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Uncertainty may darken the entire horizon, but not everyone is affected equally.   The edge often goes to those who can learn quickly. "For the military," Petraeus observed, "learning faster than the enemy meant deploying lessons learned teams and ensuring commanders are focused on identifying the need to make changes to our big ideas, campaign plans, organizational structures, equipment, and operational bases." For companies, learning faster than competitors can mean incorporating a "What have we learned?" discussion into weekly or daily team meetings. Whatever the size of your organization, don't stop the learning with an observation. Drive to change behaviors.

How do Lean organizations develop their employees if Lean considers expenditure of resources other than for creation of value to be wasteful? First, a true lean organization isn't obsessed with waste. If anything, they are obsessed with value.  Waste is anything more than the absolutely minimum required to add value to a product or service; waste is not just anything that doesn't create value. I can't imagine much value can be delivered without the right skills and capabilities in the organization. Therefore, I don't think there is any conflict between developing employees and waste elimination. Second, a lean organization thinks about the total system, and thinks long term. There is a constant pursuit of the knowledge between cause and effect. All of that means that there is a strong understanding of the performance impact (effect) of more talented and skilled people (cause). Third, people think too narrowly about how they develop their people that they think it all must cost dollars, because it is all about training. I'm not suggesting that you should stop training; I've rarely seen an organization that is over-trained. What I'm suggesting is that the increase in developing people come from coaching and experimentation. These two sources of development are very powerful when done consistently and for the long-term.

Before moving on to the principles in the Continuous Improvement dimension, I want to introduce a new principle that has been proposed for the Cultural Enablers dimension. For purposes of this blog, I have named this principle "Build a Learning Organization."

The heart of most effective continuous improvement is experimentation. Experimentation is the mother of all learning methods. It drives learning throughout an organization based on what is real, not based on theory or opinion. Whether you use PDCA, DMAIC, 8D, A3s or any other method in the alphabet soup of continuous improvement, there is a backbone of experimentation whose spirit you can follow, or fail to.

And she is right. It makes no sense, based on her experience, to work hard to expose waste. Unless. Unless you and I, leaders in our organizations, act differently as well. Unless we demonstrate exposing waste gets rewarded, not punished. Unless we walk the talk ourselves. Unless we say thank you. Unless we demonstrate respect for her opinion. That's trust. And, without it, all the waste we so nobly hope to find remains hidden. Keep on learning.

Is this series of videos something that someone would organize a learning experience around?  I would love to attend.

Lean Tip #241 - Leaders must teach by example to transform a culture. To get people across an organization to systematically work on improvement every day requires teaching the skills behind the solution. And for that to happen, their leaders and mangers also need to practice and learn those skills.

Lean Tip #251 - Effective problem solving requires good understanding of the problem and the current situation. The first step in problem solving is to be certain you have a good understanding of the current situation. To ensure your solutions get to the root cause, you must understand the process where the problem initially occurred. When starting to diagnose a problem, don't rely on verbal reports to provide the details. Go to the work area, observe the situation, solicit help from the people in the area, and collect hard evidence for yourself. Gathering the facts first hand will help you gain a better understanding of the problem which, in turn, will allow you to better focus your solutions.

A bottleneck analysis is a detailed process where an organization gathers as much detailed information about the flow of a particular product or process. Specifically, data is gathered about the point(s) in the process where workflow is bottlenecking. This type of analysis can be done specifically to identify the cause of a bottleneck that is causing problems, or to learn about processes where a bottleneck is likely to occur in the future. The bottleneck analysis will provide important information about how things are done, and how they can be improved.

Watch the Neuroscience of Deming video - pretty interesting. Makes me want to re-read Deming.

Inspired! I love it. This is terrific reinforcement of the Learning Organization ideal.

Change management is a broad discipline that involves ensuring change is implemented smoothly and with lasting benefits, by considering its wider impact on the organization and people within it. Each change initiative you manage or encounter will have its own unique set of objectives and activities, all of which must be coordinated. As a change manager, your role is to ease the journey towards new ways of working.