Lean Problem-Solving for Team Members and Leaders PDF

Lean Problem-Solving for Team Members and Leaders sunnuntai 15. syyskuuta 2024 9.30 Transcript Introductions Principles and Attitudes of Problem Solving Learning to Think Together - Brainstorming Skills Root Cause Analysis The Problem-Solving Models Analyzing and Improving Human Performance...

Lean Problem-Solving for Team Members and Leaders sunnuntai 15. syyskuuta 2024 9.30 Transcript Introductions Principles and Attitudes of Problem Solving Learning to Think Together - Brainstorming Skills Root Cause Analysis The Problem-Solving Models Analyzing and Improving Human Performance Udemy Page 1 Transcript lauantai 21. syyskuuta 2024 18.28 (bright music) -: Hello folks, my name is Larry Miller. Welcome to my course on Problem Solving Made Easy for team members and team leaders. One thing I am pretty sure about is that if you are in a high-performing organization, a competitive organization, your organization is engaged in continuously improving how you do things, you're not standing still, standing still is to die, you die when you stand still, you get healthy when you exercise, right? You use your muscles. And problem solving is the exercise, it's the using the muscles of getting smarter about how we do our work. Who should do problem solving? Not some special problem-solving team, but you, the natural work teams and every team up the ladder of the organization to the senior management team, all should be engaged in continuous improvement or solving problems. So the purpose of this course is to teach you methods and attitudes of healthy problem solving and develop a culture, a culture is what is habitual, what we do normally in the organization. And problem solving and continuous improvement should not be special (chuckles), it should be the norm that everybody in the organization is engaged in. So building that is the purpose of this course. And when you think about continuous improvement, think about what I call creative dissatisfaction. And creative dissatisfaction is the awareness of the gap between where we are and where we could be, and there's always a gap. There's always a mountaintop, a higher place to be, a better place to be, and we are aware we're here, right? And one of the jobs of leaders is to clarify and to define and create a vision of what that mountaintop looks like and why it's worth climbing up there. And our job is to engage in the steps, moving up that mountain and not being satisfied with where we are, but being creatively dissatisfied, meaning really wanting to close that gap, wanting to get better. So that's what builds a culture of continuous improvement and it needs to happen at every level in the organization. Udemy Page 2 and it needs to happen at every level in the organization. Now, the term "problem", I wanna just say a word about problem solving. In the old days, we used to think that problems were something to be quiet about, shh, you don't wanna tell anybody we have a problem. Well, that's a very destructive attitude. In fact, everybody has problems, every organization has problems, they're normal. And we need to get in the habit of solving them easily, quickly, fluidly, right? And that's a culture of continuous improvement. The simple truth about problem solving is it's not that complicated. I know sometimes people are intimidated by it but I've been involved in continuous improvement and improving the performance of organizations for about 40 years, all the time solving problems, right? And I've read probably a dozen books on problem solving. And I have to tell you that, really, problem solving comes down to some very simple things. First of all, defining the problem, well, when does it occur? Where does it occur? How often does it occur? Getting the data, the facts, going, observing it, right? Looking at the graph, the chart, counting, recording, the facts of the problem, and then brainstorming, why does it occur, right? This is where collective wisdom comes into play. Getting your whole team involved in thinking together, right? The causes, if you will, and then the solutions, right? Brainstorming solutions, and then experimenting, trying stuff out and seeing if it works and being objective about what happens when we conduct an experiment, when we try something. So that very simple methodology, all problem solving processes are based on that very simple idea and they can be a little more complicated, a little more in depth or a little quick problem solving. You can do problem solving in 10 minutes, right? With your team before going to work in the morning. So we're gonna go through all those, a bunch of methods of problem solving. You may say, "Well, why should I listen to you, Larry? Who are you? What do you know?" Those are reasonable questions. I've been involved in helping organizations improve performance for about 40 years, at least 40 years. I started working in prisons, believe it or not. I've written 11 books on the subject, I've worked with companies like Honda and Toyota, Shell Oil Company, Texaco, Merck Pharmaceuticals Udemy Page 3 Shell Oil Company, Texaco, Merck Pharmaceuticals a lot of great companies, and I've learned with each client, I have learned how to do things better. Each client, for me, has been an an experiment, if you will. So I've been constantly trying to improve how I go about helping organizations improve. And this course really comes out of my experience working with organizations, developing teams at every level in the organization, helping those teams engage in the process of continuous improvement or problem solving. Come along, join me, I think you'll enjoy it, I hope you'll come with your team. The best idea is for the whole team to go through this course together and do it, right? You learn by doing, not just by listening to Larry Miller or anybody else, you gotta do stuff. So I hope you'll do that, thanks a lot, look forward to getting into the course with you. (bright music) -: Hi again, friends. I'd like to set some expectations and go over the curriculum in this lecture. And just an important point about how you manage your own learning. I can't really manage your learning, can I? (chuckles) I can give you the lessons but how you actually learn is up to you. And let me make a recommendation to you. I think you know from your own experience that just reading a book or watching a video doesn't make you competent, doesn't make you good at something. The way you get good at any skill, like playing a musical instrument or speaking a language or doing almost anything, you have to practice, you have to put it to work. So my recommendation to you is with each section of the course, you put it to work and you really need to do it with your team, right? So I'm gonna assume that you're either the leader of a team or you're on a team, you're a team member. And I would encourage you to, with your team, take any problem. And if you don't think you have a problem, you're probably wrong. But if you don't think you have a problem, take an imaginary problem, a hypothetical problem, like too many kids drop out of school, for example, too many kids smoke, too many kids do drugs. You know, whatever, just take any hypothetical Udemy Page 4 You know, whatever, just take any hypothetical and then practice doing the 5 Whys or practice a PDCA or practice the different methods I'm gonna share with you. But better, take a real problem in your real workplace and put them to work with your team, and I think the best thing is for your whole team to go through the course together. So you'll learn together and you apply the lessons together. That's the best case. Now, let's go through the curriculum of the course very quickly. First, there's this introductory section that you're in now, of course. Then I wanna talk sort of about how we think and what our attitudes are towards solving problems. Because attitudes and thought processes really do make a difference. And I think there's some old ways of thinking about problems and there are some current or modern ways of thinking about problems that are much more conducive to improving performance, either your own performance or the performance in the organization. So attitudes of problem solving, and I wanna apply lean management, Toyota Production System thinking to how you think about problems. I wanna go through brainstorming, and I'm gonna guess you may have already participated in brainstorming or you may have had lessons in brainstorming. Maybe you have, maybe you haven't. But I wanna share with you why brainstorming is effective, what makes it effective, and some techniques of brainstorming that I think are essential to solving problems well. Then, we're gonna go through sort of simple methods of problem solving. And as we go through the brainstorming, I also wanna talk about Pareto analysis and cause and effect diagrams, common ways of thinking about what to focus on and sort of bringing out from you and your team ideas around what could be causes of a problem or solutions to a problem. And then we're gonna start with kind of really simple methods of problem solving, beginning with situation analysis, which is exactly what it sounds like. What's the situation? Where it occurs? Why it occurs? When it occurs? Analyzing the situation often leads to an understanding of why something occurs and what we need to do about it. And then we're gonna go through the 5 Whys Udemy Page 5 And then we're gonna go through the 5 Whys or what's called root cause analysis. You know, all problem solving does not have to be lengthy and it doesn't have to be complicated. Sometimes you can solve problems in one minute, right? Or five minutes or 10 minutes. Things can often, and I will say the majority of problems, if your team thinks together, and a lot of what we're gonna talk about is about thinking together, rather than thinking alone, right? We're gonna get collective wisdom. But if you think together well, you can often solve problems very easily. And root cause analysis allows you to do that. And then we're gonna go through the most common, popular, if you will, method of problem solving, which is the plan, do, check, act or plan, do, study, act, or plan, do, learn, act, they all mean the same thing. That methodology started, you know, in the 1930s and has come right up to today, it's been used by tens of thousands of teams. And the reason it's been so popular is, frankly, it's a very simple, quick way of organizing your thinking about a problem and a solution and getting on with doing an experiment and learning from it. So then we're gonna go into a more in-depth problem solving which is common in lean management or Toyota Production System, which is the A3 model. It's a way of illustrating a story of a problem that can engage more people, and it's good for more in-depth problem solving. And then, we're gonna talk about solving people problems, you know, all problems are not in a machine or just the work process. Sometimes it's 'cause people don't care, and that may be shocking to you, but sometimes it really is a motivation problem or it's a skill knowledge problem of a human being, right? So I wanna share with you some ideas about solving human performance problems. And then, we wanna talk about action planning and the team reaching consensus. You know, one of the great sins of team meetings is we talk about something and we think we agree to do something, and then, a month later, people say, "Whatever happened to that?" You know, and the answer is, nothing happened to that. Nobody did anything and we didn't learn anything from it. That is waste and we need to eliminate waste from our team meetings and from our problem solving. Udemy Page 6 from our team meetings and from our problem solving. So what's very important is a clear methodology of action planning and follow up, saying what happened, right? So that's gonna be the last section of the course. So that's the course, it's not rocket science, it's not complicated and I think you will benefit, along with your team, if you go through it together and apply the lessons and try to get good at it. Thanks a lot. -: Hi, guys, just a quick suggestion about how to get the most out