Blog posts on gemba

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• The Tendency for Lean Experts to Distrust Technology

  Technology also is often seen as this wonderful simple quick fix by executives - letting them avoid the gemba and just put hope in a essentially magic bullet solution.

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• Practicing Mistake-Promoting Instead of Mistake-Proofing at Apple

  Mistake proofing is a wonderful management concept. Design systems not just to be effective when everything goes right but designing them so mistakes are prevented.

  ...

  But guess what, the unnecessary steps Apple decided to force me through are broken so I can’t just waste my time to make them happy. No. They have created a failure point where they never should have forced the customer in the first place.

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• Out of Touch Executives Damage Companies: Go to the Gemba

  The very first thing that needs to happen is executives need to go the gemba and actually understand what their business units are doing. Only amazingly out of touch executives could sit unconcerned in their offices while Comcast practices are creating results so obviously horrible.

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• Addressing Systemic Policing Issues in the USA

  I have long been concerned about problems with our system of law enforcement in the USA. In recent years one good thing is that the problem is getting much more attention (the increasing militarization of police department however is a very bad trend that has gotten much worse over the last 10 years).
  
  I strongly believe the former police chief of Madison, Wisconsin has very good ideas on what should be done. His blog has many useful ideas and he discusses Deming's ideas often. He also wrote a guest post for the W. Edwards Deming Institute blog: Quality Beginnings: Deming and Madison, Wisconsin.

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• W. Edwards Deming Discussing the Leadership We Need in Our Organizations

  He mentions that walking around can be useful but it isn’t effective. Without the proper focus you only see a glossy picture. Going to where the work is done is important. But as with most management practices it must be done within a proper context and sadly it is often done in a superficial way. I discussed these ideas in my blog post, Management by Walking Around...

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• Continually Improving Using a Focus on Delighting Customers

  A deep appreciation for the long term needs of your customers and potential customers should guide where in the system to continually improve. And my belief on how to continual improve is to create and continually improving management system with principles of experimentation (with the necessary understanding of what conclusion can be drawn from results and what cannot), an understanding of the organization as a system and respect for people as principles to be guided by to achieve continual improvement.

  Quality practices of experimentation directed at continually improving management practices and internal processes need to be completely integrated with the efforts to continual improve customer delight. Those efforts should be one process and therefore they automatically grow together.

  The success of improvements should be evaluated at the system level (outcome measures not merely efficiency measures). In process measures are useful in adding evaluating improvement and monitoring processes but the end result for the overall system must always remain the primary concern.

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• Using Checklists to Reduce Process Variation and Improve Results

  At the core the Checklist Manifesto is about determining the critical process conditions and creating a system to assure that the those process items are properly handled.

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  It is critical that checklists be developed at the gemba (where the real work is done) and that they are modified based on experience. A good checklist system integrates continual improvement to adjust checklists based on user experience.

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• Cater to Customers Desires to Achieve Customer Delight

  Customer delight requires understanding your customers needs and desires. Often even your customers don’t understand these well. Businesses that have a deep appreciation for what their customers, and potential customers, desire and that create systems to deliver solutions that delight those customers benefit greatly from that effort.

  To build a sustainable enterprise you must provide value customers will appreciate.

  Your customers do not have one unified set of desires. Some customers may want as good an experience as is possible and if that costs substantially more they are happy to pay. Others want to pay the least possible while having an acceptable experience.

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• Find the Root Cause Instead of the Person to Blame

  Why did they make that error? Why did the process let them make that error? When you follow the why chain a couple more steps you can find root causes that will allow you to find a much more effective solution. You can then pilot (PDSA) an improvement strategy that doesn’t just amount to “Do a better job Joe” or “that is it Joe we are replacing you with Mary.” Neither of those strategies turns out to be very effective.

  But investigating a bit more to find a root cause can result in finding solutions that improve the performance of all the workers. 

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• Understanding Data

  Effective use of data is an important part of management improvement. Emphasis is needed on “effective”; data misuse is rampant and creates problems. Use of data by itself is not sufficient.

  To be effective you need to learn to think about not what is printed on the page but what lies behind the numbers you see. The numbers are just proxies for the real situation.

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• CEO Flight Attendant

  This getting out and seeing work in action is exposed a great deal, including a lean management concept, Genchi Genbutsu – to go to see the problem in situ (not just reading a report about it).

  The success of many management practices is more a matter of how the practice is done than if it is done. Also the success depends on the rest of the management system. Practices cannot just be copied. But you can learn from what others find useful and figure out how that idea would work within your organization.

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• The Exciting Life of Industrial Statisticians

  All of this provides great new opportunities for industrial statisticians to serve as statistical leaders-a term popularized by the late and great Ed Deming (see Hahn and Hoerl, 1998). Statistical leaders engage principally in leveraging statistical concepts and thinking (see Hoerl, Hooper, Jacobs and Lucas , 1993), and focus their activities on mentoring and supporting the most business-vital and technically challenging problems dealing with getting the right data, and converting such data into actionable information.

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• Encourage Improvement Action by Everyone

  Centralizing decision making is not an effective way to manage organizations. Organizations need to encourage improvement by everybody in the organization. We need to create a system where that is encouraged and supported.

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  Without an understanding of systems and interactions sometimes changes are made without an understanding of the consequences those changes. The beer game is a good example of one way this can cause problems (people don’t always understand all the consequences of their actions). To be clear I agree with setting up systems that allow people to make improvements in the workplace. Just be cautious to avoid tampering.

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• Management by Walking Around

  Management by walking around (MBWA) is based on the concept that a manager needs to actually understand what is really going on – not just view reports in an office. By seeing the actual state of affairs they can better understand what management improvements are actually doing where work is being done. Lean thinking includes a great deal on the importance of going to the gemba to make decisions. Anyone interested in MBWA should look at some of that material (as often MBWA is too superficial to do much good). 

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• Workplace Management by Taiichi Ohno

  Ohno focused a great deal on the faulty perceptions derived from cost accounting thinking. He discussed the importance of not letting your understanding be clouded by thinking with the accounting mindset.

  If you insist on blindly calculating individual costs and waste time insisting that this is profitable of that is not profitable, you will just increase the cost of your low volume products. For this reason there are many cases in this world where companies will discontinue car models that are actually profitable, but are money losers according to their calculations. Likewise, there are cases where companies sell a lot of model that they think is profitable but in fact are only increasing their loses.

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