There is one fundamental value that is at the core of motivating people at work. This value is often misunderstood or misconstrued, and that is a real tragedy of the modern enterprise. This value is respect for people.

What is respect for people?

Respect for people is not the same thing as respecting their personal space. Leaving someone alone is not respect.

Respect for people is not the same thing as polite behavior either. Saying “Good morning” or “Thank you” or “Sorry” is not respect. It is perhaps a little hard to see how there can be respect without manners, but at the very least it is clear that manners alone are not the same as respect.

Command-and-control management is not respect for people either. By keeping all of the control you are not valuing the contributions of others.

Ultimately, respect for people is demonstrated through empowering people and coaching them on their personal and professional growth. Genuine respect for people exists only when empowerment is complemented by working together: cooperation is the highest form of respect.

Why does it matter?

There are many ways to motivate human beings. The most lasting results are achieved when people are intrinsically motivated: not by money, not by power, but by doing what they love.

Intrinsic motivation consists of multiple factors that are all supported by respect for people:

• Autonomy: Empowering people, giving them control.
• Mastery: Giving people the chance to become better at what they do and to improve their own work conditions.
• Purpose: Having a goal, being part of something greater.
• Relatedness: Being connected with others, sharing a community.

Command-and-control management does not motivate people intrinsically at all. Yet, simply empowering people to do as they please does not tick all the boxes either, even though it is a step in the right direction. Truly respecting people to the point where you both empower them and work together with them ticks all the boxes for intrinsic motivation.

How do you build respect for people into your management system?

This is where many managers get the relationship backwards. Respect for people is not designed into the system, but the system is designed based on respect for people. Start from there, and the answers will become obvious. Respect for people is a fundamental value, from which certain features of systems arise.

I like to use this thought in the comparison between Lean and Taylorism (as generally understood): with respect for people as a fundamental value, it is impossible to design the Tayloristic system, because that system is, by its very essence, in conflict with this fundamental value. Furthermore, certain characteristics of Lean are direct consequences of adopting respect for people as a value: it is impossible to design a system where everyone does not participate in continuous improvement when starting from such a value.

This system approach extends beyond the enterprise and into the very core of modern democracy. Freedom of speech etc.do not cause respect for people – they are built into the system because of respect for people. The modern democratic system is largely built on the arguments first presented by John Stuart Mill, especially in his On Liberty, and Mill was a proponent of ever-improving mankind, and freedom of speech was one of the most important aspects of securing that improvement even in cases where the opinions stated were false, as even that dialogue served to reinforce the truths and (more commonly) find weaknesses in the prevailing opinions that enabled further improvement.

I would further argue that this is behind the Toyota Production System as well, although from a different source, Confucianism. I do not claim that TPS was intentionally set up as a Confucian system, but merely that Confucianism had a profound influence on the culture in the area where TPS was invented, and that it manifests in this way. Thus, there is no conflict between Taiichi Ohno’s sometimes demeaning behavior and respect for people. After all, the purpose of the infamous Ohno circle was to make the student see, to make him improve, and that goal of helping him improve towards perfection is what respect for people in Lean is all about.

When respect for people is seen as a fundamental value, it is easy to see how saying that is should be designed into a system sounds somehow false. When respect for people is a fundamental value, it is impossible to design a system that does not manifest it.

Photo: Leaders by thinkpublic @ Flickr (CC)

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I am fascinated by the multitudes of ways that companies fail. There is such an abundance of source material on this, and yet history keeps repeating itself over and over again with most companies that achieve breakthrough success succumbing some years down the line.

Why does this happen? What can be done to sustain success?

The bad news: your company is probably already in trouble

One insightful research piece on the subject is a decade-old piece from Accenture. While we now know more about various shades and details, the broad lines still remain the same: the world has not changed in a fundamental way since 2007, or even since 1998.

The Accenture report quotes a 1998 Corporate Strategy Board study that found that only 17 percent of Fortune 50 companies that experienced a radical slump in revenue growth managed to return back to high or even moderate growth. The conclusion: it is better to start changing when you are still strong, not when you are already weak.

