I really enjoyed Karen Martin's free webinar on Lean Psychology today. 

http://www.ksmartin.com/webinars/

Her examples and instruction are very proactive; I appreciate that. Following her tips we change agents are sure to avoid pitfalls. Much of the discussion was on resistance (per a lot of requests that she's gotten). I find it interesting what we do when we are resisting. Personally, I work on developing the habit of noticing resistance just to deal with it directly.

Hello,

I am doing a 2 minute survey on surveymonkey.com to understand better what your questions are. I've been making offers to come to your office for an hour to present and discuss Lean. With your help I would like to better focus and prepare. Please take a minute in the survey HERE (http://www.surveymonkey.com/s/5VFTGWX) to tell me who you are and what questions you have. I'll publish the results here on my blog. All is anonymous. 

Thanks,
Matt

Construction, like healthcare, is learning from another industry. I was just watching David Fillingham, Chief Executive, Royal Bolton Hospital NHS Trust give his speech on Managing the Lean Hospital: what it takes to engage the whole hospital for the Lean Healthcare Transformation Summit 2009. In this he has four points on how to convert the skeptics that I thought fit very nicely to our industry (construction):

• Rigorous use of lean methods
• Convincing data
• Hands on experience
• Reinforce through changed management system and leadership style.

So, in my own words this means that we need to:

• Adopt some tools and not to deviate from them. Make a concerted effort to use the Last Planner® System, A3 Learning, and a Visual Management System like Toyota's Safety-Quality-Deliverable-Cost-Morale work cell management boards.
• Find success stories and share them. Celebrate and publish all the wins. Go to www.leanconstruction.org and share a new presentation with your team once per week. 
• Get into action early and reflect on the learning. Experiment! When is it the right time to change anyway?
• And finally, change at the top. Leadership needs to be fully engaged. The Project Executive needs to be very well versed in Standard Work and all the tools that are being adopted so that they can coach the practice.

It is challenging to learn from other industries. Construction is not the first industry to adopt lean; there are great examples in the healthcare industry. I just read A3 Problem Solving for Healthcare: A Practical Method for Eliminating Waste to learn more about the A3 process and came away with some very helpful tips:

• State the issue through the eyes of the customer (always maintain focus on customer).
• The value of drawing with pencil and eraser the current condition can't be over stated.
• Leader/managers can use A3s to coach versus educate in a classroom.

Pick up the book at Amazon or your local reseller. There are examples and even a tip on creating maps electronically. 

Projects are made up with people thrown together. Establishing the role of a relationship designer in a project based company has many practical purposes. Let's call that person the Social Architect (SA). The Project Managment Body of Knowledge ( PMBOK) does not go into enough detail about the social aspects of project management, yet we assign this role as part of the Project Manager's job description. A better fit would be somewhere above the project level; a support person who provides guidance and training to the staff PMs and superintendents. This person would be someone with knowledge of organizational behavior and culture, as well as team dynamics. They should also be a Lean thinker.

Just as a building architect must account for both the structural limitations and aesthetics of a building, a Social Architect must account for both the technical and interpersonal makeup of the project team. A major root cause of such poor performance on construction projects is our industry's inability to effectively collaborate. Poor collaboration typically leads to the suppression of ideas, decisions being made away from where the work is being done in a top-down fashion, and overall poor trust and one way communication by project participants. A root causes of poor collaboration in our industry is the "boss man" mentality that is embedded in the organizational culture of many construction firms. Eliminating this root cause (the "boss man" mentality) is critical to resolving poor performance on construction projects. Here are some capabilities of the Social Architect do what is needed on modern projects.

