“If you want to retain those who are present, be loyal to those who are absent.” -- Dr. Stephen Covey, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People

“Learning cannot be disassociated from action.” -- Peter Senge, The Fifth Discipline

“The most important measures are both unknown and unknowable.” -- W. Edwards Deming, Out of the Crisis

Is Your Company Culture Ready for Lean Thinking?

With all of the workshops, books, web pages, and presentations that have been made available over the past few years on the topic of lean improvement, one would think that a high percentage of our organizations would be a lot leaner by now. Unfortunately, I don't believe that is the case. Sure, some companies have made significant progress, and many more have implemented a few significant improvement projects, but has the majority of the group really installed a sustainable set of lean approaches?

I have lived through the fads of quality circles, total quality management, and re-engineering. I now strongly suspect that I will witness the same rise and fall of enthusiasm for the six sigma and lean enterprise methodologies in the next year or so. It's not that I am a cynic as much as I feel that the same systemic factors exist to drag these improvement initiatives down. You might say that it has become our business improvement culture to get excited about a seemingly new way to save time and money, spend a lot of resources trying to learn and use the new tools, and still slowly watch the interest fade over time. In turn, it is only fitting that the source of such demise lies in a failure to change our cultures to support these new ways of thinking and acting each day.

Most improvement efforts fail because we try to impose the tools that best define them upon a culture that in most cases is not really ready for their use. Improvement gurus will tell you right off the bat that a culture change is necessary for sustained success, but only a select few of them will give you a clear picture of the types of changes that are really needed to make such a culture change occur. If they were brutally honest, it would be a lot harder to sell the new tools, workshops, and books, because we are culturally conditioned to seek instant gratification – the quick fix. Culture change can happen quickly, but the degree and types of personal change required, especially at the leadership level, is enough to disenchant an executive more quickly than a clear, sunny day entices them to head for the golf course.

Our culture is the foundation for our daily behaviors, and in turn, our daily results. Culture can be simply defined by looking at the collective set of behaviors that we display on the job each day – how we make decisions, how we treat people, how we react to problems, how we dress, and how we decorate our work areas. A given work culture has existed as long as its facility, and to a lesser degree its organization, has. It is a product of past history, the belief systems of the people it has hired, and the external environment it co-exists with. It is foolhardy to expect significant change to happen simply by asking people to do their jobs differently, sending them to classes that expose them to new tools, or issuing a group e-mail of new job expectations. Culture is more powerful and change resistant than that.

Think about it. To begin with, our social culture is more powerful than our work culture. It is not a cultural attribute of Americans to be lean. Sure, we might say that we want to be lean, but the recent statistics on obesity seem to contradict such statements. In most cases, the cultural angles that we pursue to make our companies leaner are analogous to the repeated purchases we make for machines that will firm up our abs – we buy the tools, but we fail to make them part of our daily lives. After awhile, they find their eternal resting place in our closets. Hopefully, we bought the collapsible variety so storage is not too much of a problem.

Our company cultures are reshaping themselves each day, but this shaping is also always occurring around a core culture. The culture loop shown on the right is a reinforcing one – our culture shapes our beliefs about how things are done or should be done, our beliefs drive our on the job behaviors, our behaviors lead us to create the systems we consciously or unconsciously use at work, and our systems help shape and reinforce the culture that is in place. There is both promise and peril in this loop. If it is understood and appreciated, we can use systems change as a mechanism to help shift our culture more quickly and to a greater degree. If we take the loop for granted or ignore it, the culture loop can spin us into complacency, or worse yet, business failure.

Henry Ford once said “If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always gotten.” This quote reflects the influence of culture, and while many of us might recognize it, fewer of us embrace its true message. If you want your lean initiative to survive, much less thrive, you have to change your existing work systems and behaviors to support it. Asking people to change or mandating that they attend classes or pass certification tests alone won't do it. In most cases, an existing work culture will even prevent the use of tools by an experienced practitioner (one who had repeatedly practiced tool use as opposed to merely being exposed to how they are supposed to work). If you want instant gratification, you better make some significant systems changes.

While the cultural norm for merely pontificating in this article without giving you any real substance is tempting, I would really like to see us move away from the fad chasing behaviors that we tend to exhibit as a culture, so I had better offer you some tangible system changes that my experience has shown really make a difference. Here are the top ten ways to help make your lean initiative survive and thrive:

• Redesign the jobs of all people, and in particular all managers, to include significant time for work on lean improvement projects – don't simply ask them to do more with less.
• Install a bottom-up system for measuring the degree to which your managers and supervisors consistently practice lean behaviors on the job – don't simply expect them to adopt these new behaviors on their own.
• Redesign all training sessions to minimize the use of lecture and maximize the amount of training time that is spent on skill practice – don't continue to rely primarily on lecture as a means of helping people learn.
• Compensate people in a manner that is fair, equitable, and commensurate with the level of lean improvements that they make – don't lay them off as improvements are made.
• Define a balanced set of performance measures for all key work processes and visually trend performance over time – don't limit your measurement efforts to the production lines and tables of numbers on paper.
• Regularly involve your internal and external customers in your lean improvement projects and learning events – don't ignore your internal customers and only talk to your external ones when they have problems or when you want more from them.
• Use technology to make all daily tasks leaner and to share lean success information across the company – don't remain stuck in an analog mindset and limit communication to bad news or changes that have to be made.
• Identify waste streams and their daily costs for all key work processes, and work to minimize these streams over time – don't assume that any process is waste free.
• Build lean improvement projects into the overall site improvement plan and be cognizant of all project resource needs (time and money) – don't keep them on a separate project list or fail to keep a list at all.
• Measure the cost and effectiveness of all group events, and work to drive costs down and effectiveness up over time – don't meet for an hour on every Monday just because you always have in the past.

I wish that I could say that these improvement ideas came to me in a dream, but in reality, I learned them from personal success and failure over the years and through my experience as a Baldrige National Quality Award Examiner. They don't represent the way that typical companies do business each day, but they are typical of systems that support the sustained, excellent results that high performance workplaces get each day. If you only choose to try using a few of them, I can guarantee that your probability of lean initiative success will be greatly enhanced.

Systems shape culture, and without culture change, your lean initiative will end up resembling the total quality management effort that your company tried twenty years ago. I wish this wasn't true, but I have seen too many attempts to lose weight, reduce credit card debt, and exercise more go by the wayside. Our existing culture encourages us to buy the tools and attend the classes, and the rest will take of itself. That however is not the cultural attitude that the high performing companies take. Is your company culture ready for lean thinking?

Kevin McManus is a performance improvement coach for Great Systems!, based in Seattle, WA, and a certified trainer for the Taproot root cause analysis process. During his twenty five years in the business world, he served as an Industrial Engineer, Training Manager, Production Manager, Plant Manager, and Director of Quality. Kevin has been a member of IIE for more than twenty five years, and he has served for eight years as a Examiner for the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. Kevin also writes the monthly performance improvement column for Industrial Engineer magazine. He can be reached via e-mail at kevin@greatsystems.com or through his website at http://www.greatsystems.com/.

Would You Like to Learn More?

Click on one of the following links to learn even more about Great Systems! and the types of systems improvements I can help you make:

	More articles and systems via the Great Systems! home page!!
	High Performance Work Culture book
	"The Fundamentals of Lean Tools and Concepts" workbook
	Types of Systems I Can Help You Improve

“The only thing I know is that I do not know it all.” -- Socrates