The Magic Pill

I remember the discussion I was having with the decision maker, arguing over how to approach a thorny and complex technical issue in a robust way: “ Ovi, to be truthful, I have limited time to put into this, I don’t have access to the required resources, but it needs to be solved anyway, my boss is expecting a solution for yesterday, so, isn't there something else we can do? ”. This sounded much like another discussion, with a different decision maker, on a similar subject: “ I totally agree with the [robust] approach, but you must understand that I need to move fast on this … what if we just do [fraction of it]…?”. Or with this one: “…yeah, that’s theory [the robust approach], we’re in the real world here, so we need to be more creative [shortcut it]…”.

 What I could sense in all these instances, besides a genuine desire for action, was the desperate quest for a “magic pill”, capable to robustly solve the thorny and complex technical issue without using the required resources, with minimum or no direct involvement and in no time at all.

There is a striking resemblance with how leadership is approaching Lean Transformations in most cases: minimum or no direct involvement, narrow function focus and expecting near instant business gains.

 Needless to say, in both situations there’s a high risk of disappointment of not getting the expected benefits, because the reality is: there’s no “magic pill”. In order to make it work, involvement, time and effort are required from all the concerned parties, including leadership, so the first difficult obstacle to overcome is Instant Gratification , the reflexive reach for quick rewards. The second obstacle (strongly related with the first one) comes from the human desire to fulfill the expectation, leading to The Lean Movement’s Strategic Errors, where some Lean fundamentals get omitted as a result. Unless these two obstacles are overcome, Lean Transformations invariably follow a Lean appearance at best, but without achieving the expected benefits.

 Now, dealing with this situation is challenging from the Lean proponent’s perspective. Here are some courses of actions that worked for me:

• Use of current / past examples of where Instant Gratification led to a business upset. Don’t forget the trade-off the decision-maker is facing: reward for instant move vs worrying about long term consequences. Unfortunately, the economic environment skews the balance towards the instant move, so the use of examples helps in counter balancing the trade-off. For this to work though, some facts and data need to be brought to the table, as these matters tend to get emotional.
• Stick to the Lean fundamentals no matter what. The big temptation in dealing with Instant Gratification is to go with the flow and compromise the approach. Maybe this is ok to start with, but is very harmful in the long term, as it becomes the norm. There are fundamentals that cannot be ignored, like Respect for People or getting out of Batch & Queue while relentlessly pursuing One-Piece-Flow . The success of a Lean Transformation, with the resulting business benefits, is directly related to how they become part of the daily work. I found that working towards these fundamentals, even in situations that required immediate intervention provided the needed relief and a basis for building a better future state in the same time.
• Practice, practice, practice. As the situation or the person you’re dealing with changes, trial-and-error is required to find out what works (or doesn't) in order to overcome the two obstacles. So, every time there was an opportunity in front of me, I treated it like gold, which proved to be beneficial for finding the right answer.

I’m very interested to learn from you how you’re addressing these challenges.

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