This week I’m speaking with David Mann, who has over 25 years of consulting on lean and lean management implementations in a wide range of manufacturing, health care, enterprise business processes, and extended value chains.
In this episode we talk about David’s book and one of my favorite lean books, Creating a Lean Culture and how you can create the behaviors and practices of a lean management system in your own organization.
What You’ll Learn This Episode:
- What inspired David to write Creating a Lean Culture
- The specific behaviors and practices that instilled a lean management system
- Mindset shifts for implementing lean systems
- The most important aspect in sustaining a lean culture
- Where David has seen the elements of lean management applied
About the Guest:
David Mann is the principal of David Mann Lean Consulting. In 15 years of lean experience at Steelcase Inc., Mann developed the concepts and tools of a lean management system, supporting 40+ lean manufacturing value stream transformations, and then leading an internal team that completed over 100 successful lean conversions in administrative and business process value streams. He established a consulting practice in 2005, serving organizations across industries worldwide.
David is an implementer, consultant, coach, teacher and the author of the book Creating a Lean Culture, in which he won a Shingo Award.
Important Links:
Full Episode Transcript
Patrick Adams
Hey, welcome, everybody. Today’s guest is David man. David has over 25 years of consulting on lean and Lean management implementations in a wide range of manufacturing, healthcare, enterprise business processes and extended value change. He’s an implementer, a consultant, a coach and a teacher. And he’s also the author of one of my favorite lean books, which also won the Shingo prize. David’s book is titled Creating a lean culture. David, I have recommended your book out to multiple clients. I love your book. I love it from a cultural standpoint, it’s probably my go to. So I just want to say thank you for putting it out there. And welcome to the lean solutions podcast. Thanks a lot, Patrick. Happy to be here. Well, David, let’s start. If you don’t mind, let’s start with your book. I’m curious to hear just about what led you to writing creating a lean culture? Well, so
David Mann
I was working at Steelcase, this would have been in the late 1980s stripes. And Steelcase, a large manufacturer, we’re located or Steelcase is located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And in Michigan, the hometown industry is automotive. Steelcase was running a classic batch and queue mass production, operating system manufacturing system, and wanted to upgrade it. And so reached out to a group of Toyota trained and ex Toyota engineers at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. The team was led by john shook, who was the first American that Toyota hired before they move manufacturing to California. So john and his team had a great deal of experience with the sort of the mother lode of lean, and they wanted to see what they had learned in the high volume, low variety, manufacturing environment of automotive, if that would work in the high variety, wildly varying volume of manufacturing office furniture. And so one of our guys reached out to them and they said, Sure, we’ll basically test and see if what we learned in the auto industry applies more broadly. So they came to help us and they were absolutely what you would expect. They were extremely competent, very sharp, and, and focused on putting in place the tools, the industrial engineering tools that had worked so well for them in, in automotive, they would form a project team. It was a broad territory. First of all, there were at the time a dozen plants in our immediate area, a dozen Steelcase plants, so there were lots of places to try out, you know, will this really work? And the experience was that when the project team finished their design, and turned the keys as it were back over to the production superintendents and, and the plant staff, these smooth running lean implementations completely fell apart. They just stopped working. And I was one of just a small handful of people. Three or four that were responsible for supporting the lane work that was going into the plant. Okay, so this is the best job I’ve ever had. I got I had been involved in in in preparing supervisors to lead they’re they’re the people in their departments through the trends, the transition, which from the point of view of a shop floor person meant that their pay system was changing from what it had been for 75 years in the company, which was peace raid, at its the more inventory you made, the more money you made, right was that was done, you know, we set up that way to de raid. And as you might imagine, that was a very big deal. So times with supervisors. So I’d go out. I spent my time going out and talking to the supervisors, walking the floor and looking to see what happened here. My colleagues, the other two, the other three people that were working on this time were from engineering and manufacturing. And they were trying to puzzle out what the technical issues were that caused these implementations to fall apart on training as social scientists. So I was out looking at trying to understand what the behavior was that was causing these problems. And it turned out that through no fault of their own, our Toyota coaches had learned at the knee of Toyota, which was use these tools, use these tools, use these tools, these are the tools that industrial engineers have known about for, you know, since before Henry Ford’s time. And the and the tools when they’re competently applied, pretty much always work. What I found was that and so this is my supposition that the Toyota train, these were all guys at the time the Toyota train guys had had really focused on on the tools, they were all engineers by training, Toyota’s approach was an engineering approach. That’s what they were able to verbalize in their teaching, and the human side was not there, it’s just the tools in use, the tools always work. And there was a lot of discomfort on the part of these long experienced manufacturing supervisors, they probably had, you know, 15 or 20 years, on average, working in, in manufacturing supervision, they knew they knew that system very well, the the old system, if you will, and and they they simply weren’t comfortable with, with what these tools were, that, that the stories are long and interesting, but a little bit too long for our conversation. They what happened is, they they when the project’s team, project teams left, and the and the new designs were running, the supervisors reverted to what they knew, taking people off balance lines to chase parts, sure, they had learned long ago that the worst thing you can do as a production supervisor is run out of parts. So they would, more or less, cheat the system and go back to producing lots and lots of inventory. And within a few days, the balance and the rhythm, the context of the new design of these lean designs would just fail. And, and so it wasn’t that people were rebelling, it’s that it became clear that they didn’t really know what to do in this new environment. Sure, other than what they knew about dealing with people, which they were very good, very good at doing. So it did not our team couldn’t find any technical problems. But they’re the problems were in, in the behavior and the habits, right of the supervisors. And we had not given them the tools for the supervisors to use to keep the lean tools running smoothly. So, there was that gap between the technical and and you know, from my perspective, the cultural, the sort of the, the implicit how, how do things work around here, that we had to focus on. So through trial and error over a period of several years, walking the floors and the plants, spending time with, with the people with the managing management staff in the plant. We developed through trial and error, basically, this set of tools that would make the process visible and the status of the process visual as well. I remember walking the floor with one of our, our lean semi American pit koski, who had been responsible for Toyota Corolla production in Canada early on, and Merrick would mumble half under his breath as we walked through the floor. What is the process? What is the process, and it took me a while to understand what Merrick was talking about. But the process part was what had been unspoken in the coaching that we got from the car Toyota experts. Sure. And so that was something that we, you know, worked on filling in. Right.
