Stop SOPA/PIPA

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.


If the latest version of SOPA - Protect IP Act (PIPA S.968) passes it would mean the end of the internet as we know it.  It allows the government and the entertainment industry to shutdown sites just because they feel there are copyright infringements or there are links to sites that are copy write infringements.  What this means is that bloggers like myself could get 5 years in prison just because a commentor left a link to a site the corporations feel is supporting copyright infringements. Such sites can include youtube, facebook, and others.

Please contact your representative and senator and tell them you oppose PIPA S.968

More information on what's in PIPA

The Money Trail - which representatives and senators are given money by pro PIPA corporations

What's Missing With Your Lean Initiative

We are currently looking at new innovative ways to deliver services to folks that have superior value.  We want to hear from you on what you would like to see from a consulting company that you don't see.  It can be cost, product, services, or any other items but we want to hear from you.

Here are some of the ideas that are in the works:

-Distance facilitation
-Online coaching for managers
-Full package implementation (strategy, org structure, training, and some projects) at a single price point
-Strengths based problem solving

We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments section or contact us directly.


Related Blog Posts:

Change Effort Not Working? Try Appreciative Inquiry And Changing The Culture

How To Make a Change Management Effort Like Lean Stick

Services

Lean in the Office

You might think of a scene like the one in the picture when you think of a "non-Lean office."  The fact is that Lean in the office is much more than just a 5s program.  For those unfamiliar, 5s is a 5 step process to help organize the work space and more importantly you use 5s to help see where there might be opportunities for improvements.  The 5s process is 1) Sort 2) Set 3) Shine 4) Standardize 5) Sustain.  For more information please contact us.  

A Lean office is an office that is designed to deliver the most value with minimal waste to a customer.  5s is a great place to start because it will usually lead to other findings which you can improve.  We have found a slightly different way to approach a lean office.  First step is to give everyone Lean training and teaching people to see what is value and what is waste.  The next step is to look at what you are currently doing well and try to see how you can do more of it.  An example of this is at an office I helped they were a a couple of people great at communicating with customers/clients.  We decided to standardize as much as possible their process and train others on how to have good interactions with customers/clients.  The training was done by the people who  were thought to be the leaders in the area (a receptionist, a manger, and a technician).  You can find what's working well by doing an appreciative inquiry.

After leveraging what you have working well then there is an opportunity to work on the problem areas.  We usually like to do some mapping events to get a good feel for where the main opportunities lay.  A value stream map or multiple value stream maps is ideal for this step.  In an office setting value stream maps can get a bit hairy and may not be as clear as in a manufacturing setting.  Don't worry that is ok just do the best you can in mapping.  Once you've mapped out the current state for a particular area then design an ideal future state map. The difference from the current state and the ideal state will be the projects you will need to work on in your office.  Don't worry if you can't get everything done this year, just prioritize and pick which ones you want to do.  Just remember that this is iterative so if it's not perfect then don't worry you'll have another change to improve it.  We recommend doing a value stream map at least once a year and doing both a current state and future state map.

From this point you can go in several directions but you will have multiple projects to work on through out the year.  For sustaining and continuous improvement we find that daily management helps.  This is a simple board with metrics and if the metrics aren't meet then we try to root cause the problem and solve it so it doesn't happen again in the future.  It's a great way to engage all people and give them ownership in their work space.  For more information on daily management, value stream mapping, or any other questions you may have please contact us. 

Change Effort Not Working? Try Appreciative Inquiry And Changing The Culture

This is the abbreviated post for the more detailed post on how to make change management work.

Many of my clients approach me because they want one of three things.
1) Process improvement
2) Strategy facilitation
3) Cultural changes

Mostly they ask for the first two choices because they are more concrete.  When clients choose to do only process improvement or only strategy the gains from their efforts and the lean way consulting are short lived.  Ultimately true sustainable change only comes from cultural change and that is not easy.  Organizations fall into typically two categories.

1) An organization wants to do a process improvement effort like Lean and are excited to use the tools because of all the great things they heard Lean can do for their organization.  While that is true they miss the critical element of the management and sustaining side.
2) An organization wants to do a process improvement effort like lean and understands it's more than a tool set but will focus on a problem orientation when implementing Lean.

The lean way consulting's system for process improvement is to integrate cultural changes at the beginning with an approach called appreciative inquiry.  Appreciative inquiry is an approach designed to build on the strengths of an organization and address the weaknesses in the context of building on strengths.  Normal Lean implementations are based solely on what's not working.

By looking at the positive side of things we activate the parasympathetic system which allows us to be more creative and able to solve problems easier (this is an oversimplification of the biological system of the PNS but the end result is still the same).  It doesn't take much effort for people to be more positive and open to other solutions.  Cornell university did an experiment where they asked physicians think out loud while they solve a case of a patient with liver disease.  They found that when they gave physicians just a small bag of candy or some kind of small gift those physicians were better at integrating case information and less likely to become fixated on the initial ideas and coming to premature closure in their diagnosis.  This is the type of thinking you want from every person in your company.  You get less resistance, more buy-in, and a sustainable solution.  Here is the basic approach the lean way consulting uses for a new change management effort:

0) Training (ongoing)
1) Start in a place where there is a need
2) Build out an area to experiment and grow momentum
3) Expand by creating tension to constantly move people out of their comfort zones
4) Integrate what you are doing in strategy

For more information please contact us oh where you can get started.  You can also take our free assessment and we will analyze your current culture for free.

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How To Make a Change Management Effort Like Lean Stick

How To Make a Change Management Effort Like Lean Stick

Change is inevitable - except from a vending machine.

-Robert C. Gallagher

If you are involved in any kind of change management effort that is large typically it takes about 2-5 years to make the change sustainable(The Banks Report December 2005). A Lean implementation is no different and in this blog post I want to talk about the initial conditions you need to make a Lean (or any other change effort) sustainable in the long run. Before we get into how to change a culture let's look at all the factors that influence culture:

Mission/Vision of the company - ex. Nike's mission; "To bring inspiration and innovation to every athlete in the world."
Process controls - ex. role cultures have many rulebooks and power cultures relay on individuals to get things done.
Org. Structure - ex. decision flow, hierarchies, etc.
Power Structures - ex. where are decisions being made, are they made by groups or individuals, how concentrated is the decision making?
Symbols - ex. employee of the month pictures/parking, logos, designs, offices vs. cubicles, etc.
Rituals and Routines - ex. meeting schedule and how each meeting is run, reports that are more habitual instead of useful, etc.
Stories and Myths - ex. building up people and events to get a message across, GE's story of how Thomas Edison invented the light bulb.
(source: Johnson, Gerry (1988) "Rethinking Incrementalism", Strategic Management Journal Vol 9 pp75-91)

A good change management program will tackle most if not all of the elements. In a Lean transformation you will typically change process controls, org. structure, power structures, symbols, rituals and routines, indirectly change the stories and myths and possibly the mission/vision statement. So why isn't every change management program successful? There has to be a driving force moving people out of their comfort zones. These forces can be either internal or external but it needs to be significant enough to drive people to change.

In designing systems Lean designs include pull systems. A pull system is designed so a product/customer doesn't move to the next step until the next step is ready and "pulls" the product/customer into the step. Please seen this wikipedia article for more information. The main question becomes how do you generate pull for a change effort. When ever we do change efforts we look at these factors:

1) Sponsorship support - What level is the sponsor that supports the change, are they the CEO or owner?
2) Support structure - Are there others who want the change?
3) Current situation - What are the current conditions like morale, productivity, turn over, etc? Is there opportunity to get a quick win in any area that is measurable
4) Resources - Does the company have the right people or do they have plans to either train, hire, or bring in consultants to help? Do they have time and money dedicated to the change?

If these 4 factors are in place then we move forward with the change effort. If they are not then we address them first before moving forward if we even move forward. Usually training is a good alternative to a change management program if you don't have the above 4 factors.

Ok now we're ready to start a change management effort like Lean, how do we start. Here is the traditional approach:
0) Training (ongoing)
1) Start in a place where there is a need
2) Build out an area to experiment and grow momentum
3) Expand by creating tension to constantly move people out of their comfort zones
4) Integrate what you are doing in strategy

There are many steps in between and it's not always this linear but it's like a pyramid where you start at the tip (small) and expand out. This process can be a lot of pushing to get changes made. If you want to generate pull start with upending the pyramid and start will the whole system. I want to introduce to you a new tool that is being taught at Toyota university and that's Appreciative Inquiry. Appreciative Inquiry (AI) is different from a traditional approach:

Traditional approach:
1) Felt need/identification of problem
2) Analysis of Causes
3) analysis of Possible Solutions
4) Action Planning

Appreciative Inquiry Approach:
1) Appreciating & Valuing the Best of What Is
2) Envisioning What Might Be
3) Dialoging What Should Be

(source: David L Cooperrider;Diana Whitney. Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change (p. 13). Kindle Edition.)

How does an appreciative inquiry approach get people excited about change? That is where the AI process is different from the traditional approach. AI focuses on strengths and and the foundation is in positive psychology. Positive psychology is not about being a cheerleader 100% of the time but it's about finding what's good, how to be resistant, and being aware of what could go wrong the negatives of a situation. What happens with appreciative inquiry is that we ask people what is right with the system and how do we do more of what is right. By appealing to people's positive emotions we have seen high levels of engagement with staff members and better sustainability with efforts. Below is an example of how appreciative inquiry can lead to results:

Roadway began holding Al Summits throughout its North American operations, realizing that to thrive in an industry in which net profit margins are less than 5 percent in a profitable year, each of its twenty-eight thousand employees must assume leadership responsibility. The results have been impressive. When the work began, Roadway stock was around $ I4 per share. In two years the stock rose to more than $40 per share, before any merger discussions with Yellow, whose stock was a much lower $24 per share. Following the merger in 2003, the combined company was valued at around $42 per share because of the strength of Roadway's improvements. But beyond stock prices, many other measures have steadily improved at statistically significant levels, including operating ratios (the lowest in years) and well-documented overtime changes in survey data looking at measures of morale, levels of trust, clarity in focus and priority vision, commitment levels, and confidence in a new and better future. Many of the changes occurred during an economic downturn in the industry and have been traced to the power and effect of the new culture of engagement fostered by more than twenty large-scale Appreciative Inquiry Al Summits. Jim Staley, Roadway's CEO, says he's seen tremendous employee involvement in task teams at terminals that have held Al Summits, and each team has produced results. "The Appreciative Inquiry approach unleashes tremendous power, tremendous enthusiasm, and gets people fully engaged in the right way in what we're trying to accomplish," Mr. Staley says. "It's not that we don't deal with the negative anymore," he explains. "But the value of Al is that, in anything we do, there's a positive foundation of strength to build on in addressing those problems.

(source:David L Cooperrider;Diana Whitney. Appreciative Inquiry: A Positive Revolution in Change (pp. 40-41). Kindle Edition.)

You might be asking yourself how do you integrate this approach with Lean? One way The Lean Way has found works well is to start your lean efforts with training everyone so they have a general knowledge of lean and how to think lean then start the whole system design approach of appreciative inquiry. This is an oversimplification of the process and each organization is unique so for specific questions please send questions to us from the contact page.

We have started the effort in a hospital system in Cleveland and we decided to tackle group performance. We wanted to make a better working environment for the PMO group so we decided to take the appreciative inquiry approach. During the process the team had comments like "This process gave me hope that things can be better" and "Wow this is great and I never thought of it this way." With the results that came from the effort the team decided to redesign the team building events for the upcoming year to foster a better working environment.


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