The Emotional Side of Lean

I read an interesting article in January's edition of the Journal for Quality and Participation about the need for emotional intelligence in a project. It’s by Rangarajan Parthasarathy, and you can read it here. It pulls together the principles of project management, evidence-based management, and the emotional quotient necessary to making a project successful.

In order to truly make the recommendations of a Lean project work, you have to have more than just knowledge of statistics and Lean tools and how to apply them to your project. You should reach across the groups with equities in the program and work the kind of relationship management magic that creates an atmosphere where everyone is looking forward together toward the same goal. You have to be able to create a sense of ownership among the stakeholders. Essentially, you must “sell” the solution.

It’s hard to find good project leaders who can consult as a part of the team without losing the evidence-based management required by Lean. A great way to overcome that is to assign specific roles; partner a person with the “soft” skills required to keep all of the people and personalities running in the same direction with a person that has the quantitative ability to keep the data collection and analysis clean and productive. I believe that the lack of attention to the emotional side of a project, particularly the acceptance and ownership of the resulting changes, is a preventable source of failure.

"Lean Won't Work Here" -- Post by Mark Graban of Lean Blog

This morning I ran across this excellent post by Mark Graban on Lean Blog that walks through a short history of how organizations have crafted various reasons for why Lean won't work for them. He starts with the automotive industry and ends with health care - but in each case, the industry leaders adopt lean and the laggards fall behind. Each justification for resistance begins with "we're different . . . . ".

Big Sky uses lean principles for many of our clients, but we too have found that there is significant resistance to overt Lean or Six Sigma projects. Many clients are turned off by what I would call "true believers" -- practitioners who are unwilling to let go of by-the-book implementations of lean or six sigma methodology. The practicioners' or consultants unwillingness to be flexible or adapt their approach to the unique client situation dooms adoption of lean in the organization and everyone suffers are a result.

The bottom line, however, is that I have yet to find a process in any organization that couldn't be improved using at least some of the Lean or Six Sigma toolkit. Every client and every organization really is different -- but that doesn't mean that Lean/Six won't work. It does mean that Lean and Six Sigma must be applied differently. The real finesse comes with educating the organization in a way that isn't threatening or dogmatic, but brings them along at just the right pace.

Thanks to Mark and Lean Blog for a great post that I will surely be sharing with many of my clients.

How Heathrow Fixed Itself (From Think Operations Research)

I ran accross an interesting post today while reviewing Alltop's Operations Research page on how Heathrow Airport has fixed its initial problems with wait time.  According to the Think Operations Research author, Heathrow has posted key performance measures in plain view for everyone to see, on giant screens:

"It measures and reports on the terminal's various wait time, service availability, overall ease and accuracy, as well as cleanliness."

I have not seen them myself, but the lesson here appears to be twofold: 1) Measure performance and 2) Share the results.