Patrick Adams
And, David, you mentioned the Toyota experts a little bit earlier. And just again, I’m actually curious, I obviously, I love the story. And I want to hear how that obviously, then turned into the topics that came into your creating a lean culture book. But I’m also curious to hear a little bit more about the toyota experts that came into your plant and worked with you. And you said that, that they were, you know, just just what you thought they would be right. So can you just tell us just a little bit more about what that means? Exactly? Like, what were the characteristics that you found? You know, and what were the challenges that they gave you? Or? or How did you feel when they would come into the plant, and when they would leave and things like that?
David Mann
It was in some respects, it was like they had X-ray vision, right, like Superman sharing, they walk in, look at you know, look at a process, and sometimes that they just shake their heads, and then they’d and what they would do is they would ask us questions. Mm hmm. And the in the US in, in this case, didn’t really i mean that the people that they were focused on with the people that they that they was appropriate focus on, people who were who were responsible for, for guiding the work the people in positions of managerial responsibility at every level, from the from the frontline supervisor, to the to the plant manager to the manufacturing executive. And that’s what they would do. That was the Socratic method that they had learned that you hear about or read about. When you’re studying the Toyota Production System. The focus is not to tell people what to do, the focus is to ask them questions that lead them to think it’s as it is, it’s very much like the rounds that medical students go on. They, you know, a group of students will walk up to the bedside of where they are. And, the teacher will begin asking students, you know, what do you see here? What do you think it means? What would you do? And the manufacturing guys? What if the if the answer wasn’t, wasn’t the right answer, they would let you know in a gentle but pointed way. I’m sure all Merrick would mimic his Toyota teacher from the Corolla plant in Canada. All Merrick no good. It was sort of that. It was that Socratic method that brought you to see more deeply. So it’s a master apprentice mode of teaching. That is, that’s what rounding is. That’s what that’s what the coaching was that we got from, from the Toyota experts, we had to come to see with our own eyes. What they saw that sort of the classic objective of a gimbal walk is, is to learn to see what your teacher sees. Right? And that’s the approach they took. They were you know, and they were they were they were good at it, this was a consulting operation. And if you don’t want your client to become so frustrated with you that they say don’t come. Right, right. So they’re very good at this. They were trained by masters. Mm hmm.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. I love it and hearing the story of how you were impacted at Steelcase and just them coming in and you know, on how frequently did they come in? What was the frequency over and you said this was over a period of years?
David Mann
Yeah, the main, I would say they would be depending on the phase of work in a given plant. They might be in, you know, every day for a week, okay. Maybe every week for a couple of months. Sure. And so coming in really doing the intensive work with the intensive teaching is really what they were doing, occasionally working on some of the technical aspects with with one of our technical people, sharing, for example, developing an application program that would calculate konban replenishment quantities for a shared resource, supporting multiple Value streams, where the resource may have been 1000 ton press and change over time was what it was going to be just because of the scale of thing down to much smaller pieces of equipment that you could change over like that. So, they worked on that level. And they also worked on, you know, what, how do you how do you look at this assembly cell and understand when it’s running well, and when it isn’t
Patrick Adams
very nice. That’s great. And so let’s go back to the lean culture, creating a lean culture in the book that you wrote, how did you develop the ideas of the lean culture? Obviously, this happened over time, but can you just kind of give us a picture of what those concepts are and how you develop them, you know, over that over that period of time.
David Mann
So I was running at the really at the same time, everybody else was learning? Sure. And I go out to see what I could see. And what I saw was people who had a great deal of pride in what they did, they’d been doing it both on the supervision side, and on the production operator side, this is a very high tenured workforce, people with a lot of pride and what they did, and they were there struggling. And so we would talk about, well, what how if that, if the idea is to see problems, which is, which is one of the basic elements of the Toyota Production System. And that is, it’s not about eliminating waste. It’s about seeing waste, see the problem? And then do and understand the cause of the problem, and then do something about it. Right. So it was difficult for them, understandably, to see at a glance, how’s this process working? What is the process here? And the question mark would ask, what is the process? What is the process? And and in collaborative trial and error work? What if we, we understand, we understand tack time, that was part of the foundation of the designs? And so if we understand tap tack time, then it should be easy to understand what’s expected, versus what actually happened? So how can we show actual versus expected, and that, you know, we had flip chart stands and flip charts. And so how many, how many pieces are supposed to be completed in this period of time, and how many were actually completed and when actually did not meet expected, that meant that something had happened that contradicted the expectations, that was a problem. That was a mistake, let’s go understand what the problem is. And some of the problems were very straightforward. My habit as a, you know, 23 years supervisor is never run out of parts. My habit is if you need something, pull somebody off the line and, and send her off to find it. And those, you know, those kinds of behaviors, immediately cut the legs out from under a balanced cadence of production. That’s right.