Of course, this is where it all becomes so difficult. Companies do not achieve their peak results when they are at the top of their game. There is considerable inertia between actions and results, and peak results come at a point when the actual performance is already going down.

But how can you tell? Peak result is not a good indicator, because it is a lagging indicator. You can only tell that you have reached the peak after it is already behind you. Furthermore, the implication of the research is that once you can determine the you are past your peak, your odds of getting back in shape are already coming crashing down.

More bad news: it is the top management’s fault

I have personal experience from working with two market-leading companies that came to experience significant issues. What is encouraging is that in both cases, all the signs were there years before any issues arose. What is discouraging is that in both cases, the issues were caused by incompetent management that lasted for years, even close to a decade before it outweighed the legacy of awesomeness that was at the core of both companies.

This all makes perfect sense, of course. Do you believe that it is the poor performance of assembly workers or engineers that causes a company to fail? Sure, overall poor performance contributes to failure, but that poor performance, in turn, is caused by the strategy, management structures, processes, and culture of the company, and those can be guided only by top management. Top management cannot create them at will, but they are the only ones who can change them, with the help of everyone else.

It is not that all management teams are bad. It might even be the case that you can achieve sustainable success with all the same people. It is just a different thing to achieve success once, and to sustain that success over a long period of time. It is easy to fall into complacency, or maybe just not recognize the importance of constant change and stay put when others are moving forwards. Sustaining success requires continuous improvement and the mental strength to keep pushing on even when you are already at the top.

The good news: you can institutionalize the good practices

The important realization is that you need to keep acting even if you do not feel the pain. If you fully embrace this view, you can make everything fall into place, even if it takes a mental struggle to force yourself to do it.

Are you continuously improving your way of working? Even those processes that are looking good right now? Do you give your employees time to develop their work, and require them to do so?

Do you know what is going on in your industry and in the world? Do you balance between internal promotions and outside hires? Do you look for a variety of backgrounds when hiring to keep new ideas coming in?

Do you coach your leaders to encourage experimentation? Do you give people autonomy and responsibility?

There are lots of terms to describe doing such things. One could talk about strategic Lean, improvement Kata, coaching Kata, red teaming, and building dynamic capabilities. Many improvement methodologies overlap, so I’m not too interested in tagging things by methodology.

In the end, it is all about acting even when you do not feel the pain, and empowering everyone else in the organization to act as well.

Photo: Success! By Laen @ Flickr (CC)

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Helsingin Sanomat, one of the main newspapers in Finland, published an article on a “magic trick” performed in the public home care for the elderly in the city of Helsinki. This magic trick reduced the workload of personnel while improving the well-being of their customers. (Here is a link to the article itself, it is in Finnish)

Obviously, there is no actual magic at work – just work. However, it looks like an interesting case of process improvement in services, so let’s take a look at what Helsingin Sanomat reported on the new system and what kind of general framework this work is linked to.

The new system in home care for the elderly in Vuosaari area in Helsinki

The key to unlock improvements was recognizing the bottlenecks. In home care for the elderly, these are from 8 a.m. to 10 a.m. in the morning and from 8 p.m. to 10 p.m. in the evening: the times when people need help in getting out of bed, taking their medicine, and going to bed.

In order to protect the bottleneck, all non-essential tasks were moved away from these hours: weekly visits, showering, walks outside, and grocery shopping were moved to separate visits at the customers in the afternoon.

Changes to working hours were crucial in accomplishing the improvements. Previously, employees worked in two eight-hour shifts, and weekend work could result in seven consecutive work days and individual days off. In the new system, a work shift lasts nine hours, but there are never more than four consecutive work days and there are always two consecutive days off. Overall, employees have eight days off work in each three-week segment. With the new work shifts, more people are at work in the afternoon thanks to overlap of morning and evening shifts, which enables longer afternoon visits and improved service.

Furthermore, buffers were built in to the new system, as four employees were set aside to a reserve pool to cover any absences. Previously, such absences were covered by temporary workforce, but now they are handled by full-time personnel.

