In our last article, we began to think about the importance of discipline and how it relates to the success of lean within our organisations and personal lives.
In this article, we pick up the baton once more and press on with our exploration of human behaviour within lean systems. As we have already seen, you cannot take the human out of lean.
Over the years, I have had the opportunity and privilege of training lean methods in many companies and businesses. Every so often, I would encounter the “it cannot work here” response, often voiced like this:
“They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction…” (Peck, p3)
The above quotation derives from the feelings of those entering psychotherapy. They compare their travails with their perception that those around them have life easy. Life should be simple; they hypothesise, and when they step into work, that feeling prevails.
Such a simple premise has startling implications for lean in particular and business in general.
If I believe that work should be simple, then am I more likely to discard that which requires a degree of effort and learning? Surely ‘difficult’ means something is not working? Consider the following quotation, also by Peck:
“Whenever we seek to avoid the responsibility for our own behaviour, we do so by attempting to give that responsibility to some other individual or organisation or entity.” (Peck, p.30.)
And here is a key point in our thinking. Lean has, for a long time, sought to place responsibility for change back into the laps of the process experts, those that do the job every day.
To begin with, many will flourish in that sense of fresh, new empowerment, but that empowerment must be total, and it must be everlasting. The empowerment puzzle can be a definite drawback of “Event Kaizen.” For a couple of blissful weeks, while the kaizen focus is in my area, I feel incredibly supported, and my outlook changes vastly:
“The feeling of being valuable – ‘I am a valuable person’ – is essential to mental health and is a cornerstone of self-discipline.” (Peck, p12.)
I begin to perform. I begin to highlight and implement positive change in my working environment and processes, because I am temporarily inspired to self-discipline. Life is good, and, perhaps it can be simple. I feel content.
But then the focus shifts to another area, and my day returns to normal. At this point, I must make the conscious decision to remain disciplined and assume the pain of responsibility. Unless the daily drumbeat of improvement is apparent to me, perhaps through the receipt of coaching, it will be easy for me to go back to where I was comfortable. Again, Peck describes this in the context of those who gain the most through therapy:
“We must possess the willingness and the capacity to suffer continual self-examination.” (Peck, p.25.)
Peck goes on to state that this is by no means an inherent trait in people. But it is more prevalent in lean professionals. Most lean experts that I know do not even consider themselves to be experts. Most are engaged in a lifelong study of the subject. When lean gets you, it gets you like that. The problem arises when the lean professional forgets that those around feel differently.
As we mentioned in our first article, lean is difficult. And we must recognise this. When we, as change agents, evangelise and beat the drum of empowered kaizen at the lowest level, what we are essentially asking for is this: “delay the gratification of doing what is easy now (your work) and except the pain of improving it. Then assume the responsibility for continuing this task with the training that we have given you.”
The sudden onset of responsibility then gives rise to confusion:
“If we are to cope with the turbulence of life today, we must start by finding a way to organise it in our minds. Until we do that we will feel impotent, victims of events beyond our control or even our capacity to understand.” (Handy, p.22.)
And so, we are right back to two fundamental misconceptions that we will begin to address in future posts: i) that others are to blame for our work situations, and ii) our thinking comes from external events.
While the spotlight of the joy of continuous improvement success may bring temporary relief, it will eventually give way to frustration when the pace slows, and the buzz of results become more difficult to find. At this point, it is easy to think that the problem is actually lean and conclude, “I knew it would never work here!”
If we can genuinely weave the antidotes to these mistaken beliefs into our lean thinking, then perhaps we will be getting somewhere.
Bibliography:
HANDY, Charles: “The Empty Raincoat” Arrow (2002.)
PECK, M Scott: “The Road Less Travelled” Penguin Random House UK (1978.)