Day 99: Make your own tuna sandwich

This past week, I spent three days at a local tech company with one of my coaches helping the company's employees with value stream mapping, cycle time reduction, root cause analysis, and standardization of processes. The group had three processes to work on, so they broke into three teams and went off to their meeting rooms, VSM kits in hand, somewhat tentative in what they were expected to do, what the outcomes would be.

This work is very much what I did in my Greenbelt, so I found myself thinking back to that experience. I remember feeling very lost and quite unsure in what the end result might be. My role this time was to help keep the teams moving, get them unstuck when they got stuck, and to challenge them. Challenge them to think big, think differently, to be brave and seek innovative and creative solutions to problems.

This is what I was going for:

Instead, this is what I saw:

During our hansei at the end of Day 1, I asked them all how they were feeling about their progress so far. They were frustrated, tired, annoyed with each other, and pretty much demoralized. Exactly the way I felt after Day 1. It was great! Seriously! I reassured them that this was perfectly normal, and they seemed happy to hear that.

Day 2, some of the teams were having some real "Aha!" moments, but some were struggling. My first instinct was to just jump in and tell them what to do - so I had to be very conscious in what I said to them - to not give too much direction, to not solve their problems for them. I had to channel my inner coach and quiet my outer handyman (woman?).

The old saying "catch a fish, feed a man for a day; teach that man to fish, feed him for life" popped into my brain here. I was not here to make people tuna sandwiches - I was here to show them how to make their own sammies, right? One team was trying to solve bottlenecks in an area completely foreign to the members - I heard a lot of assumptions and guesses and maybes - so when in doubt, what do you do?

GO TO GEMBA!

Which the team did - and they talked with the stakeholders - and they saw what was happening, what was contributing to the bottlenecks. Eureka! Major light bulbs going on there folks! This team suddenly started working together, with other employees, I'm talking Sales staff working with Warehousing and Shipper/Receivers! Boo-yeah!

By the start of Day 3, the teams were well along, most had new VSMs that had substantial time savings, and a list of TODOs to follow up on. More importantly, they were working across departments, and always thinking about their customers. It was great to see the progress achieved and the changes in the team dynamics. I think I did an OK job and was reasonably helpful. I hope they saw value in what we did, and will keep the momentum going.

Guess I can eat that tuna sandwich after all.

AMac