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. 

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.

Did you wait to discover the parts of speech before trying to talk? That's a crazy idea. It was when you were a kid and you just got frustrated and eventually learned to speak. You didn't think about learning and you weren't trying to 'transform your organization'. You just got started and got better. But today, you feel like you don't have all the facts. You keep you from getting started because you aren't sure what's next. 

Maybe this doesn't describe you, but it is a common trap. David Sundow, author of Ways of the Hand, wrote albeit a bit cryptically about his experience with learning how to play jazz piano. He stared like any of us would get started. Learning the basics. Figuring out many small processes that he could get good at. But it didn't just tie together like he thought it would when he learned enough.

The Squeeze: A Novel Approach to Business Sustainability by Gary Langenwalter.

The common names of the green movement don't do justice to what the possibilities are with sustainability. It is time to stop going to work and doing things that aren't aligned with who you are at home. We must consider why we do what we do and change the why to fit what we want. The Triple Bottom Line (profit, planet, people) can now make sense and we can now take real action on it.

The author stylizes a set of characters to send the message. We follow a family owned business through the worst of the worse. Part romance with a critical message embedded, the author demonstrates how to go about a sustainability transformation. The recipe could be used by any lean team. Targeted towards executives as well as front line supervisors, The Squeeze will help your team become open to how deep the needed shifts are. But the beauty of sustainability is that this gives us permission to behave the way that we know we should be anyway.

The story that we tell ourselves about what is going on around us help us explain our situation and further our action with progress towards goals. What is the story of someone who causes an accident? Surely they believed that what they were doing was doing whatever was best for them at the time. And was this wrong?

Ten Questions About Human Error: A New View of Human Factors and System Safety by Sidney Dekker deals with this and other critical questions that come up during your first exploration of the New View of safety. Much progress has been made in the way of safety - we more often attribute systemic reasons for failure and choose a path of learning. Yet, the criminalization of accidents happens. And the organization punishes. 

More important than the bulleted rules of engagement for a human error investigation, and more important than the pitfalls to avoid, are Sidney Dekker's signs of not learning from failure. The safety department of today, as with our standards, don't include a possibility of real safety transformation. 

1. Maintain physical fitness

2. Acknowledge the negative and accentuate the positive

Just Culture: Balancing Safety and Accountability by Sidney Dekker

Bad stuff happens to good people. The truth turns into people's versions when an accident happens. Something serious can draw media and even court attention. A code of silence typically ensues because it is to easily to be unjustly accused. And it is no wonder why this happens. Rather than increase reporting of accidents, the author suggests that we generate a culture of honestly disclosing accidents with the only intention of learning to avoid repeated mistakes. 

The book is littered with examples from real cases where ethics and legal issues collide. My heart poured to repeatedly see how people are punished for their unknown involvement in a supposed crime. 

The Field Guide to Understanding Human Error by Sidney Dekker

Have a safety incident that you are pissed about? Ever kick someone off the job for not wearing their safety glasses? I happen to be following the safety officer when he asked the drywall guy to send his plaster home for the day. This was the second confirmed occurrence of the violation. Later I happen to be in a planning meeting when the plaster foremen informed the group that they were late delivering what was needed because of the safety officer. 

Nobody ever asked the guy why he removed his glasses. It made sense for him to do it even after he had been formally requested to use them again. I wonder what is going to happen tomorrow? He'll either be back fighting the same problem or someone else will be in his way.