Tag Archives: lean culture

The Five Minute Catch-up

July 27, 2017Five Minute Lean ExcerptFive Minute Catch Up, lean culture, lean leaderDavid McLachlan

This is an excerpt from the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable.

You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.

The Five Minute Catch-up

One of the biggest challenges of a Lean transformation is getting everyone on the same page with the problem solving, job improving tools and methods, and creating a culture that supports it.

Having this book in everyone’s hands is a good start, but if you want to ensure things move along quickly, you can use the “Five Minute Catch-up” to keep the method front of mind and increase your Lean momentum further.

As a Leader, it simply involves catching up with your team-mates for five minutes, once a week, and asking the questions below. The questions might seem simple, but they are designed with the “power of incentives” (5.5) in mind. Remember, what we measure, tends to improve. Asking these questions by catching up once a week is a friendly way to measure progress, and ensures the skills do not fade away. In practice, this might mean stopping by our team-mates’ desk or workstation (the Gemba), or catching up at lunch or morning tea.

The questions are:

Where are you up to in the book?
What is your favourite part today?
Which part puzzles you?
What part(s) can you use currently to improve your own personal job?
How can I help you do this?

Other options might be to make the questions visible (on the wall or workstation) so everybody knows what to expect. Then team-mates, leaders, managers and even CEOs can stop by at any time and ask – everyone is on the same page.

If people aren’t reading the book, or say they find it annoying or distasteful, don’t worry! Disagreeing with something is how we come to understand it. Keep going routinely through the questions each week, and encourage team-mates to seek and discover answers for themselves. The problem solving culture will form, and you will find that the biggest critics often evolve into the greatest supporters.

Selected chapters from the story within Five minute Lean:

Check out these selected chapters from the teachings within Five Minute Lean:

Avoid This Deadly Trap Of Failed Lean Transformations

January 5, 2015Lean Newseducate, five minute lean, Lean, lean culture, lean transformationDavid McLachlan

Everything Has a Honeymoon Period

When companies begin a Lean transformation, there is often an air of excitement that surrounds it. After all, you already know (and if you don’t a quick Google search will reveal) the huge benefits a business can gain from going through Lean process improvement, namely:

Improved quality
Reduced defects and rework
Improved lead times and faster processes
Less burdensome work and happier employees

The potential can seem so great, that anything touched by the hand of Lean during the honeymoon period can seem to do no wrong. But what happens when Lean has been a part of your company for two years? Five years? What about 10 years? Employees know lip-service when they see an idea with a distinct lack of follow up, and it doesn’t take long for them to brand your potential improvements as “just another fad”. When this happens, it can be very very hard to bring back your improvement initiative from the brink.

And here’s the real kicker: it’s not your fault. You had the best of intentions. You thought you were doing all the right things. You read the books, you hired the “gurus”, you attended the seminars. But you didn’t know about the one deadly trap that you absolutely must avoid during your Lean transformation.

The Deadly Trap: Educate To The Lowest Level Of Your Company Or You Will Fail

The simple fact is you need to teach Lean from the very top to the very bottom of your organisation, or your initiative will fail. You need management to be well versed and on board, otherwise projects will find it hard to get off the ground. You also need front line staff – team-mates from the Gemba – to know the improvement methods so they can use it to improve their job and your business every day. This is extremely powerful stuff.

Teaching it company-wide gives you passionate business-improvers at all levels of a company. You now have people working in the Gemba who know how to map and improve their process as part of their job.

You see, the power of Lean is in its simplicity. Yes, there are things to learn and yes you will need to think differently, but in the end the message is simple: Map your process, reduce wasteful steps, use a Pull system, build in quality or error proofing and experiment in a controlled space until you win. This means that:

Lean can be easy to explain to others
When it is easy to explain, it is easy to share
When it is easy to share, it is easy to teach
When it is easy to teach, it is easy for many people to take advantage of the tools and lessons

And that is the power of Five Minute Lean. A simple message with a simple “toolbox” of improvement techniques that fit seamlessly together.

We Want Momentum, Not Inertia

Teaching Lean to all levels of a company also helps us build momentum for our change initiative. Momentum has a habit of growing, like a snowball rolling down a hill gathering speed.

On the flip side, for every person who doesn’t understand Lean properly, you can consider each one an anchor thrown over the side of your boat, slowing you down until you are forced to stop all together. They will either passively or actively dismiss your Lean transformation, and both are extremely dangerous.

Find A Way To Teach Others Easily

If you can find a quick, simple, waste-free way to teach and get your team-mates involved on your Lean journey, you will win. In fact, everyone will win, as processes become easier, faster and less burdensome. A great place to start is my book – Five Minute Lean – where the chapter titles double as a standard process checklist that anyone can use and learn from. Having this in the hands of each of your team-mates can do amazing things.

Yours in change,

David McLachlan

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Want to learn about Lean? Get the book "Five Minute Lean", by David McLachlan - a wonderful book that blends teaching of the tools, culture and philosophy of traditional Lean with a modern-day Lean parable. You can get the whole book on Amazon here and enjoy your own copy.

Lean and the Zen Master’s Story

August 29, 2014Lean NewsLean, lean culture, lean story, lean tools, mountain not a mountain, zen, zen storyDavid McLachlan

There is an old saying in Zen, originally formulated by Qingyuan Weixin, and later translated by D.T. Suzuki in one of the first books on Zen to reach the western world.

It goes like this:

“Before I had studied Zen for thirty years, I saw mountains as mountains, and rivers as rivers.

When I arrived at a more intimate knowledge, I came to the point where I saw that mountains are not mountains, and rivers are not rivers.

But now that I have got its very substance I see mountains once again as mountains, and rivers once again as rivers.”

This saying might seem paradoxical at first (just like a lot of Zen might) but in truth it makes complete sense and applies itself to Lean perfectly well in the form of Lean Tools, and Lean Culture.

How the Zen Story Applies: Lean Tools vs Lean Culture

You see when a man or woman first starts down the path of Lean, it is all about the Tools. They see the wonderful tools, the amazing things they can do in making their job better, reducing lead times, improving quality by leaps and bounds, and they are excited.

After many years of studying and applying Lean, it becomes about the Culture. They say that only the culture matters, one of Lean Management and enabling people to swarm problems and solve the root cause, building people to be proficient in the Lean problem solving skills.

Then after many more years, when they finally get it, it is all about the Tools in the end. This is because the tools are how you actually teach your people. The tools are how you frame a problem in a way that helps you solve it efficiently. The tools are what you use every time you are building that capability in your team-mates.

So there you have it: Mountain, not-mountain, mountain again. Keep learning and applying Lean and I know you will see the mountain again in your own life.

Yours in change,

David McLachlan