Do People Feel Comfortable Showing Problems?

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One of the most common obstacles to successfully deploying lean is failure to appreciate the level of transformation required in behaviors and systems. Far too often, companies attempt to implement a variety of lean tools on top of traditional systems and behaviors and are disappointed with the results.


Among the many behaviors that require transformation for lean to work effectively is the need to make problems visible. Since lean is heavily focused on continually comparing actual results to standards and addressing the issues that cause gaps between the two, it can only work when problems are highlighted quickly and honestly.


Is it Really That Difficult?


Assuring problems are visible makes perfect sense and is something many organizations mistakenly believe they already do. For a variety of reasons, showing problems is not something that does not come naturally to many people. It is more natural to hide – or at least not openly display – problems with the hope they can be resolved before being discovered.


It is important to understand the reasons people hide problems and to realize that transformation is required in order to make it okay – and even an expectation – to show problems quickly and clearly.


Why do we Hide Problems?


Although there are a number of reasons that people don't feel comfortable showing their problems, a few tend to show up more than others. The first is a fear of looking incompetent or unable to do the job effectively. Whether the result of a highly competitive culture, overreaction of leaders to problems in the past, or something built into the person's emotional makeup, some people will not feel comfortable openly showing problems. Even when internal competition is not openly encouraged, a history of promoting people who hide problems or twist the story to make it appear that things are under control can cement the idea that it is not okay to openly discuss problems.


Another cause of hiding problems is the fear of getting "help" from people who don't understand what's really happening in the workplace. Some leaders feel that it is important to have all the answers and will regularly offer solutions to the problems without having all the facts. When the leader is disconnected from gemba, this leads to frustration in team members because they will feel compelled to follow the proposed solutions even when they know they won't work.


It is perfectly normal for people to want to show that processes are running smoothly and things are under control.  Because of this, it is up to the company's leaders to continually instill the idea that highlighting problems is not only acceptable but expected within the organization.  This means that there should never be negative consequences for making a problem visible.  On the contrary, it should be made clear to everyone that hiding problems or failing to take action to address them is an unacceptable behavior.


As leaders are able to create the culture that it is okay to make problems visible, there are three common ways to help people show problems quickly and clearly: alarms or andons, dashboards, and meetings.


Andons


An andon signal is a way to immediately show that some aspect of work is not meeting standard. Andons are perhaps the most effective way to show problems because they are designed to highlight a problem immediately and at the point where it happens. Examples include ropes or buttons in the factory where people can signal a problem as it happens, or sensors that detect problems immediately (e.g., retrieving components for an assembly in the incorrect sequence by sounding an alarm when the operator reaches into an incorrect bin).


The keys to making an andon successful include having clear standards, enabling quick notification, providing immediate help, and recording the problems for longer-term problem-solving.


Dashboards


A key objective of a dashboard for an area or process is to clearly and objectively show the gaps between expected and actual results.  Hiding the gaps or continually putting a positive spin on how things are going misses the opportunity to align team members on what's important, and the problems that require attention.


Posting charts that track what's critical for an area help keep people focused on how a process is expected to perform and, the more sensitive the chart, the more quickly action can be taken when a gap occurs.


Dashboards become ineffective when too much data is displayed or the charts lack simplicity. Think how difficult driving would be if the dashboard in your car contained 10 or 12 gages with a variety of information on each.  The same applies to a dashboard for a work area.  Keeping it simple and clearly connected to company or system targets is a key to assuring it is effective.


It is also critical to keep dashboards easy to maintain. Too often, people create multi-color, three-dimensional charts that show too much data, making the charts become nothing more than eye candy.  The purpose of a chart is to highlight problems, not prove how adept someone is at creating graphs.


Meetings


Many companies waste a lot of time in meetings talking about what is going well.  Performance is reviewed and discussed – sometimes in excruciating depth – even when processes are on-target.  People learn to dread meetings and use the time to catch up on email, Instagram, or the latest headlines on their phones.

The more daily and weekly meetings are focused on gaps - existing and potential - the more engaged people will be.  The dashboards should drive the meetings and, the better the dashboards, the quicker people can zero in on the gaps and talk about what is truly important.

When teams do this well, they begin to take advantage of the collective knowledge of the team by focusing on improving performance.  If they dance around the real issues by ignoring the gaps and continually putting a positive spin on how things are going, they miss opportunities to build teamwork and address the real problems.