of this course. Now, I know a lot of people, you know, they get into these courses, and they just wanna finish them. You know, they just wanna, like, whip through them as fast as they can, and you can do that. You can sit, you know, for two hours or so and just go through the course. But from my perspective, I'm biased, my perspective is this is about developing skill, getting better at doing something on a regular basis. And to develop skill, you have to practice. So my recommendation is I'm gonna have some practice recommendations, practice exercises, as we go through the course, and I hope you'll do them, and I hope you'll do them with your team because they are team things, right? They're not just things for you to sit in an office and do by yourself. There are things where you really have to engage other people, and that's a good thing. I mean, that's what it's about. Problem-solving is about group, it's about team problem-solving. So I hope you'll engage your team in the doing. Another really good thing to do is to have what I call a study circle. And the study circle can be, you know, three other managers or five other people who are going through the course at the same time and have lunch together. Have lunch together and discuss the last section. Like, you know, agree in the next week we're all gonna go through Section 3 or Section 4. Go through it, try it out with your team, and then with the study circle, share how it went. And by listening to other people who are trying to apply the lesson, Udemy Page 7 who are trying to apply the lesson, share how it went for them and with their team, you will learn from them, and they will learn from you. So I really like the idea of having a study circle. The other thing you can do if you have coaches in your organization, and I'm a big advocate of having internal, you don't have to hire an external Larry Miller, you can have internal consultants or internal coaches who help with improvement processes. And you might invite them to sit in on some of your team meetings as you develop an A3, as you develop your PDCA or do root cause analysis, or you know, observe how you do brainstorming. And the purpose of that is not to give you a grade, right? The purpose of that is, and it's always, you know, to have somebody outside looking in, right, rather than somebody inside, you know. You know, it's why Tom Brady, the world's best quarterback, has a coach. The best tennis players, golfers, they have coaches, right? So somebody looking from the outside can look at what you're doing and say, "I really liked the way you did this. I thought that worked great. But something you might try is I notice that person over in the corner, they never said anything." Hmm, right? "And you might do something to bring them out." You know, that kind of feedback is just really really helpful in developing your skill. So those are all things that will help with skill building, not just going through the course. I'd rather you go through it slowly and apply it and develop skill than whip through it and say you did it, right. That's my bias anyway. Okay, thanks a lot. Let's get on with the course. (gentle upbeat music) (gentle upbeat music fades) Narrator: Hi, friends. I wanna talk about lean management and some ideas or principles of leading that I think are very important to how you go about problem solving. And as you may or may not know, the workplace has really been transformed in many ways, just like back in the 19 oh something. More than a hundred years ago. Workplaces were transformed by Henry Ford's factory and the mass production model. Udemy Page 8 and the mass production model. Well, today, whether it's in auto assembly plants or any manufacturing environment, or healthcare, or almost any other work setting, the way we do things is being transformed by Toyota Production System or lean management. And a lot of that centers around problem solving. And I wanted to share with you some principles of lean that will help you think about why we're doing what we're doing. Why we're problem solving. Now, first of all, is this idea of continuous improvement. The two core pillars. You look at the house of lean. The two core pillars are respect for people and continuous improvement. And the idea of continuous improvement is essential to understanding problem solving. Because rather than think of problem solving as there's a problem and now it's fixed. Boom. You know. Like one problem, one solution. You know just get it. That's not the way the world works, right? The way the world really works is there's a future state. There's an ideal state. There's and ideal you. There's an ideal company. There's an ideal country, right? There are ideal states that are in our mind, you know, the way we'd like things to be. And as we learn, that tends to move, right? We get more discriminating. We get better and better at thinking about what the ideal state could be. That's the challenge and it's the job of leadership to make sure we are challenged. So we're motivated. So we're moving forward. So leaders create challenge, right? And then teams work on moving up the mountain, if you will, right? And not in one big leap. Don't try to make one big leap because you're likely to fall off the mountain that way. You move up the mountain in baby steps, if you will, or with incremental problem solving and implementing and experimenting. And essential to the idea of continuous improvement is this idea of experimentation. You conduct experiments. Every team conducts experiments. Everything we try, you know, me recording this video course. It's an experiment, you know. And I'm sure I'll look back on it three years from now and say oh boy, I could have done that better. Good. That's the way the world progresses, right? So, think about continuous improvement as the small steps that your team is gonna go through as you solve problems. That is continuous improvement. And then the idea of respect for people Udemy Page 9 And then the idea of respect for people is absolutely essential. I was involved in Honda some years ago and something that really impressed me was I was there one day and I was with a woman. I would say she was in her 40s, you know, mature woman. And she came to Honda just like two years earlier as a public relations person. And I'm sure her first day at work, you know, as a PR person, right? I'm sure she looked good. I'm sure she had a nice dress on and her makeup done and nice jewelry on and so forth, to make a good impression on your first day, right? And when she walked in and met her boss, she was handed her baseball cap and a uniform. And assigned to welding on the line. For six weeks, she worked on the assembly line. I asked her how she felt about that and she said, well, to be very honest, it kind of scared the hell out of me. I didn't really like it. And I said well, two years later now, looking back on that, what do you think about that experience? And she said it was absolutely the best thing. And I said why? She said because I learned respect. I learned to respect those who are on the spot, who have their hands on or those who are at the gemba, as they say at Toyota. Those who are doing the real work. The world's greatest experts are on the spot and have their hands on. That's respect for people. Who should be problem solving? What problem? The people who are the world's greatest experts in whatever the problem is, the people who are doing the work, who have their hands on, should be solving problems and engaging in continuous improvement. And that is respect for people as well as continuous improvement. The idea of going to the gemba. You know, too often, managers sit in their offices or conference rooms solving problems. And most of them have never been there. They haven't worked on the line or they haven't gone and seen what's actually happening. Go and see. It's a really simple idea, isn't it? Go and observe. Go and see. At the gemba. At the place the work gets done. So you know the facts. Be fact based. Get the data. Study the data. Look at the graph. Look at the chart. Count. Record. Udemy Page 10 Look at the chart. Count. Record. So you know what you're talking about and you're not just spewing ideas off the top of your head, okay? Applying the scientific method. And applying the scientific method simply means experimentation. You know, we have this idea of the light bulb going off in Thomas Edison's head. It wasn't one light bulb. It was a thousand ideas that eventually led to the final thing that worked, right? You must be willing to experiment. Now, not experiment in uncontrolled, wild ways. No, you experiment by your team studying things. Getting the data. Trying a small experiment and immediately watching the results and seeing what happens. That's the scientific method, right? Toyota Production System began with Shigeo Shingo looking at the die change process where the hydraulic press would come down and stamp out parts. And at Ford. This is back, you know, in the 60s or so. It look 24 hours to change dies on a die press. Last time I was at Honda America Manufacturing, in Marysville, they have they said was the world's largest stamping press. And there was a flip chart next to it and it said point 54. You know what point 54 was? 54 seconds to change dies on the world's largest stamping press. How did they get there? They got there, not because Shigeo Shingo, the engineer, knew the answers. He didn't know the answers. His genius was not to know the answers. His genius was to inquire. His genius was to get the team around. And engage them in thinking together and conducting experiments. And over years, years of trying things, years of experimentation, it went from a day to point 54 seconds, right? That is the root of lean management, where that whole thing began. Okay, focus on the process and not the person. Dr. Deming said 95 percent of quality problems occur in the process not the person. And 95 percent of times we blame the person and don't fix the process and then we can't figure out why we still have the problem. And it's because we got rid of the person, replaced him with another one, but the process is the same Udemy Page 11 but the process is the same and you've still got the problem. Focus on the process not the person. Don't blame the person. Don't create fear. Return joy to work. You know what returns joy to work? It's control, empowerment, feeling that you're respected for doing your work and respected for being able to think well about problems and solve problems. And when you're able to do that, joy returns to work. Those are some lean principles that I think will be helpful. Thank you. -: So looking at the attitudes and sort of principles of problem-solving, you know, this is not something you can just take a problem and apply, you know, those eight principles to on a one-to-one basis. But what I'd like you to do is I'm attaching a Word document to this, and with your group, I'd like you to discuss those principles. And I'd like you to ask yourself the question, do we conform to them? Are we applying those principles or not? And next column over to the right, what could we do better to be more effective at respect for people, you know, for example, or blaming the process and not the person? You know, just some of those principles. Just have that conversation, and I think, you know, growth and learning comes from that conversation and you don't have to identify 25 things to do differently, if you identify one or two, that's great. So why don't you give that a try? Thanks. -: Hi again, friends, I'd like to talk, before we get into the specific methods of problem solving, I'd like to talk about some skills that I know will be useful in any method of problem solving or decision making. And you may be skilled in brainstorming, or you may not. I'm gonna assume that you're not, because I'm gonna share some, I think important ideas about brainstorming and some methods of brainstorming during this section. And I want you to think about how we think, because that's what brainstorming is really about. And the way we've learned to think in our popular culture, you know the culture we've grown up in, Udemy Page 12 you know the culture