Are your internal lean experts excelling?

Lean nation,

Today's blog will review an important lesson.  If you have read any of my blogs in the past, your will quickly recognize this theme.  About 1/3 or more of my blogs focus on this topic.  Have you guessed it yet?

Leadership

I was teaching a Master's class at the University of Toronto, and an adjunct this week on healthcare quality improvement.  I had a class of some the best and brightest minds in healthcare including a blend of physicians, clinicians, and administrator's.  It is inspiring that our next generation of healthcare leadership is getting a grounding in lean quality improvement.

This class was an intense course.  4 days of  consecutive lessons.  I prefer teaching in that format since the concepts are progressive in their application and the back to back consistency enables better retention and application of the material.  The questions I received from the class were very interesting and an excellent gauge for what is happening within the healthcare industry.  As least as it relates to the students in the class. And this class was international in their make-up.

Would you be able to guess where the majority of questions came from?   Yes there were thee usual list of questions related to tools and their application.  The concepts students struggled the most with included the following:

• the application of takt time
• properly completing a time observation
• properly completing a loading diagram
• applying the scientific method through the A3, and 
• process control

Ironically, the broader issues with the class were not tool related at all.  There were leadership related.   As we talked through linking lean improvement to corporate strategy, removing the barriers to large scale organizational change,  dealing with accountability issues,  one theme became apparent.  Leadership in these students organizations were unclear of their roles,  or not engaged in the improvement process at the level required to be successful.  

All of the major issues that need to be resolved to transform an organization must be dealt with directly by senior leadership.  This topic dominated the class from the first through the fourth day.  I had to spend a lot of time addressing the leadership aspects of each of the change concepts. More time was spent talking about the tricks to get leadership's attention.

Let's go back to the title of this blog.  Are your lean improvement experts excelling in your organization?  If not,  the problem may not lie with the improvement team, it may lie with leadership.

Lean Blessings:

Ron

Ron Bercaw

President and Sensei

Breakthrough Horizons Ltd

www.breakthroughhorizons.com

Shingo award winning author

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

Establishing the proper governance for lean change

What I want to talk about today is establishing and infrastructure for improvement. Most organizations fail to establish a governance process for their change and this can cause some damage to the improvement process.

In his book titled "Leading Change", leadership and change management guru, John Kotter summarizes the key reasons why some transformational changes succeed and other's fail. Mr. Kotter cites the 8 step change process in his best seller. These steps include the following:

1)Create Urgency
2)Form a Powerful Coalition
3)Create a Vision for change
4)Communicate the Vision
5)Remove Obstacles
6)Create Short Term Wins
7)Build on the Change
8)Anchor the Changes in Corporate Culture

What I want to focus in on today is point #2, forming a powerful coalition. The first hurdle to overcome is convincing people that change is necessary. This takes strong leadership and visible support from key people within your organization. Managing change isn't enough - you have to lead it. Easy to say, but difficult to do since likely we are not totally clear on where we are going and perhaps no one has gone here before.

Every organization has effective change leaders. But to get to the "real" leaders you need to recognize that they don't necessarily follow the traditional company hierarchy. To lead change, you need to bring together team, of influential people whose power comes from a variety of sources. These sources may include position title, status, expertise, and political importance. These leaders can be formal or informal. Once formed, your guiding coalition needs to work as a team, continuing to build urgency and momentum around the need for change.

Over time, the responsibilities of this team should become more formal. I teach that the guiding coalition or steering committee has six main responsibilities:

1) Make sure you are working in the right areas - Are we climbing the right wall and do the improvements link to the strategy of your organization?
2) Make sure the changes are being sustained - You can only go forward if you hold the gains.
3) Monitor the pace of change to maintain momentum - If we go too fast and sustaining results will suffer; if we go too slow, you will never get momentum
4) Develop people - Where are the change champions? Are they being properly developed?
5) Capture the results - What are we measuring? Are the results relevant and current? Are we capturing the hard measures like productivity, and cost?
6) Remove organizational barriers - Align policies and procedures to facilitate change. Deal with the "antibodies" in the change process.

Without the powerful coalition to steer the change process, the current culture of your organization will likely overtake the few change champions and derail your change efforts.

Lean Blessings,

Ron

Ron Bercaw
www.breakthroughhorizons.com