This week I was in Independence, MO working with another team in our company to help learn the skills of coaching and how to see waste like never before. As part of the start of the journey we try to understand the coaching skills needed to develop others and we watch some short videos of other companies that perform very quick improvements, eliminating waste in the process. Coaching allows us to rethink the entire idea of how we manage and lead, while watching videos of people improving processes helps us tear down that invisible wall that's holding us all back.
When I was in college I decided to take a semester to study abroad in Sweden. While in Sweden I was able to go on a lot of trips around parts of Europe. In the photo above I went with a group of students to Norway to hike the Jostedal glacier. When looking up, the glacier looked massive and formidable. Yet, we trekked up it together. We put on our spikes, tied to each other, and started the hike up the glacier. There were some who were afraid, but as a team we hiked. If you've never hiked a glacier, you should know that they are actively moving and melting. That means that there are crevices, thinning ice, and thousands of years old of organic material. We are tied together just in case someone were to fall so we can lift them up. Sure enough, on this hike the person just two people ahead of me fell in one of the crevices. We all sat down, as we had been instructed in the safety briefing. Then, we pulled her up. She was afraid more now than ever, yet we continued to hike. Making our way up, we turned around to see where we came from, and that's what you see here in the photo - the beauty of accomplishment.
Thinking about this experience from so long ago, there was a clear parallel to what I experienced this week. While we worked with the team this week, we went on their first Gemba walk to look for all the waste in the processes. It takes very little time to start to see it all, and once we do, we will never be able to go back to not seeing it. As we watched one of the processes we saw the struggle, and the struggle spread as time became an issue. More people joined in to the process, and all experienced the same struggles - having to do all that waste! Tons of transport, defects, overprocessing, meanwhile others just waited for the process to finish. Eliminating or reducing just one of those wastes we might've been finished on time or early using just the regular staffing. After all was finished, we discussed this new skill, and all the waste we just witnessed. What can we do to help with all that struggle?
We had an idea, based on a video we watched, to utilize a new layout in order to eliminate a lot of the defects and transport waste. The original process required us to sort products from a pallet into bins. The bins were all set up three deep and side by side. There were two work cells for two separate sorts and one person worked each sort. The layout was rather spread out, and sorting into the farther bins would, nearly a third of the time, miss and require the person to squeeze between the bins in order to fix the error. So we had an idea to reduce the transport, and the error rate by utilizing the "U" shaped workcell, and thereby reducing the three deep bin system to a two deep bin system. We didn't just go out and do it though, we talked with the people that were assigned to that process. We talked about the struggles we witnessed, and asked if they thought there was a better way. And so we let them come up with a better way and supported the idea. As managers, we stepped back from providing the solution, and as coaches, asked questions that led to an action. Once we went through that first iteration, we asked the same question - "how can we make this better?" And so we took the action that we had already taken, and continued to improve until we created a much cleaner layout with less potential for defects. We all stood and looked at it as though we were on top of that glacier looking down at the beauty.
Later in that day, I walked with more supervisors, trained now to see waste. Their manager came by at the end of our walk as we were discussing what we saw, and the manager asked them "so what can we improve?" The supervisors started listing off a lot of different ideas, tied directly to eliminating the waste, the struggles, they saw in the process. The best question came next - "what is holding you back from doing that?"
The manager worked with us on the improvement from earlier in the day, and had been stewing on this idea all afternoon. What ever kept us from improving before? I think it is fear. Fear that our idea might be wrong. But that's alright if it's wrong. We will iterate and iterate until we create something much better than it was, much better than we can do alone.
From these experiences I have learned that if fear is what holds you back, teams drive us forward.