Lean only apples to automotive….

It only works in a Japanese culture….

It only applies to repetitive work….

It only applies to manufacturing….

Fortunately, there are many well-publicised examples of lean being applied successfully in many industry sectors and countries that contradict all the above.

It’s about process improvement, so our CI department can implement it…

This misses the point that in an organisation becoming lean every single person should be using the countless problems that arise in performing day-to-day work to identify root causes and developing countermeasures.

I’ve got an empowered workforce – let them get on with it….

Ignores the fact that in a lean organisation, every person understands exactly how what they do daily impacts on business objectives and works to improve their attainment. And there is very close monitoring of progress towards objectives at all levels of the organisation, with PDCA problem solving and countermeasures being employed where necessary.

It’s a project methodology….

Loses the opportunity to ensure every single person is involved actively in improvement on a never-ending basis.

I can introduce it by diktat…

Lean only works if people are convinced of the need, their experience shows it actually improves life for them, and if they are encouraged to solve their own problems as much as possible. The directive approach to management needs to be replaced by a coaching approach to allow people to develop their lean skills.

Value stream mapping is just process mapping with another name….

People who say this often focus entirely on the work flow, at a very detailed level, completely ignoring the associated information flow. Experienced value stream mappers will know that often major improvements in value stream performance are achieved as a result of improving the information flow as well as the work flow.

It’s about/we can use it to cut heads…

Organisations that try to use lean to reduce payroll numbers do so only one time. Respect for people, a foundation of lean, disappears, and no further cooperation can be expected from employees.

I can delegate this to others while I focus on the strategically important stuff….

All the great lean examples have a common characteristic – a chief executive who leads the lean journey by example.

It can’t improve knowledge work….

Often said about the work of designers, doctors, IT systems developers etc. However, John Toussaint of the ThedaCare Center for Healthcare Value in USA has found that surgeons can apply standard work to their procedures.

In their book Lean IT, Steve Bell and Mike Orzen make a distinction between processes and practices, the latter being “non-routine, highly variable, loosely defined and requiring a degree of judgement and experience to carry out.” They state that lean can help the design of knowledge management systems to manage both unstructured data and structured data that will support and help improve practice (or knowledge) work.

If we understand lean management as applying PDCA by everybody at all levels of the organisation and focus effort on the three aspects of purpose, process and people, perhaps there will be fewer myths and more action.

In the early to mid-1990s, The Boldt Company took up the initiative of looking for ways to increase productivity. At that time, a large percentage of our work was self-performed.  Our goal was to find ways that we could improve productivity in an effort to reduce schedules and lower costs without sacrificing quality.

We embarked on an extensive labour productivity challenge believing that if we were to break the work down into specific increments and assign aggressive targets for the completion of those increments, our workforce would gradually begin increasing their production and we would achieve the breakthrough results that we were looking for.

We began tracking everything, from square feet of surface area of concrete formwork to tons of reinforcing steel placed, to lineal feet of steel studs. Through all of our efforts, we achieved improvement but not at the levels we had hoped. We kept our eyes open for new and innovative developments that might offer the solution to our challenge.

In 1998, we began to investigate how Toyota’s lean model could be used in the construction industry. We also became aware that an organisation by the name of the Lean Construction Institute was on this same track.

In 1999, The Bold Company became one of the early members of the Lean Construction Institute. With their help, we launched an initiative to implement the Last Planner^® System and Pull Planning. We selected five projects to target for implementation.

The results we achieved were nothing short of amazing: in our previous attempts to improve productivity, we achieved somewhere between a 3% to 5% improvement in schedule and budget performance. On our first attempt of implementing lean tools we were seeing the potential for a 10 to 15% increase without any additional resources.

During these early years, our lean efforts were focused primarily on the implementation of the tools.

At the time we really didn’t understand why the tools worked for us but it was through them that we slowly began to see the impact that such things as constraint removal and the reliability of commitments had on the outcome of our projects.

In retrospect, our use of the tools started to change the way that we looked at the construction process. For the first time we were able to view it from the perspective of overall project performance improvement and optimisation, as opposed to a more myopic view of merely improving and optimising individual parts.

By 2000 we had implemented the Last Planner and Pull Planning on 20 projects, all of which ended up performing well above our expectations.

That same year we were presented with an opportunity to expand the use of the newly discovered planning tools to the design process in addition to the construction process. Coincidentally, we had just started approaching target costing, a process used by lean companies to eliminate waste and innovate value in product development.

We negotiated a contract with a private university in rural Minnesota for the design and construction of a 114,000-square-foot athletic facility. That previous year another private college located in the same town had just completed the construction of a similar 85,400-square-foot facility. They did it in 24 months using a conventional design/bid/build model, for a cost of $13.5 million.

We discussed our lean delivery concept with our design partner and decided to give it a try: we completed the project in 2002 and it was a complete success, by all measures. We designed and constructed our facility in 14 months for a total cost of $11.7 million.

That was a 35% reduction in cost on a price-per-square-foot basis and a 42% reduction in schedule as compared to the other facility.

The results confirmed that the path we were on with lean was the right one. With that project we recommitted our effort and began exploring and experimenting with new techniques.

We rapidly moved from the implementation in five projects in 1999 to more than 40 by 2001. In addition to Last Planner and Pull Planning, we began implementing and developing new tools such as target costing, project financial management, workflow, production management, lean business process and collaborative project delivery.

Each time we implemented a new process it changed the way we saw what we were doing. For the first time we began to see problems that we never knew existed through conventional eyes.

Over time our focus began to shift, and seeing problems became easier. We began to look for, or in some cases to develop, our own tools to solve the problem we saw, rather than using the tools to see the problem.

THE CHALLENGE

Our journey has developed over the course of 15 years. The current paradigm within the construction industry states that there is a dynamic balance between project cost, schedule and quality. It is believed that you are only able to have an impact on two of these factors at any one time.  If you wish to maintain the level of quality on a project, the only way that you are able to increase the speed of delivery would be to increase cost.

This point was proven on another Boldt project. We were constructing a 446,000-square-foot, 9-story hospital in Sacramento, California.

We asked our field team to put together a schedule that reflected what they believed it would take to install the exterior skin of the building. This was a critical aspect for the project since we needed to enclose the building before we could begin any of the interior framing.

After several weeks of planning, the project team delivered a schedule that indicated it would take 11 months (240 working days) to complete the task.

Their reasoning was sound. However, in order to deliver the project as promised, we would need to complete the task in just six months (130 working days). We asked the project team to go back and look at their schedule and tell us what it would take to complete the project in that time frame.

They concluded that the work could in fact be done in that time, but that it would result in a substantial cost increase.

Their plan was to attack the problem by adding additional shifts and stacking the trades.

The increased cost was due to shift differential pay and inefficiencies in the execution of the work. We challenged the project team, but they were convinced that their plan was the only way to succeed.

The traditional approach would have been to accept the team’s recommended schedule – after all, this was an exceptionally experienced team with years of successful projects behind them.

What we were asking the team to do defied all conventional thinking: we wanted to maintain the level of quality, reduce the schedule, AND maintain the price.

From our experience we understood that if we were able to achieve our goal of six months we were going to have to help the team see the work from a different perspective. To help with the challenge, the team turned to line of balance or takt time planning. They used the following steps:

1.  Define work sectors – The team broke the work to be done into areas of approximately equal amounts of work;
2. Trade sequence – The team identified all of the necessary trades that needed to pass through a sector to complete the work;
3. Durations – Each trade sequence was analysed to identify the crew size and duration;
4. Balance workflow – All durations and crew size were analysed and then sized appropriately to ensure that the work in each sector flowed without interruption. There would be no work waiting on workers and no workers waiting on work;
5. Production plan – The final step was to sequence the workflow into a production plan.

To ensure that quality was also maintained, the team established a Built-In Quality work plan. This helped the team to ensure that not only was the work to be completed on time but that it would be completed correctly and with the expected level of quality the first time.

The results of the effort stunned the planning team.