So we, so we talked about that. And we, you know, draw up I, you know, I would scribble on a notebook page that I was carrying, and ask the supervisor if that if that made sense to her, you know, what would something like that look like? And the next time it’s odd, so I’ll see you next week, the next time I’d come out there would be a version of something that that appears in creating a lean culture on production tracking chart, hour by hour or cycle by cycle or tact is too fast for that, but that same idea capturing Are we following the cadence or are we not following the cadence and that that gave the the people on the floor everybody on the floor? A chance to see how the process works here? And if it isn’t, then let’s capture what happened and write what happened. We ended up doing it on post. Notes are a great technology for this kind of Absolutely. And technology goes easy for me to master. Yes. And so we get the idea of as that in various places around the company. These accountability boards started showing up. Some of my colleagues had had experience with that and other places where they had worked and said oh way we can apply that here. And those tools were discovered and our people we were working with the operators and the supervisors discovered that these were valuable for them. And then as you as you go up the organizational levels, it becomes very easy when you’re color coding things red and green up for a production superintendent, a plant manager, an executive even can walk the floor, look at all this visual stuff, and be able to tell there’s a problem here, and then go to a different board and see, is the problem being worked on? And, who’s responsible for working on it? Right? How is it common, so it evolved over a period of time. And I was fortunate enough to be in a position to see that happening. Sure. And, you know, my, my, I have academic training. And academics are supposed to publish stuff, which was sort of my version of publishing. Yeah. I do, you know, presentations for the Association for manufacturing excellence, which I highly recommend as an organization, and, and elsewhere. And eventually, I thought, Hey, I can you know, I can turn this into a book. Right, right. And it’s worth, it’s worth writing a book.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. Now, I love it. I love your book. As I’ve already mentioned, the question that I have is, you talked about some of the tools and different things that you were implementing out on the production floor. But you also talked about when the toyota experts left and things kind of started to slide back over time, eventually, you found the concepts and the techniques that were necessary in order to sustain those improvements. Can you talk to us about you know, what were those behaviors specifically, or those practices that were necessary in order to, you know, instill that that Lean management system into the the organization,
David Mann
the work of this was an iPad, you know, this is not me, you know, the, you know, the Swami, this is collaboration with lots of people, industrial engineers that had responsibility for, you know, making this thing work and production supervisors who were responsible for producing what they were supposed to produce, as well as production operators, who had an opportunity. It’s interesting, I think people in management positions have a fair amount of discretion to define something that’s a problem worth working on. If you’re, if you’re a production operator, in an assembly cell, up to that point you had no discretion to identify something that needed working on. Now, if there was something that was causing you a problem in getting parts A, B, and C, to go together with the ease that they were designed to go together with. That’s a problem for you. It’s also a problem for the organization. It’s a problem it’s worth working on. So that kind of that kind of sharing of responsibility at some level, for finding problems and making improvements, eliminating frustrations that had a bet had a great deal to do with it. Sure. So there we’d have these trial and error kinds of things. Well, what if you made a chart like this? scribble, scribble, scribble? scribble, do you think that would work? Well? Yes, that’s a possibility. I’d give that a try. So Okay, see you next week. And let’s see what, let’s see how that works. And people would go through the, you know, supervisors, team leaders, they go through their own iterations of versions of these visual controls. It’s an immediately apparent system, it’s not complicated, because you can tell at a glance. Now, the answer to America’s question, what is the process here? How is it working? And those misses show up? It’s, initially, countercultural in that you’re not supposed to, you’re not supposed to bring problems up. You’re just supposed to make it run. Like, David, don’t tell me what the problem is. Just ship it. Just make it run. And now it was, what are the problems that are coming up? who’s working on him? What are the steps? How’s it going? So a very different approach that is more about sort of lifting up the hood of the finely tuned production processes and seeing where the where the misses were coming from, and then doing something about them, right. So the tools sort of created themselves in making it more directly visible. What’s the process? How’s it working? Where are the problems? How are we doing on the problems? And so this is, this is a sort of a crude form of documentation. But if you save all those post it notes about what the problems are, which in some places happened. You also have the history of how we get to this point. Have we seen this problem before? What did we do about it?
Patrick Adams
Right? It sounds like it was just a total mind shift from where you were thinking before to how you needed to think going forward. And even the tools that were developed, you know, over time, were a process of trial learning of trial, and just PDCA cycles, you know, just different. Let’s try this, okay, let’s tweak it, let’s adjust. Let’s go to this. Let’s try this one. And then over time, you know, again, as you said, that the mindset, the mindset just shifted to the point where the team was understood that they need just need to continue learning and improving and as you say, you know, making those problems visible, so that they can actually take action on them go after them.
David Mann
Exactly. We sort of get it’s really TPS means it’s a thinking production system. Right, right. And the something that that I think is important and gratifying is that the the people actually doing the work, the people who experience the problems by being given a voice, by being listened to, and they’re also participating in in not just in improving the process, but improving the work that they do, and eliminating the sources of irritation, frustration, and delay, that, that make the shift seem like it last forever. It was, I think it did a lot for the sort of the, the, the sense that we’re, we’re to a greater degree, we’re in this together.
Patrick Adams
Yeah. And I’m sure that you know, that’s also where the buy in came from, to from the team members, as they started to see problems eliminated, which were probably creating headaches for them and roadblocks for them to be able to do their job, which then created frustrations. And so obviously, they saw that, you know, this new form of thinking, this new mindset shift would help them to just have a better day. You know, at the end of the day,
David Mann
One of the things that I guess is a question, sort of an orienting question for me is, what would if there’s, if there’s a reason to do these things, to use these tools to operate in this way, the question that anybody would have sort of in a thought bubble. Okay, what’s in it for me? And what’s in it for me is, oh, this is a better day at work. It’s better to work for the operator, it’s a better day at work for the team leader, it’s a better day at work for the supervisor, it’s a better day at work for the superintendent, and all the way up the line, right? But it’s eliminating, it’s focusing on identifying, working at reducing and eliminating problems, and everybody, everybody has problems. Absolutely. Now, the problems were much more in the foreground, they weren’t being suppressed, you know, shut up and do your work, that’s a big change. subtle, but in terms of, you know, how do I feel about what I’m doing? You know, nine hours a day. big change?
