Last month, Lean insider posted Lean Deployment is coming into its own. In it, consultants find that “Companies can’t seem to move from their vision or strategy to the workplace, with the result that “employees are not working on those workplace activities that are directly supporting the strategy.”
Continuous improvement is on every manager’s mind. So we bring in consultants to train our workforce in new techniques.
But knowledge does not make change happens. It only allows it to happen.
Fifteen years ago I read an article about the Taguchi “House of Quality”. It was part of the TQM craze. The writer had been in a Tokyo bar in the evening, where he saw to engineers arguing about some home project. Both of them started drawing a house of quality on the back of a napkin, to convince the other.
Wow! That’s what I call transformation. Imagine training your staff in a new technique, - Lean for example. And they adopt it in such a way that they use it in their home!
That article made me think. Somehow, these engineers had made the method part of their comfort zone. They used it naturally, without even thinking about it.
Yes we need the training. If you don’t know what Lean is, you can’t do it. But we need more. We need a program that slowly brings the new techniques in everybody’s comfort zone. There will be resistance, because the new technique is most likely displacing and old one. So we will have to bring it about gradually.
I think the biggest mistake we can make is train people and hope they will be so enthralled with the subject that they will simply go and do it.
What’s your plan to make new methods stick?