The original schedule using conventional techniques indicated that it would take 11 months to enclose the building. The results of the revised planning effort showed that the work could be completed in six months, 45% faster than originally thought without any increase in cost.

HARD TO BELIEVE

The team’s initial reaction was that there must have been an error in their logic. To figure out where they had made a mistake, the team went back and re-examined their work. They mocked up a section of the wall in a first-run study to ensure that they had all of the sequences correct.  After extensive review, they convinced themselves that their plan was in fact valid.

On September 1, 2011 the enclosure team started work. By February 1, 2012 the team had the building substantially enclosed. By March 1, a full six months sooner than they had originally planned, the work was complete. No additional overtime was spent on the work and the improvement in schedule resulted in zero cost increases.

Our lean journey has taken many twists and turns over the course of the past 15 years. When we first started out, we viewed our efforts of implementing the Last Planner System as a learning curve that we had to overcome to achieve the results we were looking for.

What we discovered when we reached the top of that learning curve is that we were exposed to even greater challenges that we never knew existed. Sort of like entering the foothills of a mountain range, the view of the mountain range is hidden from view by the apex of each rise. It is only when we reach the pinnacle of each one that we are exposed to what truly lies ahead.

We view lean and our efforts to apply Toyota-based approach to the design and construction environments as an exciting and strategic undertaking. We have much more to learn than we have already learned but we are committed to this direction for our customers and for Boldt.

In 2007 Toyota was one of the most valuable global brands, widely admired and copied for its excellent production system and management practices, and the envy of the world for its operational excellence and high quality products. Profit per vehicle was more than 80% higher than second-place Honda.

Perhaps the most telling statistic is the simplest: Toyota was profitable every year from 1950 until 2008. The car maker seemed charmed, impervious to the ebbs and flows of the business cycle and of the missteps, blind spots or miscalculations of virtually every other firm.

Then, over the course of three years, Toyota was hit by a stunning series of setbacks on every conceivable front. Oil prices spiked (which negatively affects both Toyota’s costs and sales), the global recession came, allegations of serious quality safety and quality problems hit, leading to tens of millions of vehicle recalls; and to top it off, two major natural disasters (flooding in Thailand, and the earthquake and tsunami in northern Japan) struck key areas of Toyota’s production and supply chain. This remarkable series of events brought Toyota’s unbroken record of profitability to an unceremonious end.

Despite the downturn in Toyota’s fortunes, some things didn’t change. Throughout this period Toyota did not engage in any involuntary layoffs. It invested in continuous improvement and people development around the world. It invested in research and development for the future. And it invested in quality.

Now that statement may bring a few readers up short. After all, arguably the largest blow to Toyota in this difficult period were the indications that Toyota had cut corners on quality and safety. But look behind the headlines at the actual data and a different story emerges.

Toyota won just as many, if not more, quality awards during its supposed quality struggles as at any other time in the company’s history. In 2009 Toyota (or its Scion or Lexus brands) placed first in six of ten categories on the Consumer Reports quality survey. In the fall of 2010, Toyota led 10 of Consumer Reports’ 17 categories. J.D. Power consistently ranked Toyota models among the top five for initial quality (during the first three months of ownership) in nearly every category in which Toyota had a vehicle on offer.  In 2011, Toyota dominated J. D. Power’s three-year dependability ratings – ratings of the same cars that had been at the centre of the recall crisis.

Never during this time did Toyota’s brand value among automotive companies fall from its perch at the top. In fact, Toyota’s brand value overall improved! According to the brandirectory Global 500, in 2007, before all of the bad news, Toyota’s brand value among all companies had slipped to 16^th, but by 2009 and 2010 it was up to 10^th.

Toyota returned to profitability quickly, despite the ongoing series of setbacks, suffering only one year of actual losses. And in 2012, the first full year without a major crisis, returned to number one in global units sold.

That’s the kind of performance – absorbing blow after blow while maintaining quality, investment and profitability – that most companies would find unimaginable.

And yet, if you spend much time in lean circles you’re more likely to hear doubts about Toyota’s ongoing value as a lean model than you are to hear expressions of amazement at its incredible resilience.

So why all the hand wringing about Toyota’s demise as a company to admire and learn from? We summarise and refute five myths propagated through ignorance (and occasionally through malice) that have distorted views of Toyota, and which are ultimately damaging to the spirit and advancement of the lean movement.

Myth #1: The struggles of Toyota through the Great Recession and recall crisis revealed serious weaknesses in the company

Reality: As we discussed above, Toyota’s actual record during this period was one that many companies would rightfully envy. Except for a few months early in 2009 during the most intense attacks on Toyota’s reputation for quality, safety, and integrity, the organisation has been at or near the top of ratings on just about every measure compiled by (truly) independent analysts – quality (initial, three year, and five year), safety, retail sales, resale value, value for dollars spent, value of the brand, and environmental friendliness.

Even when sales plummeted during the recession and during the worst of the recall crisis, Toyota kept team members employed and engaged with training and kaizen – continuing to develop people and make processes more flexible, more productive, and capable of higher quality. Many plants were able to make dramatic quality breakthroughs during the “downtime.”

That being said, Toyota executives from Akio Toyoda on down will tell you that there were serious weaknesses revealed – it’s just that those weaknesses aren’t what are commonly imagined or believed. The company engaged in a great deal of reflection, which led to major initiatives to connect better with customers, get data on customer experience directly and quickly and to the right person who could act on it, speed decision-making, increase information flow between regions on quality and safety and to invest further in people development.

In that sense the recession and the recall crisis revealed weaknesses at Toyota that could have hurt its future – and the company immediately took steps to improve.

Myth #2: Toyota had electronic problems that led to sudden unintended acceleration endangering customers

We cover this, at a level of detail that seems obsessive to many readers, in our book Toyota Under Fire. There never was any evidence of runaway Toyotas. That was the conclusion of the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration and the NASA engineers the agency hired to investigate the alleged problems with Toyota vehicles.

The wave of recalls Toyota undertook during the runaway vehicle hysteria were to correct two “defects”: customers would stack floor mats in vehicles high enough to trap the accelerator pedal; and some accelerator pedals could become “sticky” and slow to return. In neither case could the accelerator overcome the vehicle’s brakes if applied. When Toyota finally realised that customers were truly worried about the safety of their vehicles, it decided to go over and above with recalls.

Before moving on, we’ll briefly note that the most famous runaway vehicle accident – the incident that started the crisis – had a definitive cause: a dangerous oversized floor mat from a much larger vehicle incorrectly installed in the vehicle. As documented in the California Highway Patrol’s investigation of the accident the vehicle in question was a loaner vehicle provided by a local Lexus dealer. A few days before the incident another customer had been using the vehicle and found that the accelerator became trapped under the floor mat. He removed this dangerous floor mat, returned it to the dealer and complained. The dealer, rather than correcting the problem, reinstalled the mat and loaned the vehicle out again with tragic results.

Myth #3:  Toyota’s massive numbers of recalls are signs of a serious decline in quality and safety

There are two factors to note here. First, the reality of the global automobile industry requires that manufacturers strive to adopt common “platforms” and parts, meaning that many parts are reused across many different types of vehicles. And Toyota has been the industry master of this. Thus, a single defect today will yield a much larger number of vehicles recalled than it would have a decade ago, particularly if you have been successful and have a large number of vehicles on the road. The proper comparison is not number of vehicles recalled, but number of recalls, which is akin to number of errors made.

However, even measuring recalls leads to a distorted picture. As we noted above, in response to the fears of customers, Toyota has changed its approach to recalls. The company has decided to factor in customer perceptions and not just actual engineering defects into its recall decisions, a move we have not seen by other auto makers. That’s the right approach for a company that strives to put customers first, and arguably it should have been that way prior to the recall crisis. Regardless, Toyota’s new approach to recalls shouldn’t be mistaken as reflecting on engineering quality. You will continue to see more vehicles being recalled by Toyota today than in the past as they seek to do everything possible to earn and keep customers’ trust.

