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Gemba walks are not to be confused with management by walking around (MBWA). The primary purpose of Gemba walking is to teach. When you are the Gemba walker, you are playing the role of sensei (mentor, coach, teacher). The role of the sensei is to ask questions, introduce new tools and approaches, stimulate new thinking, teach, and (sparingly) to give advice.

How do you start a Gemba Walk in your plant? It may seem overwhelming but it doesn't need to be.  Don't walk into the workplace looking for everything.  If you do, you will accomplish nothing while causing confusion. This simple list is a good place to start.  Use this list to build your own Gemba Walk theme.

The gemba walk how-to guide has its merits. But we need to be careful. Gemba walk templates, observation points, and sample questions can appear formal, audit-like, creating distance between the observer and the observed. We should worry less about doing the gemba walk the right way and focus more on doing the right thing by people. This means treating people as individuals and showing them respect. This means taking a genuine interest in person in front of us, in how they see reality and and learning how they wish to influence outcomes in their lives and work. Ultimately, the gemba walk is not about the gemba or the walk. It is all about the humble listen.

During one of my training opportunities a Toyota Sensei once told me that the highest form of "respect for people" was allowing people to solve their own problems.  This statement stuck with me and I have often used this during training/coaching sessions.  Apparently, this statement also stuck with my friend.  In the hallway last week he said after a year of gemba he finally understood his role as a leader and what I meant when I talked about "respect for people."   He said at first he loved the Lean approach, because he loved being in gemba, but after a while the follow-up became overwhelming to him and frustrating to the teams he worked with.  He said each time he went to gemba he felt guilty about the increasing number of problems he was not having the time to solve.

Leaders should adopt a 'gemba mentality' Firstly, leaders on a gemba walk need to realise that they cannot and should not provide the answers and solutions to the problems they encounter. They are primarily there to coach the process owners to take ownership of solving problems and developing solutions to make the process more effective and efficient, while also eliminating waste. It is the leader's role to ensure that all the people who are involved in the process are actively engaged in improving it.

What's more important… going to gemba (the place the work is done) or being able to performance basic and/or advanced statistical analysis?

Get out there, go to the Gemba. I say this to executives and to people on-the-floor alike. They must start their Lean journey with a trip to see what Toyota calls the three reals - the real place, the real data and the real problem. They must go and see for themselves, not just take the advice of a Lean committee!

Going to the gemba to understand what is really happening, digging for facts especially when they contradict popular perception, developing a strategy, and communicating that strategy to stakeholders and customers. That's leadership, law enforcement style.

Very simple things to do while in Gemba

Skip it. Avoid it. Leave it out. Never touch the stuff. Don't be tempted. Stick to the story. Succeed through subtraction. This man is a lean thinker. And he bears an uncanny physical resemblance to both John Shook and James Womack, after they borrowed some hair from Mike Rother. If Elmore Leonard cared what a gemba walk was, he might say something like this:

gemba-based observers should be able to understand, unassisted, what a given object, process or system is. If relevant, a visual control should also share the subject's purpose, and related operating rules, including a definition of the normal condition (and often, what to do in response to an abnormal condition).

A customer asked last week whether Gemba Academy had a video comparison of solving a problem using a non-CI approach vs. solving the same problem with some basic CI tools and thought processes. While this is one of our favorite topics and is addressed here and there in blog posts, videos and podcasts, we didn't have this exact module. It is a good suggestion to collect and summarize these in one place. As a first step, here is my draft of the top 10 differences between traditional problem solving and problem solving that is infused with the principles and practices of continuous improvement.

Some great articles for us Continuous Improvement Geeks!

When you are at the gemba, you are watching the work. We like to say you are "looking for waste" and list seven, or eight, or ten different categories of waste that you are supposed to look for. I think it is simpler than that. An ideal workflow is smooth. The product moves smoothly, without starts and stops, without sudden changes in momentum. The people move smoothly. Each of their motions engages the product and advances the work in some way. Machines do not interfere with the smooth movement of product or people. Information flows the same way. There is nothing in how it is stored, retrieved, or presented that causes people to break their smooth rhythm. When you watch the work, try to visualize what smooth would look like. Smooth has no wasted motions, no excessive activities. Anything that doesn't look smooth is likely the result of an accommodation, an awkward operation, poor information presentation, poor computer screen layout and workflow. Just another way of looking at it.

Go to the gemba. Go and see. Stand in a circle and observe what's happening with your own eyes.

I liked when he pointed out that we must look for evidence that things are going right. The 21 questions post also looks at this issue of what to look for.

The only thing better would be if he had a stand-up desk!

Great story about the power of going to Gemba!

A good reminder that during our Gemba walks we need to notice safety issues.

So, think of standard work more as a verb and less as a noun. Next time when you're at the gemba, take note of the revision date of the standard work sheets and standard work combination sheets. If they haven't been updated and improved over the last quarter or two, then you might have an issue. There's a good chance that you've never left the land of system-driven kaizen.