Job Instruction, Art or Science?

Recently I watched an interview about the Art vs. Science of writing Job Breakdown sheets. I am highly suspect of the Art vs. Science pitch when it comes to leadership consulting. Why? Because even the greatest artists practiced and perfected their brushstrokes before they painted their masterpiece. This tells me that with practice, perseverance and opportunity - anyone can learn.

What I learned from this interview is that writing Job Breakdown sheets is not necessarily a technically precise exercise, but is about combining words and concepts rearranging them into sequences that work for the learner, so that it is easy for the learner to capture and remember all of the important steps and key points of the job. That it doesn't really matter if it is a key point or an important step, but what is important is that we are figuring out a way to make the job digestible for the learner.

While this sounds nice, I couldn't disagree more.

It's funny, pretty much every interaction I've had with people on the shop floor evolves into a discussion around things like sequence of work, subtleties of the job, the nuances and history of the work which that person takes pride in. If I were to suggest that those subtleties are not subtle, or the sequence is out of order, or their history is fiction, I can guarantee a somewhat visceral reaction. After all, they have the experience of the value-add work, whereas I do not. All I can do is help them learn new skills, show them where we need to go and encourage them to make their value-add better.

I was recently trained by somebody on how to assemble a component of a product we make. After watching the person do the job, I tried it myself. When I started the job out of sequence, the person immediately corrected me, "Don't forget to grease your part first!" Clearly, this person wanted me to remember something important before I moved on. In this case, I can probably say that the Important Step is, "Grease Part".

Now let's use our experts example: what would happen if I arbitrarily decided to put the greasing step as a keypoint, and I put it as 3rd on the list because I think it may be easier for the person to remember the 3rd keypoint because there is a #3 on the grease tube? If I write that as a key point, what is the Important Step?
Is it the same? I probably don't need to explain to you how this example alone invalidates the argument that keypoints and important steps are interchangeable.

But that may not be enough...now lets go one step further: how would I know that they can't remember it as the first step? I must have had the experience of observing the person fumble through the steps in order to realize this problem and then subsequently rearrange the steps in order to move the 1st to the 3rd, or was it the 2nd? What is the likelihood that this unpreparedness would undermine the training effectiveness, if effective at all?

Oh, you test the breakdown sheet first. O.k., let's say it was tested first, but we can go deeper with the flaws of this approach. Now, three weeks later, a different trainer must train a new person using the same breakdown sheet with the 1st keypoint located in the 3rd, or may be the keypoint is now the Important Step. What is the likelihood that they will be confused when they see me grease the parts on the 1st step and then skip over it on the 3rd? What is the likelihood that I will even use the breakdown sheet since it really isn't accurate in the first place?

And further still...what happens when the two trainees talk to each other? How well will they communicate about this job? What problems can you imagine, in the context of your workplace? Now imagine how many key points you may have in your workplace? Is it 100? 1,000? 10,000? 100,000? More? How many people work with these keypoints? It doesn't take much math effort to explain how this turns into a nightmare probability problem  - which is the primary purpose for putting standards in place to begin with.

I was somewhat surprised to see Important Steps and Key Points treated this way. It is my contention that this muddled thinking is the primary reason why people have difficulty in training to begin with and subsequently, problem solving at higher levels.

I think what he was trying to say is that you want to give people the right amount of information, in the right sequence so that they remember the job easily. That I can agree with.

So, let me kindly remind everybody here about the anatomy of a Job Breakdown Sheet:

WHAT - Important Steps - Advance the work - this is the sequence of the steps. The sequence of work can be rearranged for kaizen, but not for training, that would sort of defeat the purpose of standard work.

HOW - Key points - things that could hurt a person, make or break the job, or make the work easier, a trick, or a knack for something. I suppose you could make a key point an important step, but an important step it does not make. Example: Safety - you can do any job in an unsafe manner, and still advance the work. Key points are HOW you advance the work.

WHY - Reasons for the key points. Don't you want to know why we do things this way? Don't you want to communicate these things to people so they do not take shortcuts? You may better understand how your work relates to individual progress, team goals and business growth objectives if you include this info on your breakdown sheet.

When it comes to art vs. science, Job Breakdown Sheets are mostly science and little art. Yes, you need to know how to approach people. Yes, you need to know how to work with people. These are artful skills needed in dealing with people, but those skills alone will not make you successful at building a continuous improvement culture and they are not to be confused with technical skills.

The Discovery of "Lean"

Whoa! I've been out of the blog saddle for a while...been a busy winter.