Myth #4:  Toyota’s “woes” were caused by growing too fast

To explain Toyota’s alleged struggles, many experts cited the company’s rapid growth from 2000 to 2010. The assumption was that the large number of new people brought in diluted the culture of excellence. Others claimed that Toyota, in response to this growth, shifted its focus from quality to profits. Akio Toyoda himself said the company grew too quickly.

We certainly won’t claim to have more insight than Toyoda-san, but in our conversations with him it is clear that he believes that Toyota’s rapid growth was not causing problems in actual product quality but in the ability of the company to react quickly to change, to connect with customers deeply and to continue its decades of continuous improvement. It’s not that company had gotten worse, but that it was failing to get better as fast as it should.

Myth #5: Toyota is no longer the “holy grail” of lean that everyone should strive to emulate

After our spirited defence of Toyota thus far, you may be surprised to read that we don’t think this is a myth. It is absolutely true. Toyota isn’t the “holy grail” that the lean movement should look to today. But it’s also true that it never was.

To explain that assertion we have to delve into the assumptions behind this statement. The first is that there is value in emulating a model. The second is that Toyota was at some point a “holy grail.” Third, whatever characteristics crowned Toyota as the “holy grail” have degraded to a level that it fell off this pedestal.

After The Toyota Way was published in 2004, Jeff got a strange question from an America Toyota vice president at the Toyota Technical Center in Ann Arbor: “Do you really believe we are this good?”  He then answered his own question:  “We have many warts just like any other company.”

The fact is  that Toyota never was and never will be a “holy grail” of lean. Leave that for gods and goddesses. What we believe does deserve a special place is the Toyota Way. Don’t mistake Toyota for the Toyota Way. The Toyota Way is an ideal where every place, every second, every person is demonstrating great respect for people and continuously improving products, processes, and themselves. Toyota doesn’t have any pretentions that it lives up to the Toyota Way. No one else should either.

We greatly admire the ideals of the Toyota Way, including: challenge people to think deeply about problems and constantly improve themselves, maintain the positive outlook that there is always a better way and we can achieve it, think long-term, put society and the customers ahead of self-interest, and strive for perfection. In our experience Toyota works harder and more consistently in achieving these lofty ideals then any large, multinational company we know of, and in most cases by leaps and bounds.

Will studying at the altar of Toyota lead to these same values, ideals, and passionate pursuit of perfection? Absolutely not! You learn by doing on your own journey, through struggles. The Great Recession, the recall crisis, and even the natural disasters were in some ways a blessing in disguise for Toyota, as it pushed the Japanese into relinquishing some control over the regions of the world, allowed and challenged regional leaders to take more responsibility for their development, and led to thousands of kaizen activities to improve Toyota’s quality and responsiveness to customer concerns.

The “holy grail” then isn’t Toyota, or even truly the Toyota Way, which is simply one particular way of expressing the true goal: zero defects, zero waste, people first, always innovate. Any organisation that finds the energy to relentlessly pursue that goal is worth studying and learning from. But if you ever change from actively pursuing the goal to emulating such an organisation, then you’ve lost your way.

Since the founding of the Ministry of Justice Continuous Improvement Academy in 2008 I have seen a rise in demand to build lean capability across the organisation.

The academy was created to learn more about how lean practice and methods could benefit us. An overriding objective for myself and my team was to build an improvement culture and capability across the organisations we work with, which now include not just the Ministry of Justice, but also its arm’s length bodies and other government departments.

Public sector spending restrictions have caused us all to question how we deliver services and run our businesses. Many organisations have reacted with an increased focus on cost-cutting.

For us at the Ministry, however, cost-cutting programmes are just one part of how we are transforming the organisation: we have also opted for the use of lean thinking, as one of our responses.

Skilling our people and getting them engaged in the use of proven tools and techniques to strip out waste in the processes they work with every day is certainly common sense.

In an early lean engagement for the department, a business manager working on freedom of information requests – where the estimated removal of unnecessary processes through lean activity would result in a 20% gain in efficiency – quickly saw how much lean was helping in processing requests. “It was hard work but it was worth it, because we have reduced unnecessary day to day tasks so that we can focus on what is really important – timeliness,” she told me.

Initially, we focused heavily on this kind of bottom-up approach and saw some fantastic results in terms of efficiency savings and staff engagement. However, we struggled to sustain these improvements in some areas and had to revisit our approach.

We looked outside our organisation to identify best practice and see how we could make it work at the MoJ. We began to prioritise some of the less visible and foundational elements of lean, focusing on the creation and alignment of strategy and the leadership buy-in needed to support a continuous improvement culture.

One of our main learning programmes now aims to equip our leaders with the understanding and skills they need in order to be able to drive lean activities within their teams, by concentrating far less on what lean tools are and more on them working together to develop meaningful focus and actions for continuous improvement, which ties in with the wider business priorities their teams have.

A leader who recently attended this programme told me: “The confidence and understanding gained from discussions about other people’s experience and struggles to push forward are great. It’s a good forum for bouncing ideas around regarding CI rather than being left to do this solo.”

Her Majesty’s Courts and Tribunals Service (HMCTS) has provided us with our biggest case study to date. Having worked with lean for the previous five years there has been a strong commitment to build an understanding of what the methodology is, with a high level of awareness from all members of staff. We have worked with them internally to achieve this, through the Continuous Improvement Academy, and have trained practitioners to lead lean activity in their business areas, experts to do the same across internal hierarchical boundaries, and leaders to support this work and engage their teams.

The work has been recognised as a good example of improved delivery across all levels of an organisation. The HMCTS chief executive summed it up pretty well, reflecting on what lean has meant to the court service: “Lean is important for us in ensuring everyone gets the opportunity to contribute to how we improve the service we offer.”

We are seeking to emulate these successes, as well as lessons learned from HMCTS throughout the Ministry and beyond, and are currently working with Office of the Public Guardian, Scottish Tribunal Service and the Department for Energy and Climate Change to do just that.

Learning lessons and adapting approaches accordingly now feels like a normal thing to do, common sense if you will.

haring of that  give our people confidence to practice continuous improvementeling theyrtant – timeliness”to better understand

Whilst lean remains at its heart, we have adapted the academy by learning and drawing inspiration from any approach where we see people being engaged to better understand and improve services while focusing on delivering value to customers. It has been a big part of our own continuous improvement efforts, to focus more on positive outcomes and learning from these, and why in turn we moved from being known as the Lean Academy to  the Continuous Improvement Academy.

This is helping us to give our people the confidence to practice continuous improvement.

Going forward, a better understanding of what constitutes customer value must become common practice if lean is to demonstrate its beneficial effect to both individuals and the business and to become more meaningful. For many people who have attended our Academy, a key learning point is that lean is not just about improving the service for your own team, but about better understanding processes from the customer’s perspective and working with others to improve service delivery.

With this in mind, lean is driving opportunities for us to work across boundaries, not only within MoJ, but also with our key stakeholders. This has been particularly true across the Criminal Justice System, where we have worked with partner agencies and other government departments to deliver improvements. In turn this has produced real efficiencies through identifying and tracking non value added work.

A challenge with “common sense” is that it makes you think everyone can see what you see. While principles may appear as common sense, for lean to be sustained the improvement activity must be meaningful for all those involved, both at an organisational and individual level.

For me lean is common sense, but the practice of continuous improvement is harder and requires you to get under the skin of common sense. Common sense dictates that if something is not right you change it and lean provides simple approaches to do this, but for these to become an autonomous way of working requires changing habits.

These are not rooted in common sense but are products of mindsets, which are not always tangible. Practising continuous improvement continually requires us to question the roots of common sense and support people on a much more subtle level.

We cannot just lift and shift a set of tools and products to be successful. Sustainable continuous improvement requires us to adapt approaches, understand wider business objectives and engage our staff and managers to drive lean themselves.

Team information boards are a great example of this. Having a place where teams can meet to identify actions to deliver improvements is just common sense, but five years after we first started working with teams to create team information boards our approach has greatly changed, to enable people to work in a better way.