we've grown up in, and in many of our societies, we have sort of learned to judge. When we hear somebody suggest something, we're immediately thinking, that'll work, that won't work. That's a good idea, that's a bad idea. And we tend to process that way. And, the critical element of brainstorming is putting that aside. To not judge. Because what judgment does is it takes you off track of idea generation. And brainstorming is about idea generation. And it's, unless you've participated in good brainstorming, it's kind of hard to explain, because there's sort of a magic, there's a chemistry to brainstorming. And what it's about is that, you know I have an idea that I express. And if you're thinking about creating ideas, my idea may stimulate your brain. You know, everything in our brain doesn't come from the inside out. It comes from outside, and then the reaction to what's coming outside. And that's what's going on in brainstorming, there's this processing and reacting, processing and reacting very quickly. And it's about generating a lot of ideas. And it's about putting aside the idea that, you offer some suggestion, right? I mean, let's take our, you know hypothetical thing of too many kids drop out of school. So how do we, you know, keep kids in school to graduate? And I say, well let's offer them a million dollars to stay in school. Now, obviously, we're not gonna offer them a million dollars to stay in school, I'd go back to high school. No, that's obviously a stupid idea. But if we're brainstorming, you don't react by saying, Larry, that is a really stupid idea. You think, and you say, well maybe that stimulates some idea. Well, yeah maybe the problem is they need some more incentive, right? And you start thinking about, well what could be an incentive to stay in school? And that may take you to some other idea and your idea will trigger an idea in somebody else. And the important thing about brainstorming is it's okay to say wild and crazy things. Not because we're necessarily gonna do that wild and crazy thing, but because it's part Udemy Page 13 and crazy thing, but because it's part of the chemical reaction that's going on in our brains. So it's how we stimulate other ideas. So the most important thing, and if you're the facilitator, you're leading a brainstorming session, first of all you make clear that now we're brainstorming. So everybody, if they've been trained, they put aside their tendency to judge immediately. Now, they will often find that very hard to do because it is so normal for us. So as the facilitator, you're listening to the comments coming from the group. And if somebody reacts by making a judgmental statement about, that'll never work, you say, thanks Larry but we're not judging now let's just generate ideas, right? And do it gently. You don't have to beat them on the head but just gently remind them that we're not judging now, we're just generating ideas. So you keep them on track, on generating ideas. The more ideas, the better. The more wild and crazy ideas, the better. And the more people you involve. You know, the nice thing about brainstorming, is that, you know, in every group of let's say 10 people, there are always two or three who do at least 50 to 80% of the talking in the group. You know what I'm talking about. And then there's another two or three who almost never talk, right? And then there's the other sort of in between who talk occasionally. When you brainstorm it's important to give everybody the opportunity to talk. And when we talk about methods of brainstorming in the next lecture, I'll share some methods that can get everybody involved. But what you find in brainstorming is sometimes the people who talk the least actually have some of the best ideas. They're just not people who will jump in and assert those ideas. The other nice thing about brainstorming is that when we finally come up with an action, or you may be brainstorming causes of a problem or solutions, you know, actions we can take. And the nice thing about when you engage in that brainstorming, it becomes very clear that the final output of that is not one person's idea. It's the idea that's come from that chemical reaction. Collective brain thinking. The collective mind of the group. And that causes the group to feel ownership for that idea. And if they have ownership, they're more likely to act Udemy Page 14 And if they have ownership, they're more likely to act and follow through, and implement it. Just some critical elements of brainstorming. First of all, if you're the facilitator, clearly define what it is we're brainstorming about. Are we brainstorming about causes of a problem, or solutions, or what? Make that very clear. No judging, as we said. Visualize, it's very important, use a flip chart or a whiteboard or something where you put the ideas up on the board, and people can see them because seeing them helps them generate additional ideas. So don't just have people say things and let them die in space. Make them visual. Give it time. You know, great ideas don't come in like one minute, right? You know, silence is a wonderful thing. You know, be willing to sit and think. You know, one of the things I found useful in facilitating a brainstorming group is to have people just sit and privately write down ideas on a piece of paper or post-it notes. So they have sort of that private thinking time and then they share them and then they write additional ideas. So take your time, quiet time's good. And you know what is also a sign of really good brainstorming, is laughter. Because when people are sort of generating wild and crazy ideas, they're thinking creatively, they're funny, I mean, some things that come out are really, like, crazy ideas and that's healthy, that's a healthy dynamic in the group. So encourage laughter, encourage funny ideas because you never know where they will lead. So those are just some of the critical elements of brainstorming. Let's come back and talk about some more specific methods that can bring people out. (lighthearted music) -: As the facilitator of a brainstorming session, it's good for you to have different methods in your pocket, so to speak, that you can bring out at different times. And I think in a good brainstorming session, you won't use just one method. You'll try different methods, and the reason is that different people respond better to different methods. We are diverse, we are different, Udemy Page 15 We are diverse, we are different, and we don't all respond well to the same method. So the first method is just called freewheeling, which is where you just lay out the problem and you say, "Let's brainstorm." And it's kinda whoever wants to speak first, speaks first, and it's just sort of freewheeling. It's just whatever comes to people. Now as the facilitator, this is a very important point, you listen to the idea. Now you may clarify the idea and then you put the idea up on the flip chart or the Post-it Note up. Make sure you have heard correctly, 'cause sometimes people articulate an idea, and the facilitator repeats the idea but they don't have it right. And it's very important for the person to watch the person, make sure they nod their head, like, "Yes, that's right." And put it up and don't prejudice the idea. Sometimes a facilitator, having their own ideas, will write somebody else's idea in a way that's not really their idea, it's actually their idea. It's okay to put your ideas up, but make sure they're your ideas. But anyway, so freewheeling is just going around the room in sort of a random fashion. Round Robin is where we go, let's say from left to right or right to left, and we literally go around. And so the advantage of this is that everybody knows they're gonna be called upon. So it's not just the quick talkers or the loud talkers who get a say. Everybody gets a say. So you start, "John, you have any ideas? Mary, Susan." You know, you go around the room, giving each person a chance, and that's important because we all know there's some who won't speak otherwise. Another method is to use Post-it Notes. I use a lot of Post-it Notes, okay, and a wall, right? And just ask people to sit quietly, write their ideas on Post-it Notes or some other piece of paper. And then have everybody, you know, I like to get people out of their seat, 'cause people's brains die when they sit on them for too long. (chuckles) So have everybody get out of their seat and put 'em up on a flip chart or on the wall. And then, once you have a lot of ideas on the wall, Udemy Page 16 And then, once you have a lot of ideas on the wall, use what I call an affinity diagram, and I'll come back and talk about that in a minute, but it's a way of organizing and thinking about all those ideas. Mind mapping, and on Udemy there's some good courses on mind mapping, and it's a way of diagramming from a central problem or a central solution, sub-topics, sub-ideas, actions. And it's sort of you illustrate kind of the way our brains really work. We don't sorta work in the most organized way. Our brains sort of work in a random fashion. But you can kind of put things down as people generate ideas that are related to another idea, right? For example, to the staying in school idea. Larry says, "Give 'em a million dollars to stay in school," and somebody else says, "Well, maybe we can have awards for staying in school." And you can see how like there's a main thread there of incentives, right? What are some different incentives that could help kids stay in school? So that's just one channel of the mind map. So mind mapping is, again, a way of generating ideas. And then I wanna come back and talk about cause and effect diagrams, which are another way of generating and organizing ideas. So let me come back and talk about affinity diagrams and cause and effect diagrams in particular. Those are two of the most common and helpful methods, I think, for brainstorming and organizing our thinking. Thanks. -: Chances are you've seen fishbone diagrams or called cause and effect diagrams. They have causes and effect, right? The arrow points towards the effect of different causes or solutions that may be a solution to a problem. Now, this is also called the Ishikawa diagram, the Japanese person who sort of invented it or made it popular at least, or just fishbone, cause and effect or fishbone diagrams. Now, this used to be man, machine, materials, methods, manpower, machine, material. And that sort of worked in an old factory where it was just men who worked there. So we don't use men now. We can use people if you want, Udemy Page 17 We can use people if you want, but there's no one right main headings for this. So you think about what are main headings. The way I've often organized the main topics on a fishbone diagram are really social and technical. That's one of my favorite ways of thinking about what's going on in an organization. There are people things, human things, cultural or social things. And then there are sort of the more technical, mechanical, process, machinery, you know, those kinds of things. And that's the way this one is organized but you can decide what works best here. But here you see materials, equipment, information. Those are sort of technical things. And then you see skills or knowledge, motivation and processes. Those are all sort of more about how people do their work and the skills and motivation of people. And you can take those and just focus on one of them as you do your brainstorming. You can say, let's first and again, you have to know what the problem is. But let's say we have breakage on the line, right? Okay, well, what are possible reasons why as the product is going down the assembly line, why do things break? Well, there may be issues around materials, right? So let's think about that. What could be going on regarding materials? And maybe there's poor input. Maybe the material's too thin, it's too soft, it's too, I don't know, we don't know what we're talking about, right? But it could be anything. And then equipment, well, equipment may be out of alignment and now your group can get specific that at point three on the assembly line, things aren't tightened correctly or whatever it is. But you brainstorm, right? Just