffer between the consultants implementing lean and the management team. At best the KPO is a team of ever-learning teachers who practice what they preach, and bravely act as the proverbial thorn in management's side.

The KPO gets a bad name when it is more Office than Kaizen, and the Promotion is more "rah, rah" than changing people's lives in positive ways. What is the role of a kaizen promotion officer? Simply put, to promote kaizen. Here are 10 specific actions and behaviors to keep in mind when writing the job description of a kaizen promotion officer:

1. Follow standard work that includes frequent gemba walks on their own and with site leaders to see the reality and pick up the opportunities and important issues people face. Following standard work is also the most basic way of demonstrating that the KPO personnel practice what they preach.

2. Monitor and communicate the performance of kaizen to all stakeholders in the organization.

3. Encourage kaizen activity in all of its forms.

4. Do kaizen. This may seem obvious but some kaizen promotion officers believe or have been told that it is not their job to do kaizen. There are several reasons why this is wrong. First of all, it is everybody's job to do kaizen, meaning we should make small improvements to their own work. Second, the KPO should not do all of the kaizen activity but enable others to do it. That is what the P stands for: promotion. This is best done by first demonstrating how kaizen is done. Third, the KPO needs to act as the last line of defense when other resources are not available to take countermeasure or in response to andon alerts and line stops.

5. Solve critical problems for the organization. This is a variation on the andon response, but rather by request from the management to quickly address a critical safety, quality, delivery or cost issue having a known cause and an appropriate lean tool as countermeasure. The KPO should be seen by management as an expert problem solving resource or a group that has the capacity to facilitate such problem solving.

6. Sit on committees to bring the influence of the kaizen mindset to topics such as capital expenditure planning, human resource policies, and annual objective setting.

7. Ensure sustaining systems are in place such as suggestion systems, team leaders and group leaders with appropriate spans of control and clear roles and responsibilities, and hoshin planning.

8. Benchmark organizations doing lean and build peer-to-peer learning networks.

9. Go learn form other peer organizations through benchmarking, conferences, seminars and training sessions, and bring this learning back to the organization for further promotion.

10. Eliminate the kaizen promotion office or at least minimize the need for all of the above by developing the next generation of leaders who can do all of these things as part of their daily work. As a first step make the KPO into a smaller core group with rotating members as part of a management development program.

How many of you work in a KPO, lean promotion office or equivalent? How would you answer Raghavendra's question? What have you found to be the most important roles and responsibilities for yourself and other KPO colleagues?

Hoshin simply means policy and kanri means management, but in English these two together sound awfully bureaucratic and dry so often "policy deployment" or even "strategy deployment" is used to give it pizazz. We prefer to retain "policy" because we believe it implies longer term thinking, values and continuity, while strategy is about what things to do towards those policy objectives. Many see hoshin kanri as another lean tool, a convenient way to track projects, or another secret of Toyota to demystify, learn and benefit from, but the truth is much simpler: hoshin kanri is daily management driven by long-term thinking.

At its best hoshin kanri can turn resistance into support, create cross-functional cooperation, engage the wider workforce in crafting executable strategies, link improvement actions with financial results, allow the team to respond to changes and setbacks simply by following the process, and generate and act on effective strategies year after year by learning and refining the policy deployment process.

The ideal place to start a company deployment of lean would be hoshin kanri. Unfortunately most leadership teams are not ready for this degree of candor, management by fact, deselection of cherished projects, and disciplined and frequent review. Getting policy deployment right takes time in leadership training, strategy development, understanding what PDCA really means, and the dos and don'ts of putting words and pictures on A3 sized paper. There is no point in doing hoshin kanri middle-up, except as a learning exercise or to prove a point. It is also definitely not just a budgeting exercise, which people sometimes mistake hoshin kanri to be.

As our small, globally distributed company prepares to make yet another serious attempt at making policy deployment part of the way we work, I reflect on some of the ways we have seen clients, friends, ourselves and our colleagues struggle with hoshin kanri. There is nothing difficult about hoshin kanri itself. There is everything difficult about its insistence that we practice the basics day after day like professionals, rather than play each day as we please, like amateurs. Specifically, here are nine ways to struggle at hoshin kanri:

1. Wrapping today's management process in A3 paper
It's important to allow hoshin kanri to make you better. Too many senior leaders at excellent companies have tried to take their management process, add a few X-matrices or A3 reports, insert one or more of the words "goal, policy, strategy, deployment, alignment" etc. and basically continue the same way as before. This is a good way to struggle at hoshin kanri. The only way to get out of this is to have a standardized way of learning and improving the process itself. If the hoshin kanri process doesn't have a PDCA process built in for reflection and learning as part of every review cycle, it is not hoshin.