The Problems Are There - Why Not Look at Them

Every organization has problems, and a key determinant of success is how well the problems are addressed.  Openly showing the problems is the first step to resolving them.  Getting to this point, however, often requires shifting behavior to make it okay – even expected – to look for the gaps.

Improving Dashboards With The 3-Meter Rule

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Dashboards are critical for a successful continual improvement effort.  Effective dashboards can drive better coaching, faster team meetings, and more effective problem-solving.  A common problem that interferes with the effectiveness of dashboards, however, is the inclusion of charts that attempt to convey too much information and are difficult to understand.  One way to prevent this problem is to make sure that all charts on a dashboard comply with the 3-meter rule.

Simply stated, the 3-meter rule means that a chart should clearly convey its message from a distance of 3 meters.  When looking at a chart, if you need to move close or ask for explanations to understand the information displayed, you can assume that the chart is in need of improvement. 

Dashboards should drive conversations around closing gaps between current and targeted performance.  To make sure the conversations are focused and effective, however, they should be centered around data. When the problem or breakdown is not clear, people will spend time attempting to understand the intention of the chart rather than addressing the problems shown by the data.

Besides helping focus the discussion on problem-solving, a chart that meets the 3-meter rule enables more people to be involved in the conversation.  The closer someone needs to be to understand a chart, the fewer people who are able to see the information and participate in addressing the problem.  Minds wander and separate discussions begin to happen, which negatively impacts the effort.

Creating charts that are easy to understand from a distance of 3 meters sometimes requires significant reflection and effort, but the investing time upfront can greatly aid the improvement process by making objectives clear and the problems that interfere with meeting the objectives visible.

Identifying Proper Leading Metrics

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One of the areas of lean that people tend to have difficulty grasping is the relationship between leading and lagging metrics, and how to identify effective leading metrics. People spend a lot of time attempting to determine leading indicators that, in the end, are often disconnected with any of the actions being taken to improve performance. 

Leading and lagging metrics both have a role to play in improving performance and are not difficult to identify once you understand the process and how to properly connect them to the problem-solving.

LAGGING METRICS

A lagging metric measures the result of a process. Barrels of oil produced, total recordable incident rate (TRIR), warranty expenses, and production costs are all examples of lagging indicators because the activities they measure have already occurred. The result lags the activity being measured and, whether you are happy with the result or not, you can't do anything to change it. 

Lagging indicators are important because they tend to represent what's important to the area being measured. They measure a result we are ultimately trying to achieve and help us determine if our efforts were successful in meeting targets.

Other examples of lagging metrics include on-time delivery, actual capital expenditures, defect rate, and customer satisfaction. Identifying them requires a clear understanding of what the business or team is ultimately trying to achieve. 

LEADING METRICS

A leading metric is a measure of an activity that influences a lagging metric.  As a measure of an activity being performed by a team, leading metrics can be influenced by the team in an effort to improve the results of a lagging metric. 

As an example, suppose a team is trying to improve safety performance as measured by TRIR and, through a breakdown of past incidents, discovers that hand injuries represent the largest category.  After breaking down the problem, the team determines that incorrect use of tools is the most likely cause and failing to wear gloves is increasing the severity of the injuries.  As a way to reduce the number and severity of hand injuries, the team introduces regular training sessions and an audit process to help assure team members are using proper tools and gloves.

The team can now create a dashboard that measures like TRIR (lagging metric), injury type (lagging breakdown), hand injuries (lagging metric), training classes held (leading metric) and audit results (leading metric).  By following these leading metrics, the team is assuring that the activities to improve safety are happening and that they are truly reducing hand injuries. 

In the above example, the effort of identifying the leading metrics did not consist of an isolated brainstorming session attempting to identify a specific metric to follow.  It was integrated with the problem-solving process and became nothing more than identifying a measure of the actions taken to eliminate a root cause of the problem.

KEEP IT SIMPLE

The problems people have related to identifying leading metrics often result from failing to connect the effort to problem-solving.  Attempting to determine the proper leading metrics in isolation from problem-solving often leads to frustration and wasted effort in creating and maintaining the measures, and a lack of clarity in understanding how to improve performance of lagging metrics.

Using Dashboards to Develop Leaders

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It is pretty widely known that the role and responsibilities of a leader differs significantly in a lean environment.  As is often the case, though, knowing and doing are two different things.  Becoming a lean leader, like most of lean thinking, is a simple concept that is very difficult to apply.

