Starting Lean from Scratch

A Senior Leader’s Guide to Beginning and Steering an Organizational Culture Change for Continuous Improvement

Brent Timmerman, Brent Donald Timmerman

• Publisher: Productivity Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780367185695
• eBook ISBN: 9780429589492
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

What if the problem is you? For organizations just preparing to begin a continuous-improvement (CI) journey, the behaviors of the leadership must transform dramatically for the Lean toolkit to succeed. Many organizations invest in training colleagues about the power of the tools but fail to address the behavior and mindset of the leadership. Unfortunately, misaligned leadership behaviors will counteract any culture change that is attempted simply by pushing the use of Lean tools. This book outlines a comprehensive set of leadership principles that must be understood and modelled by the leadership before the CI Journey can effectively begin.

This book organizes these leadership principles into a framework of a conceptual model called the "Three Spaces of Lean Transformation." The model suggests that these spaces of Trust, Change, and Continuous Improvement must be consciously shaped, developed, and maintained by the organizational leadership if a continuous improvement culture change succeeds. This book organizes a set of leadership principles -- that supports the culture change -- into each of these three spaces.

The book is written in the first-person narrative and maintains a mentoring format. This book is for professionals at the very beginning of an intimidating Lean journey and with very little background or formal Lean training.

Although these leadership principles are framed in the approach of being necessary to support an innovation culture change, the principles are, in fact, those necessary to support effective employee engagement. In addition, this set of leadership principles, if modeled consistently by the leaders, will create an organizational culture that will attract and retain great employees.

These principles form the strong leadership foundation that must be established in organizations where, previously, many of the leadership behaviors were contrary to what is required by a "Lean" organization. The proper adoption of these leadership principles by an organization will support the long-term success of the Lean journey, and that this will enable a lasting, not a temporary, change to a continuous improvement culture.

Part I

Understanding the Spaces of Lean Transformation

1

Introduction

“A man has made at least a start on discovering the meaning of human life when he plants shade trees under which he knows full well he will never sit.”

Elton Trueblood¹

author

This book is written as a guidebook for senior leaders looking at starting a Lean journey in an organization that has little or no experience with the methodology and philosophy. It is also intended as a troubleshooting tool for leaders who have already started a Lean journey but recognize that they are struggling with getting aspects of the culture change to stick.

Part 1 of this text sets the stage for how the framework of the book is intended to work, according to a model that I call the “Three Spaces of Lean Transformation.” The next chapter defines and describes this model, and each of the spaces, and then Chapter 3 defines some of the terminology that I use throughout the book to provide some clarity. Chapter 4 describes the roles that are played by the different “characters” within the Lean management team, and it also outlines the duties that each of the characters have in each of the Three Spaces of Lean Transformation in order to properly support the desired culture change.

The next three parts of the book are dedicated to outlining the set of principles that the organization’s leadership team must follow in order to provide a supportive leadership environment for the tools of innovation to work. Each space of the model contains its own relevant group of leadership principles and is described in its own dedicated part of the book, such as Part 2 Understanding the Space of Trust, Part 3 Understanding the Space for Change, and Part 4 Understanding the Space for Continuous Improvement. Each chapter is kept quite short, some just a couple of pages long, in order to keep the reader focused on a single principle. Each chapter in these three parts describes a single leadership principle, and the titles of these chapters label each principle in plain, jargon-free English, in order to try to introduce to the reader simple terminology that I have found resonates well with people on a journey like this.

The final part of the book, Understanding the New Way, is a summary of what is intended to be accomplished by putting in place the model of the Three Spaces. It also includes a challenge for the reader in terms of taking the concept of modelling the way of these leadership principles beyond the workplace. The final two chapters illustrate for the reader that idea of how the change in organizational culture will start to “feel,” when it begins, and the criticality of the role of the leader in this transformation.

Taking your organization on a journey that involves the transformation of the organizational culture is both exciting, and scary, for everyone involved. But there is tremendous value in taking your organization going down the path of a Lean journey, especially if every senior leader is prepared to ask themselves, “What if part of the problem is me?”

Taking your organization on a journey that involves the transformation of the organizational culture is both exciting, and scary, for everyone involved. But there is tremendous value in taking your organization going down the path of a Lean journey, especially if every senior leader is prepared to ask themselves, “What if part of the problem is me?”

2

The Three Spaces Model

“Progress cannot be generated when we are satisfied with the existing situation.”

Attributed to Taiichi Ohno

founder of the Toyota Production System

The conceptual model of the Three Spaces of Lean Transformation was something we developed at Manitoba Housing in 2016 to attempt to represent to outside audiences why we were successful with our Lean program so quickly, when other organizations were struggling to gain traction with their efforts. In order to graphically show the model, I had the following simple diagram developed by a staff member at Manitoba Housing, Figure 2.1.

FIGURE 2.1 The Three Spaces conceptual model.¹ Copyright 2016, Manitoba Housing, used with permission.