Rather than setting the standard of what the board should contain, we focus on supporting teams to develop meaningful boards that will be used effectively and meet their business challenges, promoting ongoing problem solving with leaders.

A leader who was struggling to encourage communications and drive improvement across her team using the boards said that her team saw them as meaningless until their name was changed into Improving justice.

Our aim for the future includes developing our continuous improvement community to allow for good “common sense” ideas to be shared with greater ease (as part of our Transforming Justice programme) and taking this forward to be able to do the same across the public sector, as cross-government continuous improvement initiatives grow and develop – our Academy and our CI staff are always ready to help other public sector organisations.

Lean answers important questions for the organisation and for this reason demand for the services of our academy continues to grow. How do we engage our people? How do we improve the service to our customers? How do we deliver better for less? All of these answers seem to be simple common sense, but require a great deal of understanding of what lean means and what the benefits it can bring are.

Seyfarth Shaw started its lean journey in 2005, when clients began to ask the firm to introduce alternative fees. Specifically, they wanted to pay a flat rate per piece of work rather than being billed the traditional way, by the hour, or in more recent times, “by the minute.”

Lisa Damon, a Boston-based partner and day-to-day leader of lean efforts at Seyfarth Shaw, explains: “While looking at alternative ways to bill our clients, we realised that there was no point in trying to figure out how long a certain job would take and, therefore, how much we should charge for it. We had no reliable way to track or measure that, nor did other law firms. First we had to step back and understand whether we were working in the most efficient and best possible way.”

In the attempt to find a process methodology that could be applied to and work in a legal setting, the firm started to visit clients such as Caterpillar, Motorola, and DuPont. The leaders of legal departments in these companies were some of the people starting a revolution in the practice of law, a revolution that the firm has since helped to spearhead.

DuPont’s general counsel, Tom Sager, is one of the earliest adopters of lean in a legal department. He proved a critical figure in Seyfarth’s transformation.

Damon continues: “Tom told us right away that we couldn’t treat this like a traditional law firm initiative. He warned us this would be the hardest thing we would ever do institutionally, and explained that it needed to be driven unflinchingly by leadership.”

Seyfarth’s leadership took Sager’s advice, and committed to making lean the new path for the firm. The first thing the firm did was to hire Six Sigma Academy (now SSA & Company) to migrate and adapt some of the lean six sigma techniques and principles to a legal environment.

With the help of Six Sigma Academy, Seyfarth’s leadership tried to figure out what lean in a law firm would look like. What the organisation decided it needed was a completely new way of delivering law: instead of measuring success by the number of minutes they worked, Seyfarth would let its clients define success. The law firm’s role would be to design more efficient solutions to the delivery of legal services.

The shift would be both sublime (some individual lawyers are inherently “lean” in their approach) and monumental (in terms of consistency across hundreds of lawyers, changes to systemic business operations and differences in legal practice specialties).

“We came out with much more focused tools, a very heavy emphasis on Voice Of the Client [VOC] and a way to incorporate data analysis in our daily lives. It was a completely new way to look at things,” Damon says. Those initial steps would result in the creation of a new client service model, SeyfarthLean. According to the firm, SeyfarthLean “combines the core principles of Lean Six Sigma with robust technology, knowledge management, process management techniques, alternative fee structures and practical tools.”

Training and education were a key part of these early efforts. It wasn’t just leaders who attended the initial Six Sigma Academy green belt courses. Thought leaders among the firm’s partners played a vital role in supporting the spread of lean across the organisation, too. Damon comments: “We included those partners who had responsibilities in the areas of the businesses where we thought lean could make a difference. They were able to use lean to drive truly extraordinary results around the business, allowing us to show from the very first green belt class the real, tangible difference lean could make.”

According to Damon, it has always been the clients’ overwhelming response to pull the firm towards lean. Even when a partner is sceptical about the value of the methodology, a client’s enthusiastic request to hear more about it is normally enough to have that partner on board.

FROM SCRATCH

The fact that Seyfarth doesn’t have any other law firm to draw inspiration from or benchmark against is “freeing,” Damon says. “We look at many clients who have lean in their companies and we are driven forward by them. If you think about it, as a service provider this is a wonderful place to be because it’s the voice of the customer driving you directly, at all times.”

It is the relationship with clients that fuels Seyfarth’s lean journey, and the individuals the firm works with that shape the way it implements the methodology: people like Ken Grady from footwear manufacturer Wolverine Worldwide, Gary Chadick from communications and aviation electronics company Rockwell Collins or David Allgood from Royal Bank of Canada are, according to Damon, “visionaries” who left an indelible mark in Seyfarth’s approach to change.

Another “bedrock relationship” for Seyfarth was the one with United Technologies. “Our relationship partner was someone who really understood the UTC business and its Achieving Competitive Excellence system, which looks and sounds a lot like lean. In 2008 he se t up the opportunity for us to show UTC’s legal department our work. I remember how electric it was in that room, as they recognised what we were doing was directly in line with what they were doing,” Damon recalls.

Over the next few months, the two organisations began to align their strategies, until UTC turned around and gave Seyfarth the chance to experiment with their operations all over the United States (except for Connecticut, where UTC already had a provider). “We have been working with them hand in hand to take an entire portfolio of work and use lean principles to deliver it in the best possible way,” continues Damon.

VOC, ALWAYS

Lawyers don’t enjoy the best of reputations. They are often perceived as money making machines (the billable hours system doesn’t help, as it can incentivise inefficiencies at times). Maybe that’s why one could be slightly taken aback upon hearing Damon talk about doing more with less or about helping client’s legal departments improve their operations (like Seyfarth does through its consulting business).

When asked whether this was not against the firm’s interest (if legal departments become more efficient, it’s fair to think organisations will not need external help as much), she chuckled and replied: “If you delight your clients, they will give you more and better work. When we go to an inhouse law department, help them solve a problem, and leave them in a better spot than we found them, we know we’ll end up benefitting. We may lose a piece of work, we may not get paid as much, we may even not get engaged at all, but in the long run clients will come back to us.”

Hardly what you expect to hear from a lawyer.

It’s not that much of a surprise, however. Lean, Damon says, turns the whole legal system on its head.

“You are used to calling your lawyer and telling them what the problem is. If it’s your lawyer calling you, they are most likely trying to sell you something. Lean changes everything: as your lawyer I am sitting in the room with you and asking you how I can help you and what you need from your law firm,” she explains.

According to Seyfarth Shaw, client needs are everything. During a client meeting, partners will sit next to what are known in the firm as “legal technology solutions architects,” IT experts that listen to what the client needs, go home and create it. “They stand in the client’s shoes, and wonder what could work for their particular situation, what they can design,” Damon continues.

Technology contributes greatly to the success of Seyfarth. Clients, for example, have constant access to data via SeyfarthLink, a “client collaboration and portfolio management” system to monitor progress and cost of a specific legal matter or group of matters.

Online process maps connect with templates and tools used in a specific legal process, such as commercial litigation. The firm has mapped nearly 200 various legal processes. Custom technology solutions have included the use of mobile technology, such as an app to speed decision-making and tracking of global trademark prosecution efforts.

Another example of how IT supports the firm is the Seyfarth Scorecard, a system that collects data from clients on the company’s performance, which is shared with firm leadership and the team serving the client. The Scorecard information gathered is then used as the basis for client interviews, lessons learned sessions and client service improvements. It also serves as a component of compensation discussions, in general review of partners’ work.

Damon says: “While it has been very successful, the scorecard would not stand on its own. It only provides the data we need if coupled with intense VOC exercises and lessons learned sessions.”

STILL A UNIQUE SYSTEM

The introduction of lean has allowed Seyfarth to achieve great results. The firm was able to reach a level of 20% revenue coming from alternative fees in 2011, and the 18-member Legal Project Management Office team’s client-facing time went from 20% in 2010 to nearly 100% in 2012.

Clients greatly benefitted from the new approach Seyfarth implemented. A national defence contractor saw fees reduced by over 30% compared to the prior firm to manage its national portfolio of single employment cases, while a global manufacturer improved its trademark prosecution productivity by 22%.

