The simplest questions

Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, observes that the only truly serious questions are ones that even a child can formulate. They are the questions with no answers; it is questions with no answers that set the limit of human possibilities, describe the boundaries of human existence. A Lean consultant concerned with reputation is well-advised to have ready answers for questions about cycle time, change-over time, equipment uptime, in-process inventory, and order velocity through a system. Experience and the standard manuals supply most of those answers. Harder, and more often the determining factor in whether an engagement succeeds, are the simpler questions — the rhetorical, almost-childlike ones that get asked in passing and then go unanswered or are answered offhandedly. Three of these come up in almost every engagement.

Does Lean, like automation, result in job losses? This is the most common question the practice receives during an engagement. Participating employees are reasonably concerned that they are being asked to suggest the very improvements that will eliminate their jobs; management is reasonably concerned about employee morale. The practice’s experience is that clients who engage Lean seriously tend to be operations looking to grow and hire — constrained by lack of space, equipment, or hours rather than by demand — and that Lean tends to relieve those constraints, leading to renewed hiring. The practice has, on more than one occasion, added jobs within the five days of a single kaizen event. More structurally: Lean disciplines produce automated systems with a human touch — Kanban cards, shadow boards, standard work documents — methods that lay the working of the system clear to human understanding rather than putting it inside a black box. Satya Nadella’s argument in Hit Refresh — that an increase in artificial intelligence has to be accompanied by an increase in real intelligence, real empathy, and real common sense — is a clearer statement of the same proposition than most Lean writers have managed.

How long does Lean take to stick? This question is, in effect, a question about habit-formation. Charles Duhigg, in The Power of Habit, describes the habit loop — cue, routine, reward — that the cognitive-science literature has converged on as the basic unit of durable behaviour change. Lean practice supplies, by design, an unusually rich set of cues: Kanban cards trigger replenishment, shadow boards trigger tool returns, visual factory data triggers operator response, standard work documents trigger procedure-following. The rewards are similarly visible: the resolved issue, the cleared queue, the closed Kanban loop. The remaining question is duration. Ray Dalio, in Principles, reports that conversations with neurologists and psychologists yield a working figure of about eighteen months of repetition for a strong probability of a forever habit. The practice’s own observations are consistent. Operations that maintain the discipline for less than twelve months tend to backslide; operations that maintain it for two years tend not to.

The paradox of teaching empowerment. Empowered employees are the richest source of ideas for process improvement, but the common initial reaction from employees who are asked to take on decision-making is reluctance. The reluctance usually stems from a feeling that increasing responsibility will mean increasing culpability — and on a poorly run line, that feeling is correct. Jacqueline Novogratz, in The Blue Sweater, describes empowerment as the practice of asking the right questions and ensuring people are being seen, being held accountable, and succeeding — three conditions that have to be in place at once. The right first questions are usually the ones closest to the work the operator already does. Sheena Iyengar’s Art of Choosing supplies the structural complement: choosing well is easier when expertise is high (which the visible workplace builds), when the expertise of others is available (which empowerment surfaces), and when collaboration is possible (which a well-mapped current state enables).

The common feature of these three questions is that none of them admits a satisfactory answer drawn from the Lean literature alone. The answers worth giving come from books on automation and human work, on habit formation, on the psychology of empowerment. The questions are simple in the sense that a child could ask them; they are difficult in the sense that they describe the conditions under which the operational disciplines either take hold or fail to. A practice that cannot answer them ends up with engagements that produce gains during the kaizen and lose them in the months afterwards.

If you have a simple question of your own, write to Neil Deshpande at neil@increaseeta.com or Rishi Malhotra at rishi@increaseeta.com.

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