Speaking of staying busy, Mark Warren has been at it as well. Take a few minutes out of your day to check out this great synopsis about the "Discovery of Lean" by Mark:

I really like the slide above. It best illustrates what is wrong with today's version of lean:

1) We are taught to create work cells because that is lean,
2) The work cells do not really synchronize well,
3) They are not synchronized because the work content is not not balanced,
4) The work is unstable because standards are weak or non-existent,
5) Standards are weak or non-existent because (insert your reason here)

If you follow the chain above in the opposite direction, it is easy to see that people who organize for flow by first creating work standards it is far easier to implement and improve work cell arrangements to be flexible with demand. And of course, Job Instruction is a great place to start with creating work standards.

It is between the parentheses above where leadership can make all of the difference. Managers end up inserting excuses, leaders find the reasons and eliminate them. That is called waste elimination.

Learning to see the waste can be hard, because we are so hyper focused on creating work cells. When the work cells do not work, we resort to old coercive speed up tactics, give up or go back to the old way.

So, I admit it. I'm a purist, the stuff today's Lean is made of is really just a collection of skills and principles applied and developed over 100 years ago. I really like Mark's YouTube video above because it speaks to the validity of principles in systems leadership. I'm curious what all of you think about Mark's story above? Does this resonate? In what way?

(Darn, it is hard to not use the word, "lean")

TWI - New Zealand Program Evolution & Toyota Discoveries

Digging a little deeper in the first sections of the New Zealand Appreciation, Operating and Follow-Up programs the past days...there are some interesting discoveries to discuss.

A little background may be in order: as stated in previous posts, the New Zealand TWI group honed their skills over 30 years - far longer than the TWI Institutes of World War II. They also had some pretty good exposure, er, influence over a heavy Lean hitter. Mark reported back to me that the New Zealand group, later called ITS, or Industrial Training Service, contracted with Toyota NZ operations to deliver TWI programs. This occurred over some 45 sessions during the early to mid 1980s. More roots to dig into! Here is an article link about the Toyota NZ TWI installation.

I digress. The point is, ITS had lots of experience, arguably far more experience than the WWII TWI team, especially when looking at their program development over the years. Here are a few things that were codified in their JI program:

First, Job Instruction training improves communication. My experience is that the JI skill is an excellent way of clearly communicating with people. What is interesting to me is that ITS states that their JI program aims to improve communication and training. This is the first time I’ve seen anyone claim that the aim of JI is to improve communication, especially over the training objective. Most trainers in the U.S. will claim better communication is an output, or result of training - not the primary aim. Perhaps the ITS team did not mean it that way, but judging from the 240 pages of materials in this book, I think they may have discovered something and shifted the focus on the JI program:

Form #103/1, from New Zealand ITS, TWI Appreciation, Organizing and Follow Up, ed. Mark Warren

This makes me wonder, why do I often hear from others that communication is a problem in companies? (data) I thought we had this one figured out? Obviously, not. So, we need to relearn how to communicate. There are many ways, TWI JI skills being one way. Are there patterns in the art of communication that we are missing that, if found and used, could make communication better? Is communication an art? Have we forgotten about the science behind communication, or are we all better served to leave the talking to those born with the gift? Would your team benefit if individuals could learn how to communicate better? Do you have any ideas about how JI skills could improve communication? What is your experience?

The second discovery is how ITS “sold” TWI programs to organizations. They called it “The “Problem Approach”. I think almost all companies today try to sell something to customers that they think they need. You don’t sell a car to somebody, you sell status. Or reliability. Or style. Or all of the above, but you aren’t selling them just a car. In the case of ITS, they used “The Problem Approach” to sell management on the proven results obtained by people using TWI skills. The ITS group really embraced the model setup during the war, which was never really codified as the war ended. ITS seems to have figured out that is how to get around some of the objections to installing what could be perceived as yet another training program.

Form #301 from New Zealand ITS, TWI Appreciation, Organizing and Follow Up, ed. Mark Warren.

What results have you realized using TWI skills? Do you feel they could be used to sell the continuing use of the program, or the spread of the program to other parts of the organization? What best practices could you share that help demonstrate benefits of TWI skills that go beyond training? Have you found that people communicate, cooperate and collaborate better when taking a different approach than what we have learned about TWI already?

Hidden Benefits of Job Instruction - Part 2

There are several basic things you do when practicing the skill of instruction:

1) Creating Timetables

2) Writing Job Breakdown Sheets

3) Readying the workplace with correct tools, materials, equipment, etc.