One would think these results would encourage other law firms to follow Seyfarth’s example. This was the case for a while. “We started off, and pretty soon we heard other firms were getting into it. However, because lean is so hard and promotes transparency, many got off the bandwagon very quickly. Instead of jumping on lean, the industry started to teach lawyers project management,” Damon explains. “That’s a good step, but we believe that it is scratching the surface.”

What’s Seyfarth’s secret, then? How did it manage to keep going? According to Damon, it’s by focusing on the control function, the C, in the DMAIC improvement cycle. She says: “Because lawyers are so incredibly busy, keeping the team focused is a necessary element. We have learned that without that control function things tend to go back to the way they were. It has become what differentiates success from lack of success for us.”

Maybe another way to practice the law does exist.

We were recently invited to give a briefing on lean approaches in professional services jointly organised by the West Midlands Economic Forum and Aston University in the UK.

As the event was a breakfast seminar starting at 7:30am, we anticipated just a row or two of a small meeting room to be filled by lean enthusiasts from the university’s engineering faculty. Imagine our surprise when around 100 people turned up for the presentation!

They showed real interest in the lean work we have been conducting at the law firm.

We left the seminar thinking that the professional services sector might be ready to embrace lean thinking.

Higgs’ lean journey began with a drive to overcome the inherent dysfunctions in a traditional law firm and grapple with the challenges in the wider legal services sector, widely criticised for being ineffective, inefficient and uneconomical for clients.

Below are listed the main challenges for businesses operating in this sector.

Internal Challenges

• Legacy service models that no longer deliver value either to the client or the firm;
• Difficulty in implementing changes in knowledge-based businesses;
• Inherent fear of disruptive innovation;
• Obstructions to fully understanding clients’ needs and expectations on service and price;
• Changing requirements of the modern client

External Challenges

• Increasingly diverse competition from those who have access to new funding sources and greater knowledge base;
• Threat of new entrants in the form of “supermarket law shops” triggered by deregulation;
• Rapidly changing marketplace;
• Cost pressures and the attack on hourly billing

It was with these challenges in mind that we began our breakfast briefing to a diverse bunch of people from business and commerce intrigued by what we had been doing.

Whilst it is commonly known that many law firms have reacted to changes by resorting to consolidating their market positions through mergers and acquisitions and taking heart that there is security in size, lean practices remain largely untapped.

However, we believe that the way to tap into lean is to use the correct approach, find what lies deep-rooted within a firm’s culture and values, whether large or small, and begin to rethink conventional prevailing wisdom in the legal industry.

To many, a law service can be an elusive concept, difficult to visualise and highly intangible, involving high levels of knowledge intensity and customisation. To complicate matters further many other external stakeholders are also involved; for instance, processing a typical road traffic accident claim requires up to 15 different parties; all of whom impact upon the time to reach a settlement.

Higgs must liaise and obtain necessary information from these external stakeholders whilst aiming to reduce processing and lapse time, improve engagement between the client and lawyer and enhance the quality of service being delivered; this is a tough set of performance metrics to balance. Managing such processes effectively with seamless integration can help minimise time spent and reduce costs.

Due to the implicit nature of law processes with high knowledge intensity and demanding provider-client co-production a very personable approach to change was most suitable.

Our lean journey has used a new approach to imbibe lean thinking into the organisation through a type of Soft Systems Methodology (SSM) known as The Process Oriented Holonic (PrOH) Modelling Methodology developed by Ben Clegg at Aston University (the work is part funded by a Knowledge Transfer Partnership from the European Regional Development Fund and the Technology Strategy Board).

Using PrOH this project has modelled five different legal services: road traffic accident settlement; dispute resolution; commercial property; corporate services; and private client. These were selected to represent the range in volume and variety of services offered. PrOH models were used to conceptualise, visualise, critique and initiate the redesign of these services.

As material wastage is relatively insignificant compared to wastage of fee earners’ billable hours in law services the approach to change had to focus directly on people, and to increase their personal and firm-wide propensity towards lean.

Buy-in for change from lawyers and support staff meant potentially reducing wasted time, reducing bills for the client and improved productivity for the firm. This approach worked equally well in all service lines whether high-volume-low-variety or low-volume-high-variety.

Thus the lesson from that morning’s talk for our audience was that lean was not just about the tools and philosophy already familiar to the practitioner, but also about using an appropriate modelling and change methodology. We would propose that the more people-centric one’s operations are the softer the approach to change should be.

In this instance applying lean thinking through the use of PrOH modelling not only helped achieve cost savings, improved process efficiency and service quality but also enabled Higgs to bring about a much needed cultural change measured by the readiness of its people, in all strata, to participate in the lean implementation.

So far this project has received a significant degree of interest from the legal profession, wider business community and academia. We will continue our early successes by applying it to other Higgs processes and examine more closely how a person appraisal, learning and development system might strengthen the quest for the philosophical adoption of lean.

Many lean managers and industrial engineers were “brought up” on the work of Fred Taylor and Elton Mayo, and have been influenced by the writings of Peter Drucker, Jim Collins, Tom Peters, and Michael Porter. But there was, at least for me, much that was unknown about the origins of the theories of these “gurus”. I wondered, after reading this book, if such ignorance was just me, so I asked a tiny sample of two HR academics, from different universities, a strategy academic, and a high profile lean consultant. Guess what? Apart from a few inklings, they were as misinformed as I was.

It is not often that I come across a book that simultaneously informs, horrifies, shocks, and entertains, but here we have one. And beautifully written to boot.

Stewart’s book follows two parallel streams. One tells his own story, from new arrival to partner, in a top management consultancy and the other examines the background to the theories of some major gurus.

On the theories of Taylor and Mayo the word “fudge” comes to mind and probably some four-letter words as well. Apart from fundamental research flaws, “Taylor feigned research where negotiation was required. This confusion of facts and values, the attempt to find pseudotechnical solutions to moral and political problems… is the cardinal sin of management theory to the present” and “’Scientific management’ is not science it is business.” As for Mayo, he was hardly ever at the Hawthorne gemba, and simply ignored contrary evidence. Yet his influence remains.

The consultancy stream reveals an amazing inside story of political wrangling, of some of the generic theories used, and of downright ignorance and internal incompetence whilst charging huge fees to unsuspecting clients. One approach, apparently the invariable opening gambit (that I must admit to using myself) is of the “whale”. In other words, doing a pareto of product contributions and product costs and then revealing these findings and follow up recommendations to often amazed and delighted top management. The consultancy survives, and the partners prosper, basically on the initiative of bright young associates.

MBA education comes in for particular stick. Many are taught by professors with little industrial experience using closed case studies with 20/20 hindsight but little predictive value. Of course, Mintzberg has also taken up this theme, but Stewart extends it. Such programmes nevertheless have value because they are a clearing house for admitting the best and brightest. Stewart’s suggestions, including the replacement of many fashionable theories with discussing Shakespeare and the classics, as a foundation for wiser sustainable practice, should certainly be considered by Deans and recruiters.

Likewise, the writings of (surprising to me) Drucker come in for tough scrutiny. The showmanship and promotional abilities of Tom Peters, Jim Collins and Michael Porter are praised but their theories are treated much more harshly. On Peters and Collins, readers may already be familiar with the devastating critique in Phil Rosenzweig’s The Halo Effect. But of Deming, there is no mention. A pity.

The conclusion? If you are a lean practitioner, read this book to understand the limitations of famous theories. If you are a senior manager, read this book before paying high fees to a consultant. If you are an academic, read and reflect on better ways  for lean education.

What has worked for Toyota for decades has not led to comparable success in Western enterprises. Many efforts and projects have been brought into practice that impose the lean methods devised at Toyota and adapted in one way or another for enterprises whose cultures were not prepared for such vast changes in thinking and working. Consequently, lean professionals such as Emiliani have seen “so few successful lean transformations.”