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. So David, have you seen the elements of Lean management applied? widely, obviously within Steelcase in, you know, the surrounding area? You’ve witnessed it, you’ve experienced it, but what about outside of that? I mean, what where have you seen the elements of Lean management applied outside of Steelcase
David Mann
really all over the place? So from underground mining, to process industries, refining, aerospace defense, overhaul depots, electronic manufacturing, you know, the pick and place machines, things that you wouldn’t, that you wouldn’t think would lend themselves to this kind of, you know, very, I mean, crew, we’re talking about post it notes here, right? I mean, that people want to put them on Excel, which gives me a little heartburn, but as you can see it, building airliners, building we’re overhauling military aircraft in the biopharmaceutical industry, in, in insurance claim processing, just any place you can imagine. Because if you think about it, these are not they’re not technical tools that work only in a technical environment. These are tools that recognize that we all have problems. And some of those problems are problems at work. And, and I would, and, and I would experience a better day at work, if I had the chance to identify a problem and maybe help resolve it, I’m going to like that. And so if I like it, I’m going to support it. I’m not gonna, I’m not going to be, you know, resistant. You know why, you know, why? Why do people resist change, because there’s nothing in it for them. If the people doing the work are part of the change, and that and that they benefit from it. And it’s, you know, I don’t want to get too exotic here. But it’s a psychic benefit. It’s an emotional benefit about that, oh, the problem that I used to complain to my family about buying dinner every day. I come home once and say, you know, that thing that I complain about all the time? Oh, do we ever? I don’t want to hear about that. Well, we drove a stick through, it’s hard today, it’s gone. It’s never coming back. That’s if you can, this is so so so lean, broadly speaking it benefits from the perspective that we’re working on enlisting people’s hearts and minds, we definitely want their minds. But we also want what their hearts want. We want them to have an emotional reaction to what they’re doing that is more positive than it was before. And when you talk about engaging the workforce, when you can do that, broadly, that is a very difficult to duplicate competitive advantage. Absolutely. What you see in well functioning lean organizations, you know, you can send an industrial spy to see what is there you know, what are they doing? What’s the technology? What we need to get this is something completely different qualitatively different. And it shows up in, consistently improving quantitative results.
Patrick Adams
Yes, yes, it does. So what would you say, you know, everything we’ve talked about today, what would you say would be the one most important piece in sustaining a lean culture and applying lean practices? Obviously, we’ve talked about multiple things to help with sustainment, but what would you say would be the most important in sustainment of lean culture and applied lean? applying lean practices?
David Mann
It’s a simple answer. It’s true. It’s not just in what you and I are talking about. But broadly, it’s just a matter of being consistent. So that’s easy to say, but it’s hard to do. That’s right. So there’s, so there’s consistency built into the management system process. And that that consistency shows up as leader Standard Work? Yes, a good example of leader Standard Work would be first of all, is leader standard work that the leader herself produces, and that he or she carries around with them. Every day. I was talking to a team leader in an assembly area, who had written her own leader Standard Work as part of this initiative in her plan, and I asked her how it was going, what did you know, what did she think of this leader standard work that she produced herself. And she said, You know, I used to get pulled off my position all the time to, you know, run here, run there, do this or do that. And now, and she held up, she held up her hand holding her or her standard word, document. She said, Now, this is like a stop sign that a crossing guard says, I’ve got to follow my standard work. I can’t, I’m sorry, I can’t go do that for you. Because I’ve got these responsibilities. And I need to make sure that I’m following them. That’s right. So one of the paradoxes of lean is that it requires consistency. That’s process based consistency. But that consistency depends on humans paying attention to it. So so the team leader with her with her standard work that she was really focused on, is the consistency at her level, if you go up a level so she’s a team leader, her supervisor has Standard Work that includes at least a cursory review on an occasional basis and frequency depends on what makes sense in the area. a cursory review that what was supposed to happen in the in the team leader Standard Work, in fact is happening, that process looks stable, and that so that so you’ve got a process dependency from the lowest level all the way up to the top, and that process dependency relies on And people, yes, that if the if the people or person at the top doesn’t support it, that that those that that process is going to wither all the way down to the root all the way down to as low as you can go. That’s right. So it’s a, it’s a discipline that really needs to permeate an entire organization, it doesn’t have to be as structured all the way all the way to the, you know, to the, to the top, but there needs to be support for it. And the best support is occasionally, the person at the top, who, who may never have worked in a factory before, or in a mine, or in an ER or in a, you know, in a clinical lab that they know to look for. Again, this is like Merrick pa koski. And his advice they need to look for and see evidence that there’s a process, the process is being followed, and see, following the process is, is identifying issues that can result in improvement, if they’re followed up. That’s right. So it’s, um, it’s, you know, everybody’s got a play.
Some people, you know, play full time, and some people are more on a, on a drop in basis. And one of the benefits that was unexpected is that the visual nature of the Lean management system makes it very, very easy to learn. So you don’t need to be a technical person, you don’t have to have the mathematical skills to figure out the combined replenishment boundaries for the shared resources, etc, etc, you can walk through an area, look at the visuals until, until the things are working here, or the things aren’t working here. And you can ask the people in that area to explain the visuals to you. And if if they’re, if they can tell you stories about how they felt you can feel confident, if I’m, you know, a senior leader, you can feel confident that the lien strategy that you’ve invested in, is being followed, all the way all the way down to the to the production floor level, whether it’s a call center, a limestone mine, an oil, refinery, all that in any place. And if you see the so if, and senior leaders are, you know, they’re they didn’t, they’re smart people, they tend to be intuitive. And they can they can learn what a good visual control looks like, in a in about, I don’t know, a day or an hour or a gimble walk with the coach for them, people like you and me, who are coaching up so that the so that the the higher level people can see for themselves at the at any level of the organization, is our lien strategy being followed? Is it producing improvement? Right? And if it isn’t, then they can ask people like you and me, where should I look for the weak leg in the chain? And they can go there and in a socially appropriate way they can reinforce what, what improved practice would look like? Absolutely. Its simplicity makes it widely accessible and easy to understand.
Patrick Adams
Yes, and I agree completely with that. That, you know, sometimes we tend to make things so complex that they’re just hard to follow, or they fall apart because of the complexity. And really, we need to think about the simplicity of, you know, just exactly what you’re talking about. How do we make things visual, just as a simple chart or color coding? Or, you know, what are different ways that we can help make these problems visible? So very much appreciate the comments around that. And, David, this has been a great conversation. i love having you on. I’m curious, for those that are listening that are interested in going out and grabbing your book creating a lean culture, is it out on Amazon? Or where can they find that
David Mann
Amazon is probably the easiest. It’s available in a bunch of translations. If you go to my website, he man lien calm, I think,
Patrick Adams
Okay, we can drop that in the show notes too. So people have the link to your website.
David Mann
But right if you if there’s a on the resources page, there’s a button for translations. You click on that, you know, you’ll get the foreign language publishers and their contact information.