2. Not knowing why
If you have a strategy, objective or a policy handed down to you from your superior, do you always understand the reason for it? Most of the time we don't challenge and ask why. Those who do are seen as either disruptive at worst and mavericks at best. If you don't know the "objective of the objective" or the reason for the policy, enough questions have not been asked. Simply accepting the policy handed down without challenge and attempting to pass it through a hoshin kanri process is another sure way to struggle. A healthy culture of ask "why?" and the patience to pass the ball up and down until stakeholders have enough information to support, if not agree, is necessary. Catch ball with a willingness to question and be questioned is essential.

3. Setting broad, vague, shallow objectives
Mission statements can fill a plaque on the wall and say virtually nothing. To the committees who crafted them, they may seem brilliant. However to the rank and file who are being asked to act on these policies, they are nearly useless. Big does not have to mean broad and vague. In the effort to give meaning to everyone, objectives can become shallow. These qualities may be excusable for 10-year pans, but for 1-3 year plans, not. The clearer your top level objectives, the better lower level strategies you will develop. Not spending time to make the top level policy statements and hoshin kanri objectives clear and full of deep insight is another way to struggle in policy deployment. It is OK if the wording changes later on based on the catch ball. Most mission statement generation sessions come to conclusions not because everyone on the committee is happy with the product but often because time, patience and consulting budget have run out.

4. Cheating on the "therefore" test
The root cause analysis of the gaps between where you are and where you want to be should result in actions and plans to close those gaps. These in total become your strategy. Working backward from the end of your A3 back to the top, people find that you can't always get there from here. The logical flow of cause and effect is lacking. Somewhere along the way we have all lied to ourselves and agreed it is a great idea, without passing the "therefore" test. When the plans come together very quickly, we often haven't asked enough questions or through through the contingency plans, and this can lead to struggles and disappointments down the road as plans must be changed to meet reality. When you have a plan, stop and work backwards, saying "we will do this, therefore..." until you can demonstrate that the gaps will be closed.

5. Marking it yellow or red and moving on
Too often we raise yellow or red flags, discuss countermeasures, leave the meeting and trust that our colleagues have taken care of the issue. Yet we have seen more reds and yellows lingering on hoshin documents than the process should allow. When there is no method to safely surface these problems, ask for help, receive help, and learn as a group how to prevent the same mistake in the future, the hoshin kanri process will struggle.

6. Using the down-up-down process for negotiation, not consensus
If the policy is well-formed, there should be no negotiation. It should be customer focused, people-centered, and driven by sustainable profitability. Developing consensus on the policy may result in changes to the policy, but changes are very different than negotiated settlements. When each side gives up something, the end product is a compromise. When the catch ball process does not connect the vision at the top with the day to day realities on the front line, hoshin kanri is less than fully effective. The best way to bring about catch ball is through teams. A lack of a team culture is another great way to turn hoshin kanri into a struggle...

7. Happy planing
Happy plans are the ones where you tell yourself and your team all about your dreams, ideas, and all of the exciting things you will take on. Hoshin plans are the ones where you do this, and then ruthlessly remove the ideas that aren't supported by resources, alignment of purpose, customers, or adequate data to say that you should be putting your money and time there. Hoshin is painful until you you have experienced the happiness of doing fewer things far more effectively. Avoiding this and pursuing happy plans leads to struggle and wasted resources while tough decisions are not made.

8. Writing your hoshin plan on the computer
We recommend doing your top level A3 by hand. Use a big whiteboard or a large piece of paper. You need to be able to walk people through the thinking process, how you wrote down, crossed out, erased, reconsidered, clarified. If you show people that it's OK to put text in a spreadsheet you will find it much harder to get them to accept the fact that they need to make changes to it. People are more tolerant of you scribbling on a whiteboard or piece of paper but don't like it when you mess with their electronic documents, for some reason. The hoshin plan that goes from words across a table straight onto a laptop projected on a screen lacks a certain honesty and rigor.

9. Having a strategy that is too good to be changed by hoshin kanri
Pity the management team with a brilliant plan. Unless it is the result of brilliant planning which is a process and not chance, and repeatable, hoshin kanri will struggle as "we already..." tried it, thought of it, studied it, spoke to the customers, and so on until there is only room to fit the brilliant plan onto a lonly A3 report. Just as in kaizen, we need to belive "now is the worst it will ever be" and our job is to make what we have now better. We need to be careful how much we pay consultants *cough* to give us a brilliant plan.

We will stop at nine. There are plenty more ways to struggle with it. Hoshin kanri is not for the faint of heart. But this not meant to discourage anyone. I have been guilty of at least 10 of the struggles above, but the learning itself has been worth it. The rewards of hoshin are great. It requires great humility, a willingness to engage a broad range of people in setting the strategy, the discipline to go see for yourself, ask why until the true causes are found, and never be satisfied with the process or results. It is a great way to accomplish important things. It is a great way to develop people.