Cost-wise, the goal is to reduce costs while improving service and well-being at work. Currently, the number of sick leave days and outsourcing purchases have been reduced, but there have also been some additional costs related to evening and weekend work.

Bottlenecks, buffers – now where have I heard these words before?

The language of bottlenecks and buffers does not come from the original article, but is rather my interpretation of the text. Still, those are terms that the description of the events is easily translated into.

The framework I have in mind here is Theory of Constraints (TOC). While TOC is more well-known in manufacturing, the same general ideas can be modified to apply in services as well.

The general TOC improvement cycle, Five Focusing Steps, consists of the following phases:

1. Identify. What is the current constraint, the bottleneck that limits the entire process. In this case, the morning and evening visits were the hard limiting factors.
2. Exploit. Increase the output of the bottleneck. In this case, all non-essential work was removed from the morning and evening visits.
3. Subordinate. By definition, anything that is not the bottleneck has excess capacity. Use that capacity to help the bottleneck. In this case, tasks that were not essential to do in the morning or evening were moved to the afternoon, and work shifts were modified accordingly to support this.
4. Elevate. When the situation cannot be improved upon by using existing resources differently, it is time to invest. This is a step that needs to be approached cautiously, and in this case, there are no signs of any elevate actions yet – and that is good!
5. Repeat.

Upon closer examination, the magic trick turns out to be an application of Theory of Constraints!

How deep is the rabbit hole?

Alas, one could also take a different look at the case. This other lens I have in mind is Single-Minute Exchange of Die (SMED).

SMED is one of the Lean tools invented at Toyota, where it is used to reduce changeover times of machinery. When you need to start producing a different part on a machine, there is a lot of work involved. So much in fact, that it used to be accepted that the changeover process would take several hours, during which the machine could not be operated. With the SMED technique, Toyota has reduced changeover times from hours to minutes.

The SMED process is roughly as follows:

1. Identify which operations are internal to the task and which ones are external. Internal operations are those that have to be performed during the task, while external ones could be performed at another time.
2. Separate internal operations from external operations so that the external operations can be moved to take place at another time.
3. Convert remaining internal operations to external operations whenever possible.
4. Simplify all internal and external operations.
5. Repeat.

What was done in Helsinki could also be described as an application of SMED. The bottlenecks in mornings and evenings were limiting the overall process, and therefore they identified which operations were internal to those visits and which ones were external and could be moved to a less busy time.

Multiple frameworks, multiple lenses

I am sure what was done in Helsinki could be described in terms of many improvement methodologies. In the end, the methodology used does not matter, the improved service and well-being matter. Various methodologies merely provide us with lenses through which we can examine the world and find ways to do things better.

Photo: Magic trick by Gareth Saunders @ Flickr (CC)

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Tip 1: Write, draw, doodle, build

Computers are great, I love them. However, research is discovering an increasing number of clues that the human mind is not completely at home in the digital world. There are innovation advantages to be gained from using your body to a fuller extent than just typing on a keyboard: writing things down by hand is useful for memory and innovation, and so is drawing and building physical prototypes. There’s something about those tactile sensory experiences that just make us humans tick.

It is possible that gadgets can incorporate this experience into the digital world, but so far there is no perfect replacement for a notepad or a whiteboard. I actually tried to simulate the experience with a Samsung Galaxy Note phone, using the stylus to take notes and draw. At least my phone did not explode on my face, but it was still a sub-par experience. I’m still waiting for that Minority Report style user interface where I can just write and draw with my finger in the air (but could I touch it?). Until then, notepads and whiteboards will do just fine.

Tip 2: Take a walk

It is by now rather well-established that walking improves creative thinking. The exercise, the rhythm, and our almost completely available attention combine to significantly improve creative capabilities while walking. (Note that walking does not improve the later stages where a precise answer to a well-defined question is needed.)

There are many ways to use this knowledge. You can hold walking meetings to brainstorm ideas. You can go to the shop floor and see how the work is actually done (the Lean practice of gemba walks – and generally a pretty good and novel idea for many executives). You can make it a habit to walk to see other people instead of calling them, if they happen to be close by. Or you can just take a walk alone when you need to work on an idea at the early creative stage.

