Shortly after 9am last Friday my home Internet went down. After doing my own troubleshooting, I was pretty certain it wasn’t anything in my control, so I called the technical support line of my provider. The person on the other end (who I later in this saga learned was in the Philippines) was obviously reading ..read more

Back in the early 1990s I was an avid skier, putting in 40+ days on the slopes every season. I was part of a group that did days in local (to Seattle) ski areas; annual trips to Whistler, BC (my favorite place); Mount Hood and Mount Bachelor in Oregon; and a semi-fateful trip to Red Mountain in Trail, British Columbia in March of 1993. Red Mountain is known for its challenging terrain. March 13, 1993: Mark and the Red Mountain ski patrol I was a pretty good skier, though not an expert. There were places where I would be in over my head. And I followed some expert skier friends into one of thos ..read more

In early spring of 1999 I was sitting in a classroom at Boeing with a couple of dozen other employees. Everyone with a “management” job code was being sent to this session over a few weeks’ time. The topic was a major new direction for the company. From this point forward, management was to use “shareholder value” as the primary consideration for decisions. The main emphasis here was on a financial metric that would drive all decisions: RONA, or Return On Net Assets. This was obviously a long time ago, and I have long since (unfortunately) discarded the handout materials because I wanted to re ..read more

I recently did an “Introduction to Toyota Kata” session for Kata School Cascadia. The intent is to give an overview of my interpretation of the background, and how Toyota Kata fits into, and augments, your Continuous Improvement effort. Here is a direct URL in case you can’t see the embed on your phone or pad: https://videopress.com/v/4vWvDZRe In this presentation I go over what I mean when I say “culture” and then briefly discuss a “continuous improvement culture.” Then introduce the “why” of Toyota Kata as a way to start to nudge the culture in the direction we want it to go. Finally I over ..read more

Continuing on the theme of value stream mapping (and process mapping in general) – in the last post, Where is your value stream map? I outlined the typical scenario – the map is built by the Continuous Improvement Team, and they are the ones primarily engaged in the conversations about how to close the gap between the current state and the future state. The challenge here is that ultimately it is the line leadership, not the Continuous Improvement Team, that drives whether or not this effort is long-term successful. Getting a continuous improvement culture into place means changing the day-to ..read more

Thanks to everyone who left comments on the last post, Learning to See in 2023. You are making me think. Although Learning to See (the book) describes building your value stream map on A3 / 11×17 paper, most of the maps I have seen have been large affairs on a wall. I like this approach because it shifts people into the position of standing side-by-side talking about what is in front of them, which fosters collaboration. The question in the title, though, is more about whose wall is it? Who sees this every day, who is standing and talking about the current state, the future state, and steps t ..read more

Let me profile a company – I have an actual company in mind, but this one is only a concrete example. This company has been engaged with continuous improvement since at least 1998. Yet, just a few weeks ago, they posted an opening for a Continuous Improvement Director. And this isn’t the first time. I have seen this position posted by this company every couple of years. The posting explicitly calls out this C.I. director’s responsibility to “champion” their “[Corporate Name] Business System.” That at least implies that the [Corporate Name] Business System is something aspirational that must be ..read more

This all happened nearly three decades ago. Since then the company has been through a series of mergers and acquisitions. Thus, the only thing I can be certain of is that things are different today – at least I hope so. It was Tuesday afternoon of a traditional five-day kaizen event. Monday morning had been spent training the team on the basics of “JIT” including some fundamental principles and a 1:1 flow simulation just to demonstrate some of the possibilities. Beginning mid-afternoon on Monday and continuing into Tuesday morning was “walk the process” – mainly looking at material flow, where ..read more

by Hank C. Andersen Not many years ago there was a CEO so exceedingly fond of finding the right strategy that he spent all of his money on consultants to tell him what the strategy should be. One day there came two consultants and they said they could craft the most magnificent strategy imagianable. Not only would it solve all of the problems, and produce great prosperity and profitability, but it had an added feature: It would make no sense to anyone not qualified to be in his job. “This would be just the strategy for me,” thought the CEO. “If I adopted it, then I would be able to discover wh ..read more

Andrea brought up an interesting point in our weekly open Toyota Kata discussion. She noted that as the coaching conversation became more and more fluid, it tended to become more like a report-out from the learner than coaching them. That got me thinking about a couple of things. Updating the Toyota Kata StoryboardReverse Coaching Something I think I have talked about in the past is the technique of using the Improvement Kata structure to report out. In other words, report out progress (like in a meeting, for example) as though you were answering a version of the Coaching Questions even though ..read more