Eliminating the Waste Due to "Conference Room Kaizens"

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You know the drill. Endless meetings bickering about what to do next to solve the problem.?

“Boss is getting on us, we’d better come up with an answer pretty quick here.”

Meanwhile the engineers debate arcane topics and want to show each other spreadsheets. And nobody can agree on what to do. People speculate about the sources of the problem in the absence of any real data.?

“The last time we saw a problem like this it was a fault of the vendor. It’s probably the same thing popping up again.”?

?“Jordan thinks we should quarantine the lot and Casey wants to ship it. Who’s right?”

We call problem-solving sessions like this “Conference Room Kaizens.” It’s a slightly derogatory reminder that it’s difficult to solve problems from the office, or the meeting room. Instead, go out and see the problem first-hand.??

Your "20 years in this industry" experience means we know where to start looking for the issue, not that we know how to solve it yet.

What to Do Instead?

• Talk to the people involved and get their ideas. After all, they know more about how to do their job properly than anybody else.

Affected employees have skin in this game - they have to live with the mess until it's cleaned up. Use their thoughts, skills, and experiences to help make the situation better

• Use data to understand the source(s) of the problem and then come up with a plan to implement. Note: You may have to set up a measurement system to collect data, first.
• Test the countermeasures instead of debating their merits in the conference room. Learn what actually works and how much improvement you’ll see. Stop discussing and test your ideas using 'tryzen' which advocates a "Fail fast, fail cheap" method to test improvement ideas. It's kinda like kaizen... just try it and then you'll know so much more about the best approach than you do right now.

I’ve seen people argue passionately about the merits of solutions that they just thought of in the meeting

The reality is that nobody knows how a change will work until we’ve tried it. For more on this topic, see my post on “In Theory, There is No Difference Between Theory and Practice”

What to Do Next

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Learn how we build practitioners with our hands-on coaching approach. Check out the CICS advantage today!

Visit the CICS LSS learning kits webstore to browse the coaching services we offer. See why our products, like Magic Ball or Red Bead and Blue Bead Experiment Kits are "Designed by Trainers for Trainers."