4) Organizing the workplace as it will be used,

5) Training using the 4 step method

6) Following up with people and adjusting plans

In Part II of Hidden Benefits, we ask the question: what is the primary purpose of Writing Job Breakdown Sheets? The primary reason is to organize our thoughts around training. Consider that Job Breakdown Sheets are for the trainer. Job Breakdown Sheets (or JBS) illustrate this in a simple way:

• The materials, tools and information needed to do the job,
• Important Steps, or, the orderly sequence of the job, 
• Keypoints of each Important Steps, or, the quality, safety and special knowledge about the step,
• Reasons for the Keypoints, or, the reason and logic behind why we do things a certain way,

But there are more benefits than organizing your thoughts. When used with a bias towards continuous improvement, questions asked when writing a Job Breakdown Sheets can lead us to habits and behaviors that are sometimes lacking in Lean implementations.

First Benefit to using JBS: What do you see?

JBS are very different than Work Instructions (or WI). See my post on JBS vs. WI for more details. For today, we will focus on one of the key differences: writing a good JBS forces you to go to the shop floor and observe the actual job. This sharpens your observation, questioning and coaching skills. In a past life, I wrote WI's behind an engineer's desk. I quickly discovered that going to the source and pulling information from the production system created a better WI. But even then, the effectiveness of the WI was diluted because of the length and depth of unnecessary details, flowery language and technical jargon. A JBS is concise, short and represents the actual work on the floor. When I learned about Job Instruction and started writing JBS, this alone enhanced my observation, questioning and coaching skills - without those objectives even being my intent...which leads me to the next hidden benefit:

Second Benefit to using JBS: Discovery and Connectivity Support the Business Strategy

A JBS can concisely and accurately represent safety, quality and productivity keypoints - or HOW things are done. In recent years, I've added a small check box column along the right side of the Reasons for the Keypoints:

✔ = Quality
$ = Cost
+ = Safety
↑ = Productivity

In this way, we can concretely illustrate how a keypoint contributes to (Q)uality, (C)ost, (S)afety, (P)roductivity. In lean transformations that focus on tool use, we struggle with linking the activities of people with meeting customer and company objectives related to QCSP. As a result, we create new tools such as Hoshin plans, X-chart Strategic Project Deployment, Leader Standard Work, etc. These management tools are designed to force lean tool use in the workplace. Unfortunately, the success rate of this push style lean transformation is quite low, and the degrees of separation between reconciling the improvement efforts of individuals and customer related goals and objectives is many.

When two people can see how work is directly connected to QCSP objectives we immediately clear the fog around what we are doing and what we should be working on. The pathways to improvement immediately shorten and degrees of separation to success are reduced to one.

I've sat through many, many hours of Hoshin planning realizing that the primary difficulty in doing so is trying to connect the dots between what people do to get results and what the expected results are to be. A JBS helps us make the connection within minutes: by directly observing the work, we are able to see how our work affects business objectives.

Third Benefit to writing JBS: Demonstrate a commitment to development of your people.

When you stop telling people to improve and starting working together with them, people see that there is a plan for them. JBS' are a great approach to deliberately practice working together. When they see that you are thinking about them and taking action, what do you suppose is going through their mind? For some they may feel uneasy. For others, they may be excited. A few may mutter, "It's about time!" If you follow through on your plan, in the long run the team will realize that we are in this together and for each other.

Summary: If you write JBS with others, you are modeling one of the high quality leadership behavior traits: mentoring and teaching. And doing this with others increases each person's emotional intelligence, working with others, resolving differences, testing assumptions, organizing actions, reflecting on results. We need tools to help us do what is required of us for the benefit of our team. A JBS is another deliberate method we can use to maximize the potential of our people.

In Part 3 of Hidden Benefits, we'll stress the importance of readying the workplace for instruction.

JBS - How to To Tear Down a Lean Pillar

I've been hearing a lean term lately that I thought was mercifully dead and buried many years ago. You have seen it, heard it and probably used it. I know I did, and regretfully so. This term has been emphasized and expounded in Lean presentations by high priced Lean Senseis. The term has been codified by multi-national corporations as part of their lean curriculum and embedded within their corporate universities. Recently, looking through two published lean books, I found the term was listed, fully defined and book-ended with Japanese words and origins - a pretense used liberally in lean circles with little understanding of the history around continuous improvement  Unfortunately,  for many people the term is within our lexicon forever. Have you figured out the term yet? Be patient...

