Year: 2020

I’ve been at home, by myself, for nine days now.

Don’t get me wrong, I have been in regular contact with my family via the phone, and have Skyped into the odd meeting at work, so I am not entirely cut-off. I also have a mind which is conceiving lots of things that I can do, so I am by no means bored either.

But what I have had is time to reflect.

In the world of lean knowledge and coaching, it is in the reflection that the learning and growth take place.

My focus, naturally, has drifted to those simple things that I will enjoy when the lockdown lifts. With the lighter evenings, attention slides to those long summer days. Maybe, I will be able to have a walk along the beach, or visit a friend, or go into a shop and find the products I want. I hope that I will enjoy these things with a greater depth. I also hope that I will appreciate those around me more. I wish, in short, to have changed, slightly at least, for the better.

This has been my growth, in reflection.

But there is also the realization that I am missing the structure and camaraderie of work. How might that have changed when I return, if it changes at all?

Lean is a people system that runs on principles. Principles are those truths upon which we can be certain. They are there to be our touchstones in times of crisis, but are we rattled so profoundly that people will start to question their principles of lean?

Fundamentally, I hope the answer is no. I live by two overarching lean principles that give me everything else. They are to “respect people” and to “create a learning environment.”

I have already stated that I hope we will return to work ready to appreciate each other a lot more but, while working from home, have we become tied up in our own projects? It will be natural that we will wish to follow these up back in the workplace. However, decisions will need making. With budgets now tighter, we will need to return to observing a critical lean principle. What do we need to work on that is currently most closely aligned to what the customer wants?

We may find offices shrinking in size as we realize that a lot of our team were able to work effectively from home. This idea has been around for decades, where businesses become central hubs that one only visits occasionally. But people have a strong need to belong and collaborate. I have a strong sense of identity when I pull on my uniform in the morning. When we blur the line between work and home, the two tend to merge. Work can stretch out into the times that were previously the reserve of family. Would this be an exercise in respect? It is that structure and compartmental feel of my day that I miss.

Covid-19 has ushered in an extraordinary time within the community. Different businesses have reacted in different ways. Maybe those businesses that remained central in their communities will enjoy mutual bonhomie with their staff and customers, for a while, at least.

Social media has been quick to condemn those companies perceived (and perception is all it takes) to have behaved unfairly towards their staff. If the general public has lost trust, then what about their teams, the very experts who are needed to drive the new consolidation? Our principle of “respect for people” has been played out in a very public way over the last weeks. In the aftermath, customers and workers are asking, “who should we trust?” Reputations, built carefully over the years, have disappeared in a matter of hours. Respect for people has become externalized. Some organizations out there will need to fight hard to win back trust. Insincerity in this endeavour will continue to be called out.

One hallmark of future thinking, in the short-term, at least, is sure to be caution.

Deplenished war chests will need to build back up. Some projects might be put back. But conversely, there will be an overwhelming temptation to carry more stock. Buffers keep the wheels turning. For a while, the stripped-down notion of Just in Time (JIT) may not make sense. By extension, many companies are probably working frantically to keep small, single-source suppliers afloat. Some of these might need to be subsumed into their customer companies, bringing the requisite skills under the same roof. The diverse, patchwork landscape of different size business will look totally different if only the big boys survive.

In following the principle of “creating a learning environment,” we will inevitably sit down, as groups and as individuals, to ask what we learned.

We saw, in the instances of public panic buying, that an instinct is to increase inventory. If we have more, and the supply is interrupted, it will be longer before we run out. But, as we know, we hold that stock at our own cost. Pictures have emerged, over recent days, of household bins full of uneaten food, obsolete before it had the chance to add value in the form of a meal. We must resist the temptation to build the waste of inventory into our systems.

In the end, it will come back to the simple truth that was there all along. We must remove waste, overburden, and unevenness from our processes. We always knew that, but now that waste will cut a bit deeper, as we aim to get back to where we were. TIMWOODS will be the mantra, and the gemba is where we all need to be.

Lean thinking will be more vital than ever. People will respond, because people are great: especially those who are respected and learning.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, many of us will find ourselves working from home.

However, unless we are particularly motivated and strong-willed, this can be a tremendously difficult task to achieve with any degree of effectiveness.

In this article, I consider some of the reasons why and one or two strategies to help the crossover.

And it’s in that word crossover that much of the difficulty lies. We associate the physical environment of the office with work and the comfortable surroundings of home as a place of relaxation. Indeed, home is where we go to stop thinking about work, so when it follows us through the door, feelings of conflict will naturally arise.

The workplace, by its nature, is free from the distractions of the television, or the washing basket. While we would disagree that it is an influence, the presence of our co-workers gives us a certain amount of the accountability that we need. True, we might briefly look at the internet at work, but at home, we are free to indulge further. We begin to adopt, “I’ll just start when…” attitude, which, the longer it extends, the more difficult it is to break. This outlook is often coupled with an internal reward system, which argues that “when I’ve done two hours work, I will be allowed to watch this or do that,” substituting in whichever “home-related” activity we find appealing. Our one ally, structure, is lost.

As I have mentioned in these pages before, we are human, and it is okay that we are. We cannot, and should not, expect the same level of performance from those who are not acclimatized to home working. Yet, on an individual level, our work ethic haunts us and we ponder the curse of our own weakness. It is certain, we convince ourselves, that our colleagues are producing full, value-filled days. We will get found out. We must do something.