Successful lean efforts are based on the involvement and empowerment of employees. Speaking with other lean practitioners, a common thought keeps arising, that lean people must be different in order to make their lean intentions successful.

The Exemplary Lean Followership Model (ELFM) enables to describe individuals in a systematic and holistic way along a set of 18 scales within five occupational dimensions.

THE CONCEPT OF FOLLOWERSHIP

Where there is a leader, there are followers.

Followers may be seen simply as subordinates who work directly for a superior – someone who is giving the orders, setting up the rules and leading the way, as per the 2010 Merriam-Webster definition. Other definitions extend the understanding of a follower to a condition, a role or a function.

The term is ambiguous, however, as leaders can simultaneously fulfil a follower role towards their own superiors. In some definitions, following focuses not only on the superior-subordinate pair but on a certain idea or principle that is being followed – such as the lean philosophy. In this case, questions of hierarchy are no longer at the centre of attention.

Looking back to the origins of lean at Toyota, two very central lean principles (“Pillars of The Toyota Way”) can be found, which focus on the role of all employees, those that may be termed as “followers”: respect for people and continuous improvement. The respect for people principle consists of “respect” and “teamwork”, where teamwork is aimed at personal and professional growth, sharing opportunities of development and maximising individual and team performance. As Professor Jeffrey Liker noted in 2007, at Toyota people are seen as the key to expanding and strengthening the company. Toyota actually “makes people, not cars.”

THE BACKGROUND

In introducing lean into a company, the common approach still concerns itself with the tools and techniques, meaning that the focus of change is the changing of methods. Most lean production methods are quite simple to understand and apply. Yet they are certainly not at all simple when it comes to applying them well and sustainably.

Tackling this challenge in theory and in discussions held by practitioners up to today mostly means talking about lean leadership and taking a closer look at this end of the problem. The singular lean professional who is either hired to “build lean” or who trains teams on a consulting or training basis is the one (or the few) counted on by top management to infiltrate enterprise systems and cultures with lean knowledge and principles.

It is their responsibility – and an enormous one at that – to get lean thinking through to employees and make lean efforts visible, measurable and successful.

What about the vast majority of people actually involved in lean transition processes? What about the employees, the ones asked to work in a new and promising way? The employees in an organisation choose to either follow the lean lead or not, and if they withdraw their support to change, project failure is almost certain.

Following the approach of focusing on leaders to drive change could overburden them and the organisation, since approximately 80% of the effort in lean transformations is consumed by changing leaders’ mindsets first (like Mann noted in 2009). Anyway, this proceeding would have to be questioned following a notice of Pauline Found and others (2009) about a central principle of lean: improvements “are based on the ideas and knowledge of employees.”

Speaking of people, of employees and teams, of those trying to make those new ideas work in their actual working environment, leads directly to the idea of lean followership.

DEVELOPING A MODEL OF LEAN FOLLOWERSHIP

To understand the concept of followership in depth, I analysed various approaches to followership in general, key authors being Zaleznik, Crockett, Kelley, Lundin & Lancaster, Hollander, Chaleff, Brown, Nolan & Harty, Meilinger, Collinson, Kellerman, Dixon & Westbrook, Frisina and Bennis.

Those approaches were traced back to their basic elements and condensed into one holistic framework describing good followership in general work environments.

Based on this framework, it was explored if working in a lean environment requires specific characteristics and behaviours to be an exemplary follower. Since there have been almost no contributions by scholars that primarily focus on lean-specific followership, a survey of 42 experienced lean practitioners from 15 different companies enriched this exploration.

FINDINGS

The focus of lean processes needs to be shifted from tools and leaders to the much disregarded aspect of people, of followers, to be effective. The term “follower” describes an evolved role of employees.

A reliance on leaders is not up to date anymore and the success of an organisation is mainly determined by the quality of its followers – for better and for worse. It is therefore indispensable to know how an exemplary follower may be described as a basis for selection and development.

Exploring good followership in general already exposed parallels to what is considered to be lean thinking, for example a pronounced team orientation. Lean-specific literature and the survey of experienced lean practitioners validated this first impression. Indeed, it also appeared that there are lean-specific characteristics and behaviours that would form an exemplary lean follower and distinguish them from a general exemplary follower, most notably a strong customer orientation.

A followership model that could describe an exemplary follower in a holistic way for a lean environment had to incorporate those specifics, resulting in the Exemplary Lean Followership Model.

Regarding the concept of followership applied to lean organisations two main questions come into view:

#1. Is there a difference between good followership in general and good followership in lean

organisations? Yes, but…

The literature analysis indicates that a distinction is possible and necessary and this impression is emphasised by the survey results. The question may therefore be answered in the positive. However, there is a considerable overlap in terms of what is considered good followership in general and good followership in lean organisations.

#2. What are the characteristics and behaviours of exemplary followers in lean organisations and how may they be described?

The descriptions of good lean employees differed strongly and they are based merely on assumptions and personal experiences. I developed a standardised description model for exemplary lean followers.

EXEMPLARY LEAN FOLLOWERSHIP MODEL (ELFM)

Exemplary lean followers hold pronounced characteristics and behaviours, which are allocated in the this model to 18 scales within five dimensions:

1. Occupational Orientation
   • Motivation to Perform
   • Motivation to Create
   • Motivation to Lead
   • Customer Orientation
2. Work Habits
   • Conscientiousness
   • Flexibility
   • Action-Oriented
   • Thinking
   • Problem Solving
3. Social Capabilities
   • Sensitivity
   • Interpersonal Skills
   • Ability to Socialise
   • Team Orientation
   • Organisation Oriented
   • Leader Oriented
4. Mental Constitution
   • Self-Confidence
   • Moral Balance
5. Personality
   • Uprightness

The ELFM enables describing individuals along a holistic set of scales in a systematic way. Descriptions and commentary are an important part of the framework if applied in practice. Scales have to be interpreted in the right way, for example “Leader Oriented”, to be of benefit to the organisation. This scale for example refers to the way a follower deals with leaders, a positive value would be to have an active and intense dialogue and, say, not showing a person-oriented loyalty.

With its occupational focus, this set of scales covers relevant occupational dimensions (and not all facets of a personality).

SCALE DEFINITIONS

In the following each scale will be described briefly in ascending importance to clarify the meaning in the context of this work.

All scales are considered as being close to each other regarding their importance for a successful lean environment. However, a gradation of the scales by importance was still possible and should enable prioritising development initiatives if needed (degree 1 is most important).

1) Sensitivity

The ability for positive conflict management and showing diplomacy with a good sense for signals in social situations and a high ability to interpret behaviour;

2) Problem-Solving

Being prepared to cope with problems and the ability to identify problems, formulate solutions and to solve them;

2) Thinking

Critical and independent thinking and not being a “yes man/woman”;

2) Action-Oriented

Being willing to and having the ability to quickly execute decisions and standard work guidelines, to stick to a selected alternative even in the face of strong resistance, to concentrate on relevant aspects and managing themselves well;

2) Motivation to Lead

Show favour to guide, coordinate and to influence while being confident. High ability to inspire and motivate;

3) Moral Balance

Moral and psychological balance to pursue personal and corporate goals simultaneously without conflict while following policies and ethical standards;

3) Leader-Oriented

Supporting the leader and keeping him well informed. Moreover, challenge the leaders who are ineffective or unethical by giving constructive criticism and helping them to change. Withdrawing

support if abusive leaders do not change;

4) Ability to Socialise

Being thoughtful, considerate and respectful. Empathising with others and respecting the work they do. Acting balancing and integrating in their environment;

5) Uprightness

Being courageous and honest even when speaking to those in power and having strong moral principles;

5) Self-Confidence

Being a self-starter and a risk-taker. Furthermore, emotional independence from other’s judgements with high self-control and a compelling appearance;

5) Flexibility

Flexibility as an overall approach to work showing a high ability to tolerate ambiguity, confidence in new situations and an openness to new perspectives. Being versatile and innovative;

5) Customer Orientation

Showing awareness of customers and their needs;

6) Conscientiousness

Accurate work style having a high-quality standard on one’s work. Accepts responsibility and is dependable and trustworthy;

7) Interpersonal Skills

Active listening skills and high verbal communication skills enabling the effective expression and discussion of ideas and information in individual or group situations. Furthermore, has the social capacity to work well with others and the ability to develop and actively cultivate occupational and private networks;

8) Organisation-Oriented

Being highly committed to the organisation and to a purpose beyond themselves. Guided by a common purpose to contribute to the big picture. Works across organisational boundaries and has an enterprising way of thinking and a systems view;

9) Team Orientation

Being highly cooperative and collaborative in maintaining group cohesiveness and sharing opportunities of development. Meet collective goals as well as individual ones and is willing to step back in favour of the team;

9) Motivation to Create

Taking initiative and participating actively with high engagement. If inspired by an idea or task, they fight against resistance, make decisions and defend decisions. Highly active in creating change in their environments;

9) Motivation to Perform

A general positive attitude coupled with a desire and ability to continually and quickly learn – driven by intrinsic motivation. Competency in problem-solving and has a questioning nature.

