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What's the point of the morning meeting? Paul Akers says it is about building a team. You can not build a team when the leader is talking. The leader must ask employees questions so they talk. When employees talk you are building a team.  What do you ask? Ask them "what bugs you?" Problems are not the employees fault. Management is to blame.

One of the most important learning's I took from the experience was how effective rapid prototyping and hands on experimenting could be in an event. The Sensei went from team to team throughout the event and kept telling us to stop brainstorming and start "trystorming (actual simulation or creation of the idea)." This meant putting away the flip charts and sticky notes and getting out on the floor and getting our hands dirty. Having the 3D, tangible "mock-ups" allowed the teams to quickly understand each others ideas and iteratively improve the solution in a way that would not be possible on paper. Simulations became real and many of the bugs of standard work could be worked out in advance prior to a "down stream" implementation.

While workplaces don't have commanders, they do have leaders. So the same principle of intent holds true in the civilian world. If you are a manager and your team knows how you define success, they will be able to make decisions in your absence. That is a critically important skill for a highly functioning team to develop

I believe this speaks to many of the issues we face: Imagine, however, an environment where each person was, somehow, physically connected to every other person in the organization. If a cable was constructed, reaching from each person outward in a web to the next person, until all were somehow connected, how would we behave? In such an environment, a hurried, frantic procurement team would be in the way of the assembly team, who would be thrown off pace by the inconsistency of the accounts payable group, who would need to be wary of the movements of the marketing group, who would be tripped up by the haphazard movements of the stock room. Everyone would suffer some physical impediment, as well as constant interruptions and irritations, straining the mental and emotional ties as well. Over time, our imaginary cable connecting everyone in the workplace would wear out, but probably not before the people in the "network" did.

What do you get when you combine free and Lean?  Well, the FreeLeanSite.com. Jay Watson is the Lean thinker behind this site. It grew from a passion of implementing Lean on the shop floor at companies like Motorola, Honeywell, and General Electric. He started the site to make "lean thinking" concepts of continuous improvement highly accessible for practitioners in North America. Our primary focus is on accelerating the developmental process, sustaining the effort, and most importantly - driving for results. The majority of the training modules are absolutely free to download and modify as needed. A management improvement process focused on elements of Safety, Quality, and Speed of Execution provides a framework for action. The site has four major sections to aid in finding the right resource: Jay also provides some advice on implementing Lean by defining a Lean Roadmap.The roadmap consists of the following three phases: PHASE 1 (GET READY): PLANNING FOR IMPROVEMENT PHASE II (GET SET): CONDUCTING A PILOT PROGRAM PHASE III (GO!): TEAM PROBLEM SOLVING/ SKILLS DEVELOPMENT I have been truly amazed by the sheer amount of Lean related material that Jay has compiled.  This is a great resource for learning on your own or sharing with your team.

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.

There is, however, another relevant layer: the underlying workflows that dictate what you work on and how this work is executed. For example, if you're a project manager at a consulting firm, and you spend much of your day emailing back and forth with your team members to get answers to questions from your clients, this behavior is an implicit workflow that dictates that asynchronous, unstructured messaging is your preferred method for extracting relevant information from your team.

I was recently working with a customer who works as a supervisor in a distribution operation.  She's new to lean and is tasked with developing her team to work autonomously to meet customer needs and continuously improve processes.  She asked, "How do I teach my team?"  It's a simple question, with a not-so-simple answer.  So, here are some thoughts on teaching others.  Keep in mind, I'm not trained to be a teacher, although I've facilitated many workplace training events.

How does your team run its pace line? When circumstances throw it off course, how quickly does it react to protect itself? How does your team re-establish its operating groove? What is communication like? How quickly does the wind tunnel return? Does your team practice this drill?

In the spirit of doing better, the smallest ideas are likely to be the easiest to adopt and implement. These improvements are sometimes called Point or Mini Kaizen. Making one small change is both rewarding to the person making the change and if communicated to others can lead to a widespread adoption of the improvement and the possibility that someone will improve on what has already been improved. There's no telling what might occur if this were the everyday habit of all team members.

The same goes for the four basic questions around the daily accountability process - the process by which leaders facilitate effective follow-through. The follow-through that I am referring to is about the countermeasures necessary for what some refer to as (team-based):

More from our team in the Distribution Center.

Good team effort to come up with this one.

Operating systems, government programs, established non-profits, teachers with tenure, market leaders, businesses with long-standing customers--these organizations are all facing an uphill battle in creating a culture where there's an urgency to improve. Just because it's uphill doesn't mean it's hopeless, though. One of the most essential tasks a leader faces is understanding just how much the team is afraid of making things better (because it usually means making things worse--for some people).

The FMEA Tool (Failure, Modes, Effects, Analysis) is a powerful tool available to a Lean Six Sigma practitioner. The tool is extensively used where a safety critical environment exists, such as the aerospace or automotive industry. The tool allows a team the ability to design quality and safety into processes or products on the front end of the environment, eliminating potential problems before they occur.

"The general answer to this question from today's webinar is that if people don't find a particular tool purposeful, they don't use it. More specifically for poka-yoke, there are seven reasons team members do not see the tool as purposeful:

I look forward to the day when our company implements Poka-yoke on our paper supplies. It works if you believe in it.

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.

"Challenge" is one of the explicit values in The Toyota Way 2001 but it looks quite different. Yes, there are challenges issued. But behind that challenge is a support structure. The leaders, at all levels are expected to stretch their own personal development, but to do so within the context of kaizen, deep understanding gained by genchi genbutsu, team work and most important of all, respect. The leader's development level is gauged by how the challenge is met even more than whether it is met. Just "get-r-done" doesn't work here.

Too often [kaizen] has come to mean assembling a special team for a project using lean of Six Sigma methods, or perhaps organizing a kaizen "event" for a week to make a burst of changes. We sometimes hear the phrase "doing a kaizen" as if it were a one-off activity. At Toyota, kaizen […] is how the company operates at the most fundamental level.