So, businesses find their people logging in at ever more obscure times, working deeper into the night and weekends. Our commuting times now become part of our working time, and we spread our tasks over a greater time frame to try and extract the core hours required. Who sent the email at four am, and who was around to answer it? Our structure is now further in the distance.

Those that are most successful at homeworking recognize the need for a strict and robust structure.

Their work is likely to take place in a designated “office space,” which they mentally associate with work. Perhaps it has work-related, or work-branded items in it. The space is even more successful if it is isolated, and out of view from family members, piles of ironing, or remote controls.

It is all about reinforcing the mind that you are in a working environment. One easy and effective way to achieve this is to wear what you would wear in the office, right down to the shoes on your feet. If your business has a uniform, this is an even greater bonus. Put it on. Put it on at the same time you would for a typical working day. If it helps, leave the house at the same time and drive around the town to simulate your morning commute. Every small strategy can help.

But most of all, when you lose structure, don’t beat yourself up for behaving slightly differently. You’re human, and you’re great that way. Simply pick up your knowledge of PDCA. Ask yourself what you learned today, and what you’re going to do differently tomorrow. Leave being a machine to the machines.

Stay safe and stay healthy.

Best wishes,

Simon.

Over the last week or so, I was fortunate enough to attend a course at work. Before going on the training, I aimed to see what parallels I could find between the topic and my lean knowledge.

The course centered around MTM, or Methods-Time Measurement. Primarily, MTM seeks to explore a process by breaking it down into its building blocks. Each of these building blocks, e.g., reach, grasp, move, position, and release, is given a standard time. This analysis allows for processes to be accurately planned prior to real-life deployment.

Each building block is designated a different code and a different time, which is dependent on distance class. For example, a reach of 80cm is given more time than a reach of 20cm. This seemed to make sense.

During the training, we were given different scenarios to analyze by using the appropriate code. I did not always do too well at these exercises and found some of them very difficult.

I reflected on this difficulty. Although I work primarily in lean, it had been a long time since I had had to think about quick, repeatable processes with such a degree of granularity. But it was in this reflection that the learning happened.

The course materials were deeply rooted in my mind. It was a weird experience, but I felt that I could actually feel my brain processing the new data as I slept. Indeed, on the last day of the training, we were given a video to watch and analyze.

Given some of my less spectacular efforts on previous days, there was every possibility that I would not do particularly well. However, I was pleasantly surprised when I began to perform with clarity and precision during the test.

Again, I reflected. Perhaps I had run out of ways to get it wrong? Maybe the strongest learning had come from the errors I had made?

I had started the course looking for lean parallels. It did not take me long to realize that I needed to put this thinking aside and concentrate fully on the information I was being given.

Yet, here, I was, on the final day of a fairly intense course, reflecting on PDCA and Coaching cycles. After all, I had gradually improved my MTM analyzing skills through a series of mistakes. Similarly, I felt my learning had not exclusively happened in the classroom. It had happened in the quiet times when I was reflecting at home. It had happened when I was moving around, observing the shop floor before the training day had even begun.

When we talk about the “learning enterprise,” we are not talking about sending everybody on courses. We are talking about the learning that happens when we are gently coached through our mistakes.

“What did you expect to happen?”

“What did happen?”

“What did you learn?”

“What are you going to do next?”

The role of the leader is to coach her people to do the things that they currently feel are impossible. This is the learning enterprise – a place where people learn in the moments of space and reflection.

As we have seen in previous articles, this constant re-examination takes a good deal of discipline, both on behalf of the coach and coachee. But the outcome, well, that can be spectacular.

It is worth stating, at the outset, that “The Empty Raincoat” by Charles Handy was originally published in 1994.

Therefore, to read it in 2020 is something of a joy. The book details Handy’s thoughts on the dilemma of the individual in the corporate world. Are we all to become anonymous? The titular empty raincoat? The book is very far-reaching in its scope but does not overstretch itself. Many of the predictions have come to pass. Some, like the idea of federalism, seem to have played out and be seeking out a second Sigmoidal curve.

This cyclical idea of renewal is certainly an interesting one. Handy talks of the need to begin the next upward curve, before the previous arc is complete. Naturally, the difficulty inherent comes in recognizing that the downward trajectory has started. This is one of the many modern business paradoxes that Handy explores.

As a lean thinker, I was particularly interested in Handy’s thoughts on belonging. Belonging creates engagement within the lean enterprise, and this topic features heavily in Handy’s work. Handy explores the concept of twin citizenship, both on the level of the large and the small. As humans, we engage with the goal of the department and the corporation. Handy did extrapolate this to the idea of the small community, inside the federal state. He hypothesized if this might spell the end of the nation station – with small, self-governing towns, orbiting a European centre. History has shown that the notion of the nation-state is still a strong one.

In the corporate world, Handy speaks of central hubs, granting subsidiarity to satellite entities. The success of this model, argues Handy, becomes the individual’s sense of membership to the centre and the unit where the work is done.

Handy speaks of the rise of the portfolio worker — a vendor of self, giving service to multiple companies via an invoice of skill, not time. Although the large organization has yet to degrade to this level, there are signs of Handy’s forewarning. The job for life has undoubtedly disappeared from our landscape.

“The Empty Raincoat” is a remarkable book, which certainly stands the test of time. The author, and his work, is an academic area I will re-visit in coming years.

Thoroughly recommended.