As always, the lean crowd is predictably unpredictable. Everyone has a different view and I love perspective, but defining lean and every one’s different interpretations of it is virtually impossible . . . like chasing Jell-O across the table.
A recent comment caught my attention. The claim that Lean is more than tools is predictable even though they all run around with 5S, kaizens, poka yoke, standardization and other Japanese terms that long lost context of the thinking that created the tools. But this comment claims that if we honor three principles we change thinking. Well why didn’t I think of that? Here they are:
- Honor Standards
- Honor People’s Good Ideas
- Honor Customers
Well . . . there you have it. Go improve your service organization now, but don’t forget the tools. Even though they don’t transfer very well from manufacturing to service. This thinking is why according to Nohia and Berkley in Harvard Business Review claim 75% of executives are unhappy with change initiatives in their organizations.
Now why?
American Management thinks they can just copy from Japan, but they don’t know what to copy! – W. Edwards Deming
And so here we are with failing projects to improve organizations, because copying Japan is not enough. Dr. Deming challenged us to think for ourselves not learn the Japanese language. His concern, we will never catch up . . . Japan isn’t standing still. Copying always leaves you behind the one that is advancing thinking.
Just saying buy into these principles will not get you where you want to be. The human change methods I reference, change behavior in a normative fashion.
How is this different?
I’ve ranted many times about how standards create failure demand in service organizations. The often quoted “Where there is no standard, there is no kaizen” is mostly true . . . in manufacturing, but the variety problems of service are completely ignored. It is blind copying. But don’t believe me, look for yourself.
The human change methods I am talking about have to change thinking (management thinking) and behavior changes will follow. This is Dr. Deming’s 4th area in his System of Profound Knowledge – psychology. There is no tool in the lean toolbox.
The audits for compliance lock in the waste created. The inspection police come to check their boxes, this isn’t improvement this is coercion. You may get compliance, but you haven’t changed thinking. Worse, you add to costs. The best inspection you can have is never done (not needed) or done by the worker alone.
While service companies are out building misguided standards and entrapping with technology, we miss the 95% problem that Dr. Deming talked about . . . management thinking.
From “If Japan can . . . Why can’t we?
“I ask people in management what proportion of this problem arises from your production worker. And the answer is always: All of it! That’s absolutely wrong. There’s nobody that comes out of a School of Business that knows what management is, or what its deficiencies are. There’s no one coming out of a School of Business that ever heard of the answers that I’m giving your questions—or probably even thought of the questions.” – W. Edwards Deming
So, if we want to improve our systems. We need normative methods to change thinking and behavior. The coercive and rational approaches just don’t work.
And no, Lean has nothing in their toolbox.
Leave me a comment. . . share your opinion! Click on comments below.
Make the new decade a profitable and rewarding one, start a new path here. Download free from www.newsystemsthinking.com “Understanding Your Organization as a System” and gain knowledge of systems thinking or contact us about how to get started at [email protected]. Reach him on Twitter at www.twitter.com/TriBabbittor LinkedIn at www.linkedin.com/in/trippbabbitt.
Tripp Babbitt is a columnist (Quality Digest, PSNews and IQPC), speaker, and consultant to private and public service industry.
Share This:


John Seddon’s roots in interventionist psychology is helpful and good, but is a bit outdated.
During his time, interventionist psychology believed that one must change thinking, then behavior changes – which is what you also cite above. I believe that to some extent.
But today, interventionist psychology flips that around to the following: change behavior first, then the feelings and the thinking will follow.
In the case of prison inmates and drug addicts, they must change their behavior first, then the thinking and the feelings will follow. Trying to change a drug addict’s thinking while they are addicted is a losing battle because the object of change is itself tainted – the mind.
In the case of couples therapy, one must behave loving and caring for their spouse, then the feelings and thoughts of love will follow.
Interventionist Psychology has changed and my examples above are the current practice – and, it makes complete sense and rings true against my experience.
A lot of what you say makes sense and your criticism of the lean subculture is great, and I find myself agreeing with some of it.
But, the Vanguard Method and its main underlying assumptions is in question.
Lean is aligned to the current tenets of interventionist psychology: change behavior first, then the feelings and the thinking will follow.
Thoughts?
Peter-
You give lean way to much credit for any method to change thinking or behavior. For the most part, they copy tools and change definitions constantly. Jell-O is appropriate.
Here is my read on intervention theory. First of all, my belief is that saying certain theories on psychology are outdated would be erroneous. Freud, Jung, Maslow, Herzberg and many others are “old” theories.
Regardless, there is no one theory that is correct in my book. All have difficulties as no theory is ever proven. Ask a scientist.
What I will say is that the Vanguard Method uses intervention theory and we are constantly learning. However “dated,” we have been on a learning curve for many years using the Vanguard Method and intervention theory. Perfect no, but the closest I have found to a decent model with consistently good to great results.
When greater than 60 – 75% of improvement efforts are failing, I will stick with what is working and let the psychologists argue over the theories.
We could argue theory, but with your computer science/philosophy degrees and my business and economics degrees . . . I doubt we get to far except anecdotes.
I am always keen to hear new intervention methods, but let’s not get them from the lean community there are none there.
What, on God’s green earth, is a ‘failure demand’? You pepper this term around constantly but it makes absolutely no logical sense.
Is someone demanding failure?
I have also peppered the definition everywhere “demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer.
It makes perfect sense! . . . to those in service.
@Tripp Babbitt
Makes no sense whatsoever.
“A demand caused by a failure to do something or do something right for a customer.”
Based upon this statement, there is no demand on the customers’ behalf until the provider has failed to provide something not demanded, or failed to do ‘right’ something which was not demanded.
