Day 493: When "CI" means "Control and Influence"

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