Patrick Adams
Oh, that’s great. And I actually prefer audio and your book is also audio and as I said, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve shared it out multiple times to different people and I’ve listened to it myself multiple times. So I appreciate the fact that it is offered with a different Languages audio in and obviously, again, you can get it on Amazon will drop the link in the show notes as well as to your website too. So yeah, David, it’s been great to have you on. I appreciate the conversation. I feel like we could talk about these concepts all day long. But we have to wrap things up here. All right, Patrick, thanks a lot for the opportunity. I appreciate it. All right. Take care David. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the lien solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe. This way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined. Please give us a review. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
Hey, welcome, everybody. Today’s guest is David man. David has over 25 years of consulting on lean and Lean management implementations in a wide range of manufacturing, healthcare, enterprise business processes and extended value change. He’s an implementer, a consultant, a coach and a teacher. And he’s also the author of one of my favorite lean books, which also won the Shingo prize. David’s book is titled Creating a lean culture. David, I have recommended your book out to multiple clients. I love your book. I love it from a cultural standpoint, it’s probably my go to. So I just want to say thank you for putting it out there. And welcome to the lean solutions podcast. Thanks a lot, Patrick. Happy to be here. Well, David, let’s start. If you don’t mind, let’s start with your book. I’m curious to hear just about what led you to writing creating a lean culture? Well, so
David Mann
I was working at Steelcase, this would have been in the late 1980s stripes. And Steelcase, a large manufacturer, we’re located or Steelcase is located in Grand Rapids, Michigan. And in Michigan, the hometown industry is automotive. Steelcase was running a classic batch and queue mass production, operating system manufacturing system, and wanted to upgrade it. And so reached out to a group of Toyota trained and ex Toyota engineers at the University of Michigan College of Engineering. The team was led by john shook, who was the first American that Toyota hired before they move manufacturing to California. So john and his team had a great deal of experience with the sort of the mother lode of lean, and they wanted to see what they had learned in the high volume, low variety, manufacturing environment of automotive, if that would work in the high variety, wildly varying volume of manufacturing office furniture. And so one of our guys reached out to them and they said, Sure, we’ll basically test and see if what we learned in the auto industry applies more broadly. So they came to help us and they were absolutely what you would expect. They were extremely competent, very sharp, and, and focused on putting in place the tools, the industrial engineering tools that had worked so well for them in, in automotive, they would form a project team. It was a broad territory. First of all, there were at the time a dozen plants in our immediate area, a dozen Steelcase plants, so there were lots of places to try out, you know, will this really work? And the experience was that when the project team finished their design, and turned the keys as it were back over to the production superintendents and, and the plant staff, these smooth running lean implementations completely fell apart. They just stopped working. And I was one of just a small handful of people. Three or four that were responsible for supporting the lane work that was going into the plant. Okay, so this is the best job I’ve ever had. I got I had been involved in in in preparing supervisors to lead they’re they’re the people in their departments through the trends, the transition, which from the point of view of a shop floor person meant that their pay system was changing from what it had been for 75 years in the company, which was peace raid, at its the more inventory you made, the more money you made, right was that was done, you know, we set up that way to de raid. And as you might imagine, that was a very big deal. So times with supervisors. So I’d go out. I spent my time going out and talking to the supervisors, walking the floor and looking to see what happened here. My colleagues, the other two, the other three people that were working on this time were from engineering and manufacturing. And they were trying to puzzle out what the technical issues were that caused these implementations to fall apart on training as social scientists. So I was out looking at trying to understand what the behavior was that was causing these problems. And it turned out that through no fault of their own, our Toyota coaches had learned at the knee of Toyota, which was use these tools, use these tools, use these tools, these are the tools that industrial engineers have known about for, you know, since before Henry Ford’s time. And the and the tools when they’re competently applied, pretty much always work. What I found was that and so this is my supposition that the Toyota train, these were all guys at the time the Toyota train guys had had really focused on on the tools, they were all engineers by training, Toyota’s approach was an engineering approach. That’s what they were able to verbalize in their teaching, and the human side was not there, it’s just the tools in use, the tools always work. And there was a lot of discomfort on the part of these long experienced manufacturing supervisors, they probably had, you know, 15 or 20 years, on average, working in, in manufacturing supervision, they knew they knew that system very well, the the old system, if you will, and and they they simply weren’t comfortable with, with what these tools were, that, that the stories are long and interesting, but a little bit too long for our conversation. They what happened is, they they when the project’s team, project teams left, and the and the new designs were running, the supervisors reverted to what they knew, taking people off balance lines to chase parts, sure, they had learned long ago that the worst thing you can do as a production supervisor is run out of parts. So they would, more or less, cheat the system and go back to producing lots and lots of inventory. And within a few days, the balance and the rhythm, the context of the new design of these lean designs would just fail. And, and so it wasn’t that people were rebelling, it’s that it became clear that they didn’t really know what to do in this new environment. Sure, other than what they knew about dealing with people, which they were very good, very good at doing. So it did not our team couldn’t find any technical problems. But they’re the problems were in, in the behavior and the habits, right of the supervisors. And we had not given them the tools for the supervisors to use to keep the lean tools running smoothly. So, there was that gap between the technical and and you know, from my perspective, the cultural, the sort of the, the implicit how, how do things work around here, that we had to focus on. So through trial and error over a period of several years, walking the floors and the plants, spending time with, with the people with the managing management staff in the plant. We developed through trial and error, basically, this set of tools that would make the process visible and the status of the process visual as well. I remember walking the floor with one of our, our lean semi American pit koski, who had been responsible for Toyota Corolla production in Canada early on, and Merrick would mumble half under his breath as we walked through the floor. What is the process? What is the process, and it took me a while to understand what Merrick was talking about. But the process part was what had been unspoken in the coaching that we got from the car Toyota experts. Sure. And so that was something that we, you know, worked on filling in. Right.
Patrick Adams
And, David, you mentioned the Toyota experts a little bit earlier. And just again, I’m actually curious, I obviously, I love the story. And I want to hear how that obviously, then turned into the topics that came into your creating a lean culture book. But I’m also curious to hear a little bit more about the toyota experts that came into your plant and worked with you. And you said that, that they were, you know, just just what you thought they would be right. So can you just tell us just a little bit more about what that means? Exactly? Like, what were the characteristics that you found? You know, and what were the challenges that they gave you? Or? or How did you feel when they would come into the plant, and when they would leave and things like that?
