Shut up your left brain, already

“3 minutes!” one of the old-time sensei once told me. “See, hear, smell. In three minutes you can tell how good or bad any factory is.” I remember being nonplussed and then dismissing it as more “Japanese” folklore. I’m nowhere near the “3 minutes” mark but I have picked up a few odd habits over the years. Yes, I do talk to boxes (hello, how long have you been here? Has anyone told you where you’re going next? Do you know when you’re moving?). Yes, my favorite problem-solving method is not the A3 but “go back, watch longer, observe more.” And yes, you can pick up what goes on in a workplace in three minutes or less – if you listen to the right-side of your brain.

?Brain hemisphere differentiation has come in and out of fashion in neuroscience research and neuroscience commentary. A caveat first – students of human behavior have a tendency to extrapolate brain research findings to behavior, which is plain silly when you think about it. Behavior is the result of brain/body/social integration and unlikely to be explained by this or that functional trait. Still, discussing how the brain works makes for interesting and intriguing metaphors to think about minds and how we act and interact in the real world.

?Hemispheric brain difference was brought into the pop culture by Michael Gazzaniga, who has studied split-brain patients all his life. Our brains are made of two hemispheres, right and left, connected by a bundle of nerve fibres, the corpus callosum. In the sixties, surgeons would cut through this tissue to cure severe epilepsy. As a graduate student, Gazzaniga joined Roger Sperry’s lab, where researchers had noticed that split brain patients, although their epilepsy did improve, showed curious behavioral troubles, such as having difficulty making mundane choices (products to buy on a shelf, clothes to wear, etc.). He started working with these patients and went on to popularize the idea of hemispheric specialization. In short, language and calculation happen in the left side of your brain, and impulse and intention on the right. By placing a screen separating left and right fields of vision and showing different pictures to the right and left brain, for instance a yellow chick to the left brain and a snowed up driveway to the right, and then asking patients to choose an object, they would, in this instance, 1/ pick up a shovel (to clear the snow from driveway), 2/ explain this was to carry the chick in (their verbal left brain had not seen the driveway), and 3/ the bizarre explanations would make perfect sense to them (they saw the driveway without being aware of it and did not notice how incongruous their left-hemisphere interpretation was).

?The left brain integrates your understanding of what is going on, but the right-brain experiences and motivates. As with most such findings, once that idea took root in the popular culture, it took the extreme form of a “rational left-brain” and a “creative right brain.” Further research has shown there clearly are hemispheric distinctions, but far more nuanced than that. Each hemisphere is capable of carrying out the other’s work and rewiring itself to a large degree. Patients with strokes in their left hemisphere can learn to speak again from the right, and so on. Progressively, the idea lost allure and impetus and faded away.

?Hemispheric specialization remains a fact, albeit a nuanced and complex one. Professor Iain McGilchrist has recently taken up the mammoth task of reviewing all the research on hemispheric specialization in his The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and The Making Of The Western World, and proposed a new perspective. The right hemisphere experiences but is mute. The left hemisphere explains and is vocal but has no appreciation of things as they are. Amongst the curiosities McGilchrist emphasizes, the right hemisphere sees living things while the left right hemisphere picks up dead or mechanical things but ignores the living. The left hemisphere interprets here and now but has no sense of becoming and as a result mostly intervenes to defend the status quo. The right hemisphere is mute, but not dumb. It understands situations, it recognizes words as markers of complex concepts, but it cannot, on its own build a coherent argument or persuasive logic.

?Expanding from brain specialization, McGilchrist proposes the daring theory that our current civilization is dominated by the left-hemisphere. We surround ourselves with dry, dead, mechanical machines and calculators and although these are clearly useful, we also lose the vibrancy of love of life, the strength of experience, the enthusiasm for action, the depth of connection with each other and the universe around us. We build environments of straight lines, concrete walls, mechanical devices and digital screens. We have comforts humanity has never experienced before, and then we want to leave it all to breathe in the woods or walk on the beach. For all I know, he’s on to something.

?In the west, lean is often interpreted as typical left-brain optimization. People confuse lean with basic industrial engineering (set up a more efficient flow line), consultants use “lean” to pressure workers to deliver numerical results rather than to deepen everyone’s understanding of the value-adding process and so on. Kaizen spirit, the unique component that makes “lean” lean is inherited from Asia and often dismissed as a fanciful notion in the West. Yet, this is what transforms companies. Kaizen is the key to learning, and to growth, both personal and for the company. Lean is the only management approach I know that is interested in what people think, not just what they do.

