If you want to attain Operational Excellence: Do the work!

Jennie was a Personal Running Trainer, and a new client engaged her with the goal to achieve a Boston Marathon qualifying time. They asked her to help them to attain this goal, telling her that it was a high priority for them, and confirmed their commitment to reaching the objective.

Jennie was excited for them and designed a personalised training plan, with a schedule for their training runs and a diet & nutrition plan, to ensure that they had everything in place to be successful. She aligned diaries, put in place weekly coaching sessions, and ensured that everything was in place to support their success.

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The first session went really well, with tons of enthusiasm from Grant, her client, and she baselined his performance at an estimated 4 hours, which tallied with his latest marathon time of 3 hours 56 mins, and was against a qualifying time target of 3 hours and 5 mins, the 2023 maximum time for a 35 years old male.

However, as the weeks passed, Jennie observed that Grant wasn't progressing very much in terms of both pace and stamina, which she was able to monitor via access to his fitness tracker data, and also in body weight, which had actually slightly increased.

Jennie therefore decided to have a discussion with Grant and challenge whether he was, in fact, following the training plan. He admitted that he wasn't, and when she enquired further, said that it was because he considered it too rigorous, too detailed, and over-complicated, and he asked her:

Can't you just provide me with a simple set of activities to undertake that will get me to my goal?

The above sounds ridiculous, right? If you want to meet the goal of running a Boston Marathon qualifying time, then you'll have to put the work in! You'll have to eat the right foods, drink sufficient fluids, cut-out (or at the very least significantly cut-back) on alcohol, and put the miles (or kilometres) in training to build you pace and stamina.

You'll have to put the work in!

Whilst I'm pretty sure that there are many people who give up on a training plan that was intended to meet their sporting goals, I'm pretty confident that there are very few who would blame the trainer for having over-complicated their training plan by asking them to follow best-practices in their training regime. They might make some different excuses for having quit, but they would most likely admit that the failure to meet the target was because they didn't do the work.

However, transfer this scenario to one whereby Jennie is a Lean Practitioner, asked by an organisation to support their declared journey to attain Operational Excellence. In this scenario, it wouldn't be surprising for the leadership of the organisation to rail against a deployment model that they considered over-complicated or too difficult to follow, and instead demand a simplistic and easy approach to achieving their goals. Much energy would be spent discussing whether it may be simplified and a lot of effort made to avoid doing it.

This is unfortunately one of the biggest challenges for a Lean Deployment in any organisation, the fact that it requires a lot of overt effort, as opposed to the covert effort that happens naturally. What I mean by this is that a traditional organisation has a vast amount of effort being expended every day by its workforce, mostly non-value added / wasteful activity, but it is not explicitly observed and therefore the leadership is unconscious to its scale. However, when a Lean Deployment is initiated, the effort is clearly defined and obvious to the organisation, and can therefore be perceived as overwhelming, despite the fact that the successful outcomes and improvements that it could bring would significantly increase the amount of value added activity and therefore reduce the amount of wasteful and burdensome endeavour.

This is the paradox of a Lean Deployment, the visibility of the effort required to become really good at what you do, instead of the continual mediocrity of insufficient focus and discipline. Nevertheless, it is even worse than the metaphor of the prospective Boston Marathon runner, Grant, as in his case not training greatly reduced the amount of effort that he had to expend and the time away from friends and family whereas, in the case of an organisation choosing not to put the effort in to become operationally excellent, they are sentencing their people to more effort and time away from friends and family, as they continue to spend most of their time on wasteful activity, using inadequate (or non-existent) processes.

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As unpalatable as it might be, the only way that an organisation can attain and sustain Operational Excellence is to do the work, and this is possibly one of the main reasons why many Lean Transformations fail to meet their long-term ambitions.

Just as with Grant's failed attempt at qualifying for the Boston Marathon, the issue with the failure to put the work in is one of emotional, rather than logical, commitment. The logic of the desired outcome is unimpeachable and the want for it usually high. What is difficult to gain, collectively, is the acceptance of the work required to increase the organisational stamina, strengthen its sinews and reduce its fat, with the latter not being its people but its wasteful activities.

The BTFA Cycle (LINK to article):

The Bovis, or Believe-Think-Feel-Act, cycle helps to demonstrate how these emotional responses define the decisions that we humans make, far more than the very logical Deming-Shewhart, or Plan-Do-Check-Act, cycle. This is not to say that the PDCA cycle isn't essential, it is, but that an understanding of the BTFA cycle is what has been missing in our approach to transformational and change activities over many decades.

If you want to attain Operational Excellence: Do the work!

And if you want to understand how to get the work done, learn more about the impact of the BTFA cycle.

Interested to learn more? Click on the following links to read the introductions or buy one of my books:

• Leading Lean by Living Lean: Changing how you lead, not who you are
• The Simplicity of Lean: Defeating Complexity, Delivering Excellence
• Leading with Lean: An experience-based guide to Leading a Lean Transformation

Feel free to visit?my Website at:?LeadingwithLean?and?my other?LinkedIn posts?may be found?at this?link.

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