I was taught that waste is the non-value add elements of our work or processes.  This non-value-add work is even categorized into 7 wastes including waiting, overproduction, rework, motion, over-processing, inventory, and conveyance.  At US Synthetic, our work systems are built around finding and eliminating these wastes.  Year after year, our employees execute tens of thousands of waste elimination improvements.  All the while, I am slowly learning about what respect really means and its connection to waste.

I recently had an experience that taught me about respect and its’ relationship to waste.   On a study trip to Japan with Paul Akers, we watched preschoolers express gratitude for their lunch that included thanking the fish for their lives.  They gave thanks to the fisherman and the farmer whose work made these foods available.  They expressed appreciation to the staff that gave their time to prepare the lunch. With these grateful hearts, they ate their meals and left NO waste.  These kids were mindful of the sacrifices made on their behalf.  They understood that wasting food is the same as wasting the resources of the earth and the time of people. These preschool kids likely did not understand the depth of these concepts but this pattern of mindfulness and respect for resources was being taught and reinforced every day.  These behaviors over time result in a cultural phenomenon in japan of a deep regret for waste called mottainai.

Do I have mottainai or a deep regret for waste?  Do I feel an inner pain or struggle of conscience when we have over-processing, over-production, scrap or conveyance? The answer is no. Though I don’t like these things they don’t bother me deeply.  In fact, I am quite numb to them because they happen so often.  Waste, as it was taught to me, has mostly financial implications.  The 7 wastes incur unnecessary costs and tie up cash in our businesses.  So it is common for us to think lets get lean, eliminate waste, and improve our productivity.  Can we really feel a deep regret for the financials of our company? Can we feel mottainai as I witnessed in Japan?   The answer is no, so long as we continue to think of waste only in the context of financial terms.

Waste and mottanai is much bigger than the 7 wastes, it is rooted in the disrespect for or the wasting of precious resources.   It is to take something of value and to devalue it.  There are two primary sources for which we must feel mottainai. First, we must feel regret for the wasting of natural resources.  How do you feel when you brush your teeth and leave the water running?  Or leave the refrigerator door wide open?  Or see litter in a beautiful park?  These are feelings of mottainai.

Second, we must feel regret for wasting the most precious and finite resource, which is the time of people. When we produce scrap, over-process parts, or overproduce, we are disrespecting people and wasting their time.  We must feel mottainai for the literal wasting of people’s lives.  When we connect waste to the disrespect of people and resources, only then, will we feel a deep regret for waste.  And when we feel deep regret, we will continually work to eliminate that waste. This is how we become cultural lean thinkers.

Mottainai must exist in all dimensions of life.  Walk through your home and look for waste.  Look for the disrespect of resources and time.  Notice the clothes on the floor, dishes in the sink, a cluttered closet or garage.  These and many more are forms of waste.  They add extra burden to lives and deprive us of time to do what we really value.  These wastes will exist till someone cleans them up or solves the root of the problem. Wastes in the home often fall to our Mothers.  My kids and I create endless sources of waste in our daily activities and in doing so we are not mindful of how they impact Mom.  Our waste becomes her burden and our entitlement.  We are so quick to disrespect her time and we lack feelings of mottainai for the world we leave her.  This is not right.

It is not right to disrespect our Mothers or any other human being through the burdens of waste we create.  We must be sensitive to the outputs of our activities and associated waste. When we feel mottainai we clean up after ourselves, we organize our lives, we design capable products and processes, we don’t overburden people, we minimize variation, and we never allow for the 7 wastes to exist.  This deep regret for waste and a desire to eliminate is a natural evolution of our respect for people and the earth.  Because we respect we eliminate waste and because we eliminate waste we demonstrate respect.  They are inseparable elements of the Toyota Production System and being a good human being.

But getting from zero to the mindset shift necessary to create a new cultural paradigm requires being specific about your intention for Lean. Your intention directly correlates with the new behaviors that will result upon implementation. Organizations’ intentions for Lean are too often shaped by nearsighted needs: Cost savings, productivity gains, delivery times. The problem with this approach is that nearsighted intention builds behavioral habits that only serve the short term.

The true value of Lean is in how it can affect the big picture. With the right intention, it is possible to have a broad lasting impact, even when you’re starting small. 5S is a great example of how a smaller-scale effort can have either a limited physical impact or serve as an important cultural enabler depending on the intention behind its implementation.

For example, 5S is traditionally executed to get a quick win and show progress when launching a Lean effort. If the intention is simply to achieve a spruced-up working environment, you’ll attain that. You may or may not be able to sustain the cleanliness depending on how you stay on top of it, but regardless, a tidier workspace in one area won’t render new thinking and new productivity and collaboration improving habits in another.

If, however, you introduce 5S with the intention of it being the first step to improve employee engagement and company culture, Sort, Set in Order and Shine take on a new, more significant meaning with very different criteria around their implementation. Suddenly participants aren’t just sorting to see what they have, they’re thinking about how those items got there, why they have them, why they need them, who cares about them being there, what leadership or other team members have to do with the current chaos and what can be done about it.

What kinds of habits do we want to create?  A habit of putting things back where they go? Or a habit of thinking critically about what creates value and what doesn’t?

Intention also plays into sustainability. Before I begin a 5S workshop I spend time trying to understand why people are working in their environments the way they are. All behavior is an expression of a need unmet – we all do what we do as a result of a need we have that isn’t being satisfied. There are tangible reasons why the area is the way it is. This is why cleaning up an environment without addressing the root causes of the current state doesn’t lead to sustainable change. It’s why we see 5S efforts repeated several times – and why my garage never stays clean.

