Learning to Lead

While I am sick to death of reading and hearing about the Toyota Way every single time I turn around, I feel there are a few things to be said to cement my key learnings.

Now I"m a scientist, but I have a hard time applying the scientific method to manufacturing work, as Spear does in Leading the Way, which is perhaps why I am not a management scientist. Let's see, I hypothesize that the nut will be sufficiently tight after 3 turns. I take approximately 300 random samples of nuts turned three times and determine that 20% of the nuts aren't sufficiently tight. I reject the hypothesis and conclude: Three turns are not enough! With this knowledge in hand I know I have to stop being a scientist and start being an advocate for one of two changes: have the nut turners turn the nut more times (and hypothesize how many times, so I can test it again) or change the process.

It is a bit of a leap for me that continuous improvement is actually a variant of the scientific method. But that doesn't mean that I think continuous improvement isn't an absolutely wonderful concept. It just means that I believe testing work as it is being done is a great way to ensure that work meets a standard, and bad work doesn't make it to the next customer. Exploring the gap between what is expected and what occurs doesn't require an experiment. Continuous learning and improvement is more than understanding the gap.

I think by now we all understand that there is something special at Toyota that allows their tools and processes to flourish. Spears calls out their Principles. Others use terms like culture. Most describe the angst Americans hear when they are told that this "way" flourishes, in part, through the immediate outing of problems, rather than their swift sweep under the rug.

I am in the midst of training a new hire in my office. I have never had the opportunity to do this before. Meeting on Monday to discuss plans and expectations, and then meeting again on Friday to compare actual outcomes with plans is a very appealing idea. However, charging my new employee to make a specific number of changes sounds very much like asking for a research paper of particular length to be delivered, quality and content be damned. Also, picking the right metric for documenting the effects of the changes is a daily challenge already. 

I also like the challenge of figuring out how to improve our visual management of the work so it is easy to see what is going well, what is going wrong, and what needs to be done.

The new hire, Dallis, had an initial objective of reducing "overburden" on the worker. Spears emphasizes the effect of this language. Focusing on overburden emphasizes the impact of the work design on the person. By contrast, focusing on "waste" suggests that the person is the problem.

Despite my skepticism about the application of the scientific method, and experimentation, I want to document here the presentation format as described in Spears' article.

In all the presentations, the group leaders explained the problems they were addressing, the processes they used to develop countermeasures, and the effect these countermeasures had on performance. All work and improvements are structured as experiments.

Fundamental Principles Underlying the system:

1) There's no substitute for direct observation
2) Porposed changes should always be structured as experiments
3) Workers and managers should experiment as frequently as possible
4) Managers should coach, not fix

What a Day

This morning I got up at 5 to head down to Canoga Park to take the first half of a two day class from Bill Bellows at Rocketdyne on Enterprise Thinking.  An hour of the class was a vidoetaped lecture by my hero Peter Senge.  And fifteen minutes ago I got home from a lecture by Mohammad Yunus.   

What were the common themes of the day?

• We are not born into this world to be money making machines;
• We are born into this world with the capacity to learn;
• We are born with unlimited potential, but society has not allowed millions to unwrap this gift.  They die unexplored and unknown;
• The post industrial machine, the system of profit maximization, is a theory that real people are trying to imitate, when it is theory that should be imitating life;
• Poverty is not caused by the poor, poor performance is not caused by the person who measures it, grades are not caused by your performance... all of this is caused by systems of institutions, policies and concepts that are artificially imposed;
• A learning organization changes the system, but conventional systems are slow or reluctant to change.
• And from Toyota Way: Lean is about developing principles that are right for your organization and diligently practicing them to achieve high performance that continues to add value to customers and society.  This of course, means being competitive and profitable.

I have spent quite a bit of time thinking today about measurements.  We are in the midst of developing performance metrics for next year.  First, I have learned that there is no need to pull goals out of thin air, that we actually have the data to help us create our goals, with a statistical understanding of how we are performing today being possible.  But are we measuring the right thing?  If we want to provide excellent bicycle parking, does it make sense only to measure the number of hitching posts we put out?  

As long as we are driven to measure success as the maximization of profit, it will be difficult for our mainstream to support social business, where we measure success toward the dividends that are returned toward our goal.  I loved the idea Yunus promoted which is this:  the business can set its goal, for example, health, or the end of malnutrition.  The business can choose to return its dividends back toward meeting that goal.  Then the bottom line is not profit, but rather we can measure our success by the number of people we reach.  He advocated businesses that sell health insurance and bank accounts to the poor, as a viable business prospect that could help us peel off the systems that keep people in poverty.

Yunus was very cooly received by our Santa Barbara crowd.  I was disappointed.  I had heard warming receptions for any number of local bands.  Is it just too much for us to wrap our minds around?