?In the lean tradition, it is well understood that most actions are willful:

?See —> understand —> decide —> act

?No words are need there, only intuition, this is purely right-brain thinking. To learn, however, we’re taught to reverse this chain:

?See <— understand <— decide <— act

?And the left brain intervenes to list hypotheses and test them in order to change understanding, discover new causal chains that better fit the facts, and so learn to see symptoms we’d previously ignore. This is the point of the “5 why?” and yes, it needs verbalizing in order to both clarify the logic and share the understanding with others.

?Your sensei will typically ask you to visualize the learning opportunity, by doing 5S, setting up a Kanban, or visualizing the problem on a board or flipchart, and then expect you to try to improve things in order to understand the problem better. As my father’s sensei once told him “see with your legs, think with your hands” – right brain work. The experiments will be laid out as a story, usually describing the problem, the cause, the countermeasure and the impact in order to share, discuss, and pursue with other insights and initiatives, until we have familiarized ourselves well enough with the problem that a generic solution appears. This is pottery, not architecture.

?The trouble is that in a left-brain culture each of these right-brain steps will be countered by an argument for the status quo. People will go on and on about why setting up the visual structure is unnecessary or too costly, or not worth the effort because the problem is unsolvable due to unchangeable conditions. “Engineering will never listen,” is often mentioned. Or “we need to change the computer system first,” etc.

?Then, in a left-brain culture, the problem-solving exercise itself will largely turn to absurd verbal arguments about why things are how they are, about who is responsible for what, about hair-splitting about facts and unreasonable investment demands. All perfectly rational and, seen from a right-bain perspectives, reasons not to act and just try something.

?With McGilchrist in mind, in recent gemba walks I’ve asked people to shut their let brain up. Shut it up. Just look at the inventory – what does your right brain tell you? There’s too much of it and we don’t know why - is the answer. Look at how people handle quality – what does your right brain tell you? They don’t care about it because nothing helps them to see what quality should be. Shut it up, look at the atmosphere – what does your right brain tell you? No one is looking at us and they are actually studiously avoiding catching our eye, something is going on. It’s fascinating.

?The most surprising aspect of suggesting that people shut up their left brain is that they get it right away. I thought I’d have to explain the split-brain concept forever, but no, they take to it very easily, and are themselves stunned at how obvious the obvious – is. Our right brain sees, grasps the situation, understands the concept concretely and wants to do something about it right now – the kaizen spirit. And then the left-brain comes in and argues against it. It’s spectacular.

Just watch, left brainers will argue that my right brain / left brain distinction is not founded, that I’m the first one to ask for writing up of problems (I am, I do), that this is silly and so on. Don’t do anything. Just nitpick and argue. Don’t look at the moon the finger is pointing at, discuss the finger. Left brain.

Try it yourself. Go to any gemba, and shut up your left brain. Look at the workspace as if you were mute. See what jumps up at you. Don’t dismiss it. Don’t explain it. Keep looking. You’ll see.

As Tatsuhiko Yoshimura taught us long ago, the secret to Toyota thinking is not more rules and responsibilities, it’s not better systems and tools. It’s stronger awareness about quality, from everyone, everywhere, all the time. It’s from encouraging the kaizen spirit: see something wrong, try something, and then use the PDCA to learn: what was the planned changed? How did you carry it out? Where did you check for impacts? What have you learned, will you adopt the change, adapt or abandon it? I am not arguing here for abandoning the left-brain and striving for a purely intuitive culture. As in all things, balance is the key. Left brain explanations are essential to learning. Indeed, to a large degree, I’d argue that learning is about evolving interpretations. Problem solving in the end is finding a better story for the problem and what to do about it and sharing it among ourselves. Interpreting is the left brain’s work.

Start with the right brain. I am suggesting to start deep thinking with experiencing the gemba and the people more directly, following our impulses to change things, and then switch on the left brain to plan the changes and direct them. Don’t start by discussing why things are the way they are and will never change. Begin by looking for the change you can enact right away: talk to that person, move that box, look more deeply into where the tool hits the part. And then think it through, not the other way around. Anyone who has experienced the old time senseis will remember their directness and sometimes their brutality in showing you things and sometimes ripping up wires to disable conveyors or demanding machines be moved on the spot (when I started with lean, we used to create cells in a week by moving the robots during the night from Wednesday to Thursday). Without the sensei, lean devolves to looking at indicators and making action plans. If you want to improve your lean practice right away, shut up your left brain already, and let your right brain move, now!