Following is a one step Job Breakdown Sheet that will reveal the term for you:

Job: How to Tear Down a Lean Pillar

Important Step: Present Lean Manufacturing concepts to a team of people who could benefit by it.

Key Point #1: Point out that the organization is made up of Lean Champions,
Key Point #2: and Lean Concrete-Heads,

Reason: Most of us want to improve and will, but there are also a few people on the team that will be an impediment to progress. They must be removed from the process.

"Concrete heads." There is nothing quite like launching a Patriot missile into the Respect for People pillar, is there?

When you act like a frustrated child and call people names - what do you suppose people are hearing?

First, you only know how to engage one type of person and not others. You have more than followers to lead, remember, even leaders sometimes resist change or resent criticism, how will you influence them?

Second, you are demonstrating your insincerity when you say that Lean is about involving everybody in the organization yet are inexplicably declaring before the world that some are to be excluded . Yes, there are people who will resist change and resent criticism, but they do change, they have changed and eventually will again when the right motivation is found.

Third, you are modeling the wrong behavior - giving up. No doubt, as a leader they will test your mettle. Will you resist the challenge and resent the criticism that you can't figure out a way to get a person's involvement - or will you seek out and develop new and creative leadership skills?

TWI - It's all about YOU!

Interesting day today...I delivered an "appreciation" session to a team where I presented the benefits of Job Instruction. In our world today, we tend to get hyper fixated on the need for mutual benefits and for good reason. When we work together as a team, we feel good about the results for all involved. That is a BIG deal.

TWI guys will inevitably break BIG things down into their smaller components. How about the notion of mutual benefits? Well, for starters, mutual benefits implies that  more than one person realizes a benefit. O.k., let's look at two people who are using Job Instruction: the leader and the team member.

I'll use the comments I received after the session. First, the leader explained that she was very excited about using JI because now she could see a way to get through to the person she was training. Her explanation was that the team member just wasn't getting it and this would help her, "get it". That sounds like a one-sided benefit. Where is the mutual benefit?

While the team member is most likely to "get it", actually the primary aim of practicing Job Instruction is to make the leader more capable. Capable of what, though? Could she think of any benefit that she might realize by practicing Job Instruction? This question prompted a different discussion, one that lead us to why TWI is a leadership development tool first, and a tool to help people get it - as a result of practicing the skill.

In this world of collective thinking, we cannot forget that groups of people are made up of unique individuals.  Put another way, you cannot have a group without individuals, so do you want your group full of undeveloped people? Who would you prefer develop those individuals? Undeveloped leaders? As much as we would like to do things for others, with no regard for ourselves, we cannot truly see mutual benefit until we have discovered ways to help ourselves first. This is an important concept of leadership that we cannot forget. The unique concept behind TWI J-skills is that they are all about YOU!

Allen Iverson's Leadership Lessons Revisited - 10 years later

Like the TWI skills, this one will last forever...I forgot that this existed and a friend recently sent this to my inbox.

What a gem!

Lesson learned: even leaders need to "practice" EVERY day!

Allen Iverson's practice rant with the 76ers - Philly.com:

'via Blog this'

Kaizen: Volunteerism or Coercion?

Does kaizen require volunteerism to reach the highest level of success? Or does it require management mandated 100% participation? What if you are just starting an effort to have people in your organization formally improve their work? Do you recruit volunteers, or mandate improvement by each and every person? Does this evolve into an act of coercion, where people are not fully engaged with the act of continuous improvement - but only doing so to keep the boss off their backs? 

Below are some quotes on volunteerism and coercion...after considering these from the point of view of a leader, what do you now think of kaizen, volunteerism vs. coercion, management vs. leadership? Are there alternative approaches to managing and leading people than MBO, expectations, accountability, hoshin plans and the like?

I always wondered why somebody didn't do something about that. Then I realized I was somebody.

-- Lily Tomlin

Treat people as if they were what they ought to be, and help them become what they are capable of being.

--Goethe

If you want to build a ship, don't drum up people together to collect wood and don't assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea. 

-- Antoine de Saint-Exupery 

“Leadership is not manifested by coercion, even against the resented. Greatness is not manifested by unlimited pragmatism, which places such a high premium on the end justifying any means and any measures.”

-- Source unknown

“People are changed, not by coercion or intimidation, but by example.”

-- Source unknown

If he who employs coercion against me could mould me to his purposes by argument, no doubt he would. He pretends to punish me because his argument is strong; but he really punishes me because his argument is weak. -- William Godwin