I used to think lean was something best begun at work. I listened to
friends who enthusiastically embraced lean in their homes, but I hesitated
to recommend those new to lean to follow their example. Replenishing
kitchen cupboards using Kanban cards and purchasing two dishwashers so
you never have to put the dishes away works for some people, but it can
also lead to domestic disputes for others.
Better to get some hands on experience of lean at work first before trying
to convince the rest of your family. Once the lean infection has taken,
then by all means think about taking it home. I certainly did warn those
taking the lean medicine that there was no antidote and that they would
begin to see lean opportunities everywhere. As you go off on your
holidays you will no doubt see more Mura (variation), Muri (overburden)
and Muda (waste) in new surroundings on your travels.
Perhaps the best place to start at home in my experience is doing 5S in
the home office – managing the flow
of paper in and out, using visual
management to store everything etc. However I now think we would all
make more progress with lean if we really begin using a lot more lean
management in running our own personal lives, both at home and at
work, particularly if you are a manager.
This was brought home to me recently in redesigning the complex flow of
patients through a hospital. With our team’s guidance they introduced the
core elements of visual management – a Plan For Every Patient and
Patient Progress Boards - to track the progress of patients from step to
step, to respond quickly when things did not go according to plan and to
identify recurrent problems that needed tackling. Variability in each step
in the process was reduced and overall performance improved
significantly. We had begun to create some stability before we began to
redesign the process itself.
However we then walked away to work elsewhere and the discipline of
using visual management tailed off things quickly went backwards again
and normal chaos was resumed. Not surprising really as the staff were
new to this, but much more significantly there was no effective
management to make it work. We had made our point and the stability
quickly returned when we came back a few weeks later. We have repeated
this experiment of walking away on several other projects, with the same
results. In these hospitals we were only seeing a more vivid example of
what happens time and time again with lean projects in every factory or
office. The key to sustaining lean is always management.
We have always said that learning lean is an experiential journey. The
same is true with lean management. So this year I have been
experimenting with using the tools of lean management in running my
life. One of the hardest things is to do is to use simple policy deployment
to focus on just doing the most important things and to deselect the many
other things you would also like to do but don’t have time for. The second
is using A3 planning to really define what you are trying to accomplish and
what actions might get you there.
Next comes using a plan by the day or at least plan by the week board to
visually manage your workload. My office calls this “Dan’s No Board” – as
it is really beginning to level out my workload and reduce my natural
tendency to say yes to too many things. Then if you can, do a little
reflection every week on your effectiveness – how many hours per week
are you really being effective and how much time is really not very
productive. If you are honest you will be surprised how much of your time
– and that of your employees - is
wasted in unnecessary meetings, fire
fighting, travelling etc. Being able to answer emails while on move for
instance goes a long way to making this time more productive.
I wish I could say all this is easy – it is not. It is genuinely difficult to
sustain. But keep at it and you will see it makes a huge difference to your
life.
Yours sincerely
Professor Daniel T Jones
Yours sincerely
Professor Daniel T Jones
