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. 

Thanks Becky for your most recent post. I'm happy that you are seeing a benefit. The improvement is something I have had success with for a while. I probably should have forwarded it along sooner but to be honest it just didn't occur to me. The "A-Ha" moment came when there were a number of emails piling up in my "Waiting" email folder that I wanted to close out. I wish I could say that I forwarded the improvement idea for purely altruistic reasons but I simply wanted to encourage the people with whom I collaborate via email to act more quickly. Now I didn't conduct a Good 5 Why (TM). I presumed that this was an email organization issue. I've forwarded the improvement idea, and I'll check in three weeks time to determine if this countermeasure is successful. I'll adjust as necessary and this may include performing a Good 5 Why at the source of the issue if my hypothesis is proven wrong.

I am writing a post describing my thoughts on my travel experience on a recent trip.  Hopefully I'll have this done tonight or tomorrow morning.

I hear this word a lot working with teams...hopefully. I just heard it in a check-in session of a design team I am coaching.  I find myself using it, but not as much as I had in the past.  It's a hard habit to break.  "Hopefully" is a hedge.  We use such words when making commitments to try to communicate that we really aren't sure about our ability to meet a commitment when we had said we would.  This affects the ability of individuals on the team to create flow in their own work because there now there is variability in the system, whether or not the commitment is fulfilled today or tomorrow.  This language also gives us the opportunity to succeed.  We all would rather succeed.  If we commit to today and do not fulfill the commitment, we failed.  If we expand the delivery window, we increase our opportunity to claim success, however we limit learning.

Let's be specific in our language and learn when things do not go as planned so that our teams can become more reliable.

What does it take to become Lean? Don't be shocked if I tell you it is only one thing. To be lean all you need is the habit of learning. Changing. Doing things differently. To get out of a rut try a shotgun approach and change things randomly. But that is probably not what you need. We are all overburdened, already wrapped up in something and without any spare attention. So, don't change things randomly. But do learning as a group and state its value. Hang on to what you have learned through careful dilution so as to make it applicable in the future. Display what you've learned on the wall to create an environment that supports learning. Make a big goal about performance and declare that we need to learn new things to make it happen. 

 

Formalize a learning cycle in your organization. Plan-Do-Check-Adjust has been popularized and time tested. Figure out what it means and support/celebrate mini projects. Create an honorable award for the mini-project that best exemplifies the spirit of this. In one Toyota factory it was a golden broom award and given to the wait staff in the lunchroom for analyzing clientele traffic and placing a statistically appropriate amount of tea at each table. 

In the true spirit of lean I have taken the opportunity to reflect back on the past three months of blogging on the LPC website. I started blogging in order to share experiences or knowledge that I acquire in my role as a lean project coach so that those embarking on a lean journey may benefit. In order to share, there have to be willing recipients. The number of hits to my blog is respectable for a new blog but I can't say that I am truly sharing because I am neither generating a large amount of traffic nor stimulating readers enough so they will register to the site and comment.

My assessments:

• Writing a post including a link to an 80 minute video was not valuable for most readers.
• Posts incorporating lean ideas into a more personal context and posts speaking to current events in our industry generate greater interest than other posts I have written.
• I am not generating word-of-mouth.

My action items for the next three months: