Some people make Lean much too difficult.
Recently I stopped by to see my friend Gerry at the restaurant he manages. He had just hired some young students to work part-time during the summer, and was training them intermittently as he went about his regular duties. Although Gerry knows almost nothing of Lean, I was struck by the Lean touches he has developed intuitively in his business. It’s worth a look.
The restaurant supply truck had come that morning. The new kid, Nathan, had figured out where many of the supplies belonged and put them away. But he was standing beside a huge box of paper napkins, evidently trying to decide what to do. Gerry asked him “What’s up?” Nathan replied that he wasn’t sure whether he should take the paper-wrapped bundles of napkins out of the box and put them on the shelf, or just put the whole box on the shelf unopened.
Gerry replied like this: “Well, let’s think about this. If we’re out of napkins in the front, and a guest asks the cashier for some napkins, the cashier will come back here looking for those bundles of napkins, which is what he usually sees. If he doesn’t find bundles of napkins, he may start randomly reading labels on boxes, trying to find a box of napkins. When he finds the box of napkins, he will have to get it down and open it, which means he may need to hunt down a knife. Meanwhile our guest is waiting for some napkins because maybe their child spilled a drink and they want to clean it up themselves.”
“Oh,” Nathan said. “I’ll open the box and put the bundles on the shelf.”
So what was Gerry doing? He was teaching some very basic Lean lessons.
First, he was teaching. It’s common in mass production organizations for managers to believe their primary job is to work their will on the organization. Leaders in Lean organization understand that, even if you want to work your will on the organization, the best way to do that is to teach, to teach employees how to think about the organization and how to solve problems. Gerry sometimes gives orders, but he often teaches.
Second, Gerry was teaching Nathan to think in terms of a system, that is, in terms of a set of components that interact to produce a particular outcome. Gerry intuitively understands that his restaurant is a system, that many little actions and thought processes in seemingly minor activities, when taken togther, lead to either success or failure. Gerry was trying to inculcate that understanding in Nathan.
Thinking in terms of a system was one of the fundamental teachings of Edwards Deming. Point five of his Fourteen Points For The Transformation Of Management gets to the heart of the issue: “Improve constantly and forever the system of production and service, to improve quality and productivity, and thus constantly decrease costs.” Gerry intuitively understands that fundamental lesson.
Third, Gerry was leading Nathan beyond the typically trivial understanding of who the customer is. To many people, including people in management, the only customer is the one who walks in the front door. If they didn’t walk in the front door, the reasoning seems to go, their concerns are not my concerns. This is a mass production attitude.
To Gerry, the customer is anybody who receives something of value from somebody else in the system. Gerry wanted Nathan to understand that the cashier is Nathan’s customer, just as much as the patron who walks in the front door is Nathan’s customer. Both customers gain from Nathan understanding their needs and choosing to do the best thing possible to meet those needs. Doing something as seemingly simple and trivial as putting away napkins in a particular way helps meet the needs of both those customers. When those customers gain, the business gains, often, admittedly, in ways that are very difficult to measure directly.
Ultimately, what Gerry was doing with Nathan strikes me as just common sense. Much of Lean is about institutionalizing common sense. We have all known people, after all, who have little or no common sense or, to be blunt about it, are simply too lazy to think hard enough to have common sense. And no one person, even one with a lot of common sense, has all the answers, so we pool our talents and ideas, make them the standard way of working — standard work, if you will — and we are on our way to a Lean transformation.
Of course, not all of Lean is a simple and intuitive as Gerry makes it look. Effective use of statistics to guide management decisions, to name one example, takes training and a fair amount of practice. And a lot of people get fixated on kanban systems, which is nearly inexplicable to me. Typically, that’s one of the last things I would think to do.
Mostly, to start a Lean transformation, I think you should just do what Gerry does intuitively: First, teach, don’t order. Second, start with thinking about the system — the components, their interactions, and the outcomes you need to achieve. Third, know who the customers are for every activity (most activities have more than one customer, as Nathan and Gerry figured out), then meet the needs of those customer. Lean doesn’t have to be as hard as many people make it.
Copyright 2015 by Paul G. Spring. All rights reserved.