around equipment and then around information. Who gets what information that may be causing them to adjust at the right time or not adjust at the right time or, you know, I don't know. But those are are ways. And then, you know, is there anything about human skills that could be causing that line breakdown or breakage on the line? Is there a possible people caring issue, a motivation issue rather than a knowledge or skill issue? Udemy Page 18 a motivation issue rather than a knowledge or skill issue? So think about all those things and process. Do we maintain the equipment at the right time? Do we have a preventive maintenance problem? Is there something not right about the process by which we set up the equipment? Those are all things that could be within those categories. And that's all about solutions, right? And then you can flip it over and if we agree, like what are the three most likely causes of the problem? Then you flip it over and say, okay, given those three causes now, what are potential solutions? And again, you can use the same categories or other categories to brainstorm possible solutions to the problem. Hope that makes sense. It's really a simple thing. And by the way, you know, you can use this in a one-hour or 20-minute, you know, team meeting but you can also put it on the wall and there's something called CE deck, cause and effect diagrams with the addition of cards. And the idea is you have a big wall in your work area and you make a big fishbone diagram, right? And you have the problem that we're trying to work on and then people can think, you know, and you have it up there for a week, let's say, and you have yellow cards and blue cards, for example. And yellow cards can be problem, you know, causes of the problem. And blue cards can be potential solutions, things we can do to improve it. And you can start with the group, you know, putting up some initial ideas but not trying to finalize it, not trying to fix, and then the entire work area, people who work in that area can walk by and look at it. They can go home and think about it, right? And they can come back in the morning and write a, you know, cause card, a yellow card and put it up, whether that's under equipment or under motivation or whatever, and put up solution cards. So I like that idea. I giving people time to think, right? And it also is more inclusive. You might have, you know, 10 people on in a team meeting but there may be 50 people who work in the area who might have ideas about that. And that gives them, you know, all a way of contributing to that. And then the team can take that and then come up with a final decision about, you know, an intervention, things we can do to improve. Udemy Page 19 things we can do to improve. Hope that makes sense. When I come back, I wanna talk about affinity diagrams, which I like. Thanks. The word affinity means things that are like something else, right? Two things have affinity for each other. People have affinity for each other, because they have common interests, right? That's the idea of affinity. Now, I should probably get a cheque from 3M Corporation for selling post-it notes, because I think I've sold a lot of post-it notes. I like post-it notes. I like post-it notes with different colors that can be used in a variety of ways. And in doing affinity diagrams post-it notes are the preferred, in my opinion, the preferred tool or device. And here's the idea. This board, I was working with a healthcare organization, redesigning their workflow, and redesigning the people system, the organization of teams and so forth in the organization. And as we went through the analysis, people come up with ideas, but we don't wanna, at that point take the time to go off on a study or a decision about each idea, right? So while we're going through the analysis, if I'm facilitating, I say, you know that's a great idea. Let's put that on the parking lot. So write that down on a post-it note and let's put it up on this board, right? And it gets put up on the board. And then when we're ready to start designing the new process, the new social system, we have all these ideas. We could have a hundred different ideas that have come up during the analysis stage. And now we say and this is where it becomes an affinity diagram, we say, let's just go up to the board, the whole team, let's say 10 people, go up to the board and stare at it, you know, look at things and start moving them around. Start organizing them into logical groupings, right? Affinity groups. And as they do that, there'll be some things there about software and computers, and that becomes a group. Udemy Page 20 about software and computers, and that becomes a group. There'll be other things about skills that people have. And that becomes another thing. And you see, I basically have the board organized here into technical and social, the issues, right? That need to be improved. And that's an affinity diagram. They're creating these affinity groups. And then we'll decide which of those groups we want to address, which are the most important ones. We'll prioritize them. And then we'll work on designing those one by one. So that's one use of an affinity diagram. Here you see another, you know, where people were brainstorming, they can have a lot of ideas, instead of a crazy amount of ideas. And they're completely disorganized. And that's okay. You start by just getting stuff up on the board, right? It's just getting those post-it notes up. And you can, like with the cause and effect diagram, you know, you can say, let's talk about materials let's talk about methods, let's talk about equipment. You know, you can generate ideas by having people focus. And you can, rather than putting on a fishbowl diagram, just put those post-it notes up right? Now, you could start by having all the blue ones being technical things and all the red ones being social people, cultural issues. You could do that. So that starts a natural sort of organization of them. But they could just be random, you know, any color. And they're all up there on the wall. And then again, and I like, again, I like people to get out of their seats 'cause we sit too too long and we need blood flow, right? Which comes from standing up, move around the room. So get the group up, have them go to the board and have them create affinity groups. And I like to ask them not to talk. I know that's very hard for people, particularly in my culture where we love to talk but ask them not to talk. Just create these affinity groupings. And here's just an example. You know, one way you can see people have organized things and then you can focus on them one by one, coming up with decision points, or deciding on countermeasures to the problem or solutions, potential solutions to the problem that you're now going to conduct an experiment around, 'cause that's in problem solving, Udemy Page 21 'cause that's in problem solving, you study the problem, right? Come up with causes, come up with solutions, decide on actions, which are always experiments. You're never certain what will work. So always think of them as experiments but those can come out of this affinity diagram process. So I hope that's helpful. Those are our ways of you know, facilitating, brainstorming and generating ideas and organizing those ideas. Hope that's helpful. Thanks. -: Hi, friends. Pareto, Pareto analysis, the Pareto principle, the 80/20 rule, you may have heard of any of those or all of them. Let me explain what that rule is, where it comes from, and how you can employ that. It is a good transition from the point of brainstorming all the possible causes of a problem. And let's say the problem is machines break down too often or too many kids drop out of high or whatever the problem is. And you may have brainstormed 20, 30, 40, 50 different possible causes, all of which may be valid in some way. Now, you may want to group those so the ones that are almost identical or very similar or sort of in one package. And once you've done that, you can do that by using the affinity diagram by the way, but still, you're gonna come down to saying, "Okay, now we have all these possible causes of the problem. Which ones do we focus on improving? Which ones do we work on? Do we work of them on all of them at the same time, or do we just pick a few to work on?" And I think it is almost always recommended that you work on a few, not all of them, because you don't have the energy, or the bandwidth, if you will, to work on all of 'em. So how do you decide which ones? And this is where the Pareto principle comes in. Now Vilfredo Pareto, an Italian mathematician back in the last century, more than a century ago, made an observation. He was a gardener. He had a little vegetable garden, and he had pea plants and pea pods, you know, that the peas come in. And he observed that 80% of the peas came from 20% of the plants or 20% of the pods. And that's where he derived this 80/20 rule. In other words, 80% of the benefit, 80% of the good, Udemy Page 22 In other words, 80% of the benefit, 80% of the good, the value comes from 20% of the possible options. And he went on to study and apply that to lots of different situations. And it's not always true, but as a general rule, it's a thought process that's worthwhile having in your head. And you know, it may be that the 80% of the problems from customers come from only 20% of the customers, or, and you know you can think of lots of different applications. It may be that 80% of sales come from 20% of the salespeople, or 80% of the company's profits may come from 20% of your products. There are lots of, you know, possible applications of that. Let's take a simple example of a movie theater, and let's say there's a competitive movie theater. And what we've noticed is that customers are leaving your theater and going to the other theater. And we have to ask why. You know, what is the cause of their dissatisfaction? So we asked them. You know, that's usually the logical thing to do, right? You survey them in some way, and you find that there are a list of complaints. You know, for example, dirty floors may be a complaint. Dirty bathrooms may be a complaint. Soggy popcorn may be a complaint, et cetera. There may be all kinds of. Now are they all equal? Are they all sort of equally the cause of dissatisfaction? Probably not. Probably the 80/20 rule applies in that from only 20% of the different causes of dissatisfaction comes 80% of the reason why people are going to the other movie theater and not coming back to your movie theater. So what we want to do is do some analysis of those different causes, right? And you can see, you can go from your fishbone diagram or affinity diagram right into Pareto analysis and then into countermeasures. You see the switch there. So if you look at this chart, you see that the most number of complaints are about dirty floors, second about bathrooms, right? So if you just forget about the others, if we're gonna work on improving, let's just clean the floors for heaven's sakes. I mean, how hard is that? So it would be a huge improvement Udemy Page 23 So it would be a huge improvement in customer satisfaction if we just clean the floors and clean the bathrooms more often, right? So let's focus on those two, and that will take care of probably 80% of the cause of dissatisfaction. And, you know, we can then go on and work on the others if you like. But let's first address those that are the greatest causes of the problem. So that's very simply the 80/20 rule. So when you look at that brainstormed list of all the possible causes of a problem, think about the 8/20 rule and try to organize them and try to get some data on which of those causes are likely to be the 20% that result in the 80% of the problem. I hope that makes sense. That's the Pareto principle. Thanks. So for this section on brainstorming, definitely (chuckles) what's the practice exercise? Brainstorm. (chuckles) Take a problem, any problem. if you can't think of one in the organization, which I am doubtful that you can't think of one in the organization, but if you can't, then take something in society, right, something larger, outside there, and go through the brainstorming techniques. You