Kaizen, learning, and coordination
Yesterday, I was starting a 5S campaign in my office; it began with cleaning up my collection of diskettes. Yes, I have an awesome collection of 5-1/4", 3-1/2", CD, and DVDs; some of them are labeled, and some of the labels even make sense. Some of them contain private information, and some of them I can't read, so to make sure, I decided to destroy them.
With a stack of about 60 diskettes in front of me, I began to dismantle them and realized that I had a process in need of improvement. One piece at a time was disappointingly slow. Wait, not only slow, but highly variable. There are 5 steps in the process:
6. Throw the scrap away
I pulled a wastebasket around the corner and started over, one piece at a time. I can now dismantle diskettes without thinking about it in a smooth process that takes less than 10 seconds, and I can do this at my computer workstation immediately after I check the contents. Because the waste goes immediately into the garbage, I can essentially process indefinitely (or at least until the trash needs emptying).
The problem here was the variability of the second step, and I was not doing it frequently enough to really understand it. Therefore, I altered the standard process in order to isolate the problem, developed my technique, and returned to the process. This is what happens when people in a workgroup tackle similar problems: each person applies his own knowledge and experience to a process and finds small tweaks to it. There's nothing new or unique about that; that's what Hayek was describing about the use of knowledge in society.
As I have said before, kaizen is a formal process for disseminating knowledge in a business setting, and is therefore addressed to reducing transaction costs within a firm. Kaizen is a process, not an event, so it is said that Lean is management of processes, not outcomes. The outcome is the goal of the process.
These things are true whether you are talking about people working together within a group, or across organizational boundaries. In fact, it is when people are working across boundaries that kaizen has the most potential. Within a group, it is easy for the supervisor to set priorities and to maintain focus on the process. Across groups, even if everyone agrees to the intended outcome, it is difficult to coordinate priorities. That is especially true on temporary projects. Production and sales may have divergent views about delays and costs, with one considering them to be necessary and unavoidable while the other one sees them as deadly and unreasonable. Kaizen serves as a formal coordinating focal point, to which the team members can appeal to their supervisors for higher priority. The kaizen activity trumps local concerns or at least calls for alignment of local priorities with the priorities of the kaizened process.
One final note: the learning is not effective if there is no standard work. Everyone "doing his own thing" is chaos, and chaos is not a good way to run a business if you want happy customers. Hayek's point was that chaos does not exist in society even in the absence of central planning because a coordinating mechanism exists: price. Mine is that chaos will not exist in a business if management emphasizes standard work, but this is not enough if you also want to improve. To improve, you must have a formalized method for experimentation and communication, and kaizen is the best one yet devised.
lean management
project kaizen
With a stack of about 60 diskettes in front of me, I began to dismantle them and realized that I had a process in need of improvement. One piece at a time was disappointingly slow. Wait, not only slow, but highly variable. There are 5 steps in the process:
- Remove the sliding door.
- Pry the cartridge open
- Remove the disk
- Pop the hub out
- Stack the plastic disks for shredding
6. Throw the scrap away
I pulled a wastebasket around the corner and started over, one piece at a time. I can now dismantle diskettes without thinking about it in a smooth process that takes less than 10 seconds, and I can do this at my computer workstation immediately after I check the contents. Because the waste goes immediately into the garbage, I can essentially process indefinitely (or at least until the trash needs emptying).
The problem here was the variability of the second step, and I was not doing it frequently enough to really understand it. Therefore, I altered the standard process in order to isolate the problem, developed my technique, and returned to the process. This is what happens when people in a workgroup tackle similar problems: each person applies his own knowledge and experience to a process and finds small tweaks to it. There's nothing new or unique about that; that's what Hayek was describing about the use of knowledge in society.
Organizational learning = standard work + experimentation + communicationKaizen is the formalization of the last part of that:
Organizational learning = standard work + (experimentation + communication)As Ohno says, standard work instructions cannot be written from behind a desk: you must go to the factory floor. From there, you can see what is really happening. But the supervisor can't also do the work, or he would not have the time to work on other supervisory tasks (hiring, timesheets, etc.). Someone must conduct the experimentation, and the workers themselves are closest to the activity. If each worker does his own experimentation and develops his own solutions, you would no longer have standard work, so there must be communication vertically and laterally.
= standard work + kaizen
As I have said before, kaizen is a formal process for disseminating knowledge in a business setting, and is therefore addressed to reducing transaction costs within a firm. Kaizen is a process, not an event, so it is said that Lean is management of processes, not outcomes. The outcome is the goal of the process.
These things are true whether you are talking about people working together within a group, or across organizational boundaries. In fact, it is when people are working across boundaries that kaizen has the most potential. Within a group, it is easy for the supervisor to set priorities and to maintain focus on the process. Across groups, even if everyone agrees to the intended outcome, it is difficult to coordinate priorities. That is especially true on temporary projects. Production and sales may have divergent views about delays and costs, with one considering them to be necessary and unavoidable while the other one sees them as deadly and unreasonable. Kaizen serves as a formal coordinating focal point, to which the team members can appeal to their supervisors for higher priority. The kaizen activity trumps local concerns or at least calls for alignment of local priorities with the priorities of the kaizened process.
One final note: the learning is not effective if there is no standard work. Everyone "doing his own thing" is chaos, and chaos is not a good way to run a business if you want happy customers. Hayek's point was that chaos does not exist in society even in the absence of central planning because a coordinating mechanism exists: price. Mine is that chaos will not exist in a business if management emphasizes standard work, but this is not enough if you also want to improve. To improve, you must have a formalized method for experimentation and communication, and kaizen is the best one yet devised.
lean management
project kaizen
Labels: decentralization, management
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