Now, there exists is a demand that something be done, or done in a right manner.
This really stretches the King’s English, Tripp. Really.
If what you really mean is that the provider did not meet the customer’s expectation and the customer is demanding rectification, then you have described a process and a procedure.
@Pete Abilla
Nice post. Well thought out and articulated.
@Tripp Babbitt
Tripp, could you share a graphic representation of that ‘decent’ model with the rest of us?
Thanks in advance.
I am really trying to see things from your perspective, but you are really out there.
There is more than process and procedure going on with failure demand. System conditions that exist influence design and many times in a bad way.
If we turn off the things that create failure demand, the customer doesn’t have to rectify.
My question to you is what is process and procedure by your definition? In a traditional or setting people go to improve processes without addressing the variables that influence their existence.
My friends in the UK say I stretch the use of English. And by the way, it’s the Queen’s English.
@Sunfluent
Perhaps this is why you didn’t understand what Tripp was saying Synfluent, the kind died some years ago, and we have moved onto a Queen now. Perhaps you are out of date?
Nothing tricky about FAILURE demand.
I can tell that you work in mining as you appear to have little understanding of service organizations.
FAILURE DEMAND is a key and important method to understand how well your service is delivering to the customer.
Perhaps you should take it slowly and break it down into the constituent bits.
Failure = i.e. didn’t work
do something = carry out an action that they wanted
do something right = carried out an action but it wasn’t the right action
for a customer = the person demanding service
Sorry the King. I meant to write the KIng died.
@Howard Clark
You just described a process and the syntax remains defective.
I don’t ‘work’ in mining. I own the mines and we are very much a service industry. We aren’t manufacturers of coal; we are providers.
@Tripp Babbitt
The customer is not the deficient party in the failed contract, the provider is. Therefore, the provider needs to rectify, not the customer.
@Tripp Babbitt
A process is a set of actions carried out with an anticipated goal or result produced. A procedure is those said actions expressed in an ordinal manner.
if you are a service provider then this should be quite simple to comprehend.
I find this quite a lot with people who have been schooled in lean tools and techniques.
Where they see process, systems thinkers see something very different.
Shouldn’t you be hanging around the Gemba circle or as a lean consultant are you hoping to pick-up some tips?
Why don’t you try benchmarking?
Alright, back on task.
Jefferson-
Even coal mines have demands that are failure in nature. Rather than nit-picking about words, what is the nature of demands that you get from customers you don’t want?
@Tripp Babbitt
I want all my customers.
@Howard Clark
Okay, great.
When I see a process, what does a systems thinker see?
When I see a process, I envision a box with an input arrow on the left side; an output arrow on the right side and moderators and mitigators entering the box on the top side and exiting the box on the bottom side. Flow moves from left to right and is time based.
All inputs and outputs are dimensioned.
That’s about it.
@Howard Clark
I apologize, I forgot to include these responses in my post above:
I am not a lean person nor have I ever been schooled or trained in lean.
I was trained by Frederick Taylor and occasionally jog past his old house, Boxly, for inspiration.
Perhaps I can explain failure demand for Synfluent with an example with which we can all relate: potholes. I once managed an organization that was responsible for maintaining the streets in a large Midwestern city. When I arrived, I found that there was really very little maintenance going on. The organization was driven by a customer call center that took “requests for service” from the public. Their main performance metric or standard was how many requests could they solve in a given time and they weren’t very good at that. They were so inefficient at organizing their work that more failure demand calls came in following up on when the work would actually be completed. In addition, with hundreds or thousands of motorists using the same roads, there would be multiple calls for the same problem. Most all of these “requests for service” were in fact “failure demand” using Tripp’s definition. Had the organization focused their effort in maintenance activities like cracksealing roadways, improving drainage of roadways and resurfacing roadways in a timely manner, there would be no “requests for service” related to potholes.
We solved the problem from a few different angles. First, we improved the speed of the repair service with improved routing. Second, we changed operational procedures so that when one pothole in a block was identified by a request for service, the crew had the authority to repair all of the potholes within the given block. They weren’t allowed to do this before because the managers wanted to get credit for each and every request that would be generated by the multiple potholes. Second, we established an aggressive cracksealing program to prevent the potholes from occurring in the first place.
Now here is how we tie all of this back to Tripp’s article; we used Lean principles to solve this problem, it was a discrete project. However, we didn’t change the thinking in the entire organization. Once I left this organization, the cracksealing standard was tossed out the window (this is hard work that can only be done under perfect weather conditions) and I suspect that the organization is back to the firefighter mentality of waiting for a “request for service” before dispatching crews to repair potholes.
I really wish we could get over this lean vs systems thinking split. Evidently, where I learnt my “lean” is not the same as what you seem to be getting.
That is disappointing. What I learnt & practice, was never about the tools. Yes, they are useful for solving my manufacturing issues. That doesnt mean that what I was always drummed with – the “THINKING” production system – doesnt work for services. Maybe thats why I think they are the same.
Evidently, what you are getting is not that. Cant quite work out why but I suspect it has something to do with tangible benefits for consultants.
Much of the TPS is implicit knowledge. I have only ever seen one piece of work that got close to describing that, which was that article in Harvard Business by Kent & Spear about Toyota DNA. If my lean friends truely grasped that, we would not be having this debate at all, but all solving problems.
Lastly to coin a phrase…what the hell is a coal “provider” ?
Does it magically jump out of the ground and into my fireplace/powerstation all by itself when you tell it?
Or do you have to cut/dig it out with a machine… move it up a belt or two, run it through some crushing/screening filtering/washing processes, move it some more, and transport it to me having CHANGED it into something else that I, the customer can use?
That sounds like a manufacturer to me, and also like me being facetious.