IMPLICATIONS FOR ORGANISATIONS

Abraham Lincoln once said: “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Organisations should refer to this statement and institute a rigorous programme of education and self-improvement.

Applying the ELFM in the development of people would make use of it as a standardised platform for such a programme. Moreover, it should be used for selection of new hires, because this is where the development of exemplary followers starts. Furthermore, recruiters could select according to the different levels of “learnability” and identify those traits which are difficult to learn at all.

Therefore, there are two fields for application: selection and development.

As an assessment tool in both fields of application, the ELFM offers an ability to organisations, which is not to be underestimated, since it is the prerequisite for development of exemplary followers to assess them individually. Decisions to hire/not hire a person or how to develop an individual would be guided by a standardised instrument influenced by the lean philosophy. To plagiariseLincoln, it could be said that the ELFM is a “grind stone” for “sharpening the axe”.

RECOMMENDATIONS

The organisational setting should be developed in a way that makes good followership is possible. Followership would have to be institutionalised as a part of business as usual and recognised and celebrated. Managers, at least those surveyed, support this thought and were even open to being held financially responsible for the quality of followers.

The application of the ELFM shall enable lean organisations to better follow the lean principles of respect for people and continuous improvement in their original meaning: stimulation and development for individual and greater purposes.

The ELFM is a framework to support organisations in working more effectively with their main resource: people. The set of characteristics and behaviours of an exemplary lean follower has to be seen as the prerequisite to create or sustain a successful lean organisation.

In his article, Joseph considered different forms of lean training and education, but stopped at “Blended Learning” beyond 16 weeks and “Company Specific” training of up to 32 weeks.

The quality of short courses and company-specific training varies enormously, and it was with this in mind that Cardiff’s Lean Enterprise Research Centre developed an accreditation procedure known as the Lean Competency System.

TWI

First, when discussing lean training, it is fundamental to mention TWI. Training Within Industry was the training programme introduced in the USA during World War II, which later became a foundation of the Toyota Production System. The “three legged stool” of TWI – job instruction, job relations, job methods – focused on the front line manager or supervisor is the basis of stability and sustainability.

Ohno was a JI instructor, and JI remains almost unchanged at Toyota today, 70 years later. Classic TWI training is the 10-hour course (5 days of 2 hours, with considerable practice in between) held on site for each of the three modules. Although the original TWI material is in the public domain, it is wise to use a certified trainer. TWI UK has recently been established.

THE WEB

Second, we should consider the huge amount of educational material that is available through the web. Much of the material is free. This almost endless list of resources grows almost daily on YouTube, blogs, and in a multitude of websites. Of course, the material varies from poor to excellent, and critical judgment is required of both content and motive.

Here are four sites of high value:

• MIT Free Courseware: Lean Six Sigma. This series on video comprises 14 lectures together withreadings and notes. It covers basic lean manufacturing and a few six sigma topics as delivered to MIT undergraduate students. A little outdated now, but nevertheless a great introduction;
• iTunes U. Here there are thousands of courses on every conceivable topic from universities mainly in USA and UK. Not much on lean per se, but a huge amount on topics closely related to, or useful for, lean. World authorities present many of these courses. Examples are organisation behaviour and leadership, psychology, statistics, accounting, innovation, and industrial engineering;
• Vanguard-method.com. Although this is a website promoting a consultancy, it contains several provocative short videos that challenge conventional thinking and conventional lean thinking. Vanguard, of course, runs its own short-course training for the service sector;
• Lean Enterprise Institute (in the US) and the linked Lean Enterprise Academy (in the UK) and other institutes around the world often have useful and free video and discussion material and offer short courses and conferences.

PROFESSIONAL

APICS. The American Production and Inventory Control Society (The Association for Operations Management) has been the champion of MRP/ MRPII since the mid 1970s when it launched the “MRP Crusade”. For decades it has run the CPIM (Certified in Production and Inventory Management) qualification, and since 2006 the CSCP (Certified Supply Chain Professional) qualification. Both include some lean content. Both are offered in over 30 countries, with people from 78 countries having obtained qualifications.

Almost 100,000 people have obtained the CPIM worldwide. Each qualification involves quite challenging multi-choice tests – five in the case of CPIM. The time period is indeterminate, and course work is delivered by training organisations throughout the world or by self-study. Everyone takes the same tests, and there are no exemptions. In the USA many operations professors hold a CPIM. Not so in UK.

APICS has been strongly associated with MRP but has been moving steadily into the lean area in both CPIM and CSCP tests. The “execution and control of operations” module of the CPIM is strongly focused on the JIT pillar of TPS, and the master planning module covers material seldom found in both diploma and degree courses. The belief of Kate Mackle, John Darlington and I from Buckingham University is that several lean implementations have failed due to a lack of knowledge in these fundamental areas (as an aside, it is interesting, perhaps worrying, that the CPIM is far more popular in Ireland, Denmark, Belgium, France, Italy and even Germany than in the UK).

IOM. The Institute of Operations Management UK (formerly BPICS) was closely affiliated with APICS. The IOM developed its own Diploma course; a Level 5 qualification, which grew out of and away from the CPIM. More recently the CPIM has returned to the IOM. The IOM Diploma takes two years and is offered through various colleges. The Diploma is wider in scope than the CPIM, but also has limited lean content. In my opinion, breadth rather than depth.

In the USA, a breakaway group from APICS formed the AME (Association for Manufacturing Excellence) in the mid 1980s. AME wanted to pursue JIT (as lean was then known) rather than MRP, and the AME Conference has grown to become the largest lean oriented conference in the world. AME is a practitioner-led organisation that is cautious about consultants, academics, and vendors – although all of these groups are represented at the conference exhibition.

AME has begun to team up with IIE, ASQ (American Society for Quality), SME (Society of Manufacturing Engineers) and is reconciled with APICS. This has led to all co-operating on the individual Shingo prize. See below.

The IIE (Institute of Industrial Engineers) in the USA is the professional body for IE’s. Industrial Engineering is far wider in scope than the phrase tends to mean in the UK. IIE runs short courses (for example a “Green Belt” in basic lean).

But recall that Ohno described TPS as “profit based industrial engineering”.

The Shingo prize is becoming well known in the UK and Europe as the prime evaluation tool for companies. Less well known is the Shingo qualification for individuals. Like the company version, it is awarded on bronze, silver and gold levels. There are tests and, for gold level, a huge amount of evidence must be accumulated and documented on participation in kaizen-type activity. The result is that there are only a handful of gold-level individual holders in the world. This is not a taught or mentored programme, but an achievement recognition scheme.

ACADEMIC AND UNIVERSITY

Lean is at last growing in academia.

The annual Lean Educators Conference in the United States has been growing steadily to more than 200 attendees in 2012 from several countries – although only one (myself) from the UK. It was good to see business schools represented, and even better a series of presentations from university accounting departments who seem to be introducing lean accounting “under the table”.

