Site blog
Police brutality against Black people and Black Lives Matter brought racism back to the global agenda. People protest on the streets across the world and corporations find their voice and state their commitment to Inclusion and Equity. While it's important to be clear and make your voice heard, we shouldn't stop here. We should move […]
The post Kata Coaching — Next Steps Towards Inclusion and Equity at Work appeared first on Lean Blog.
Does our work promote a world of equity and opportunity, or does it perpetuate, directly or indirectly, the existing system which benefits from low wages, reduced benefits, limited opportunities, and white-focused “professional standards?” As professionals in continuous improvement, we operate on the assumption that the purpose of business is to make money. I get it. I […]
The post The Continuous Improvement Professional and Racism: What Would You Do? appeared first on Lean Blog.
Imagine a situation that has two possible outcomes:
- The solution is delivered on time and on budget with very positive Customer feedback
- The solution is delivered late, over budget and doesn’t meet the needs of the Customer
What typically happens?
In the first case we celebrate and pop the corks on bottles of champagne.
In the second case we call for a post-mortem, an exercise that is mostly fault finding and look for whose blame. Typically, we don’t look into process issues that caused the problems and ask Why? Result - no real learning and no improvements.
Even in the first case, with no review there is no shared learning. In this case the review should be on what went well and Why? What have we learned? What do we need to do to lock this learning into standards that can be used next time?
In both cases we want to ask the basic questions:
- What should be happening?
- What actually happened?
- Why are there differences?
This drill will help us improve even if the results are very good since sometimes the results were good because we got lucky. I don’t know of any leader who wants to rely on luck as a management technique since it has a habit of turning next time.
There are always things that go wrong and all processes have waste. Kaizen is the relentless drive to remove this waste and to strengthen the health of our processes. But before we can kaizen our processes, we need to use Hansei to truly reflect upon the situation, and upon the health of our processes. Hansei is used to truly Grasp the Situation and requires honest, deep reflection and thought, both when things go well and when they don’t. Design reviews, gate reviews and post launch reviews are opportunities for leaders to zoom out and assess the health of the underlying process and look for improvements. Hansei leading to kaizen.
Cheers
Al
In case you missed our last few blogs... please feel free to have another look…
TPS and Agile
Beware INITIATIVES
Point, Flow & System Improvement
Andon – Putting Quality at the Forefront
Are you a business or an institution that is ready to move beyond a nicely worded statement about diversity, equity and inclusion? Here are two compelling reasons why businesses should start moving beyond a statement: Changing demographics will drive a need for change: The United States is projected to become majority-minority sometime between 2041 and […]
The post Companies in Action for Racial Equity (C.A.R.E.)™ appeared first on Lean Blog.
To continue reading this post click on the title.
I've been carrying around my original Back Pocket Reconciliation Plan for years now. Mine is on a pastel yellow square Post-it note. There are three handwritten lines on it: 1) Describe myself as a “white settler” 2) Acknowledge lands 3) Support indigenous voices, artists and writers That first one, describe myself as a white settler, […]
The post My Personal Anti-Racism Plan? Let Me Check My Pockets. appeared first on Lean Blog.
Starting With the Grand-Daddies of Quality A few years back I developed a blog series titled, “The Grand-Daddies of Quality“– my goal was to delve deeply into our industry history, but what I discovered sent me on an entirely unexpected quest. The Quality Gurus, the Quality Greats, Fathers of Quality — whatever you want to […]
The post Anti-Racism: A River WE Must Cross appeared first on Lean Blog.
Those of us active in volunteer and community service value selflessness and sacrifice in service of others. We consider ourselves kind, caring and compassionate. Many of us are energized by the very thought of inspiring change in someone's life or situation. These are the characteristics that spurn positivity in a toxic world. These characteristics counter the […]
The post Impact Racism by Influencing People and Implementing Ideas appeared first on Lean Blog.
Change can be hard; especially for those of us who have always done things a certain way. As human beings, we are indeed creatures of habit. Even those of us who are adventurous and ambitious, we still find comfort in our daily patterns and routines. As a practitioner of continuous improvement methodologies, I am a big […]
The post One Small Thing: Sharing our Visions and Voices to #RootCauseRacism appeared first on Lean Blog.
You might have heard of a “social media takeover” where a brand with a large following gives control of their social media feed to somebody who is promoting a cause or a social message. As many Americans are doing, I've been thinking about, reflecting, and learning about racism and the effects on People of Color. […]
The post Why I’m “Handing Over” My Blog for the Week to #RootCauseRacism appeared first on Lean Blog.