David Mann
It was in some respects, it was like they had X-ray vision, right, like Superman sharing, they walk in, look at you know, look at a process, and sometimes that they just shake their heads, and then they’d and what they would do is they would ask us questions. Mm hmm. And the in the US in, in this case, didn’t really i mean that the people that they were focused on with the people that they that they was appropriate focus on, people who were who were responsible for, for guiding the work the people in positions of managerial responsibility at every level, from the from the frontline supervisor, to the to the plant manager to the manufacturing executive. And that’s what they would do. That was the Socratic method that they had learned that you hear about or read about. When you’re studying the Toyota Production System. The focus is not to tell people what to do, the focus is to ask them questions that lead them to think it’s as it is, it’s very much like the rounds that medical students go on. They, you know, a group of students will walk up to the bedside of where they are. And, the teacher will begin asking students, you know, what do you see here? What do you think it means? What would you do? And the manufacturing guys? What if the if the answer wasn’t, wasn’t the right answer, they would let you know in a gentle but pointed way. I’m sure all Merrick would mimic his Toyota teacher from the Corolla plant in Canada. All Merrick no good. It was sort of that. It was that Socratic method that brought you to see more deeply. So it’s a master apprentice mode of teaching. That is, that’s what rounding is. That’s what that’s what the coaching was that we got from, from the Toyota experts, we had to come to see with our own eyes. What they saw that sort of the classic objective of a gimbal walk is, is to learn to see what your teacher sees. Right? And that’s the approach they took. They were you know, and they were they were they were good at it, this was a consulting operation. And if you don’t want your client to become so frustrated with you that they say don’t come. Right, right. So they’re very good at this. They were trained by masters. Mm hmm.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. I love it and hearing the story of how you were impacted at Steelcase and just them coming in and you know, on how frequently did they come in? What was the frequency over and you said this was over a period of years?
David Mann
Yeah, the main, I would say they would be depending on the phase of work in a given plant. They might be in, you know, every day for a week, okay. Maybe every week for a couple of months. Sure. And so coming in really doing the intensive work with the intensive teaching is really what they were doing, occasionally working on some of the technical aspects with with one of our technical people, sharing, for example, developing an application program that would calculate konban replenishment quantities for a shared resource, supporting multiple Value streams, where the resource may have been 1000 ton press and change over time was what it was going to be just because of the scale of thing down to much smaller pieces of equipment that you could change over like that. So, they worked on that level. And they also worked on, you know, what, how do you how do you look at this assembly cell and understand when it’s running well, and when it isn’t
Patrick Adams
very nice. That’s great. And so let’s go back to the lean culture, creating a lean culture in the book that you wrote, how did you develop the ideas of the lean culture? Obviously, this happened over time, but can you just kind of give us a picture of what those concepts are and how you develop them, you know, over that over that period of time.
David Mann
So I was running at the really at the same time, everybody else was learning? Sure. And I go out to see what I could see. And what I saw was people who had a great deal of pride in what they did, they’d been doing it both on the supervision side, and on the production operator side, this is a very high tenured workforce, people with a lot of pride and what they did, and they were there struggling. And so we would talk about, well, what how if that, if the idea is to see problems, which is, which is one of the basic elements of the Toyota Production System. And that is, it’s not about eliminating waste. It’s about seeing waste, see the problem? And then do and understand the cause of the problem, and then do something about it. Right. So it was difficult for them, understandably, to see at a glance, how’s this process working? What is the process here? And the question mark would ask, what is the process? What is the process? And and in collaborative trial and error work? What if we, we understand, we understand tack time, that was part of the foundation of the designs? And so if we understand tap tack time, then it should be easy to understand what’s expected, versus what actually happened? So how can we show actual versus expected, and that, you know, we had flip chart stands and flip charts. And so how many, how many pieces are supposed to be completed in this period of time, and how many were actually completed and when actually did not meet expected, that meant that something had happened that contradicted the expectations, that was a problem. That was a mistake, let’s go understand what the problem is. And some of the problems were very straightforward. My habit as a, you know, 23 years supervisor is never run out of parts. My habit is if you need something, pull somebody off the line and, and send her off to find it. And those, you know, those kinds of behaviors, immediately cut the legs out from under a balanced cadence of production. That’s right.
So we, so we talked about that. And we, you know, draw up I, you know, I would scribble on a notebook page that I was carrying, and ask the supervisor if that if that made sense to her, you know, what would something like that look like? And the next time it’s odd, so I’ll see you next week, the next time I’d come out there would be a version of something that that appears in creating a lean culture on production tracking chart, hour by hour or cycle by cycle or tact is too fast for that, but that same idea capturing Are we following the cadence or are we not following the cadence and that that gave the the people on the floor everybody on the floor? A chance to see how the process works here? And if it isn’t, then let’s capture what happened and write what happened. We ended up doing it on post. Notes are a great technology for this kind of Absolutely. And technology goes easy for me to master. Yes. And so we get the idea of as that in various places around the company. These accountability boards started showing up. Some of my colleagues had had experience with that and other places where they had worked and said oh way we can apply that here. And those tools were discovered and our people we were working with the operators and the supervisors discovered that these were valuable for them. And then as you as you go up the organizational levels, it becomes very easy when you’re color coding things red and green up for a production superintendent, a plant manager, an executive even can walk the floor, look at all this visual stuff, and be able to tell there’s a problem here, and then go to a different board and see, is the problem being worked on? And, who’s responsible for working on it? Right? How is it common, so it evolved over a period of time. And I was fortunate enough to be in a position to see that happening. Sure. And, you know, my, my, I have academic training. And academics are supposed to publish stuff, which was sort of my version of publishing. Yeah. I do, you know, presentations for the Association for manufacturing excellence, which I highly recommend as an organization, and, and elsewhere. And eventually, I thought, Hey, I can you know, I can turn this into a book. Right, right. And it’s worth, it’s worth writing a book.