know, try the round robin. Try the Slip Method. Try putting things on Post-it notes and put 'em up. Try developing an affinity diagram. Try using the fishbone diagram. Try doing a Pareto analysis. Practice each of those, right? And I know that might take a couple practice sessions, but that's okay. I just recommend you just try each one of them 'cause I think you'll really see the value of them when you watch the group, you know, do an affinity diagram or something, and you'll say, "Gee, that's not so hard. That was pretty easy to do, and look what came out of that. That worked pretty well." So give each of those brainstorming techniques a try. Thanks a lot. -: Hi, Friends. Udemy Page 24 -: Hi, Friends. This section starts the real problem-solving methods or techniques. And I wanna start with what may be obvious, but if you look at human history and human behavior, you would determine that it is not so obvious, and that is situation analysis. And it's simply asking questions about what are the circumstances surrounding a performance or a behavior or a problem, if you will. And throughout history, there are lots of examples of where we didn't really seek to understand. You know, Stephen Covey, who I did some work with in years past, one of his seven habits was seek first to understand. And boy, that's absolutely wise, it's a good idea. When I was a child growing up, there was a TV show and had been a radio show called "Dragnet". And Sergeant Friday, who was the central character, whenever there was a crime and then he'd go talk to the people in the neighborhood and people who knew the person and so forth, and they would start talking and he would always say, "Ma'am, I just want the facts. Nothing but the facts, right?" And that's sort of the scientific mind, the practical mind, and situation analysis is a little bit like that in terms of really seeking to understand and seeking to know what the facts are that go around a problem and may be impacting that problem. And, you know, I was many, many years ago I was a soldier in Vietnam, believe it or not. And one of the things I learned there, and I think this is sort of maybe a universal truth, is that the war we thought we were fighting wasn't the same war that the Vietnamese thought they were fighting. We were like fighting different wars. In our American Civil War, that was true. The war many Northerners thought they were fighting was not the same war that the Southerners thought they were fighting. And it was a failure to understand the perspective of the other parties. And so, and on the more individual scale, by the way, I've seen a case where a manager will say, "Well, you know, that person's not performing, they've just lost interest in their job, they're just not motivated anymore, Udemy Page 25 they're just not motivated anymore, maybe they need to find another job." But then you go and and if you really listen to them, if you talk to them and you inquire, seek first to understand, in this case that I'm thinking about, you find out that her child was actually dying of an illness. And that's like, "Oh my God, you know, that changes everything, doesn't it?" But you have to understand the situation, you know, that person's situation that runs around the problem. So, this form, which is attached as a resource that you can download, you can use it any way you want, just gives you some sort of set of questions to ask in seeking to understand, asking questions. And then first, there's always defining the problem well in any problem-solving model. So, defining the problem well is your first initial description, but then also saying, "What exactly is the pinpointed behavior?" And I remember my early days in the textile mills, supervisors would say, "Well he's just lazy, you know, has a bad attitude." Boy, a bad attitude is like the worst description in the world, what the heck does that mean? Well, what it means is he doesn't arrive to work on time. And then you say, "Well, how often does he not arrive? When does he not arrive to work on time?" Maybe it's every Monday he doesn't arrive to work on time. Maybe it is every day of the week he doesn't arrive on time. Maybe it's random, there's no pattern to it at all. But very often there is a pattern, and that pattern sort of leads you to other questions, right. Why? Well, why on Monday, what's going on? And then you find out there are real reasons. Well, on Monday he has to take his child to school for some reason, which he doesn't have to do the other days. We don't know, I mean, there are lots of, but first you have to start to pinpoint the behavior. What exactly is the... And a pinpointed behavior is one that can be observed by two or more people and come up with the same conclusion. In other words, if you know baseball, right? Udemy Page 26 In other words, if you know baseball, right? What's a ball? What's a strike? Right, well, that shouldn't be just what any umpire thinks it should be, right? I mean, that should be well-defined, it should be a pinpointed behavior, or a pinpointed outcome in that case. Then there's where is it found and where is it caused? Now, there's just sort of a universal law about processes. They're sort of upstream and downstream, right? Things begin upstream, things end up downstream. Problems are often caused upstream, but then they're discovered and have their effect downstream. For example, if we're making chairs, wooden chairs, and there's a group of people who make the legs, right? Now, they all should be exactly the same length, right? But the leg makers don't install them into the seats, that's the assembly department downstream, so to speak. If the legs are not exactly, maybe they're a quarter an inch or half inch off spec right, not the same. Where do you think that's discovered? Where is it found? Well, it's found in the assembly department, isn't it? It's not found, it may not be found, it should be found, but it may not be found where they caused the problem, right? So, think about the process, where's the problem caused? Where is it found? Now, you think about the behavior and just ask yourself, "What are the antecedents and what are the consequences to that behavior?" Are there antecedents? Meaning are there work instructions. In a lean manufacturing plant, if you're at a workstation, most often there are very explicit instructions for how to do that particular job, often with photographs displaying what it should look like at each stage, right? Those are antecedents, aren't they? Those are cues, prompts, call them whatever you want, that those are standard work instructions. That's an antecedent. Are they there? Does the person know? Have they been instructed? Have they seen examples? That's the situation, Udemy Page 27 That's the situation, it's part of that situation, right? And then ask yourself the question, what currently, we're talking about the current state, there's gonna be a future state, which is what we're gonna create when we do problem solving. But in the current state, what are the consequences? Does it matter to the person? Are there any consequences? Is there any feedback? When does feedback come? You know, we know that the more immediate the feedback, the more impact it has. Well, does feedback come once a month? Does it come once a week? Does it come once a day? Does it come every hour? When, when does that feedback occur? That's part of the existing situation, right? That's part of situation analysis. And is there any recognition, reward, approval? Is there any score keeping, right? I mean, do we have that visual display on the wall where we can look at it and we can see performances going up or going down? That's both an antecedent and a consequence to behavior. So, make sure that score keeping is in place so we can see it and experience the consequence. Do managers or team members in any way approve? Do they provide social recognition for good performance? Those are all just questions about consequences that you can ask. Okay, that's situation analysis, let's talk about root cause analysis next, thanks. -: Hi folks. I think I may have said in a previous session, there's a rule of parsimony. The rule of parsimony says that the simplest explanations are often right and the simplest solutions are the ones that are the most probable to succeed, lowest cost, and should be employed first. Don't try something complicated and convoluted when a simple solution maybe the right answer. Try simple first, right. So before you engage in a very complex problem solving process, let's start with what is a very simple problem solving process, which is root cause analysis, or the five why's. Udemy Page 28 which is root cause analysis, or the five why's. What are the five why's? They're not different why's, they're the same why. Okay? And they are why, that's what they are. The five why's And here's how simple they are. If you have raised children, you understand root cause analysis. Because when a child is three years old or four years old or somewhere in that range, they will say, when they're told that they need to eat their vegetables, why? Why, mommy? Because your vegetables are healthy for you, and I want you to be healthy. Why? Well, because vegetables are more healthy than candy and ice cream and cake. Why? At some point, mommy or daddy says because I just said so. We get tired of our children saying why, and we sort of slap 'em down, not physically, but verbally, and we say, just do it 'cause I said so, right? I don't wanna argue with you. I don't have to explain it to you anymore. Now, the fact that children ask why's is a very healthy thing. Children are naturally inquisitive. They explore, they wanna know why. That is a very good thing. That's how people learn, right? We learn by asking the why question. Well, if that works for children, maybe it would work for us adults too. So when there is a problem in the workplace, the machine breaks down, we do our situation analysis and we find that it breaks down twice a day. You know, on average twice a day. And we ask the when question and it it turns out that, well, it breaks down about every two or three hours of running. Why? Well, I guess the machine gets tired or something gets outta spec or something. Well, why? Well, because it has to be in these specifications and let's go look, let's go see, right, let's go look at it. And what we find out is just the wear of the operation causes things to get a little bit out of spec after a few hours. Udemy Page 29 out of spec after a few hours. Why? Well, that's just the way the machine is designed. I mean, it's a design factor in the machinery. Why? You mean it could be designed a different way? You mean you could change the machinery? Well, maybe you could. Or why don't we fix it before it starts producing bad product? Why not? Okay. Now this is not complicated problem solving, is it? No, it's really very easy problem solving. And if you're facilitating a group in problem solving, just define the problem and just put up the question why. Brainstorm why, right? I mean, let people answer why's. And then for probably the most common why or two or three for each of those, you can sort of draw a decision tree here, ask why. Right, why does that happen? And you know after some... It may be three, it may be five, it may be six or seven whys, it'll probably be pretty obvious that there's something you can try, right? I mean, there's some solution there. There's some experiment that you can conduct. Okay, if the machine breaks down after about three hours of running, what can we do? Some pretty obvious answers, right? Now, one possibility is you redesign the machinery some way, but that may not be something we can do immediately. Maybe it's something we can refer to the engineers, right? Let's call the engineers and tell 'em about that, and maybe they can do something about that. But on the other hand, maybe we can stop the machine after two and a half hours and maintain it. You know, adjust it before it starts producing bad product, 'cause bad product is cost, right? It's waste. We wanna eliminate waste. So, then we try that experiment and then we see what happens. Does that make sense? Really, really, really simple, simple