I am just back from Edmonton, after a three day White Belt kaizen session with another of our field service groups. This session was a bit unique in that this group was able to determine their own project instead of having a sponsor prepare a project for them. Lots of interesting ideas came up, but many of them involved people who were not in the room, not on the project team. In fact most of the ideas started out with "How about that process done in Toronto?" or "Maybe we can look at how we work with those guys in Burnaby?"
These were areas they had very little control over - half of their project time would have been spent trying to influence decision makers thousands of kilometres away.
While interesting ideas, I wanted to see what the team could accomplish there and then. We went to gemba - in this case the warehouse and the field tech's truck - and looked. What wasn't working here? What wasn't self-guiding, self-explaining? What should this area look like? What was difficult? Unsafe?
So I let them in on a little secret - sometimes the "CI" in "continuous improvement" really means control and influence.
Deciding on what improvement to make, and at what level, success will depend on both: your ability to affect change because you control the process - you are the decision-maker; and where you don't control the process, your ability to influence those who do.
So with their new version of "CI" in their kaizen tool box, standing in front of a pile'o'stuff that made no sense to them, the light bulb went on.
"We can fix this" they said.
And so they did.
After a whole lot of 5S, they saw the end result and how the new standard made sense for them. More importantly, they saw how they owned this new standard - no one from any of the other offices had any real control over their solution. As long as it worked for them and the type of work they did at this location, it was valuable to this team. Even better, the new standard would act as an influence on the other locations who were doing similar work.
Best of all, the team could see the logical next steps - which projects to tackle next, which additional improvements could be made - all focused on the areas in which they had the greatest degree of control.
AMac
Last week, I was lucky enough to participate - as a presenter - at the Burnaby Board of Trade's Green Talks! event. Five minutes on any topic about the greening of our business. I chose to talk about the major challenges we had in getting employees to care about waste sorting, about their commute, about the energy use at our facility. But I also showed how we slowly changed that mindset, and how after three years, the organization had achieved some impressive results. I talked about the need for branding, guerrilla marketing (quick'n'dirty/cheap & fast/funny), and communication. This was after all a change we were asking of our employees and we needed to do a good, no - great - job in communicating why we were making this change.
Which is more effective?
A company-wide email stating something like "Effective immediately, all employees will sort their organics into the green bins in the lunchrooms" with the email printed and taped above the bins.
OR
The new green bins, each bin adorned with distinctive, highly visual posters and labels, with the company's green mascot clearly shown, and a real live friendly person standing there explaining how and why we will sort our organics to prevent them from going to the landfill, and who gives you a lollipop as a reward for listening and sorting.
(Yes, we really did this.)
Seems pretty obvious I think. If you really want people to understand the need for a change, you have to talk to them about it. One of the building blocks of Training Within Industry (TWI) is called Job Relations (JR), and one of the core principles of JR is that you tell people in advance about changes that will affect them.
Seems pretty simple right? So why are people so surprised when the company-wide emails don't drive effective change? Why do organizations keep doing it and expecting results? Isn't that the definition of insanity?
I think it's because sending an email is EASY. Putting in some effort to (1) lay the foundation for the change, (2) talk to people about the change, (3) answer their questions about the change, (4) encourage the right behaviour with praise/reward isn't hard, but it's not as easy as sending an email. I'm pretty glad that I work with people who are willing to put in the effort to do it right. So much so that we put it on our wall.
So from being able to show off our sustainability successes at this event, and being really proud of all that we had accomplished in a few short years, less than a week later I turn around and have my doctor (my respirologist) tell me that I have developed pollution-triggered asthma. That's right. All my years of running, triathlon, cycling, swimming, skating, all those activities and accomplishments didn't make much difference - the air I was breathing on a daily basis was causing my lungs to constrict and would have eventually turned into COPD if I hadn't pushed to have it checked when I did.
The irony of this whole situation isn't lost on me.
I'm not certain what it means - for me - yet. But I'll figure that out.
AMac
I am just back from Edmonton, after a three day White Belt kaizen session with another of our field service groups. This session was a bit unique in that this group was able to determine their own project instead of having a sponsor prepare a project for them. Lots of interesting ideas came up, but many of them involved people who were not in the room, not on the project team. In fact most of the ideas started out with "How about that process done in Toronto?" or "Maybe we can look at how we work with those guys in Burnaby?"
