Lean Leadership - Pace of Change

Lean Nation,

Continuing on our theme of leadership, I'd like to blog briefly this week about breadth and depth.  By breadth and depth, I'm talking about the focus of improvement within an organization.   Every organization has to make the choice of where to spend the critical improvement resources.    There are always many good opportunities for improvement, but picking the critical few is the responsibility of leadership.

We want the improvements to align with the strategic focus of the organization.  Improving the speed and accuracy of the mail room might be a good improvement project, but I doubt it will help improve your lead-time for products and services, or grow your sales.   But we are trading off that decision with creating a culture of improvement.  The best way to create a culture of improvement is to get everyone involved.

So the decision to go "deep" implies picking a few key value streams within your organization and transforming these value streams consistent with your strategic plans.     The decision to go broad implies using lean thinking in all areas of the organization so everyone can participate.

Leadership has to balance the resources and pace of change in the initial stages of an enterprise wide transformation.  Going too deep at the expense of going deep will shut off the balance of the organization from learning lean thinking.  Going too wide at the expense of going deep will dilute the focus of improvement, slow the actual transformation, and eventually impact the sustainability of the improvements.

Different third party organizations that you may use to help you in your transformation have different views with respect to which is better and which pace to shift from wide to deep or vice versa.  At the end of the day it is the role of leadership, and the steering committee to regulate the pace of change.

While you didn't ask, I always prefer to go deep first, then wide.  Everyone really underestimates the effort it takes to make meaningful change.  And everyone wants to transform really fast.  If I told you transforming your organization was a 20 year journey which model would you pursue first.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
President, Breakthrough Horizons
www.breakthroughhorizons.com