stuff. And you get sort of a cyclical thing. You know, you evaluate your experiment, right. And then you go back and you ask why it's working, why it's not working, and you may do that several iterations, in several cycles before you get to a final thing. Okay? Udemy Page 30 Okay? Thanks. Let's come back and talk about the PDCA or PDSA problem solving process. -: Hi again, folks. Let's get into the Plan-do-check-act, PDCA or PDSA, or PDLA, plan-do-learn-act, or plan-do-study-act. It's all the same thing. Very simple model. And, you know, I wanna point out that this is an enormously flexible model. And I think that's why it's survived. You know. Whether you think this is the best model in the world or not, you know, that's certainly up to you. But respect the fact that this model has been used all over the world for 50 years or more, in all kinds of companies with every kind of team you can imagine, with senior management teams, and frontline shop floor teams. It's enormously flexible. So exactly how you do it is situational. I mean, you have to think about "What is our situation?" And this model is used in the daily huddles, right? Which are, you know, on the factory floor if you will, by the huddle board with all their, you know, looking at the data, and saying, you know, what went up, what went down? What's the problem? What's the challenge? What can we do to improve? And quickly going through the plan-do-check-act model, in literally in 10 minutes, and agreeing on an experiment, a set of actions or countermeasure as some people like to call it. But the do, you know. And going and doing, and then learning from that. It can be, it can be that quick, but it can also be, you can take this model and apply it to much more, much larger problems that require more in-depth analysis. And I'll talk you through, you know, what can go on in each step of this. And let me remind you that, you know, in using this model, I want you to think that problems are normal. Problems are not just an, " Oh my God, what happened? It's a crisis." Udemy Page 31 Oh my God, what happened? It's a crisis." Problems are challenge, right? Remember our guys walking up the mountaintop. I know I overuse this graphic, but I like it, because it breaks down from the big challenge. And this is true whether it's in business, in any kind of environment, of an environment or in our personal life, right? You know, we wanna be the smartest person in the world, and make a millions of dollars, right? Well, how do you get there? You don't get there by one big jump. You get there by baby steps, if you will, or setting short-term targets, getting to those short-term targets, and moving up the scale, up the mountaintop, if you will, in that way. So, I hope you think about it that way. Now, two kinds of problems that you may want to think about. One is what you might normally think of as quality problems, which are deviations from standards. There's a way this product is supposed to look, act, and feel when it's made, and there's some gap between the way it's supposed to look, act, and feel, versus the way it actually does look, act, and feel, when we're through making it. Or it's some step in the process of making it. It's a deviation from standard performance. We have to know what standard performance is, what the specifications are, and then we can detect deviation from those specifications. That, by definition is a problem. And you have to problem solve that problem. But problems are also, even though there may be no obvious deviation from standard, and in many kinds of work, you know, unlike in a factory, if you're, you know, developing advertising, if you're writing a book, if you're developing software. You know, it's just not so obvious that there's a standard, and you may deviate from that standard. But there are higher levels of performance. There's more I an ideal that meets customer desires. You know, what will make a customer passionate about your company and your product? You know. What is that ideal state? That's the challenge that we're striving to. And there's always a gap, you know. This is, that I talked about creative dissatisfaction, Udemy Page 32 This is, that I talked about creative dissatisfaction, where we are versus where we could be. So, here are the four quadrants of the model. And let's just go through them very quickly, and then we'll come back, and go through them in more detail. But the plan, and these are not proportional. I know when you see sort of a circle broken into four quadrants like this, you think, "Well, these must be proportional in terms of time and effort. And no, they're not. The plan stage is disproportional. It takes more time, more analysis. This is where you spend more time figuring out what to do and why you're doing it, analyzing causes and brainstorming solutions. That's all in the plan stage. And then you do the experiment. And doing the experiment may be something you do in a few hours, or it may be something you do over months, all depending on what it is. And then the check, study, or learn, of course is the observation, right? The analysis of what we did. And this makes you a scientist, you know. This is scientific thinking. It's a empirical, or scientific model. And we, that's, you know, you always measure the results. You always look at the data, right? I'm obsessed with the data, I'm obsessed with charts and graphs. Look at the graph, study what happened, and then the acting is, you know, your conclusion to that. What's the, so what? So, we observe what happened. Now, there are two obvious actions. And these may be broken down into subsets, but the first action is, "Hey, it didn't work. Nothing happened, nothing changed." Entirely possible. That is not a failure. That's Thomas Edison learning about how to build a light bulb, right? You learn by the process of elimination often. So you try things, then you say, "Hey, that didn't work." So what do you do? You go around the circle again, right? The acting is the deciding that it didn't work, and now deciding that we're gonna plan again. And we start around the circle. Udemy Page 33 And we start around the circle. Or, it worked, right? And so now that it worked, what do you do? You don't forget about it. And I know this sounds stupid, because it is stupid, that's why. But, I've worked with another company, a number of companies where, we'll like do a whole like six month, or year long improvement process within a manufacturing plant. And they have, you know, 12 other manufacturing plants that are very similar. And in the first manufacturing plant, you know, what we did, we developed a team process, and all the stuff that we're talking about here. And it worked, and the results improved, blah, blah, blah. Do they now adapt that in the other plants? No. 'cause each plant manager says, "Oh no. We're different. We're different. We're not like them. We're different." And their performance doesn't improve. And somehow the company doesn't have the guts, you know, the courage, the determination, to apply the lessons from the first plant to the other plants. This is a, this is a, a failure of learning. Everybody doesn't have to go through same learning curve, right? I mean, we learn from other people's experience, both successes and failures. So part of this acting should be spreading knowledge, right? Sharing knowledge. If, you know, I've been in lots of manufacturing plants where they're like four lines, doing basically the same thing, right? So you may conduct an experiment on one of those lines, and it works. What do you do? Just have, just let the teams on the other lines figure it out all by themself? That's stupid. That's not smart. No. You take the lessons learned there, and this is the job of management. I mean, this is why you have management. You have management to spread the lessons learned from one experiment to other similar areas. And that shared learning speeds up improvement enormously. But in so many companies, you know, we slow down learning because of our arrogance, frankly, Udemy Page 34 we slow down learning because of our arrogance, frankly, our refusal to learn from what other people have done. So, let's come back and let's study, dig into the plan stage a bit more. Thanks. -: Hi folks. So let's delve into the plan stage and look at what may happen during that plan stage. And again, depending upon the nature of your problem and in your environment, that will vary a lot. But let's just go through what may be in there. And I wanna point out that at Toyota this PDCA model which has been used for many, many years there and is at the core of everything they do, they've broken it down into eight steps and they call these eight steps the Toyota Business Practice. And the Toyota business practices are used at every level in the company for every kind of improvement effort. And I suggest you respect that. I suggest you take a look at that and use it. But now, if you look at the first five of the eight steps, clarify the problem break down the problem, set target, analyze root cause develop countermeasures, those are all planned. Those are all in the first quadrant of the PDCA model. And this is where, you know, I said it's that model is disproportionate in terms of the amount of time and the stuff that may go on there. But let's go through these five components of the plan stage and look at them a little bit more. Now, the first, clarify the problem, and it is almost always true that there's a presenting problem. And then when you analyze it some the presenting problem is not that clear. And you want to clarify it. I mean, you wanna specify it. You wanna be, you know, and this is where you want to go and see go to the Gemba if you will, go and look and I know it seems so obvious that you would go and look but so often people sit in a conference room and they don't really go and observe, but go and observe exactly where it occurs when it occurs, et cetera. This is when you use that situation analysis model, right? This is all about clarifying the problem and the circumstances around when it occurs, how often does it occur. Graph it, if at all possible, graph the data. So you can see whether the problem is that boom, you know the graph looks, boom, boom. Udemy Page 35 the graph looks, boom, boom. There's some what, what Dr. Deming caused special cause you know, there's in every graph there's normal variability. And that normal variability is part of the system. It's normal, it's called common cause and statistical process control language. But then if something suddenly boom, boom, you know jumps up, that's a defect, that's a special cause. It's not a normal part of the system. Something's happening to cause that deviation or is that not the problem? Is the problem that there's a trend, right? Going up or down? That is the problem. Well, it's really important that you know that. So, and you only, well, I wouldn't say you only, but you're most likely to see that if you graph the data. So observe the surrounding conditions you know what's going on around the problem or around the machinery or the person or whatever. When that problem happens that will clarify what exactly is the problem. Then break down the problem break down the problem into its component parts. Often there are, you know, three, four parts of the problem. It's not just one thing. So what are the component parts? 