Day 81: The Harada Method and Goal Setting

It was a beautiful day for some learning at Lean Sensei's office - check out that view! How inspiring!

Wouldn't if be great to see that view every day (when not raining of course, this is Vancouver after all)? Wouldn't it be great if we could afford a big house in this area of Vancouver? What would it take to achieve that goal?

Now, that actually isn't a goal I am interested in pursuing, but it leads me back to the topic du jour: goal setting. The Harada Method is a way to break down large and distant or difficult goals into smaller steps, many of which could be converted to habits. The sum cumulative effect of all these small habits would bring one closer to the goal; even if the goal itself wasn't achieved, the progress would be noticeable.

So if I were to think of a goal that I would like to achieve, a big goal, let's pick a fun one: I would like to podium (place 1st thru 3rd) at the 2015 National long track masters championship, next February in Calgary. The Harada Method would have me list eight steps I can take to help me achieve that goal. For example: Target an opening 400m lap time of 35sec or better. Or: complete a Cooper test (12 min skate) with 50 or more laps on a 111m track.

Now my speed skating obsession aside, I want to try to apply this to some work-related goal. Our EXCEL team has a goal of $2M in documented savings for the year (2014). I think this is totally achievable but some of my teammates aren't so sure. If I were to write down the 8 steps I can take to help the team achieve that goal, what might those steps look like? Maybe something like:

- check in weekly with black belts and help them with cost-savings analyses

- publicize the current savings YTD total and the current gap

- find and offer opportunities to team members to work on kaizen to contribute to the total

I will try to develop the rest of the model, and see what my teammates think... Stay tuned!

AMac

Day 78: A month later... still catching up... making headway but culture change is sloooowwww

Well, it's only been a month since I last updated this blog and I have been busy!

We have been working on defining objectives and goals for each employee scorecard.  Every year, we start at the top level corporate objectives, and work our way down to individuals' goals and objectives. It's our version of hoshin kanri and it's been a challenge to get a different approach or mindset to making these more consistent across departments. We usually ended up with each department doing this work in relative isolation. We tried a different approach this year, where we shared far more information on objectives a few levels down from the top, identifying each affected department. I have been trying to push for common objectives, usually focused on quality or similar (being my main responsibility). But I took a different approach this time around and tried to challenge our leadership team to be brave.

Are our managers head's in the clouds?

This year, for the first time, we have added a CI project objective on every single employee scorecard (all 600+ of them). I feel validated! Now, not everyone was thrilled with this, but the leadership team agreed it was the best way to really drive a cultural shift in people. If we can convey that every employee has a responsibility to make even a small improvement, then maybe we can make the biggest leap of all: going from the constant excuse of "I don't have the enough time" to having full support from middle management to allow employees the TIME to do improvement activities. 

I have always struggled with how to address the disparity between "do what I say, not what I do" that flourishes within many organizations. Manager X might tell his staff that quality is important, but then turn around and tell the same people to ship crappy product, because on time delivery is important. How is an employee to reconcile those two conflicting messages? How can we expect employees to make good decisions, using their best judgement, when the message is that confusing? No wonder many employees are either paralyzed with fear of making any decision (for fear of being wrong) or simply check out and stop caring either way.

Many years ago, when I was working in software development, I was introduced to the concept of the triangle of product quality. The points of the triangle were simply: features, cost, time to delivery. You could fix two of the points, let the third be flexible, and still achieve an appropriate level of quality. You could not, however, constrain all three points tightly and expect good results. Or, in simpler terms: do you want it good? Fast? Or cheap? Pick two. Try to nail down all three, with no wiggle room on any of the point, and the results would usually be poor. 

Perhaps if we were all honest about what trade offs we were making, which risks we were accepting, which points of the triangle we were overly constraining, perhaps employees wouldn't feel so disenfranchised. Maybe they wouldn't think the company was being run by chickens.

AMac