“I wouldn’t start from here!”
I suspect most of us know a variation on the joke about the traveller who stops to ask a local for directions. After a long pause, the local answers, “Well, if I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here!”
The same can often be true for organisations that embark on a journey to Operational Excellence. They start to put some lean tools in place, have some initial success and press on. Yet, results often aren’t sustained or people lose interest. They wonder what mistakes they made. Maybe they started in the wrong place?
Perhaps they begin to think “maybe we should have started from scratch rather than trying to add lean to what we were already doing.”
Of course, at one level there can be some wisdom in picking a better place to start. After all, if you want to get somewhere, then it’s better to start from a place where you have a good chance of reaching your goal. In many cases it may be better to start afresh rather than attempting to tweak an existing system.
And when it comes to Operational Excellence, this is often the approach recommended by professional advisers, or at least it can seem so. I remember back in my corporate days inviting various consultants experienced in lean to advise on how we could improve our operations.
In most cases, their proposals seemed to be pretty much along the lines of “here’s our system and we will come in and apply it.” No reference to our existing ways of working. No recognition of what we were already doing well. No real identification of the specific things we needed to change. I suspect I’m exaggerating a little, but it really did seem as they were suggesting we had to rip everything up and start again.
Not only did this seem dismissive of what was, in reality, a successful operation, but it also seemed quite a wasteful approach and failed to recognise the impact of our existing ways of working on the likely success of their ‘new’ approach.
What we needed was a plan that built on what was already good and helped us to work on what needed to be improved.
In the “real world” of operations, it is very rare that an organisation has the opportunity to start with a clean sheet.
When the Japanese car and consumer goods manufacturers came to establish their UK operations, they were lucky enough to be able to start on “greenfield” sites, generally in areas where there was no tradition of car-making. In this way, they could design the factory layout they wanted to reflect their thinking, recruit and train a workforce that suited their preferred ways of working and establish operating procedures based on their principles.
For the indigenous automakers and their suppliers, this was not a realistic luxury. They had to work with outdated facilities built in an era when car making was a very different industry. They were only just emerging from a period of long, and often difficult, confrontations between management and workforce. Ways of working were based on “managers tell and workers do!”
All this was a very long way from what we were learning were the foundations of the success of Japanese manufacturers. Factories designed for flow rather than batch production, ‘just-in-time’ delivery, close relationships with suppliers and engaging the workforce in identifying and acting on improvement opportunities.
Back in those days, there was little published material and the terms ‘lean’ and ‘operational excellence’ were yet to become commonplace. So we worked with what information we had and sought to understand the principles that underpinned the success of the Japanese.
The organisation had realised that it couldn’t simply copy what the Japanese were doing We had to adapt it to recognise our existing culture. So, bit by bit, we were all introduced to those principles and were challenged to apply them in our own situation.
Often it was a case of two steps forward, one back. Yet, little by little, we learned new ways of working and leading. We put in place better processes. We learned how to develop our teams and adopt a coaching style of leadership. We aligned goals from top to bottom. We started to think longer term, focussing on the future we were trying to create rather than just reacting to the problems of today.
And slowly, steadily, performance improved. There was less and less firefighting. People started to leave on time rather than working extra hours to stay on top of things. Relationships between managers and unions became more harmonious and collaborative.
These days, by contrast, there’s so much information out there it’s hard to know where to start. Do we use lean, six sigma, theory of constraints or something else? Do we do top down or bottom up? Do we start with 5S, problem solving or kaizen? Does it really matter?
Having travelled this road for over 30 years, I’ve concluded that there is no “standard” solution. No “one size fits all.” Instead, we advocate an approach of:
Take time to work out what real business issue you are trying to resolve. That will almost certainly point you in the right direction.
Take a hard look the key components of a high performing culture.
What strengths to you have that will help you on the journey?
Where do you need to make changes or invest in acquiring new knowledge or skill?
Put those two together to identify where you need to pay attention.
From this information, create a high level outline of the steps you need to take.
For the first step only, work out more specific actions and do them!
Once you’ve taken those actions, stop and evaluate what impact they have had and what you have learned.
Plan the next step in detail and repeat.
You might start with our simple checklist to get you thinking.
Or book a no cost, no obligation discussion where we’ll listen carefully to your situation and suggest a way forward.
In either case, email hello@veracityoxford.com and we’ll be in touch.