There seems to be a common misconception that lean thinking
and innovation somehow conflict with one another. Many companies approach innovation as
something completely separate from lean in order to prevent concepts like
standardization and stability from stifling creativity.
This is unfortunate because innovation not only fits but is
actually a significant part of a lean system.
Failure to integrate innovation into a lean journey will lead to missing
out on many of the big gains that are possible with the strategy and hurting
the organization’s long-term competitiveness.
THE CONCEPT OF
IMPROVEMENT
At its most basic level, improvement consists of two
elements: problem-solving and breakthroughs.
Problem-solving involves addressing a drop in performance with the
objective of returning to the way things were before the problem occurred. This is critically important for maintaining
performance by increasing the stability of processes and systems. Most organizations, however, stop their lean
efforts there and fail to significantly improve because of a lack of attention
to improving performance and raising the standard. As important as stability is to performance,
raising the standards to new levels are just as important to long-term
competitiveness.
Breakthrough or kaizen thinking deals with this to
continually drive the organization’s performance to new levels. The successful application of kaizen into an
organization requires the type of innovative thinking and creativity that many
organizations are missing, have stifled in team members, or address completely
separate from lean.
MANAGEMENT
PROBLEM-SOLVING
Breakthrough can come from two sources: the vision and ideas
from team members to make products better and work easier. An effective vision provides direction
regarding how the company wants to perform in the future to be successful. It must be grounded in reality to some extent
but also provide enough of a stretch to energize people to apply the creativity
to make it happen. From this
perspective, a comparison of how the company currently performs and how it is
expected to perform 5 or 10 years in the future should provide a gap that needs
to be addressed through creative problem-solving, or breakthrough. As a general rule, this should consume about
20% of the organization’s resources, and the closer to the customer or the
company’s main business activities (i.e., the factory floor, service counter,
wellhead, etc.), the more the focus on the other 80%, or operating and
maintaining processes to meet performance targets, and conducting
problem-solving when targets are missed.
It should be noted, though, that the needs of every organization are
different and the split must be adjusted to fit individual situations.
Driving breakthroughs to close the gap to the vision is
basically management problem-solving and is where leaders need to spend a
significant portion of their time. This
is one of the many reasons why micromanagement of team members is damaging to
an organization. Besides the negative
effects on motivation, micromanagement shows that a leader is not developing
those on his or her team to handle day-to-day problem-solving in to free up the
leader to focus improving the system.
CHANGING THINKING
Problem-solving and breakthrough both usually reprogramming
in the way most people think. The
typical reaction to problem-solving is to immediately jump to the
countermeasure. This is often due to an
overloaded schedule, the need to look smart, arrogance, or many other factors
that are influenced by geographic and company culture. The problem with this is that, without
understanding the problem clearly, or determining the most likely root cause,
the countermeasure can be incorrect and worsen the situation, or even if it
does happen to work, the team misses a valuable opportunity to learn more about
the product or process involved.
Reprogramming thinking to improving problem-solving requires
developing the analytical skills to clarify the problem, break it down to
determine when, where, and how often it happens, and using a structured way to
discern the most likely root cause.
Basically, people need to learn to become detectives to determine what
changed since the process was meeting the standard.
Breakthrough thinking requires developing innovative or
creative thinking. This involves
developing the ability to clarify the need as the difference between current
performance and what it needs to be to meet the new target (similar to problem-solving). It also requires learning how to reflect and
observe to see what is keeping performance from improving beyond its current
level and teaching people to challenge their own assumptions to better
understand whether they are real or perceived, and if they are blocking new
ideas from being devekioed. Breaking
down the walls that protect one’s beliefs about the work is a key to increasing
the flow of ideas and creativity.
Although improvements will occur throughout the journey,
patience and a good deal of effort is required to develop problem-solving and
breakthrough thinking because it involves reprogramming the way a person has
likely thought and approached work for decades.
LEAN THINKING
INVOLVES BOTH
As an organization is undergoing a transformation toward
lean thinking, it is critical to think about the whole system, which includes
closing gaps to the standard as well as raising the standard. Considering problem-solving only and keeping
innovation separate from the effort tells people to that their ideas are not
valued and to only focus on getting processes to operate to current
standards.
Integrating the creativity of breakthrough thinking with the
stability of standardized work and problem-solving, however, can enable the
organization to tap into the big gains that most companies fail to
achieve. Like most of lean thinking,
however, it is a simple concept that requires patience, vision, and effective
leadership to make happen.