Tip 3: Hack your sleep

Sleep is a fascinating phenomenon. Our brains clean up and reorganize themselves during sleep, and that is a great opportunity for innovation. Better yet, you can affect it. What you think about just before going to sleep has an effect on your dreams and on what your brain works on during sleep.

Just last night, I played some World of Tanks and had trouble finding weak spots on opposing heavy tanks… Whoops, that was not the example I meant to use. I obviously thought about important process improvement issues before going to bed and in the morning I woke up fresh and with new potential solutions in mind. Truth be told, I have done that a lot of times, and intentionally at that. When you cannot doodle or walk your way to a solution, sleeping on it is a great option – just remember to prime your brain by thinking about the issue before falling asleep.

Photo: Create your own light by shuttermonkey @ Flickr (CC) https://flic.kr/p/6dCJTz

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Language gives us seemingly endless possibilities to create stories. However, the stories that actually resonate share a common, much more limited structure. The structure of a character, a problem, and an attempted resolution repeats over and over again when it comes to good stories.

Random streams of consciousness do not make for compelling stories. Neither do dream scenarios where everything goes well all the time. Such stories leave us feeling dissatisfied and bored, there is just something not quite right about them. Our mind craves for challenges, for problems and hardships, and for the struggle to eventually resolve them and triumph.

I don’t think this is a problem. Compare this to music, where the instrument places limitations on the music that can be created with it. The tuning system of a piano only gives you a certain set of tones, but the ones available can be combined in countless ways to produce pleasant experiences whereas an inexperienced violin player can create the most hideous combinations of tones. Practically all popular music in the past decades has used the same tuning system and new beautiful combinations keep being discovered. Innovation in a restricted space can be beautiful, sometimes even more beautiful than innovation in an unrestricted space.

Other than the plot structure, interesting stories are created by our own imaginations. Being told everything does not make for an interesting story. It is the art in what the writer chooses to tell outright, and what he hints at and how that immerses us in a story. Winston Smith in 1984, Lúthien Tinúviel in The Silmarillion, Michael Smith in Stranger in a Strange Land – I have an image in my head of what each of them looks like, and that image far exceeds the description offered by the authors. The end result of a story is always co-created by the author and the reader. The more the story is able to pull the reader in to this co-creation process, the more interesting it is.

The narrative and the art played by the words together serve to create emotions in the reader. An interesting narrative told in an interesting fashion is guaranteed to create some kind of emotional response in the reader. Part of the skill of the writer is being able to relate to the audience in order to direct these emotions, as in this aspect as well, the final result is always co-created by the author and the reader.

Finally, there is one other, perhaps the most noble, aspect of an interesting story that is often overlooked. It is the ability of a good story to instill us with a sense of purpose. To reach so far beyond its format that it shapes the way we live our life for weeks, months, or even years to come. Strangely enough, fiction conveys purpose better than reports of real life. Never has there been a stronger argument against totalitarianism than Orwell’s 1984. I was anxious for days after first reading it. It is a more powerful tool against totalitarianism than the true stories of the regimes of Saddam Hussein or Josef Stalin. (Although not as powerful as living in them, which is something I wish no one would have had to go through.)

Interesting stories consist of a good narrative and word choices that invite the reader to co-create the story’s universe and be open to the emotional ride offered by the story. Great stories go beyond that. They instill the reader with a sense of purpose for a lasting effect.

Photo: Antares Rocket With Cygnus Spacecraft Launches by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center @ Flickr (CC)

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Human beings are creatures of tales and stories. Indeed, one of the most important measures of any leader or salesperson nowadays is storytelling ability. Stories motivate us and change us, their effect on our behavior and judgment far surpasses that of non-fiction: when we encounter a story, we let our guard down and become immersed in its world, allowing it to shape ours.

However, not all stories are equal. Some affect us for a short while, some end up doing more harm than good, while some bring about lasting change and purpose. When you tell a story, you are wielding a powerful tool, so wield it responsibly.

