Build a system that loses money if you make defects.

All of us have six basic human needs: consistency, variety, significance, love and belonging, growth, and contribution. These needs are listed in the sequence in which they must be met. Think of each need being the foundation or layer upon which the next need is built. The fulfillment of each need leads to the fulfillment of the next. If a lower level need isn't met, higher level needs also won't be met.

"Think Systemically" is a principle in the Enterprise Alignment dimension of the Shingo Model. Through understanding the relationships and interconnectedness within a system we are able to make better decisions and improvements. This principle is largely based on the pioneering work of Russ Ackoff and Peter Senge. An example of thinking systemically is looking at the entire value stream to make improvements.

Some great articles for us Continuous Improvement Geeks!

Fantastic summary of why process is so important!

When I worked at Toyota, I was instructed to memorize the company's 10 Attitudes. Even now that I have moved on to another company, I find myself drawn to these core values. The following examines which each of these Attitudes means to me personally.

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.

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.

An event-based approach to process improvement can be a great driving force for change in an organization. It's easy to see exactly which parts of the process need to be altered and in what ways when looking at the situation from an event-based perspective, and this can often open up the doors to some interesting optimization possibilities. In many cases, those possibilities simply would not exist when considering the problem from another perspective, e.g. a flow-based approach.

Placing a limit on the work that can be handled by one worker or team at a time will prevent workers from starting new tasks when they still have unfinished tasks. Instead of having people start work on a new task if their current task is blocked or too difficult, the WIP limit will force them to examine why the current task is not moving forward. By establishing the reasons, they can then focus on finding a solution and finishing the task to allow more work to come in and resume the flow of work.

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."

Root Cause Analysis (RCA) is a valuable tool in quality improvement for identifying the underlying causes or facts of a issue or incident so proper solutions can be identified and implemented. It is a tool designed to identify not only what happened and how it happened, but also why. When you truly able to determine the facts of why an event happened, then you be be able to apply workable corrective actions to prevent future events. Some organizations mistakenly interpret the term 'root cause' to mean there is one root cause of an issue.

There are a series of benefits associated with standardized work using lean. When used properly, it can be a very effective tool in your arsenal. However, knowing the reasons as to why it should be implemented will also prove to be essential if we wish to get the best out of your approach. In order to help, we can spend some time examining three different benefits associated with it that may very well assist us in understanding why we may wish to use this tool.

By looking at something as simple as cycle time in an introspective manner encourages you to re-examine everything you do rather than just accepting the norm. Just because you believe things are running smoothly doesn't mean that it cannot be improved. But it is something that you will never know unless you are aware of the cycle time concept.

PDCA is a methodology used to control and continuously improve processes and products. The roots of the philosophy can be traced back to the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 1959. The father of modern quality control, W. Edwards Deming, referred to it as the "Shewart Cycle" and commonly referred to it as PDSA. It is known as a system for developing critical thinking.

We decided to use the approach that we're not going to focus on the outcome," Saban said. "We were just going to focus on the process of what it took to play the best football you could play, which was to focus on that particular play as if it had a history and life of its own. Don't look at the scoreboard, don't look at any external factors, just all your focus and all your concentration, all your effort, all your toughness, all your discipline to execute went into that particular play. Regardless of what happened on that play, success or failure, you would move on to the next play and have the same focus to do that on the next play, and you'd then do that for 60 minutes in a game and then you'd be able to live with the results regardless of what those results were."

Our lives get filled with clutter not instantly but slowly, one gift or purchase at a time, so slowly that it's difficult to even notice the clutter creep happening.

But it does happen, even to the most devoted of minimalists. If we're not ever vigilant, clutter rises like a slow never-ebbing tide.

Stacks of paper, closets overflowing, floors slowly covered by things we've meant to get to, shelves spilling from books we haven't gotten to, counters disappearing beneath piles.

It's time to clear some space to breathe.

I'm issuing a challenge for this month: declutter your space.

Effective visual management boards should allow anyone to know in real time exactly how the process is performing and where the issues are. To get there, organizations must clearly define what processes and improvements they want to measure. The key questions then become what exactly do you want to know about a process, then what are the critical metrics.

A good primer on visual communication

The TOC theory seeks to provide precise and sustained focus on improving the current constraint until it no longer limits throughput, at which point the focus moves to the next constraint. The underlying power of Theory of Constraints flows from its ability to generate a tremendously strong focus towards a single goal and to removing the constraint to achieving more of that goal.