'Cause sometimes, you know there might be four or five parts of the problem. But if we fix one of them this is sort of the Pareto analysis, if we fix one of them it will have a positive effect on all the others. So examine the component parts and also think about the social and technical. You know, in many problems, and this is you can use your fishbone diagram for this, but in many problems there are technical things, machinery methods, processes, and there are the people things of motivation and skill that may be part of the problem. So give that some thought. Set targets. And remember our mountaintop don't just shoot for the top of the mountain ask the question in the next week, what can we do? You know, what would be a reasonable achievement by the end of this week or within some relatively short period of time? And using the smart goals, you may have, you know seen or heard of this before, but good targets or goals are specific, right? This is the smart, specific, measurable, achievable relevant, and they're timely or time bound they're within some timeframe. Udemy Page 36 they're within some timeframe. So you think about that criteria when you're setting targets and then analyze the root cause of the problem. You know, this is, we talked about this in brainstorming, right? Or in the five why's, the root cause analysis. You know, what are the causes of the problem? Brainstorm, use your fishbone diagrams or affinity diagrams to brainstorm the causes. And guess what? You're gonna brainstorm solutions or what at Toyota they call countermeasures, right? So you can call them countermeasures or solutions. The countermeasures is sort of a better term because solutions sort of implies a finality where countermeasures more implies an experiment something we're gonna try. And I think that's really a better way to think about it. So brainstorm solutions, reach consensus on something that you can try a most likely thing that will work most likely change countermeasure. And then you go on and you do, right? So let's come back about doing and talk about doing and checking the next two quadrants. -: Hey, folks, I didn't mention it earlier, but I wanna mention it now that, you know, attached to the first lecture on problem solving are resources, and those resources are a PDCA form, simple, you know, on a 8 1/2 by 11 or A4 sized paper. You're welcome to take that, modify it, print it out. And then there's a second, you know, side to it, which has some of the what happens during that, you know, each of the four quadrants, and that may be useful if you're sitting around with a team, you know, thinking about a Plan, Do, Check, Act problem solving, that form and what's on the backside of it may be helpful in doing that. So the Do phase, you may think that is obvious, but you can put, you know, different things within that phase. Developing an action plan. If you said, "Okay, here's the countermeasure." Now saying, "Who's gonna do it? When are they gonna do it? You know, here's an action planning form that you may find helpful. I'll attach that and, and include that. Udemy Page 37 I'll attach that and, and include that. You know, reaching agreement and accountability is just critical to problem solving. You know, too often, teams sit and they talk, and they even agree on what needs to be done, and they leave the room, and you know what happens? Nothing happens. (chuckles) Nothing happens 'cause they didn't say, "Who is going do it by when?" Right, "What is gonna be done? Who's going to do it? By when are they gonna do it?" And then at our next meeting, whether it's tomorrow or a week from now or a month from now, we're gonna go back over our action plans and say, "What happened?" Right, you're holding people accountable, not in a negative, punitive way, but you're just saying, "What happened?" What happened is accountability, right? So you're gonna ask that question, but you can't ask that question unless you did a good job of action planning, right? So you're then gonna implement, and you've specified in your action plan who's gonna implement what, exactly what they're gonna do. Now sometimes, you know, the implementation involves training. So you may have to think that through, you know, who needs to learn what? Maybe it involves some calling the engineers to look at the equipment and do some engineering work on it. That's a possibility. It may involve all kinds of things that, you know, unless I know your situation, I can't say what it is. But during the Do phase, it may be, you know, particularly if it's on a factory floor and just about adjusting a piece of equipment, you may just be able to boom, go do it. But in other cases, it requires more than that. The doing ca be involved. The doing can take weeks or months to do, but obviously, you do it. And then, you know, you check, and again, the discipline of problem solving is important because so often we do things, but then we don't really analyze, you know, we don't really come back and say, "What did we learn?" This is, you know, why I think study or learn is just as good a word or even a better word in there than the traditional check. What did we learn from this experiment, and what does that tell us Udemy Page 38 and what does that tell us about what we need to do in the future? Right, so watch the graph. Does the trend change? Do the special causes get eliminated? You know, those blips on the graph, if you will. That's variability. Do we reduce the common cause? Do we reduce variability in our action? All those are possibly good outcomes, right? So what is the good outcome, or what is the lack of a good outcome? And it's just as important to recognize that. So then we can go on and conduct another experiment more intelligently based on our learning, right, than previously. Be sure to be on the spot. Go talk to the people who are involved in the implementation. Maybe they're not in the room. Maybe there are other people who did it. Maybe you need to go query them. You know, go listen to them. So, you know, the world's greatest experts are always on the spot, right? So let's come back, and let's talk about the Act phase. -: Hi folks. Mr. Ohno, along with Shigeo Shingo, are the founders, the sort of gods, if you will, of Toyota Production System. And Mr. Ohno said, "There can be no continuous improvement without standard work." What is standard work? Standard work is the best way we know how to do a job at this time. Not forever. (laughs) At this time. Why at this time? Because we're gonna conduct experiments, we're gonna learn. We're gonna go through that cycle and we're gonna improve. Now, in many work environments, we have engineers or some other group, developing the standard way to do things, not the people doing the work. And what that does is it causes the people doing the work to feel dumb, to feel like they're not the ones who can make improvement or make changes. This is a mistake. The people who do the work of the world's greatest experts, Udemy Page 39 The people who do the work of the world's greatest experts, sorry to say that over and over again, but it's true, they should be improving standard work. So there should be at every workstation, a sort of a one page, "Here's what we know about doing this job in the best way. You do A, B, C, D, E," maybe even a picture of it, what it looks like. So that defines standard work. Now as we work on improving, upping the bar, solving problems, what we learn from our check phase is that we should... Assuming the the experiment was successful, what we learn from the check phase is that now we should incorporate within standard work something different. Maybe it's some preventive maintenance activity, maybe it's... I don't know what. But there should be some... Learning should be captured. It should be corporate knowledge, if you will. And too often, learning from experiments stays in the head of an individual. That's not good. The individual does not own the process. The team, the organization owns the process. So if we find a way to improve the process, we need to institutionalize that. We need to make that standard. We need to make it part of standard work. So this act phase is not as obvious maybe as it might at first appear, but you need to act to improve standardized procedures. And that's why we learned. That's why we went around this cycle. So incorporate that. If it didn't work, what do we do? We don't sit and cry, we don't blame anybody. (laughs) We can all sit around and blame ourself if you want, but that's useless. That doesn't take you anywhere. We just recognize that, okay, a valuable experiment. Now let's... We learn and we develop long-term solutions by the process of elimination. So we've learned that. Now what do we try? Now let's try something else, right? And you go around the cycle again. And that's how you engage in continuous improvement. You do that continuously. Continuous improvement means continuous improvement, Udemy Page 40 Continuous improvement means continuous improvement, right? I know, I'm sorry to be obvious. Anyway, that's... Here's just a example of a client of mine, a PDCA that was done. And it's kind of neat 'cause you can see how they even put pictures of sort of the before and after, which I think was real good, and it was a bottling line. And there was breakage on the bottling line. And it all came down to a small adjustment of a gap on a piece of equipment on the line. But it took them a bunch of experiments to figure this out and make that improvement. And by visualizing it, by taking photographs of it, that then was incorporated in the standard work. So, just a good example, but there are lots of examples you can find. Okay, that's the PDCA process. It's not hard, but I'd like you now to practice that. And I think you'll learn a lot from your own experiments, your own practice. Thanks a lot. -: Hi, friends. The A3 problem solving model. Now, just for reference, the term A3, that is a metric size of paper. It's roughly 17 by 23. That larger size, if you will. A PDCA model, I've used the A4, which is basically eight and a half by 11 size for that. But the exact size doesn't matter. In fact, the bigger you can print it out, the better because you can visualize things more and you can put more things on it. But that's where the term A3 comes from. Simply the paper size. I know that's sort of boring and mundane. What is it? Why do we need another problem solving model? I mean, isn't the PDCA or PDSA or whatever, isn't that sufficient? Well, in many respects, the answer to that is yes, it is sufficient. And in many respects, I would argue that the A3 is not another model. It's simply a way Udemy Page 41 It's simply a way of using the same questions, the same categories, but in a way that can be more visualized, can be more in depth, can include more people. And I recommend you use the A3 for problems that are not so simple. For simple problems that can be solved very quickly, I would simply use the A4 or the PDSA, PDCA model. But when we have a problem that we know we'll have to spend more time inquiring, more time digging, right, more time playing detective and maybe do more experiments, maybe do several experiments, I would use the A3 model. Now, this is what the A3 looks like, very, very briefly. It's one version of it. And if you, all you have to do is Google A3 problem solving or Toyota A3 or something like that. And you'll probably find 10 different versions of what's in the categories on the A3 and that's okay. I have a client who, all their people had been trained in Six Sigma DMAIC model. And this is the Six Sigma DMAIC model of define, measure, analyze, modify, improve, and control. That's okay. You could put those same categories in the A3 form if your people are familiar with that. If they've just been trained in the eight step Toyota Business Practice, PDCA model, I would suggest you use that. And that's what I've used in the A3 that's attached and what we're going to follow now. I'm in favor of the less confusion, the better, the more simplicity, the better. So if you take the same eight steps and this is what Toyota has done, and a lot of people have done, that you use with the PDCA, you can just transpose those into the A3. So why an A3, rather than just the PDCA? My recommendation in the use of the A3, and I know you've probably heard me talk about visualizing things too many times, but I just believe in it. Udemy Page 42 but I just believe in it. And I believe in people getting out of their seats and walking up to a wall and putting things on the wall. That, there's some magic in that. People's brains work when they're out of their seats and they're actually putting stuff up. My recommendation for the best way to use the A3 model is to literally make a big wall with the different categories and then put stuff up under those categories. Now, somebody can then transpose that onto a piece of paper if you want and you can just use the piece of paper if you want. But I think the bigger and the more visual it is, the more effective it is. More in