The small stories

Some stories are meant to cause you to do something right now. Advertisement and sales of small goods are typical examples of this. There is art in creating the fleeting emotion that separates you from your money, but these are not the types of stories I’m interested in, and even the most successful of them have hardly any long-term effect, not even when “I’m on a horse” remains a meme years after being invented.

These small stories usually do not create a sense of purpose, but rather rely on a less-lasting bit of emotion to motivate immediate action.

The stories that rationalize the status quo

There are stories that are downright dangerous. We have a remarkable ability to rationalize and explain our actions, and many companies have fallen to the stories that explain how the status quo is perfectly fine. Is your engineering prowess indeed all it takes to remain the best mobile phone maker forever? Is the recession really the only reason your company has not been able to get back on track after years and years of trying? Company turnaround projects typically start years later than they could, because we are so good at telling stories to hide real issues.

When the core of your story is how things are fine as they are, it is time to take a deep breath and think. Life is not about standing still, usually you are either progressing or declining, and satisfaction with the status quo usually already means that you are declining and need to find a new story to aspire to.

The stories that change the world by providing purpose

Finally, there are stories that change the world. Actually, these stories can be the most dangerous of them all. Religions and ideologies are stories full of purpose that have had both incredible and disastrous effects on the world.

Our beliefs are becoming increasingly fragmented as the common stories of our societies are dwindling, and we do not share the same meanings and purpose the way we used to. The great narratives are not shared the same way anymore.

However, there is a lot of room for smaller narratives, for smaller groups to create common meanings and to share a common purpose. A group with a shared purpose can be a single company, for example, even if it can no longer be an entire nation.

Perhaps the people at your company yearn for the vast and endless sea, or will put a man on the moon. With the right story, created together, you can share this purpose, strengthen its hold on your minds, and use it to attract others who want to achieve it to join your journey. There is a story about the purpose of every company – and realizing what it can be can also change your company.

Case study: The purpose of an automation company

I once worked on factory automation. You know, manufacturing is that dull little place stuck in time you go to in order to make a living. It’s not fancy like Apple, or video games, or advertising. It involves big machines, cutting metal, and it’s dirty at times. No one really cares about your work, it is just one of those relics of the past that we have not yet been able to rid ourselves of to fully focus on playing Pokémon Go.

When you work on factory automation, it’s even worse. You’re doing much of the same, but at the same time you’re taking even that livelihood from other people. Those darn robots, taking away jobs.

On the other hand, that’s not how it has to be. Those robots are not really taking jobs away. Manual labor will never be the cheapest in rich countries. Manual labor is not the cheapest even in China nowadays, it’s all Vietnam or Bangladesh or what not, and it will keep moving like an orchestra of crickets from one land to the next. Jobs based on manual labor alone are never safe, not even in the low-cost countries of today.

What if there was a way to keep manufacturing profitable, no matter where you are? There is! Through automation, it is possible to manufacture close to your customers, to manufacture where you want to, instead of where you have to. This is what work on factory automation is about. It’s about keeping those factories alive, keeping them as part of their communities, keeping jobs and livelihood where they are.

Instead of closing down the plants and moving them ever so often to wherever the cheapest labor is, automation makes it possible to keep the plants running where they are. You get to choose and not just follow the inevitable.

Automation also makes work cleaner and safer for the people. Let the machines do the dirty work while people control the machines and perform tasks that require judgment and not mere repetition.

It is this world – a world where manufacturing can prosper all over the globe and where people who work in manufacturing get to fully use their skills in safe, non-repetitive work – that I worked so hard to create. It’s not old-fashioned. It’s not stuck in time. It’s not Apple-level exciting – it’s better than that!

Stories change the way we look at our lives

As the above case study hopefully illustrates, stories hold a lot of power. Are you living a dull, old-fashioned life, or are you working to make the world a better place? A single story can change the meaning of what you do from one to another. Stories are too powerful tools to be wasted on simple emotional manipulation. At best, they can create a sense of purpose that can change the world.

Photo: Storytelling by Pedro @ Flickr (CC)

The post Don’t just tell stories – create meanings and purpose first appeared on 2 cents // Ville Kilkku.

