Ready for reality?

Sometimes the method you choose to solve a problem or improve a process is not the 1st priority, rather the 2nd. It is also possible to perform some (sustainable) improvements without applying any method. However we know from various sources like science / behavioral science, Lean, Design Thinking, Scrum, etc. that it does make a different of HOW you solve a problem. But there is a preceding step which is as important as the method. It is the ability to see and know which problem to tackle first. Why should we invest all the time, money and other efforts to solve a problem which is not as beneficial as a different one in terms of return. Moreover, remember what the ToC says: sometimes in good will you try to optimize things but you make the process and the bottleneck even worse, you pile up WIP if you do not use the right method for approaching improvements.

Well having said this, the step before the first step is to create transparency. In our program, we decided to rely on the peoples inputs first. As we wanted to listen to them and focus on their ideas & problems, we didn’t need to start with applying more sophisticated tools like ToC, VSM, Levelling, Flow or Pull. Of course the issues we had were various. While many colleagues wrote down everything what they had in their mind (like salary, canteen food or some transfer services), others tried to note problems which allegedly had their origins in other departments just to be led in peace by the program. Again others were writing down the 3 topics they knew and they’ve been discussing for centuries but never really tackled, regardless if it was a real problem or not.

During the structuring and handling of all these casualties we recognized some psychological effects of the increased transparency. The colleagues didn’t feel well with it and there was an urge to work on them as quickly as possible to remove them in order to have a “clean” board. This was a sign for us that we hadn’t transmitted one important point for them: there will always be something to improve, respectively an improvement backlog and there is no end to the work. In many locations this was a big eye opener, creating some kind of worries to the management. Now you may say that this is nothing uncommon: of course it’s not, quite the contrary. It was the reason why we started with it.

The visible workload created some issues. We had to adapt our communication in underlining the fact that those issues have always been existing, its only now that they are visible. We had to even slow down some managers in doing too much. It was interesting that this increased the risk of even more fire fighting as some colleagues wanted to find quick solutions to the entries and just erase them from the list. When I was exchanging this experience with Sandor, he reminded me of a book where they had special eye glasses which turned totally black and opaque at the first signs of danger. It was to protect the person who was wearing them from dangerous situations not by eliminating the danger but by making the danger invisible for this person – “what you don’t know can’t hurt you”. Now we can think about what we want more. Being able to stay comfortable because we are not seeing any, still existing, danger, or being able to see the it and be aware of it so we can deal with it?

It is very visible that in locations with “bad” cultures this transparency turns into finger pointing, blaming & discussions. As mentioned, some people even want to distract the organization from the actual situation (make others to put on the glasses). The underlying reasons are clear for many of us, can be summarized into “psychological safety”. That’s why the change management and leadership perspective of an implementation plays a crucial role, without investing time into this cultural change, don’t start to implement anything else a la Lean, it wont work…and maybe it will be implemented as those “Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses”.

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Cheers

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