UNITED STATES

Again different from the UK, many American universities have departments of industrial engineering, a number of which run lean modules as part of their undergraduate or graduate education programmes. Some have significant lean units.

Notable among these are the University of Michigan (where Jeffrey Liker and Mike Rother are located), the University of Tennessee, and the University of Kentucky (that has close association with Toyota USA).

A few other departments of industrial engineering have recently begun to run one-year Masters degrees in lean. Take a careful look at the content rather than the title, as some are strongly focused on operations research (OR), simulation, statistics, six sigma, TOC, and manufacturing technology.

UK AND IRELAND

Lean Masters courses have grown in the 2000s in the UK and Ireland. These can probably be classified into programmes with much more six sigma than lean, those where the reverse is the case, and those where topics such as leadership, strategy and technology predominate.

Strathclyde and Limerick are in the first category. Buckingham and Cardiff are in the second category. In the third category is The Manufacturing Institute/ Lancaster, Cambridge, Cranfield, Cork, Swansea Met and De Montfort. These programmes cater for different student groups – in terms of age, experience and, crucially, the extent of practical onsite work. Any corporate sponsor should check out the range.

The Manufacturing Institute, Manchester administers the company-focused Shingo prize in the UK. The Institute holds short courses in the lean area, often focused on team leaders and supervisors, and one-day master classes. They also have an “Accelerated Route to Lean”, a Professional Diploma (over two years part-time), and an MSc (over two years and months, part-time). These latter two include some lean content.

The Diploma is classroom based. The Lancaster university-based MSc has six modules, each with workshops, “action learning sets” and web material. None of the modules are specifically on lean but Shingo prize material is incorporated. Look at the content to judge specific requirements.

Lean content is also found in some engineering postgraduate courses, for example Cambridge University’s Institute for Manufacturing programme that involves on-site exercises.

In Ireland, part-time programmes are run by Limerick University and Cork University with the former having a focus on quality and six sigma and the latter focused on supply chain.

In the UK, Swansea Met runs an MSc in Lean and Agile, focused quite strongly on logistics and manufacturing engineering. Strathclyde offers Lean Six Sigma, with one module on lean six sigma and others in the six sigma, systems, and people areas. Both of these are offered full- and parttime and are university based. Another Masters programme in Lean Operations runs at De Montfort University – one year full-time or three years part-time.

Dan Jones, Peter Hines and Nick Rich set up Lean Enterprise Research Centre (LERC) at Cardiff Business School in 1995. As the name suggests the original focus was research, and large projects such as LEAP and 3-Day Car and several smaller programmes took place. The MSc in Lean Operations began in 1999, as the first Masters degree in lean in the world. There are now some 170 MSc lean graduates. In 2012 the activities of LERC were incorporated in those of Cardiff Business School.

In January 2013, an MSc in Lean Enterprise began at the University of Buckingham. The two-year, part-time, executive programme favours on-site, “at the gemba” learning: during the first year seven of nine modules take place at factory sites. The average age of the group is late 30s, the class size is limited due to the hands-on nature of the programme, and practitioners feature strongly. The programme focus is on enterprise (meaning innovation, systems, demand and flow, accounting, supply chain, and people).

CONCLUSION

In considering lean education and training it is useful to look at the development of business education. Harvard Business School started in 1908 and Chicago Booth even earlier. Business education grew slowly at first, but exponentially from the 1960s.

The bandwagon began. Dollar signs appeared in the eyes of many a dean. Universities found it was easy to add an MBA curriculum or executive education – simply assemble a programme with academics from other disciplines, many of them without practical management experience, taking material from the explosion of books and papers. Include theories and tools that teachers are comfortable with. Exclude real managers from teaching because they lack appropriate academic qualifications.

Today, whilst there is a small core of topnotch business schools and executive education there is a huge long tail of mediocrity. But aspiring managers want the qualification. Some are even delighted with mediocre programmes because they know no better, but learn all the good words.

Critics of the “professional manager” have appeared: Mintzberg calls for a return to craft and away with synthetic case studies. Hopper and Hopper blame business schools for encouraging a culture of individual greed and short-termism.

A hopeful sign is that some leading business schools turned to on-site practice. So today it is not good enough to ask about the letters, but the good old lean standby of the Kipling 7 honest serving men – what, why, when and where, how, and who.

Any physical item that can be used to achieve a goal, especially if the item is not consumed in the process, informally the word is also used to describe a procedure or process with a specific purpose.

In the Tick-takt: Tools in time article in the last issue of LMJ, John Bicheno lists some well-known tools used in most lean journeys worldwide, in sectors ranging from manufacturing to the service industry or healthcare. Of course, John has also written the famous book The Lean Toolbox in which you will find a description of the most common tools but also the more complicated ones, like Little’s law. In my opinion, this is the book that everyone working in lean should be using as a reference throughout the journey.

Whenever I meet people who share with me a great passion for lean, they often tell me about the improvements they have accomplished; throughput time reduction, quality improvements, huge cost savings and so on. But when I ask them about how they succeeded, what method they used, which training they were provided, how they designed the KPIs to measure As-Is etc, they often end up talking about VSM, 5S, kanbans, kaizens, all the standard tools, taken straight from a book and copied.

This is all very well – but are the achievements going to be sustainable?
Is there only one way to use a lean tool? How do you know that you are comfortable with a set of tools? Anyone can learn to drive a nail into the plank, but can they perform a carpenter’s work? I doubt it.

To learn how to use a tool often requires hard work, but to get to the point where you can honestly say that you master the use of a tool or a methodology takes years of really hard work, of repeated use of the methodology. It’s of course easier to get the hang of how to facilitate a VSM, or a 5S event, even using the A3s. And certainly a bit more difficult to understand some of the more complex lean tools John mentions in his article: Little’s law or Kingman’s equation.

How long does it take to master a tool or a methodology? In his fantastic book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the “10,000-hour rule”. He claims that it takes about 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to truly master a skill, be it playing the violin, computer programming, or skateboarding.

Gladwell covers several tantalising examples, from the Beatles to Bill Gates, and argues that the biggest factor in their success is not innate talent or blind luck, but rather dedication to their chosen craft. It’s an empowering message, and one that suggests that almost anyone can succeed if they put in the time.

The same applies to being an expert in using lean tools and metholodogies. You need to practice over and over again – personally I have been on this journey for more than a decade and I feel like I have only just begun.

Reflecting of my own lean journey, I have to say I started out as what John Seddon would call “a tool-head” – using the tools blindfolded, with a strong belief in the fact that they would be able to solve any problem I might face. I thought I had found the Holy Grail and wondered why others couldn’t. It seemed so simple.

One comes to a point of the never-ending lean journey when they start to reflect on the use of tools, as mentioned in the article from Jacob Austad in the April issue of Lean Management Journal. I too started to think about what problems the tools I was using more frequently were trying to solve. I began to wonder what issues those who invented the tools were facing.

I struggled for a few years, but my understanding started to grow with the help of John Bicheno when I was attending the MSc in Lean Operations at the Lean Enterprise Research Centre in Cardiff. I became an expert in a series of tools, namely in the ability to understand the problem and then design and twist those tools to fit my needs and solve the problem. Only when you reach that point are you in control of the tools, rather than the other way around.

It’s easy to use each tool successfully and make some savings, but to make a lean implementation successful and results sustainable, tools are not enough. It’s not enough to hire a consultant to drive the change, find the cost savings, and carry out experiments. You need to educate and train the organisation and involve every employee in the use of the methodology and then yes, use the relevant tools in the correct way, making sure they are a part of daily working life and that everybody is trained and practices over and over again.

Here’s a final comment. If an organisation is to successfully use the methodology and the tools, management must change the way it runs the business day after day. It has to empower the employees involved in the problem solving exercise. As Deming said, “let the people who work with the work control and improve the work.” Managers should focus on fixing the system’s conditions, helping employees use the tools to optimise the process in their own areas. Resources must be available to support continuous improvement and therefore sustain results.

One thing is clear, though: without tools I wouldn’t be able to build anything.