Capabilities of the Social Architect

• The Social Architect is a natural facilitator. But one step beyond that is required. Not only adept at creating an enviroment that is conducive to learning and making sure the right people are in the room when needed, the SA must be able to identify when the group needs to come together.
• Just like facilitating, training is a big part of the SA's job. Their audience would typically be other managers. The Social Architect helps managers act in a way that aligns with an empowerment culture. They can coach other facilitators for effective meetings and help managers get accountability and commitments from people rather than demanded responsibility.
• They don't have to be the charasmatic leader, but they need to guide the leader with what the team needs to hear. For example, they need to be the ones that ask why they are focusing on a certian element rather than just going deeper into it. As the cliche goes, they need to be able to see the forest through the trees.
• The workplace of the 21st centuary needs to be a place where people want to come to work at. The Social Architect promotes consensus and demonstrates to managers how to achieve a level of participation with staff that allows them to feel like their voice matters. In addition, they could perform audits of human-related factors to ensure that project team members have a high-quality project experience.
• As a cabinet level position, the SA would track human-related metrics from project to project (stakeholder satisfaction surveys, absenteeism, turnover rate, etc). Company wide, the SA could facilitate an Idea Development System for soliciting and implementing team member ideas. At the start of the projects, the SA would help balance the project manager in selecting the team for a balanced technical and interpersonal compatibility levels.

The Simply Lean Pocket Guide for Construction is a great book for tools. The organization of the book presents the tools in the familiar PDCA logic using an improvement workshop 'real world' example. There are about 100 pages of templates and an easy to use glossary.

Discipline is lacking in our industry. This book shows you what to use and when to use it. But use this book along side many other influences during your lean transformation. What worries me is the lack of humanity presented. Doing a 5 Why tends to make people feel defensive. Particularly in our blame culture. There isn't a mention of this. 

That being said, I was astounded at the broad exposure one can receive from reading this book. It uses an example construction company and a Kaizen event to describe the uses of the tools. With a traditional background in Industrial Engineering (IE), it was satisfying to see all the exposure to less used tools typical in IE. 

I have not been doing lean consulting long enough to have a career's depth of war stories. When faced with some regular questions, I have to pull from the underlying philosophy rather than a real world example. Even in the Lean Construction history, there is not a lot of examples. Peter Block defends this approach in his 2003 book, The Answer to How Is Yes: Acting on What Matters. 

He says that the typical How questions are a defense against action and change. When we ask how much time is it going to take, we avoid asking about our level of commitment. When we ask how much it is going to cost we avoid asking what the price is we are willing to pay. 

The book is about the meaningful questions that we should be analyzing. Questions about our desire to create a future together. Questions about personal risk, freedom and responsibility. As I see it, progress won't happen if you study how others did it. Get your philosophy straight first and act on that.

Something to think about over the Holidays for that New Year's resolution...

"...Accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed."

Yes, this is a quote from the Declaration of Independence.  Using this quote to offer some commentary on the state of the AEC industry would have probably been more appropriate near Independence Day but when a good thought strikes, why wait?  I like this quote because it so eloquently describes how we are more likely to go with the flow no matter how frustrating that practice can be. 

I had a rather obvious realization the other day, about what those of us in the lean “field” can work on.  My notion may seem too simple, and too either/or.  But hear me out. 
If your technical skills are great, work on your people skills.  And if your people skills are great, work on your technical skills.  Seems obvious, doesn’t it?  But I see too many technicians, say, listen poorly when they are facilitating groups.  Likewise, I see great facilitators balk at really understanding takt time or data gathering. 
So, you might ask, how can I be sure which to work on?  Ask your colleagues, your boss, and the people that work for you.  They know what you need to work on, and they will appreciate that you asked. 

After being called out 4 times in exercise class, I became a annoyed with the instructor. I was with a group at my gym. We were all trying to follow instructions. It is one of those practice, not perfect-type routines where giving your all matters, not whether you do it exactly right.

And I wasn't doing it right. The instructor noticed and seemed to be picking on me. I knew she was not being mean; we have had a friendly relationship and really, this is her job. But I started resisting. I didn't make the adjustments she declared I should and pretended not to listen. I stopped getting better.
 
I felt like telling her that I was getting too much personal attention, but just let it slide and let the class end. While walking out I said 'thank you' like I always do and left it at that. I certainly don't want to create a bad experience because I want her help in the future. It would have been okay for me to ask for less help; I have done that in other circumstances.

Next time you are getting too much help, what are you going to do? Don't create a bad experience with him or her. It is ok to tell your coach that you are getting too much attention. With one-on-one coaching the best thing that you can do tell them how you are feeling about the coaching.