Michael recently hosted a webinar, along with our VP of Improvement and Innovation Services, Mark Graban, about his experiences with hosting a Lean management system in KaiNexus.
Here are some highlights:
Cornerstone had the ingenious idea to focus their whole lean culture around ideal behaviors. They found that if you can promote the ideal behaviors for staff and leaders, you are able to uphold the business principles that you think will produce the long term, sustainable results for your organization.
If you base your improvement culture around Lean tools, and you always stick with tools, your results will be unsustainable. Cornerstone believes that by focusing on ideal behaviors and developing good improvement and leadership habits, you will better achieve a Lean culture with a lasting impact.
For many organization, though, it is confusing to switch from tool-focused to behavior-focused Lean because it’s hard to know which behaviors you should be developing.
In this webinar, Michael talks about how Cornerstone bases their ideal behaviors on those outlined in the Shingo Model.
ALIGN
It’s critical to align all of your improvement work in order to reach your strategic Lean goals. Cornerstone has worked to develop these habits in order to make sure that everyone understands what their strategic goals are and is working to achieve them:
- Catchball
- Gemba Walks
- Huddling
IMPROVE
There’s a human reflex for recognizing patterns, even when there’s not really a pattern there; you’ve seen this with optical illusions. But you can’t jump to conclusions when you’re doing improvement work - you need to be methodical and work to understand a situation, why it’s happening, and what you can do to improve the process.
To hone this behavior, Cornerstone encourages:
- Gemba Walks
- Root Cause Analysis
- Requiring and Examining Data
ENABLE
Everyone at your organization has the capacity to improve their own work. Cornerstone enables this behavior using a combination of:
- Gemba Walks
- Coaching
- Huddling
- Idea Capture
It’s pretty easy to come up with a list of behaviors that will help your organization achieve its goals. It’s even pretty easy to write up a schedule for which each of those behaviors will be done - the CEO will go to Gemba every Wednesday, each team will huddle every Monday morning. You might even develop a habit, and that’s great!
But what’s keeping those behaviors from just becoming a perfunctory “We did it, now we’re done” measure? It’s vital that each of them is treated with the same enthusiasm and interest each time they’re done and that they don’t just become another item on a checklist you need to breeze through.
KaiNexus gives Cornerstone a platform of tools to help them align daily improvement with strategic initiatives, improve all processes every day, and enable everyone to participate.
This isn’t meant to be a conclusive guide to hosting a Lean management system in KaiNexus, merely to give you some ideas from which to draw inspiration. As Michael himself says, “Practice does not make perfect, contrary to popular opinion. I’ve done probably 1,000 coaching cycles now, over the last three years...Every time I do another repetition, I find something I could have done better coach and as an OpEx practitioner and as a Lean practitioner.”