Division of labor is perhaps the greatest invention of mankind. Not everyone has to be a part-time farmer in order to eat, and that’s awesome. However, increasing specialization is not only a good thing, and we have in many ways reached and even surpassed the limits where it is good for us.

The functional organization and how it defines us

Over time, division of labor has fundamentally defined how we look at jobs, organizations, and individuals. The functional organization is in many ways the epitome of division of labor: a clear structure of highly specific roles grouped according to the type of work each performs. It has done a lot of good in providing clarity, a common language, and a clear identity for the people in it. It has also enabled simple recruiting – “we need one developer” – or has it, really?

Unfortunately, the clarity provided by the functional organization hides the real complexity of life. Simplifications are often useful, and the functional organization has served us well, but its shortcomings are becoming more and more obvious, and the fact that it is the paradigm on which our thinking is based even when we endeavor to implement other organization models has far-reaching consequences.

Human being are more than their job titles. Even now, job titles do not really show what capabilities and interests we have, but still in recruiting we have the instinctive preference to look for people who have done the “same” job at another company. Yet, even while the functional organization attempts to convince us that a job is a job, in reality we are already doing many different things under the umbrella of a single title, and what those things are is different in each company.

Furthermore, functional organization may even hinder people from using all of their competences to serve the mission of the company, as some tasks belong to a different department and are not to be touched.

Finally, the narrow definitions of roles in a functional organization fail to account for the dynamic nature of today’s work – largely brought about by the advances in automation and computing. Many traditional jobs are dying. Many new jobs are springing to life. The work you do can change drastically over the course of a few years, if the organization is flexible enough to accommodate that.

The functional organization is being challenged

Interestingly enough, the functional organization is being challenged from two very different directions: Lean and Agile.

Born in traditional manufacturing industry, Lean thinking promotes the continuous improvement of the product, process, and people, and places emphasis on the value stream – the flow within the company from order to delivery. It encourages companies to organize themselves not around functions, but around the products they deliver to customers, creating self-sufficient entities that are able to ensure that the customer gets what he needs as effectively as possible. It also encourages the creation of multi-skilled employees so that the flow is not interrupted even if someone is on sick leave. While people have their specialties, the team as a whole has a diverse and distributed set of skills that enables it to face any challenge.

In software development, agile teams work in much the same way. Embedding all the needed roles within the team, the team is able to flexibly and rapidly create functional products. Diverse competencies are built naturally in this environment where the team is on a mission and the skills of the people in the team, including the many skills people have that have not been learned at the workplace, are utilized as effectively as possible in order to reach the goal and not just within the confines of a role description.

Both Lean and Agile have recognized that too much of a good thing can be bad. While division of labor has enabled mankind to progress, taken to the extreme it becomes a limiting factor that reduces the effectiveness of companies and hinders personal growth.

Role-oriented or mission-oriented teams and recruitment

What kind of a team would you rather lead? A role-oriented team where every member is a highly skilled specialist in their own narrow field, or a mission-oriented team where every member is committed to completing the mission, no matter what skills they need to use or learn?

And if you chose the team with a mission, why is your company still recruiting primarily based on role and not mission?

Photo: VFS Digital Design Agile Project Management @ Flickr (CC)

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What is a minimum viable product? It is a complete product in the sense that it actually does something.

The cleared area marked in red is not a minimum viable product. Sure, snow has been cleared across the entire width of the driveway, but you can’t actually use it for anything.

The cleared area marked in blue, on the other hand, is a minimum viable product. You have pedestrian access to the mailbox and out of the yard without walking through snow. You can actually accomplish a task! Yeah, it needs to be made wider for cars, but that’s part of future development, adding more features to the product. As a minimum viable product, the product is already accomplishing something.

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However, while there are lots of companies that are doing Lean or doing Lean Startup, there are precious few companies that are Lean. This is an important distinction, because most often when you do Lean, you are using it as a toolkit, whereas for companies that are Lean, Lean is a fundamental management philosophy that has a dramatic effect on the relationships within the enterprise and also extends beyond the enterprise to the relationship between the company and the society at large.

To understand the distinction, we need to take a look at what Lean is all about.

The three pillars of Lean

It is possible to formulate Lean as the application of the Confucian strive for perfection applied to three aspects of work:

• Perfection of the product (maximize customer value)
• Perfection of the process (eliminate waste)
• Perfection of the individual (respect people)

The traditional Western Lean toolkit is solely focused on the second pillar: perfection of the process. In the West, Lean is often seen as a cost-saving exercise with the goal of cutting any fat from the organization and the way it operates. While there is some truth in that, as waste is an anathema to perfection, it is far from the whole truth. This view has become so prevalent, because many of the early Lean tools are focused on process improvement. Thus, when you just see the tools and not the context, it is easy to err on this simplification.

Lean Startup, on the other hand, is mostly focused on the first pillar: perfection of the product. Lean Startup poses the question how should we develop products that the customers really want in a world filled with uncertainty, and turns to the scientific method – PDSA in Lean, Build-Measure-Learn in Lean Startup – for inspiration.

However, you can do Western Lean (waste elimination) or Lean Startup, or even both, and still not be a Lean company.

It all boils down to the third pillar of Lean, perfection of the individual. Lean does not make a categorical distinction between the business and the personal, something that is commonly thought of as a significant distinction in the West. You need work-life balance! From a Lean point of view, this claim is absurd. There is no work-life balance. Either you have your whole life in balance, where work is an important and engaging part of who you are, or your life is not in balance and you just turn off your brain for eight hours a day while you drudge through your work. Did I mention that most employees are not engaged at work?

Understanding the third pillar of Lean: perfection of the individual

It is only when you add in the third pillar that doing Lean can turn into being Lean.

The first noticeable effect is the way the company treats its employees. It is the fundamental right of each employee to help develop their own work. This is often misinterpreted as a factual claim that the employee knows the work best, and therefore should be the one to improve it. Yes, Lean also makes that factual claim. However, it is inconsequential when compared to the principle that is being applied. This is reflected in the mentoring practices used at Toyota. Even if the problem could be solved much faster by more senior personnel, new hires are coached through problem-solving in order to develop them as people. If you want to take a deeper look at this, I can recommend Mike Rother’s phenomenal book Toyota Kata that describes the coaching kata and improvement kata used at Toyota.

Second, this approach extends to the network of the company: its suppliers and sales channels. Lean is all about building lasting relationships where everyone can improve and get closer to being perfect.

Finally, Lean does not view a company as an entity that exists in a separate realm of economics, cut off from the society. Western economics tends to view companies this way, but this disconnect is the cause of many unethical things companies do: they simply do not view themselves as part of the society, but only as part of the field of economics, business, and profits. A Lean company also wants to be a part of the society that surrounds it, and help the entire society to prosper.

Conclusions

So, Lean and Lean Startup have a number of nice tools you can use to eliminate waste in your processes and develop better products. It is possible to achieve good results simply by applying these tools. Nonetheless, most Lean implementation attempts fail. It is one thing to use tools in the context where they are meant to be used, and quite another to rip the tools away from the whole fabric that connects them and still try to achieve the same results.

However, really adopting Lean forces the management to consider the whole relationship between the company, its employees, and the society, and that is something most executives are uncomfortable with, do not care about, or even do not at all understand why something like that is even important. That is the real tragedy of the Western corporation.

The post The difference between doing Lean or Lean Startup and being Lean first appeared on 2 cents // Ville Kilkku.

In this post, I will summarize the experiences at the Bærland Skole, and consider what Lean can do for primary schools even beyond their achievements.

Lean at the Bærland Skole primary school

The story of Lean at the Bærland Skole primary school comes from Torbjørn Netland’s blog post “Lean in the primary school?” so head there for the full story. I will provide a brief summary of the main points here.

The original goals of the program were quite typical for a Lean implementation in the West: increasing the quality of operations and eliminating waste – the non-value-added time spent on administration, preparation, and searching, that is, things that are not strictly connected to learning.