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. Now, I love it. I love your book. As I’ve already mentioned, the question that I have is, you talked about some of the tools and different things that you were implementing out on the production floor. But you also talked about when the toyota experts left and things kind of started to slide back over time, eventually, you found the concepts and the techniques that were necessary in order to sustain those improvements. Can you talk to us about you know, what were those behaviors specifically, or those practices that were necessary in order to, you know, instill that that Lean management system into the the organization,
David Mann
the work of this was an iPad, you know, this is not me, you know, the, you know, the Swami, this is collaboration with lots of people, industrial engineers that had responsibility for, you know, making this thing work and production supervisors who were responsible for producing what they were supposed to produce, as well as production operators, who had an opportunity. It’s interesting, I think people in management positions have a fair amount of discretion to define something that’s a problem worth working on. If you’re, if you’re a production operator, in an assembly cell, up to that point you had no discretion to identify something that needed working on. Now, if there was something that was causing you a problem in getting parts A, B, and C, to go together with the ease that they were designed to go together with. That’s a problem for you. It’s also a problem for the organization. It’s a problem it’s worth working on. So that kind of that kind of sharing of responsibility at some level, for finding problems and making improvements, eliminating frustrations that had a bet had a great deal to do with it. Sure. So there we’d have these trial and error kinds of things. Well, what if you made a chart like this? scribble, scribble, scribble? scribble, do you think that would work? Well? Yes, that’s a possibility. I’d give that a try. So Okay, see you next week. And let’s see what, let’s see how that works. And people would go through the, you know, supervisors, team leaders, they go through their own iterations of versions of these visual controls. It’s an immediately apparent system, it’s not complicated, because you can tell at a glance. Now, the answer to America’s question, what is the process here? How is it working? And those misses show up? It’s, initially, countercultural in that you’re not supposed to, you’re not supposed to bring problems up. You’re just supposed to make it run. Like, David, don’t tell me what the problem is. Just ship it. Just make it run. And now it was, what are the problems that are coming up? who’s working on him? What are the steps? How’s it going? So a very different approach that is more about sort of lifting up the hood of the finely tuned production processes and seeing where the where the misses were coming from, and then doing something about them, right. So the tools sort of created themselves in making it more directly visible. What’s the process? How’s it working? Where are the problems? How are we doing on the problems? And so this is, this is a sort of a crude form of documentation. But if you save all those post it notes about what the problems are, which in some places happened. You also have the history of how we get to this point. Have we seen this problem before? What did we do about it?
Patrick Adams
Right? It sounds like it was just a total mind shift from where you were thinking before to how you needed to think going forward. And even the tools that were developed, you know, over time, were a process of trial learning of trial, and just PDCA cycles, you know, just different. Let’s try this, okay, let’s tweak it, let’s adjust. Let’s go to this. Let’s try this one. And then over time, you know, again, as you said, that the mindset, the mindset just shifted to the point where the team was understood that they need just need to continue learning and improving and as you say, you know, making those problems visible, so that they can actually take action on them go after them.
David Mann
Exactly. We sort of get it’s really TPS means it’s a thinking production system. Right, right. And the something that that I think is important and gratifying is that the the people actually doing the work, the people who experience the problems by being given a voice, by being listened to, and they’re also participating in in not just in improving the process, but improving the work that they do, and eliminating the sources of irritation, frustration, and delay, that, that make the shift seem like it last forever. It was, I think it did a lot for the sort of the, the, the sense that we’re, we’re to a greater degree, we’re in this together.
Patrick Adams
Yeah. And I’m sure that you know, that’s also where the buy in came from, to from the team members, as they started to see problems eliminated, which were probably creating headaches for them and roadblocks for them to be able to do their job, which then created frustrations. And so obviously, they saw that, you know, this new form of thinking, this new mindset shift would help them to just have a better day. You know, at the end of the day,
David Mann
One of the things that I guess is a question, sort of an orienting question for me is, what would if there’s, if there’s a reason to do these things, to use these tools to operate in this way, the question that anybody would have sort of in a thought bubble. Okay, what’s in it for me? And what’s in it for me is, oh, this is a better day at work. It’s better to work for the operator, it’s a better day at work for the team leader, it’s a better day at work for the supervisor, it’s a better day at work for the superintendent, and all the way up the line, right? But it’s eliminating, it’s focusing on identifying, working at reducing and eliminating problems, and everybody, everybody has problems. Absolutely. Now, the problems were much more in the foreground, they weren’t being suppressed, you know, shut up and do your work, that’s a big change. subtle, but in terms of, you know, how do I feel about what I’m doing? You know, nine hours a day. big change?
Patrick Adams
Absolutely. So David, have you seen the elements of Lean management applied? widely, obviously within Steelcase in, you know, the surrounding area? You’ve witnessed it, you’ve experienced it, but what about outside of that? I mean, what where have you seen the elements of Lean management applied outside of Steelcase
David Mann
really all over the place? So from underground mining, to process industries, refining, aerospace defense, overhaul depots, electronic manufacturing, you know, the pick and place machines, things that you wouldn’t, that you wouldn’t think would lend themselves to this kind of, you know, very, I mean, crew, we’re talking about post it notes here, right? I mean, that people want to put them on Excel, which gives me a little heartburn, but as you can see it, building airliners, building we’re overhauling military aircraft in the biopharmaceutical industry, in, in insurance claim processing, just any place you can imagine. Because if you think about it, these are not they’re not technical tools that work only in a technical environment. These are tools that recognize that we all have problems. And some of those problems are problems at work. And, and I would, and, and I would experience a better day at work, if I had the chance to identify a problem and maybe help resolve it, I’m going to like that. And so if I like it, I’m going to support it. I’m not gonna, I’m not going to be, you know, resistant. You know why, you know, why? Why do people resist change, because there’s nothing in it for them. If the people doing the work are part of the change, and that and that they benefit from it. And it’s, you know, I don’t want to get too exotic here. But it’s a psychic benefit. It’s an emotional benefit about that, oh, the problem that I used to complain to my family about buying dinner every day. I come home once and say, you know, that thing that I complain about all the time? Oh, do we ever? I don’t want to hear about that. Well, we drove a stick through, it’s hard today, it’s gone. It’s never coming back. That’s if you can, this is so so so lean, broadly speaking it benefits from the perspective that we’re working on enlisting people’s hearts and minds, we definitely want their minds. But we also want what their hearts want. We want them to have an emotional reaction to what they’re doing that is more positive than it was before. And when you talk about engaging the workforce, when you can do that, broadly, that is a very difficult to duplicate competitive advantage. Absolutely. What you see in well functioning lean organizations, you know, you can send an industrial spy to see what is there you know, what are they doing? What’s the technology? What we need to get this is something completely different qualitatively different. And it shows up in, consistently improving quantitative results.
