Day 225: Gaining some perspective through time

This past week, I hosted a tour of my organization. The visiting group was from Calgary and they worked in the financial services sector. They wanted to see how one company had adopted lean, to hear about their journey, their successes and their challenges. Within the group's members was a guy with whom I'd completed my Black Belt a few years prior. He had actually started his Black Belt in an earlier session, but completed at the same time as I. As part of the Black Belt training, you perform a lean assessment of an organization, and my friend had actually assessed Alpha for his Black Belt session. Now, that was in late 2011, and at that time Alpha scored a 3.0 out of 5.0 - a significant improvement from a previous assessment of 2.3. So my friend had the advantage of knowing about Alpha and our business, and had an idea of how we had adopted lean into our operations, but he was not ready for what he saw this time...

In fact, he told me afterwards that he was absolutely astonished at the changes since his last visit. I was actually a bit surprised at this, so I asked him what specifically did he see this time that wasn't here last time. Here's what he said:

• 5S (*and* 5S audits)
• Kanban
• VMI
• Point of use
• Pull of work
• Huddles
• Visual management
• Problem solving via Ishikawa diagrams
• K-cards + standard work
• Training within industry (TWI)
• Kaizen via A3s, PDCA boards
• Gemba walks with fixed stops/routes

It's a long list. I know some of these things were around at the time he was last here, but perhaps they weren't as predominant, as obvious, as pervasive throughout the organization as they are today - and not just in manufacturing either.

It's funny how when we are immersed in the day-to-day, we often do not see the progress made. It's a trick of the light, I think, that we can't see our accomplishments easily. We might not be standing in the right place - or time - to see them. Perhaps that trick is what keeps us motivated to continue to strive, to achieve, to improve.

I have a small hardbound notebook that I take when I travel, particularly when I travel to other companies. I like to jot my ideas and observations in that book. I bought it for my Black Belt trip to Japan in 2012, when I visited Toyota, Nissan, Mitsubishi, Toyo, Omron. I wrote down so many ideas of things I wanted to do back at Alpha on that trip. I took that same book with me to Europe earlier this year, and on the flight over, I flipped through the early pages - the pages with all those ideas from 2012. Many of them had in fact been implemented, and often further improved. It was an odd experience, looking back in that way. Perhaps my friend's visit was a bit like that. A chance to step back a bit and find a good spot to look at all that's been accomplished.

AMac