Jeffrey Liker and Gary Convis wrote about the system of lean leadership in The Toyota Way to Lean Leadership.  In the book, they point out that the four basic responsibilities of a leader within a lean culture are (1) develop self; (2) develop others; (3) create alignment between vision and goals; and (4) drive daily improvement.  Although appearing to be fairly straightforward, putting these responsibilities into practice can be very difficult without understanding that lean is a system where the elements have to be applied together to successfully transform an organization.  Lean is like a Charles Dickens novel, where even the seemingly smallest details play a part in the story. 

What this means is that the leadership responsibilities listed above cannot be approached in isolation.  They work together, along with the tools and principles, to drive improved performance.  And focusing on the details while keeping the overall system in mind is not an easy thing to do.

I have found very few people today who don’t agree that lean makes sense for business.  Leading a team, plant, or organization, however, is a complex and challenging undertaking; and with a host of responsibilities and competing priorities and pressures, it’s not realistic to expect a leader to change his or her way of leading just because it makes sense.  The best way to help people understand how the work they do can align with these four responsibilities is to show them.  By going to gemba and demonstrating how the elements of lean work together to drive improvement, those you are coaching will begin to understand how the philosophy connects to real work. 

The Role of Dashboards

Dashboards are a perfect place to demonstrate to leaders how to fulfill the responsibilities of developing others, creating alignment, and driving improvement (and, more indirectly, developing oneself).  By creating a standard script and coaching leaders around the use of questioning based on data, you can help them gain comfort in the application of lean thinking through improved understanding of how the elements work together to drive improvement.

The questions I often use around dashboards include the following:

• What is the target? This question assures that the team is clear on what they is trying to accomplish.  It directly addresses one of the biggest problems in organizations that people “just know” what they are expected to accomplish by making the targets absolutely clear.
• Why? This moves the conversation from clarifying the target to assuring that it is the correct target.  To be truly successful, people need to understand why they are doing what they are doing, and clarifying the higher level objective helps drive alignment to the vision.
• What’s the gap? Effective problem-solving requires clarity around the gap between the target and what is actually happening.
• What are you doing about the gap? Actions to improve need to be directly aligned with the gaps in performance, and questioning the team leader on this can help assure that: (1) actions are being taken to close the gap; and (2) it is likely that the actions will be successful.  Asking how the actions were developed and assuring that they are focused on root causes will also help improve problem-solving capabilities. 
• How are the actions going? It should be clear from the dashboard which actions are being taken and how they are doing.  This is the conversation around leading and activity-based indicators that show whether or not the team is carrying out the activities they feel will address the root causes.  If the actions are being completed as planned, is it starting to close the gap?  If not, why not?  If so, what is the team planning to address next?
• What help do you need? A leader should always close the conversation with an offer of help to show that he or she is just as committed to improvement as the team.

The process can be demonstrated through a scripted conversation or by walking the leader through several dashboards to help him or her become more comfortable about applying it on a regular basis.  What is important is to understand that learning does not happen without action, and action requires that people know what they’re expected to do and how to do it.

The Science of Dashboards

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One of the elements of lean that seems simple but is often misunderstood is the development and use of dashboards.  People are often surprised to learn that there is a science to creating an effective dashboard and that it consists of much more than posting metrics related to the area.

A dashboard should drive development of people and improvement in performance.  If these two things are not happening, then it needs to be changed.  Too often, I find that the metrics on dashboards are oriented toward providing information to management rather than providing the team with the type of feedback that helps drive improvements.  If the team does not find value in the dashboards, then it is waste.

ANATOMY OF A DASHBOARD

I approach the development of dashboards by initially questioning the team about the value it provides and the problems it encounters.  Clarifying the team’s purpose will help it zero in on the value it provides to the process and what it should measure to assure it is helping the organization achieve its objectives.  It also prevents the team from becoming too narrowly focused on one target while ignoring others that are just as important (e.g., a supply chain team focusing on the price of incoming materials rather than the total cost of the material, which includes the effects the material has on production).

One thing to keep in mind with the process is that it requires time to reflect and truly understand what is happening with the process.  Once the team purpose is clear, people can start to develop the metrics that will help drive the type of improvements needed to contribute to the organization’s success through the following steps:

• Define lagging metric targets: Lagging metrics measure of the result of a process.  Defining the targets in terms of key areas like safety, quality, production, cost, etc. help measure what is ultimately important for the team.  The lagging metric connects the team’s work to the larger system and provides feedback regarding the success of improvement efforts;
• Develop leading metrics: The leading metrics are the predictors of the lagging metrics in that they help to identify what is happening now that will eventually affect the lagging metrics. 
• Identify activity-based leading metrics: Since some leading metrics are really lagging metrics, it is critical to work toward activity-based leading metrics, which measure what the team is actually doing to close the gaps in lagging metrics.  The activity metrics are, in effect, the team’s efforts to solve the problems that show up in higher-level lagging metrics.

