Lean begins with the customer. Quite often Lean transformation efforts stumble or fail because we never seriously consider what the customer wants or, more importantly, what the customer needs.

Oddly enough, I learned this lesson as a young highway department engineer designing a retaining wall for a freeway exit. It’s convoluted, but it’s literally a million-dollar story.

One day a new project packet showed up on my desk. The project narrative reported that the people who ran the Portland Zoo, directly adjacent to one of the busiest freeways in the state, anticipated having pandas on exhibit for a year or so. They wanted a new exit, the narrative said, fearing serious traffic congestion without one. I was to design a retaining wall for that new exit.

The packet contained all the work — traffic studies, funding priority comparisons, funding approvals, geotechnical studies, road alignment drawings, and so on — that had been done over the previous three years since the zoo managers had requested the exit.

Before there was a freeway this route was known as “Canyon Road.” It starts at the bottom of a deep, forested gorge just at the edge of downtown Portland, leads past the zoo, through the Portland metro area’s high-tech “silicon forest”, passes just north of the Yamhill-Carlton District American Viticulture Area (source of some of the world’s finest pinot noir wines), through one of the most important specialty agriculture areas in the nation, and on to the Oregon coast, the main summer visitor destination in the state. As a structural engineer I was to design an architecturally attractive retaining wall (a sentence fragment utterly layered with oxymorons) to replace an existing exit as laid out on the drawings in the packet.

The exit road climbed from the bottom of this landslide-prone gorge to the zoo perhaps 50 feet above the freeway. My job was to design a real, thirty-foot-high retaining wall to contain the soil under that road, then toss my work product over a merely figurative but infinitely higher wall into whatever information silo worked on the project next.

But I found a little problem. The geologist’s draft report showed that the zoo was built atop large, active, landslides. To lay people, a landslide is land that has already slid. To civil engineers and geologists, an active landslide is any unstable ground that could slide, has probably slid in the past, and/or would slide again if you gave it a chance.

To build a conventional retaining wall of the form I was ordered to design, the contractor would have had to dig a very large hole at the bottom of an active landslide with a zoo on top. Just to be clear, digging at the bottom of an active landslide is bad.

Without getting too technical about it, let me explain what likely would have happened if I had designed, and the highway division had paid the lowest bidder to build, a conventional retaining wall:

1) We would have closed for nearly the entire summer two of the four lanes on the main route to several of the highest profile and most economically important areas of the state.

2) We would have dug a huge hole at the bottom of a large, active, landslide with a zoo on top.

3) We would have slid the landslide with the zoo on top into the hole where two lanes of freeway once lay.

4) We (in the passive, bureaucratic, it’s-not-really-our-fault sense of “we”) would have been on the national news trying, first, to explain why, after a giant sucking sound, a zoo appeared where a freeway used to be and a giant hole appeared where the zoo used to be, and, second, to avoid explaining in plain language why we were so stupid.

Having glimpsed the future, I secretly slipped out of my civil/structural engineering information silo and into the geologist’s information silo. The geologist saw the wisdom of keeping our names out of the paper. He agreed to change the wording when he issued his final report.

The final geologist’s report, instead of suggesting a “reinforced earth wall” would require a reinforced earth wall.

Now, when you see a properly engineered reinforced earth wall, it may seem nothing more than a pile of concrete blocks almost too high to hold back all that dirt, but — with the caveat that it must be properly engineered — that is a type of reinforced earth wall. The reinforced earth wall is built with straps buried in the backfill (i.e., dirt). The backfill holds the straps, the straps hold those concrete blocks you see, and the blocks hold the backfill, which in turn holds the straps, which in turn hold the blocks, which in turn holds the bakfill. You get the idea. In short, the reinforced earth wall is essentially a very stable, self-supporting mass of soil. Being self-supporting, it requires almost no digging during construction, meaning almost no digging at the bottom of the slide area. This is good

(For comparison, your crazy neighbor, the kook who is into conspiracy theories, the guy who piled all that dirt and cinder blocks right on the property line next to the garage where you store your pristine all-original 1967 Corvette convertible, that pile of dirt and cinder blocks isn’t really a reinforced earth wall. It might sort of look like a reinforced earth wall but it’s actually an imminent public hazard. At a minimum, move the Corvette.)