Whatever your intention is for 5S, partnering with employees, and leveraging their experience, knowledge, and wisdom are key to seeing it come to fruition. They play an important role in helping to flag unproductive habits and identifying new ones that will sustain the change.

Intentions declared and desired habits articulated, your role as a leader is to monitor, follow up, coach, and support those new habits – on a frequent and consistent basis. It takes 20 days to make the habit a routine and 66 days to become unconscious – this is why being strategic about the specific habits we want to create at the outset is so important.

5S doesn’t end when the area is clean. Once the initial habits have become routine, it’s time to reevaluate and identify the next habits that will further the intention of the effort, work to establish those habits, and so on and so on.

For example, in my practice of using Lean to cultivate high performing organizations, reinforcement of 5S gains takes shape via a Gemba Card reminder structure. I’ve found that participation in monthly audit and scoring systems tends to be forced and is perceived as punitive. Without a guide to gauge progress though, leaders can fumble the opportunity to glean valuable insight and ask questions that are too broad or that don’t support the advancement of their effort.

The Gemba Card tool enables leaders, managers, and supervisors to have more thoughtful interaction in the Gemba than if their goal was simply to ensure that certain activities were executed or not. Here again, intention makes its mark, resulting in higher level of engagement, improved communication, better accountability, and a higher percentage of habits becoming internalized. We also tend to see a lot less resistance to future change efforts.

5S as a cultural enabler checklist:

• Be specific about the intention of your 5S effort
• Consider the use of the space and begin the Sort, Set in Order and Shine with that intention in mind
• Investigate the behaviors and habits that undermine your envisioned future
• Be strategic about the new behaviors that you want to encourage (how to interact, use the space, and maintain order)
• Be explicit about identifying the new habits that need to be adopted
• Establish a system that encourages, support, and reinforces the new habits
• Offer frequent and consistent support in pursuit of sustainability

For those who are interested in exploring this subject in more detail, you can participate in a full day workshop on Tuesday January 23, 2018 in San Luis Obispo, CA from 8:30am to 4:30pm. For more information and registration you can go to the Central Coast Lean website.

For more information about bringing Conflict is the Root of All Waste to your organization, see Info about Conflict is the root of all waste.

Like many of my clients, the organization featured in the article hadn’t previously considered the impact inconsistency had on cost. For the company in question, it turned out to be in the billions.

Causes of Internal Bleeding

How does that much hemorrhaging go unnoticed? Because the pain of inconsistency isn’t obvious, particularly in office settings where there are fewer physical indications of flaws in the system. Also because the process is thought to otherwise be stable. Thirdly, as was mentioned in the article – and is true in many organizations – the occurrence of variability was expected and accepted as part of the cost of doing business.

Interestingly, the impact of variation on performance does not go unnoticed in Lean methodology. In fact, Mura (unevenness / variation) is considered to be responsible for creating Muri (overburden on employees / processes) and Muda (waste resulting from any activity or process that does not add value).

Beyond Eliminating Waste

Muda is undoubtedly the most well-known, most often and most easily addressed category of waste. In my view this is because the eight wastes classified as muda are easily seen and understood:

• Transport – Moving people, products and information
• Inventory – Storing parts, pieces, documentation ahead of requirements
• Motion – Bending, turning, reaching, lifting
• Overproduction – Making more than is immediately required
• Over processing – Tighter tolerances or higher grade materials than are necessary
• Defects – Rework, scrap, incorrect documentation
• Skills – Under utilizing capabilities, delegating tasks with inadequate training
• Waiting – Idle time created or wasted when material, information, people and equipment are not ready

Unfortunately, many Continuous Improvement journeys begin and end here. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, many companies only realize the short-term success that results from addressing Muda because they pursue Lean for the wrong reasons.

They want to use Lean tools without adopting Lean thinking. These organizations are after the business outcome of cost cutting and so they work to address the “low hanging fruit”, the “quick win” of addressing Muda and call it a day. In addition to sustainability issues, the glaring problem with only focusing on Muda is that it doesn’t remedy instability in the process and as Deming reminds us, “Uncontrolled variation is the enemy of quality.”

Challenges to Exploring Variation

Even those who believe in the larger impact Continuous Improvement should have on culture and governance still shy away from addressing variability. I believe this hesitation has to do with the fact that exploring Mura requires more time and more expertise than addressing Muda.

This is where Six Sigma comes into play, when things get granular – and slow and granular isn’t as sexy as obvious and fast. Solving for variation is to purposely sweat the details and involves a lot of data collection, organization and statistical analysis – not as many people can or want to get involved in parsing through data sets.

In addition to giving management agita, the front lines also sometimes hesitate to tackle consistency. “We’re not robots,” is a common refrain. There is fear in that statement. Fear that they don’t matter, that their value (skill / experience/ contribution) is taken for granted and holding on to the status quo is the only guarantee – in their view – that they are seen. This sensitivity to change is why how Lean is implemented matters so much.

Solving for Variation is only Win Win

Nonetheless, before the post Muda honeymoon ends, operations leaders should absolutely turn their attention to inconsistencies in the process. As the article shows, the upside is huge. Not sometimes huge – almost always huge.

Given the reality that most Lean attempts are – at least initially – financially motivated, confronting variability ensures that your efforts to adopt Lean will continue to yield impressive cost cutting results. But better than that, it makes sustainability more likely – i.e. future benefits.

Moreover, the process of understanding inconsistency leads to alleviating the burden of unpredictability on employees up and down the food chain. This means less stress all around resulting in happier employees with the time and space to think about how to create value. And that is when things start to get interesting.