Making It Stick
Jill Jusko points out that Toyota plans well. But this is like the story of the blind men who approach the elephant only to report severally that it is like a rope (the one who held the tail), a house (the one who felt the side), a tree (the one who grabbed a leg) and a snake (the truncated blind man). Great organizations plan well, pursue Ashkenas’ simplicity, have great leaders and followers and leverage all of Blanchard’s tools. They also stick at the very basics until they succeed. In fact, rather than tools, we often find that this focus on doing the basic blocking and tackling in a repeatable fashion is what is the hardest and most critical component of continuous improvement.
Why doesn’t everyone do this? We have found that:
- Process improvements backslide. Organizations that conduct kaizen events typically report dramatic improvement at the end of each event. However, check on the performance six to nine months later and often the reported performance has deteriorated. Backsliding also occurs with many other process-improvement projects.
- A limited percent of the organization is involved. At one of our clients, a Six Sigma team took on a process that generated an 11% scrap rate and reduced it to 5%—a success for the Black Belt and team. Months later, however, the scrap rate remained virtually unchanged when a number of small, front-line initiated process changes should have reduced scrap to well below 5%. Clearly, the front-line workers were not engaged in continuing to improve performance. Although executives, sponsors, and belts all received training, these groups totaled less than 7% of employees and the vast majority of employees were not really part of the initiative. Lacking a sufficient critical mass, the initiative stalled.
- Workforce development is absent or insufficient. Another client supplied an automotive OEM with critical parts, but defects resulted in line stoppages—a costly issue for both the supplier and the OEM. Most of the defects occurred in the molding department and one countermeasure required that the molding operators remove the part from the mold using a specific movement. Unfortunately, the front-line leaders lacked the skills to teach the operators correctly the required de-molding process or to continue to check that the operators followed the standard. Without these skills, and other critical skills for supervisors, the organization will continue to struggle.
Where do we learn to do these basic things well? Surprisingly, we often can find exemplary performance within our own organizations. A ready path to success is to transfer the knowledge, skills and abilities of Kellerman’s Good Followers to the Bystanders and Participants. In that way, great plans can be executed in great ways by the great employees that we tell ourselves we have.
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