Patrick Adams
Yes, yes, it does. So what would you say, you know, everything we’ve talked about today, what would you say would be the one most important piece in sustaining a lean culture and applying lean practices? Obviously, we’ve talked about multiple things to help with sustainment, but what would you say would be the most important in sustainment of lean culture and applied lean? applying lean practices?
David Mann
It’s a simple answer. It’s true. It’s not just in what you and I are talking about. But broadly, it’s just a matter of being consistent. So that’s easy to say, but it’s hard to do. That’s right. So there’s, so there’s consistency built into the management system process. And that that consistency shows up as leader Standard Work? Yes, a good example of leader Standard Work would be first of all, is leader standard work that the leader herself produces, and that he or she carries around with them. Every day. I was talking to a team leader in an assembly area, who had written her own leader Standard Work as part of this initiative in her plan, and I asked her how it was going, what did you know, what did she think of this leader standard work that she produced herself. And she said, You know, I used to get pulled off my position all the time to, you know, run here, run there, do this or do that. And now, and she held up, she held up her hand holding her or her standard word, document. She said, Now, this is like a stop sign that a crossing guard says, I’ve got to follow my standard work. I can’t, I’m sorry, I can’t go do that for you. Because I’ve got these responsibilities. And I need to make sure that I’m following them. That’s right. So one of the paradoxes of lean is that it requires consistency. That’s process based consistency. But that consistency depends on humans paying attention to it. So so the team leader with her with her standard work that she was really focused on, is the consistency at her level, if you go up a level so she’s a team leader, her supervisor has Standard Work that includes at least a cursory review on an occasional basis and frequency depends on what makes sense in the area. a cursory review that what was supposed to happen in the in the team leader Standard Work, in fact is happening, that process looks stable, and that so that so you’ve got a process dependency from the lowest level all the way up to the top, and that process dependency relies on And people, yes, that if the if the people or person at the top doesn’t support it, that that those that that process is going to wither all the way down to the root all the way down to as low as you can go. That’s right. So it’s a, it’s a discipline that really needs to permeate an entire organization, it doesn’t have to be as structured all the way all the way to the, you know, to the, to the top, but there needs to be support for it. And the best support is occasionally, the person at the top, who, who may never have worked in a factory before, or in a mine, or in an ER or in a, you know, in a clinical lab that they know to look for. Again, this is like Merrick pa koski. And his advice they need to look for and see evidence that there’s a process, the process is being followed, and see, following the process is, is identifying issues that can result in improvement, if they’re followed up. That’s right. So it’s, um, it’s, you know, everybody’s got a play.
Some people, you know, play full time, and some people are more on a, on a drop in basis. And one of the benefits that was unexpected is that the visual nature of the Lean management system makes it very, very easy to learn. So you don’t need to be a technical person, you don’t have to have the mathematical skills to figure out the combined replenishment boundaries for the shared resources, etc, etc, you can walk through an area, look at the visuals until, until the things are working here, or the things aren’t working here. And you can ask the people in that area to explain the visuals to you. And if if they’re, if they can tell you stories about how they felt you can feel confident, if I’m, you know, a senior leader, you can feel confident that the lien strategy that you’ve invested in, is being followed, all the way all the way down to the to the production floor level, whether it’s a call center, a limestone mine, an oil, refinery, all that in any place. And if you see the so if, and senior leaders are, you know, they’re they didn’t, they’re smart people, they tend to be intuitive. And they can they can learn what a good visual control looks like, in a in about, I don’t know, a day or an hour or a gimble walk with the coach for them, people like you and me, who are coaching up so that the so that the the higher level people can see for themselves at the at any level of the organization, is our lien strategy being followed? Is it producing improvement? Right? And if it isn’t, then they can ask people like you and me, where should I look for the weak leg in the chain? And they can go there and in a socially appropriate way they can reinforce what, what improved practice would look like? Absolutely. Its simplicity makes it widely accessible and easy to understand.
Patrick Adams
Yes, and I agree completely with that. That, you know, sometimes we tend to make things so complex that they’re just hard to follow, or they fall apart because of the complexity. And really, we need to think about the simplicity of, you know, just exactly what you’re talking about. How do we make things visual, just as a simple chart or color coding? Or, you know, what are different ways that we can help make these problems visible? So very much appreciate the comments around that. And, David, this has been a great conversation. i love having you on. I’m curious, for those that are listening that are interested in going out and grabbing your book creating a lean culture, is it out on Amazon? Or where can they find that
David Mann
Amazon is probably the easiest. It’s available in a bunch of translations. If you go to my website, he man lien calm, I think,
Patrick Adams
Okay, we can drop that in the show notes too. So people have the link to your website.
David Mann
But right if you if there’s a on the resources page, there’s a button for translations. You click on that, you know, you’ll get the foreign language publishers and their contact information.
Patrick Adams
Oh, that’s great. And I actually prefer audio and your book is also audio and as I said, as I mentioned earlier, I’ve shared it out multiple times to different people and I’ve listened to it myself multiple times. So I appreciate the fact that it is offered with a different Languages audio in and obviously, again, you can get it on Amazon will drop the link in the show notes as well as to your website too. So yeah, David, it’s been great to have you on. I appreciate the conversation. I feel like we could talk about these concepts all day long. But we have to wrap things up here. All right, Patrick, thanks a lot for the opportunity. I appreciate it. All right. Take care David. Thanks so much for tuning in to this episode of the lien solutions podcast. If you haven’t done so already, please be sure to subscribe. This way you’ll get updates as new episodes become available. If you feel so inclined. Please give us a review. Thank you so much.
Transcribed by https://otter.ai
0 Comments