In any case, the reinforced earth wall the geologist specified could easily be made to follow the exit road up the side of the gorge as it curved away from the freeway, making the wall much less visually intrusive in this forested gorge. The process of construction would actually stabilize, instead of destabilizing, the landslide under the zoo. What’s more, being smaller and easier to build, the reinforced earth wall only required the closure of a single lane for a few weeks, and saved hundreds of thousands of dollars on a budget of over a million dollars.

No doubt you are thinking this all sounds like a win/win situation, and that is good, but what does it have to do with the Lean and the customer? Stick with me here. We’re almost to the end of the convolutions.

A big problem with a reinforced earth wall is that the state had never built one before, and such a wall really didn’t require a highway department engineering employee to do much to design it. I just drew a line on the project plan drawing and labeled it “REINFORCED EARTH WALL, BY OTHERS.”

Done.

If that doesn’t sound like a problem, you have, blessedly, never worked for government.

Using reinforced earth walls that require almost no in-house engineering was a threat to the empire my boss’s boss had spent his entire career building. He wasn’t about to allow some mere geologist and some low-level engineer with sound technical knowledge destroy his empire. He spent the next year working the bureaucracy, trying to force the geologist to change the requirement for the reinforced earth wall. Or so the geologist told me.

Fortunately engineers at the Federal Highway Administration thought the reinforced earth wall was a really great engineering solution for a project that might otherwise place a zoo in the middle of a freeway. They finally got tired of fighting with this high-level state bureaucrat and told him to do whatever he wanted, but if the state built anything except a reinforced earth wall, the federal government wasn’t going pay for it.

Meanwhile, back at the the zoo, the customers waited another year for their product.

By the time they started construction I had moved to other work. However, one day I stopped by the jobsite to talk to the project manager to see how the project was going. He had an interesting story.

When the project manager showed the project drawings to the people at the zoo, they were bewildered. They couldn’t seem to lay their fingers on those parts of the drawings that showed the new exit they had requested and had waited so many years to see.

They couldn’t lay their fingers on their new exit because it wasn’t there.

Now, as most of us know, a typical freeway intersection has an overpass and four ramps: two freeway entrances and two freeway exits.  At the time this project came along, this intersection, for which the zoo remains nearly the only customer, comprised an overpass and only three ramps. Oddly, it lacked a fourth ramp, what the highway department would have labeled a “freeway entrance westbound” had they ever built one.

This non-existent “freeway entrance westbound” goes to the heart of the lesson that Lean must start with understanding the needs of the customer.

This lack of a “freeway entrance westbound” meant there was no simple, clear, and direct way to leave the zoo and get onto the freeway westbound, which presumable about half the people who visited the zoo wanted to do. The people who ran the zoo realized that, to better serve their thousands of daily customers in peak season, they needed a much easier way for zoo patrons to exit the zoo parking lot and enter the freeway westbound, especially if they had pandas on exhibit. In no way did the exit the highway department proposed meet the needs of the customer.

The core reason the new exit wasn’t on the drawings is apparently that two groups of people — the people who ran the zoo and people who ran the highway department — were talking about exactly the same thing but using different language. They failed to understand each other. The highway department designed a replacement for what the zoo already had, a perfectly functional exit from the freeway. What the zoo needed was the one thing they so obviously lacked — a functional exit from the zoo parking lot, which included a new freeway entrance westbound.

Back when I was assigned this job I recalled wondering why a new “freeway entrance westbound” wasn’t shown on the road alignment drawings. Surely, I assumed, they must be building a westbound entrance at the same time we were spending all this money to rebuild the westbound exit. It was so obviously the sensible thing to do I assumed it was obvious to everybody else, too. But I was employed by the government and had learned not to ask questions, so I let it go.

After all the years of design and redesign, of bureaucratizing and game playing, of immense energy expended, nobody had ever understood the most basic needs of the customer.

I tell this story to illustrate the point that no matter how Lean you think you are, no matter how good your statistics, no matter how good or beautiful your design, no matter how great your katas and your kanbans, no matter how well you’ve mastered details, if you fundamentally misunderstand the needs of your customer, you are wasting your time with everything else you do.

In Lean, the needs of the customer must come first.

 

Copyright 2014 by Paul G. Spring. All rights reserved.