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Time to Get Started!
Day 1: The Basics
Lean in Services
A sad, but true, story.
A little while ago, my husband and I stopped by a new, fast-casual restaurant. After choosing our pizza, I ordered a fountain pop, and my husband asked for a glass of water. The young cashier (she couldnāt have been more than twenty years old) handed me a medium-sized āto-goā cup for my fountain pop, and told my husband he could find small plastic cups for water beside the soda machine. While the cashier was pointing them out, my husband noticed that there was a row of tall, glass drinking glasses right in front of him. āCould I have one of those instead,ā he asked? āI drink a lot of water. It would be great to fill up once, then sit down and enjoy my dinner, instead of having to jump up every few minutes to grab a refill.ā The cashier responded firmly and immediately, āNo. Absolutely not. Thatās not possible!ā Somewhat taken aback, my husband asked for an explanation. āOnly customers who order beer can have one of those glasses,ā stated the cashier. āBecause, if a customer drops a glass and it breaks, if theyāve only ordered water, we canāt recover the cost of the glass. And, even more importantly, thatās the way my supervisor trained me. I canāt go against my training.ā
Are you surprised by this story? Maybe you are. But maybe youāre not. Because, unfortunately, service experiences like this are quite common. As customers, whether weāre aware of it or not, weāre used to service providers giving us what I call the long list of āI canātāsā: all the reasons that they ācanātā satisfy whatever our request is. Reasons like, āour computer system doesnāt let us do thatā ā¦ āthat service is only available on our platform for bigger accountsā ā¦ āOur policy doesnāt allow for substitutionsā ā¦ and many more. But no matter how they say it, each of these is simply a way of telling customers what they ācanātā have. And the problem with this is that the two words that no customer ever wants to hear are āI canāt.ā Customers choose a company because of what the company can do for them! Not what it canāt.
āI canātā isnāt just a problem for customers, either. Itās a problem for service companies. Because if todayās customer is unhappy with the service their current company provides, they can ā and do ā easily use the Internet to find companies offering comparable services at comparable prices. Then they switch! According to Accenture, in 2013, there was more than a trillion dollars up for grabs in the USA in what they call the āswitching economy.ā1 In the study, more than fifty percent of customers reported switching companies because of a poor service experience. So, companies that want to flourish, thrive, and grow for the longterm, need to find ways to make sure that instead of saying āI canāt,ā their service providers are able to say, āOf course we can figure out how to do that for you.ā
Although we often think of Lean as a set of principles, practices and tools such as flow, leveling, daily huddles, problem-solving, and A3s, throughout this book, Iām going to challenge you to think of it differently: as an integrated system that allows us to go from āI canātā to āOf course we can. Letās figure out how.ā From the macrocosm, big-picture, strategic, organizational level, to the microcosm of the daily work each person does. That means challenging ourselves to go beyond what we already know how to do. It means creating new ways to serve our customers and better ways to work so that our organizations, our team-members, our communities, and our world can flourish, thrive, and grow forever. To do that, weāre going to have to go āback to basicsā and call on the true, deep spirit of challenge and kaizen, the spirit that Sakichi Toyoda, Japanās King of Inventors, and Taichi Ohno, father of the Toyota Production System, both embodied. Simply trying to copy practices and tools that others have used to solve their problems isnāt enough.
Thatās where creativity comes in.
Creativity
āDo you think youāre creative? If you do, raise your hand!ā Thatās how I start almost every presentations and workshop. How many people do you think raise their hand? Would you? You wouldnāt? Thatās what I thought. Sadly, most people donāt think of themselves as creative. Thatās because we tend to think that only people like artists and musicians are creative ā¦ and that creativity is reserved for people who have jobs in the art or marketing departments ā¦ the creative āpartsā of our organizations. We believe that creativity isnāt for engineers, software programmers, or customer service representatives. For people like us.
The drawback to this kind of thinking is that problems that affect our customers occur in every part of our organization. They occur during the sales process, in call centers answering customer inquiries, and behind the counter at retail stores. In general, in services, value is created together with the customer, in the moment at the time of service. Each of our customers is a unique human being, with specific wants and needs and problems of their own to solve. They do business with a company because it helps them solve a problem they are having, whether that problem is getting their employees paid, heating their homes, or using the Internet for work or play.
Service excellence means creating and delivering the service solutions our customers want and need now and for the future. So, no matter what role you have in the organization, or what department you are in, you need to be able to rely on your ability to generate the ideas that will allow you to respond to customer requests with āOf course we can. Letās figure out how.ā
You need to be able to raise your hand and confidently declare, āIām creative!ā Because thatās exactly what each of our customers needs each of us to be!
Coaching
Do you or anyone in your family play a sport? Or a musical instrument? Did you try to learn on your own at first? Then after a while did you find a coach to help you? If you did, then you know that having a coach helps move learning along much more effectively than struggling on your own. There are a variety of reasons for this, which weāll discuss throughout this book.
The one reason weāre going to focus on today, and one of the most important ones, is that a coach helps the learner get started doing something in a new and different way. Think back to anything that you wished you could learn: a specialized skill for work, a new language, or how to cook. Chances are, no matter how excited and enthusiastic you were about the thought of learning how to do something new, actually starting the new activity was pretty daunting. Or maybe, like many people, you just thought about it a lot ā¦ and never actually got started ā¦
Thatās something that happens to most of us. In general, simply getting started is one of most difficult parts of learning something new. Thatās because starting requires us not just tothink about something in a new way, but to actually do something differently. For most of us, thatās pretty scary. Worried about failure, we believe we need to be an expert on something to do it at all. Even though real learning and confidence only comes through experience and doing....
