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Fear of failure is the intense worry you experience when you imagine all the horrible things that could happen if you failed to achieve a goal. The intense worry increases the odds of holding back or giving up. Being successful relies to a large extent on your...
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“You can't teach children of color and not stand up to the injustices against them!” YES! I thought as the words showed up in my social media feed. I immediately shared it as it spoke to me… but then I thought… what does that statement really mean? How can I back that up? What can […]
The post An Educator’s Call to Action: We Must Do The Work appeared first on Lean Blog.
I was excited. I was young-enough, studied-enough, passionate-enough. I knew that with the right staff, right curriculum, right strategies, right systems and with the right energy we could raise test scores to pass all the other schools in the state. After a few years, I just knew people would come from all over the world […]
The post ABCs of Educational Injustice appeared first on Lean Blog.
The Corona pandemic is still spreading around the world. Some countries could contain the virus, while it still spreads in others. Other countries are experiencing a “second wave”, which is bigger than the first wave. One of the potential ways to get infected is at work. Hence, I would like to write about ways to ... Read more
The post On the Safety of Workers During Corona – Part 2 first appeared on AllAboutLean.com.
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: 1. Changing demographics will drive a need for change: The United States is projected to become majority-minority sometime between 2041 […]
The post Companies in Action for Racial Equity (C.A.R.E.)™ appeared first on Lean Blog.
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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.