This graphical illustration showed our belief that there are three spaces that need to be developed during an organization’s Lean transformation, in order for it to be successful. These spaces should not to be confused with phases, or sequential steps, that occur one after the other. In fact, there is substantial overlap between the development and “shaping” of these spaces. And each space really does need to be shaped.

In 2016, I developed material that I would jointly present alongside our CEO in October at a Lean conference.² I started working on the presentation in August, along with our Lean practitioner.

When we started thinking about this presentation, we had no idea that we would develop a conceptual model at the end of it. The CEO and I had given well-received presentations in the previous months to several different audiences, but I felt that there was something new at this point in our journey, a new facet to our story. We had learned more in recent months, but I wasn’t exactly sure how to describe the new approach that we had been learning.

In our first brainstorming meeting about this presentation, the Lean practitioner showed up in my office with printed copies of all of the previous presentations that we had given about the Manitoba Housing Lean program. I asked him to turn them face down on the table. I didn’t want any of them to hinder us from really innovating on a new concept. So, I had us, for almost two hours, simply focus on the three take-away points that we hoped our future audience would remember after the presentation. We doodled on my whiteboard, just trying to come up with three simple bullet-points. Our first draft looked like this:

• Recognizing the role you can play as the senior leader in being an obstacle to the success of Lean;
• Recognizing the importance of change management in Lean; and
• Recognizing the importance of setting boundaries around kaizen events, to organize them for success.

We repeatedly updated and reworked the language of these three points. We came back another day and shared with each other what we had developed over the evening. I eventually suggested that we find a way to incorporate the wording of “spaces” into these three points.

Since I was a huge fan of The Speed of Trust by Stephen M.R. Covey,³ I really wanted to describe the first bullet using the word “Trust” to describe the change of mindset that the senior leadership needs to adopt in order to avoid being a barrier to the process. This point morphed into “The Space of Trust.”

The second point didn’t take long, given the wording convention that we had started to adopt, to become “The Space for Change.”

The last point took us some time and a few more iterations. I had actually wanted at first to call it “Shaping the Working Space,” but that phrasing didn’t align with the first two points. It was the Lean practitioner that suggested the tried-and-true Lean terminology of continuous improvement, and so the final space was renamed into its final form of “The Space for Continuous Improvement.”

We had been, at the same time as we were working on the wording, trying to think of a graphical representation of our three points. We had a few variations of graphics on the side of our whiteboard. One of them was a funnel shape with segments to match each of the three points, but that looked too much like it was indicating a purely sequential approach to these three points. When we adopted the spaces language we quickly moved to three concentric circles, the graphic shown at the beginning of this chapter. It was simple, and since Lean methodology often celebrates simple as better, we went with it.

Back to the conceptual model, the idea was that we felt that each space needed to be “shaped” from what they currently look like in the organization today. Not only does each space need to be developed and shaped, but each also needs to be maintained. We believed that if the organization neglects the leadership duties to maintain the spaces that have been shaped, then these spaces will degrade and hinder, halt, or even reverse some of the progress that has been made in developing the Lean culture.

In Manitoba Housing, we found that a key partnership that worked well was the pairing of the senior leader, the Lean champion for the organization, and the Lean practitioner. In the next chapter, I will attempt to explain in more detail the roles of each of the “players” on the Lean team.

In Manitoba Housing, the CEO and the I (the COO) distinguished our strategic duties in the following simple way:

• The CEO would focus “outward and forward.” This role focused on the strategic elements of the corporation moving outside to the bigger government environment, and it also focused on strategic business planning for the future.
• The COO would focus “inward.” It was my role as COO to focus on operationalizing, making into a working reality, the strategic goals of the corporation. As such, when our new Social Housing Rental Program policy set was developed and approved, it was then handed to me to plan and manage the implementation of the policies into operations. Similarly, making Lean a part of our organizational culture at Manitoba Housing therefore also fell into my purview.

This isn’t to say that I wasn’t involved at all in strategic planning or that I never worked with other government departments, but the CEO took the lead on these areas. Conversely, the CEO was also involved with Lean, and attended as many continuous improvement event team presentations as possible. He spoke alongside me at conferences, and always steadfastly preached support for Lean management principles to staff or other leaders across government any chance he got.

In this model, The Space of Trust is the essential foundational space that needs to be in place before the Lean transformation has any hope of being successful. This space refers to the overall leadership environment, the “universe” which encompasses all of the people of the organization. It involves building and maintaining solid trust relationships between the senior leadership and the staff.

The Space for Change is a smaller space, encapsulated within the leadership universe, The Space of Trust. This is the space where change happens, and it involves the part of the organizational culture that makes people willing to change and to even participate themselves in making some of the changes happen.

The Space for Continuous Improvement is yet another smaller space, set within The Space for Change. This space is every individual improvement event in your Lean transformation. In order for each Lean event to be successful, the Lean champion and the Lean practitioner must work together, i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• About the Author
• PART I Understanding the Spaces of Lean Transformation
• PART II Understanding the Space of Trust
• PART III Understanding the Space for Change
• PART IV Understanding the Space for Continuous Improvement
• PART V Understanding the New Way
• Index