The figure below presents a very simple example of a safety dashboard for a rotor assembly area of a factory.  The top of the dashboard provides information about the longer-term direction of the company.  Although this may seem obvious to some, it is important to always maintain the connection between the team’s efforts and the company’s vision.

The next level of the dashboard provides what the company determined to be its ultimate measure of safety, followed by the rotor assembly team’s performance and focus for improvement.  In the example, the team determined that it needed to reduce hand injuries in order to improve its safety performance and further decided that it will conduct regular audits and provide ongoing training to team members on a variety of hand safety issues.

The benefit of this dashboard is that the team can use it to identify the gaps in safety performance and actually measure what it is doing to improve.  If safety is not improving, the team can look to the activity measure and figure out why, for example, audits are not being conducted according to plan.  Team members can take action to assure audits are conducted as planned to ultimately determine whether or not they are driving improvement as expected.

The development objective of the dashboard comes from the conversations around the dashboard.  How is the team performing?  What are you doing about the gaps? Why are you focusing on hand injuries? Etc.

The effort takes quite a bit of coaching and reflection by the team to truly understand the process and how to improve to achieve targets.  Once everyone understands that the customer of the team’s dashboard is the team, it becomes much easier to develop one that actually helps drive improvement. 

Making Problems Visible Is More Difficult Than It Sounds

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One of the many elements of lean that is conceptually very simple but difficult to put into practice is the need to make problems visible.  Although highlighting problems so they can be addressed makes sense, there is often a reluctance resulting from fear that doing so can damage one's career.  In organizations with highly competitive cultures, for example, openly discussing problems can make a person appear incompetent and ineffective. Even without open competition, organizations that tend to promote those who hide problems by putting a positive spin on poor performance are unconsciously cementing a behavior that it is not okay to openly discuss problems.

It is perfectly normal for people to want to show that processes are running smoothly and things are under control.  Because of this, it is up to the company's leaders to instill the idea that highlighting problems is not only acceptable but expected within the organization.  This means that there should never be negative consequences for making a problem visible.  On the contrary, it should be made clear to everyone that hiding problems or failing to take action to address them is an unacceptable behavior.

Two areas where it is important to make problems visible are dashboards and meetings.

Dashboards

The objective of a dashboard for an area or process is to clearly and objectively show the gaps between expected performance and actual results.  Hiding the gaps or continually putting a positive spin on how things are going misses the opportunity to align team members on what's important so the problems can be addressed.

Posting charts that track what's critical for an area keep people focused on how a process is expected to perform and, the more sensitive the chart, the more quickly action can be taken when a gap occurs.

It is important to note that dashboards become ineffective when too much data is displayed. Think how difficult driving would be if your dashboard contained 10 or 12 gages.  The same applies to a dashboard for a work area.  Make it simple and clearly connected to company or system targets.

It is also critical to keep dashboards simple and easy to maintain. Fight the urge to multi-color, three-dimensional graphs that show too much data.  To purpose of a chart is to highlight performance, not prove how adept someone is at creating graphs.

Meetings

Many companies waste a lot of time in meetings talking about what is going well.  Performance is reviewed and discussed - sometimes in excruciating depth - even when processes are on-target.  People learn to dread meetings and use the time to catch up on email or the latest headlines on their smart phones.

The more the daily and weekly meetings are focused on the gaps - existing and potential - the more engaged people will be.  The dashboards should drive the meetings and, the better the dashboards, the quicker people can zero in on the gaps and talk about the actions to address them.

When we do this well, we begin to take advantage of the collective knowledge of the team by focusing on improving performance.  If we dance around the real issues by ignoring the gaps and attempting to put a positive spin on how things are going, we miss an opportunity to build teamwork and fail to address the real problems.

The Problems Are There - Why Not Look At Them

Every organization has problems, and a key determinant of success is how well the problems are addressed.  Openly showing the problems is the first step at resolving them.  Getting to this point, however, often requires shifting behavior to make it okay - even expected - to look for the gaps.