Madness, or the Ballé method?

Over the past few years I've been lucky enough to walk the gemba with my two good friends, mentors, and co-authors Michael Ballé and Daryl Powell . It has sometimes been confusing, often challenging, mostly fun, yet always rewarding. After a recent visit to a couple of companies on the West coast of Norway, I started to notice similarities in how the different gemba walks were carried out. We've always had a theory of what a good gemba walk looks like (you can check out our Shingo Award winner, The Lean Sensei), but we've never quite cracked the methodology and the respective knowledge points required to reduce the risk of failure. After all, dragging executives to the production floor to discuss their issues can be quite risky. However, something became clear after the last round of gemba walks. There is a method to the madness. A checklist of sorts. I challenged Michael and we discovered it's something he's picked up from Freddy (his dad), so I coined it the Ballé method. It's almost like a risk reduction checklist for gemba walks. Energize, Educate, Engage and Empower (No, Daryl, I won't call it emPowell!).

Energize

These visits always start in a meeting room where someone from the company wants to present something they've done, usually a PowerPoint. However, such activities always take time away from the real purpose of the visits: to discover the misconceptions in management thinking that lead to ineffective or otherwise counter-productive actions. Clarifying the logic of "I understand where you want to go, and I hear what you plan to do to get there, but I don't see how doing so will get you there" – validating what they are saying but not agreeing – brings energy to the room. People react emotionally, sometimes getting angry, but that's perfectly OK. We don't have to agree, but we can understand that showing emotions is a normal human reaction to being nudged out of the comfort zone. Challenging the logic in plans and objectives always leads to interesting discussions with the most senior leaders. These are not stupid people; they understand that this is an opportunity to get new insight. They might not agree, but they seldom feel the need to justify themselves. Instead, they tend to listen and discuss.

Educate

Once attention is grabbed, the next thing would be to look for opportunities to educate, to take the lean perspective of an interesting topic and put it on the table. Lean is a learning system that allows us to study our mis-conceptions and discover our knowledge gaps by reframing a challenge or by showing a theory. The topic varies depending on the situation and depending on the conversation that is going on. We have touched on subjects ranging from logistics: precision in information flow shows us the problems we need to fix to increase the precision of material flow; quality: checking and discussing customer complaints on the gemba allows us to discuss our interpretation of facts (once a complaint has been logged in the system it must be opened to interpretation); product development: understanding the loss functions of our products allows us to make better engineering decisions by highlighting areas where the chosen technical solution has a tight loss function; and finally, fixed and flexible: if we are flexible on everything and follow every customer whim, we won't make any money on our sales. Additionally, if we refuse to make any changes for different customers, sales will struggle, so, specifically for make-to-order / build-to-specification companies, what to keep flexible and what to fix in their products should be an ongoing strategic discussion.?

Engage

Applying the lenses of Toyota Production System (TPS) allows us to find areas where things are not working as they should, and from there we try to discover a typical issue we can study in more detail. Usually, this is a particular technical problem that seems more troublesome than others. For example one of the companies we visited had problems with one of their machining lines that they couldn’t quite figure out how to deal with. Having tried various countermeasures, which they showed us, they still struggled with the line, which continued to produce certain types of defects - a troublesome problem that kept creeping back. To help better understand the underlying conditions, we asked them to break down the different factors of the problem to see if they could do something to test their hypotheses and learn more about the underlying causes that create the defect. What often happens is that this exercise surfaces widely different hypotheses about the root cause of the problem, and that getting people to agree on what the real problem actually is, and what to test first, is a very valuable means of engaging people in problem-solving.

Empower (No Daryl, still not going for it)

The aim of a gemba walk is not to develop new knowledge. It's to discover what knowledge needs to be developed. It uses the TPS as an educational tool to show gaps in knowledge. Then, learning happens when people go and explore the problem on their own, read about relevant theory and attempt to make sense of the implications. The final part of this checklist is therefore to empower senior leaders take the next step in their learning journey and then trust them to do so. When we discover a local problem with global consequences, we trust them to find the help they need (for example from a sensei) to continue the discovery process on their own. To create the space in the organization required for people to seek out and discover new knowledge, to reflect, to practice their team work and to practice their problem finding skills. With those who do, we are always surprised of what they find.

Conclusion

A successful gemba walk is not a case of picking up a card from the leaders standard work and going to the shopfloor to evaluate the implementation of lean tools, or to participate in team meetings. It's a process of discovery, and as such it's a risky and uncertain affair. Like Forrest Gump's box of chocolates metaphor, you really never know what you are going to get. Having a clear method or framework allows us to discuss what good would look like in each step and to evaluate ourselves towards that ideal:

• Did we manage to grab the attention of (and energize) the people we were visiting?
• Did we find an interesting topic to educate the team and teach new perspectives?
• Did we engage with them so that we could explore a topic or a problem more in detail?
• And finally, did we empowell (damnit Daryl!) them to continue their own, personal learning journey?

Gemba visits are never the same, but having a clear idea of what the purpose of the visit is and how to achieve this is surely helpful. However, it is worth remembering that the Sensei can only re-orient and motivate, the learning is individual and can only happen when we go and explore a topic on our own, and together with our friends and colleagues.