After some initial training and creating buy-in among the staff, there are currently three main practices that are being focused on: 5S (clean, well-organized, standardized, and effective environment), continuous improvement (via visual improvement boards and student participation – with more than 1200 improvements implemented to date), and standardization of best teaching practices (getting teachers to share best practices more).

The achievements of the school are also typical of a fairly successful, toolkit-based Lean implementation: more efficient administration, better-organized working environment, and more satisfied staff.

Lean can be so much more

OK, so all of that sounds pretty cool. Not mind-blowing, but definitely something a teacher or a rector of a school would be interested in.

However, I don’t think this is all Lean can be when it comes to education. The foundation of Lean is the Confucian ideal of perfection, and belief in striving for individual improvement and perfection, especially through self-cultivation. A Lean company supports the aspirations of its employees to perfect themselves.

This type of approach can fundamentally change learning results. There are two ways to think about intelligence and learning: you can view intelligence as a fixed trait, or you can view intelligence as something that is changeable and malleable. Furthermore, it is well-established that those who view intelligence as malleable have better learning results than those who view it as fixed (and as little as three hours of education can change one’s stance on this). The foundation of Lean, eternal self-perfection, requires an individual to adopt this view of intelligence, otherwise Lean makes no sense. Cultivating this belief in children can do more than 5S ever can.

Who is the customer?

One of the basic pillars of Lean is to maximize customer value. In the case of education, it is interesting to spend a moment to consider who the customer is. This is something that was considered at the Bærland Skole as well, and they figured that the students are neither products, because the teachers do not fill them with information, nor customers, because they are part of the value-creating network as they co-create learning with the teacher.

This reasoning for the students not being the customers is actually a bit misguided: value is always created by the customer. In fact, as the student is the one who receives value in education, that should make the student the customer, and the fact that he is co-creating this value bears no relevance to his status as a customer.

However, in the case of education there is a temporal dimension to consider, one that is aptly put in this tweet by Professor Ng:

Note to university: the student is not my customer. The graduate, about to get his second promotion, is.

— Irene Ng (@ireneclng) October 11, 2015

It is the future self of the student who is the real customer in education. This is especially true for primary school, where children do not necessarily realize the importance of the skills they are learning yet.

And hey, here is a Lean lesson as well! You need to understand your customer. Therefore, the student needs to learn to understand the needs of his future self, the customer, in order to help himself create the value he will one day need. In practice, the content of the education needs to be linked to the needs the students will have in the future, and they need to agree that these needs are real. That understanding also creates intrinsic motivation to pursue the goals of the education.

What is the role of the teacher?

In genuinely Lean thinking, students are the ones who are creating the learning for their future selves. In a Lean school, the teacher is a support function, a coach. It is through this coaching that students are guided to find the answers, just like managers in Lean companies coach their direct reports on a path of improved problem-solving and self-realization. Teachers are not there to give answers, but to help the students on the path to answers.

After all, learning can happen without a teacher, but it can never happen without a student.

Lean tools, now in proper context

This understanding of Lean helps put the various Lean tools, such as the ones applied at the Bærland Skole, to proper context. The practice of 5S is an enabler of better learning by reducing hassle and enabling proper focus and flow. Continuous improvement is needed to prevent deterioration of the system back to an earlier, less desirable state – you are either moving forwards or backwards, it is nigh impossible to stay still. Continuous improvement, and the PDSA cycle that is crucial to applying it, is also one of the most important 21^st century skills, also for adults.

The tools only become vitally important when their link to the whole context is clear. If this view of the whole is not understood, the individual tools seem much more insignificant, and their use is at the risk of being discontinued, not to mention that it is only through understanding how individual tools contribute to the whole that the tools can be applied correctly, or even discontinued, if they no longer serve their purpose. Lean is not 5S – 5S can be part of a Lean program, but even its position is not sacred, it only deserves a place in the program if it is effective in furthering the goals of the program.

Thus, while the use of Lean tools is nice, it is through understanding, and implementing, the core of Lean thinking as core of education that the true road to self-perfection of each student begins.

Photo: School by Jdog90 @ Flickr (CC)

The post Why should primary schools care about Lean? first appeared on 2 cents // Ville Kilkku.