depth problems, more visualization. You can involve more people if it's on the wall. I love the idea of like putting this in a conference room and saying to everybody in the organization, we're working on this problem. Go look at the categories. Here are post-it notes, you know, put them up where you think they fit if you have any ideas. It's a great way to engage people. Or you can have, we used to call them search conferences or design conferences where we'd literally get you know, the whole plant or 100 people or some large number of people in a large conference room, maybe a hotel ballroom, and put it up and then challenge people, you know, at their tables to discuss, you know, each category one by one, and then go put up what they think belongs in that category up on the wall. And you can literally get hundreds of people involved very quickly. And that, you know, one of the mysteries of, or magical things about change is the more people are involved in creating the change, the more people buy into that change, and the easier that change is to implement and the higher the probability of success. That's like a lawful thing. So you can use the A3 model to get a lot of people involved, to cause a lot of people to feel ownership for it. And then as you implement it, Udemy Page 43 And then as you implement it, that can be very transparent. You can say, here's what, you know, came out of our problem definition. Here are the facts and the data we gathered. Here are the causes of the problem that we brainstormed and identify and here are the solutions and we've prioritized them. We've used Pareto analysis or some other method to prioritize and here are the experiments we're conducting. And everybody can know that, and everybody can feel good about that and engaged in that. So that's why you should use the A3 model. And we're gonna follow these eight steps in the next lecture. Let's start going through the topics on the form. But you're familiar with them already 'cause we talked about them during the PDCA process. But they're clarify the problem, break the problem down into more specifics. Go analyze the problem. Go see, remember that? Set targets, analyze root causes, develop countermeasures, brainstorm solutions if you will, implement countermeasures, monitor the results and the process. You know, what has changed in the process and how's the process working since we implemented those countermeasures? This is really where we're learning, right? This is the plan to check right, part of it where we're monitoring the results and monitoring the process. And then we're saying, you know, what did we learn? And then standardizing and sharing, right? We went through all those with the PDCA. Let's now put them into the format of an A3 and let's go through that. Thanks. Attached, I'm giving you both blank A3 form and I'm also giving you this filled in A3 form, which is filled in with questions really, of what... like I did with the PDCA, what items are covered under each of these blocks, and I hope you'll take a problem and try it. And by trying the A3, just like you try the PDCA, Udemy Page 44 just like you try the PDCA, you will get your own feel for when to use it and how it works. So let's go through each of the blocks on the A3 form. The first one is define and clarify the problem. And there's always this presenting problem. Somebody's lazy, the -- machine's broken. (laughs) Those are sort of the the beginning presenting problems, but that's never the real problem, right? So we have to define it. We have to go see, observe it. Who cares about it? Who knows about this problem? Go listen to people. Where does it occur? When does it occur? How often does it occur? All those questions. You fill in the first block with the answers to all of those questions. The second block is really breaking down the problem into more specifics. Go observe, gather the data, graph the data, look at what the data is telling you. And this is where you go into the third, which is get baseline data. And I just want you to stare at this graph for a second, either one of these two graphs, and I just want you to think. Having a baseline, a stable baseline, that tells you what it really is. Those are the facts. That's the current state. And then you make a change and then you know. You really know whether it's working or not working because you got baseline data. If you didn't get the baseline data, you wouldn't really know. And I can't tell you how often people think it's working when it's not really working. But if you've got the data, got the baseline, then you're watching it run, right? A run chart. Let it run over time, and then try a second intervention. 'Cause we get to a certain level and then let's say, "Well, can we improve on that?" And the first intervention then sort of becomes your baseline for the second intervention. And you could do 10 interventions, right? 10 countermeasures, 10 changes in the process, learning all the time, learning about what works. But this is so critical. Look at the trends. Udemy Page 45 Look at the trends. Is the trend going up, down? Is it increasing or decreasing? Absolutely critical. Is there variability? What is that variability? Are there special causes, causes of defect? When do they occur? Why do they occur? All that is within this. And then once you really know the facts, you know what the data is, then you're gonna set targets. And what kind of targets are you gonna gonna set? You're gonna sort of set smart goals, right? Specific, measurable, achievable, et cetera. You're gonna move up that mountain, right? We're climbing that mountain towards the ideal state and we're doing it in baby steps, right? We're gonna set targets that are achievable targets and we're gonna measure that. And when that works, we try something else to move up even more. So these are the things that you're gonna do in setting baseline data and setting the targets. And then you're gonna analyze the root causes. What are you gonna do when you analyze root causes? You're gonna do root cause analysis. Back to a previous lecture, right? I will not repeat the whole thing, but you're gonna ask the five whys. And you're gonna use fishbone diagrams, if you will, or affinity diagrams for brainstorming, and you're going to discover the causes. When you have the data, when you have the baseline, when you've gone and seen, defined the problem well, now you can do a good job of defining or analyzing what the root causes are. And then what are you gonna do? You're gonna develop countermeasures. And you may look at... Again, you use a fishbone diagram, if you will, for solutions. And you can use brainstorming for... Pick one of the causes. Use your Pareto analysis here. Pick one cause that you think is the highest probability to have the highest impact and develop countermeasures around that one cause. Implement that, right? Develop an action plan. Action plan form attached, okay? Use your action planning form. And again, I've said this before, but I'll say it again. Udemy Page 46 And again, I've said this before, but I'll say it again. If you don't develop a good action plan, there's no accountability and chances are nothing good will happen. (laughs) Sorry to be sort of pessimistic about human nature, but it is human nature. So, be sure to develop good action statements with the who, when, and then you come back at each meeting and you go over the status of that. Monitor results and monitor the process, right? You're gonna go and see, you're gonna watch your data. Keep watching that data and continue... Analysis... The scientific method is a thought process, habits of thought, right? All this is about developing habits of thought. So when you're monitoring the results, you're monitoring them as a scientist. You're objective. You're not invested in each experiment working. If it works, great, happy for that. But you're not so invested you're gonna pretend it's working when it's not. That's not science, that's superstition. If you're a scientist, you're objective about saying what really is happening and why is it happening. So you're watching that data, you're learning from it. And then what are you gonna do? You're either gonna... Just like on the PDCA model that we're in the act part of the PDCA model now, you're gonna standardize and you're gonna share. You're gonna agree that the experiment we tried is working. We should incorporate that in our standard work, our standard procedures, or not. Or we need to try something again. Or maybe we need to get more data. We need to watch the data longer, right? And when we're sure we have really learned something valuable, we're gonna share with the rest of the organization. We're gonna share... And managers, that's your job. Your job is to make sure that solutions, improvements developed by any team, are shared with the rest of the organization. And hey, celebrate. Some positive reinforcement here. If you get good results improving a process, talk about it, share, order pizza. (laughs) Whatever turns you on, whatever works to have some positive reinforcement for that improvement is a very good idea. Udemy Page 47 is a very good idea. I hope that all makes sense. That's the A3 model. It's again, as I've said over and over again nothing rocket science, but it works. It's proven to work over and over again in hundreds of organizations by now. So please try it. So now you know how to do an A3, right? Well do you, you'll really know how to do it when you do it. You don't really know how to do something until you've done it. So let's take a problem, let's take a more complicated problem than we used for the BDCA, and let's go through the different sections of the A3. You know what they are. You've got the form. Print out the form, use it, put it on the wall, and work with your team on it. And, you know, try to tell a story. Remember, you know, the A3 is really about learning from the story, right? So tell the story about, you know, why we have this problem. And then start, you know, going through the analysis and developing countermeasures and trying them out, and learning, you know, what do you learn from doing that? And every time I've seen students do an A3, they always tell me how much they learned, you know, from doing it. In fact, the whole organization learns from doing it. The more you can make that A3 public, so it's on a wall, so people can see it, the greater the value, the more people will learn from it together. So use it. Sometimes our problems are not in the machinery or in the workflow, the work process. Sometimes they're people. Now, maybe not in your organization, but in other organizations, sometimes people are the problem. And we have to have a organized way of thinking about solving human performance problems. Because the A3 and the PDCA process, you know, all that's great, but within that, within the framework of that, you may need to say, why are people doing that? Udemy Page 48 you may need to say, why are people doing that? Or why are people not doing that? And I want to give you a way of analyzing that that can help you improve human performance as part of your problem solving process. Now, in this lecture, I just want to take a sort of a backup and take a big picture look at this for a second. Human performance is a result basically of two major components. And we'll analyze those two major components. One is competency. You're able to do it. If you ask me to sing opera, don't. If you ask me to play tennis well, if you ask me to speak Russian, or do lots of other things, I am not able to. It's not that I don't want to, it's that I'm not able to, I don't have the skill, I don't have the competence or the knowledge. On the other hand, there are things that I may be able to do. I may be competent to do, I can do, but I just don't care. You know, I'm not motivated to do it. There are a lot. I need to pick the weeds out of my garden. I really do know how to do that. But I haven't done it in about two months, and it doesn't look very good. That's not a competency problem, that's a motivation problem. That's a will do. So human performance is the result of both of those things. Now, around the 1970s, I think it was, a doctor, Robert Mage