Drawing a Pig

I can’t remember exactly where I first saw “the pig”; it was either at Air National Guard Headquarters or perhaps the University of Tennessee. But it was when I was with the Air National Guard, and was involved in the Air Force’s CPI program. But it’s become a favorite exercise of mine. It has so many teaching points to it, and has the bonus of helping bond team members, bringing them together on the same level.

I can’t even give proper credit to whoever created the exercise. There’s never been any creator information I’ve ever seen. And the couple of times I’ve Googled it, I’ve never turned up anything concrete. Perhaps the mystery just adds to my fondness for it.

It’s an exercise I’ve heard called, “Let’s Draw a Pig!” And it’s simple enough.

Everyone is given a blank sheet of paper and told to draw a pig. (Sometimes I tell a little story about how great of a team we have, and we have been authorized to have a team mascot. All the other animals, lions, tigers, bears, etc. have been used. So all we have left is the pig.)

The team members draw their pigs and then show them. This creates quite a bit of levity to the team and helps bring all the members to the same level. While there is a wide variety of artistic abilities among people, for the most part, team members tend to draw at a “stick person” level. So the CEO and the Janitor often have similar drawings.

I then explain that mascots have to be the same…so they can be recognizable, just like a brand. So we hired a team of instructional engineers to create a Standard Operating Procedure on how everyone can draw the same pig. I then pass out a sheet with step-by-step directions written out, and a piece of paper that has a large tic-tack-toe grid on it. The team is then given a few minutes to follow the instructions to draw their pig.

Of course, the instructions are not the easiest to follow. Members are told to draw an arc from one point to another, then put a dot at a midway point, draw a curly tail, etc. There’s some subjectivity to it all, and in the thousands of times I’d run this exercise, I have never seen anyone draw the pig exactly how it’s supposed to be.

So when it comes time for everyone to show their work, there’s more levity, as there is still a lot of variation among the drawings.

Telling them I saw issues while they were drawing, I reached out to the engineers to revise the SOP. I then hand them the sheet of written instructions, but this time it includes a small example of the pig drawing. I give them another sheet of grid paper and tell them to draw one last time.

Of course, with the example in the instructions, they are able to draw the pig within a minute, and they are all the same.

The wonderful things about this exercise are that it’s cheap and easy to do (just 5 sheets of paper per student and a pen). And that there are so many teaching points:

·?????? Standard work versus Variation

·?????? SOP creation

·?????? Visual Management

·?????? Communications

·?????? Idea that it is the process, not the people

And it does not take that long? I’ve done this exercise in 10 to 15 minutes, with discussion afterwards.

Despite all the wonderful things I love about drawing pigs, I did find one downside to the exercise; you have to take the prevailing culture into account. For example, while partnering with Harley-Davidson, the exercise was perfect. Harley motorcycles are called Hogs, so pigs fit right in. However, I’ve had colleagues use the exercise while teaching in the Middle East. The various religions there do not eat pork as the pig is seen as a very unclean animal. So the exercise didn’t go over too well in some classes and had to be dropped.

But, for the most part, it’s a great exercise that I highly recommend. If you haven’t seen it, and would like to find out more, send me a message and we can chat.

#quality #lean #leansixsigma #operationalexcellence #processimprovement #totalqualitymanagement #storytelling innovation? #lean #leantraining? #leanthinking?