The Problem With Problem-Solving

Just this past week, Seamus Maguire publsihed a book entitled Finding Fact Before Fixing: How Business Professionals Can Avoid False Assumptions When Solving Problems, which explores the reasons, biases, and blind spots that result in business professionals making assumptions and jumping to conclusions during problem-solving.

During a recent conversation with Seamus, I asked him: "What are some of the common mistakes business leaders make when problem-solving?" Here is his answer:

It’s my opinion that assumptions, not complexity, are the biggest obstacle to effective problem solving today.

There are a myriad of tools and frameworks that we can follow, from DMAIC to A3 and everything in between. However, even when these tools and frameworks are followed and we have the right people, problem-solving activities can still fall short.

The issue lies not in the tools themselves but rather in how people are hardwired to focus on fast results.

This creates a subconscious tendency to accept our best guesses as facts. We regularly skip the part of an investigation that requires experimental work or going to the gemba to observe.

This tendency is so subtle that we often don’t even realise we are doing it. Often, the potential causes feel so right and are so logical that it seems a waste of time to challenge them through experimentation.

The thing is, we will always be wrong more often than we are right in problem solving, and that’s ok! We can’t think our way out of a problem; if we could, well, it wouldn’t be a problem.

The alternative takes a little more work; it involves creating a way to test our hypothesis so that we learn more about the process/product in question until we reach the point where our knowledge encompasses the problem. At this point, it is no longer a problem.

That’s why true root causes often seem so obvious in hindsight. Until we have the knowledge, the issue is super complex. Then, once we gain the required knowledge, the problem becomes simple and mundane overnight, and you scratch your head, asking why it took so long to figure it out.

So next time you are asking for an update on a problem-solving activity, instead of asking ‘Have you got to root cause yet?’, or, ‘What’s the root cause?’, maybe ask, ‘What have you experimentally ruled out so far?’, or, ‘How did you confirm that?’ This will shift the focus to how problem-solving is conducted, rather than encouraging the team to accept assumptions as fact to achieve a quick result.

What do you think of Seamus's perspective? Do these types of mistakes happen in your organization? What have you done to rectify them? 

Does the Decalogue Methodology Improve Management Effectiveness?

Back in September, Angela Montgomery published a book entitled The Human Constraint: How Business Leaders Can Embed Continuous Innovation, Conflict Resolution, and Problem Solving Into Daily Practice, which explores an increasingly complex, interdependent, and fast-changing world where companies must have a way to overcome obsolete mental models and embed continuous innovation in their operations with a coherent organizational model.

When I spoke with Angela recently, I asked her: “How does the Decalogue methodology improve management effectiveness?” Here is her complete response: 

Whether it’s a startup, a scaleup, SME or multinational, smoke stack or hi-tech, leaders, founders, managers, and investors face challenges today unlike before. Applying linear thinking and conventional management tools is no longer adequate or effective. Our new reality is a complex, highly nonlinear network of cause-effect relationships. Moreover, the digital age requires better decision-making, faster innovation, and flawless delivery of products and services. What’s needed is a new way of thinking and operating. 

The Decalogue method introduces leaders to a systemic approach to managing operations. It helps them connect dots they would not otherwise see and strategize, plan, and execute at a whole new level. Learning to behave as one cohesive system involves identifying a unique leverage point (constraint) to propel performance and achieve significant and sustainable growth. The method enables a company to develop a systemic value proposition for the market that competitors cannot imitate while improving performance company-wide to deliver their offer reliably. 

The Ten Steps of the Decalogue enhance all aspects of business, from production to marketing and sales, project management, new product development, supply chain, finance, and M&A. The steps give business owners and leaders a clear and focussed path to achieving maximum value with the resources available. A leap in overall performance is achieved by defining a clear goal and measurements, understanding variation to map effective processes and interdependencies, and identifying the one factor that determines the pace of throughput. 

A key part of the journey is embracing and implementing necessary change. Our human ambitions and emotions all have a role to play, and this is what I hope to emphasize in the book. The Decalogue introduces a set of systemic Thinking Processes that enable companies to overcome cognitive barriers to change and channel their energies in a positive direction towards a common goal. These processes embed into daily practice the ability to solve problems, resolve conflicts, and continuously develop breakthrough solutions that add high value. 

What do you think of Angela Montgomery's perspective? Do you have experience with the Decalogue method? Do you think it would be effective in your organization? 

The Evolution of Product Development -- Has Lean Adjusted?

In October, Cécile Roche and Luc Delamotte published a book entitled The Lean Engineering Travel Guide: The Best Itineraries for Developing New Products and Satisfying Customers. This book explains many Lean Engineering practices in some detail and the best itineraries to develop better products, discussing the underlying intentions and offering advice for implementation. It includes numerous concrete cases that illustrate this part with case material drawn from the authors’ own experiences. In addition, there is a brief guide to where and how to get started.  

When I spoke with Cécile this month, I asked her: "How has Lean adjusted as product development evolves?" Here is her complete answer:

The power of the Lean approach is that it is based on two strong convictions. 

The first is that a company will succeed if it really takes care of the customers, and therefore offers products that will solve their real problems - Do the right thing!

The second is that the company will make money thanks to the ingenuity of its employees, which must be encouraged by the existence of organized thinking spaces. 

By doing this, you avoid the biggest wastes imaginable: products that don't sell, products that you don't know how to produce, maintain, or recycle at the right cost, and all the rework caused by poor choices - Do the right thing, then do it right!

The practices and tools of Lean are all geared towards answering this question: what are we doing to give our staff the means to understand customers properly, and the means to identify the waste caused by our misconceptions? This constant questioning, which always begins with "Do we know what we don't know?” is the best way of ensuring that we are constantly adapting to change.

To encourage this questioning, we must set up a system that can very quickly identify the gaps, knowledge gaps, and trade-offs that need to give rise to creative discussions and train people to solve problems using appropriate methods. It is the Lean system.

Lean is a dynamic approach. It's not about freezing practices in procedures that are excellent one day but already unsuitable the next, but about regularly questioning all changes (in the context, of technology, resources, skills, etc.) to assess their impact. This is what we call the Kaizen spirit. As Allen Ward said, "Instead of learning to surf, conventional organizations try to control the waves! This almost never works."

What do you think of Cécile Roche's thoughts on Lean methodology? Do you feel that Lean continues to benefit the changing face of product development? 

The Coaching Manager -- Toyota Kata and Scientific Thinking

Just this month, Tilo Schwarz and Jeffrey K. Liker published a new book entitled Giving Wings to Her Team: A Novel About Learning to Coach the Toyota Kata Way, which presents a story about the benefits of becoming a coaching manager and how to get there. We follow the fictional character, named Denise, on a journey of discovery and skill development, as she moves beyond the tools and concepts of Lean and focuses on daily practice that helps her supervisors achieve their goals. It's about the Toyota Kata approach, which helps anyone develop and apply scientific thinking -- an exploratory mindset of curiosity and experimentation.

When I recently spoke with Tilo and Jeff, I had the chance to ask them some questions specific to the concepts discussed in their current book, and how those concepts apply to daily work.

Question 1: What are the benefits of becoming a coaching manager?

In general terms, a coach teaches, watches the student, gives appropriate feedback, and assigns drills to learn specific skills.  You can coach anyone on any skill.  In Giving Wings to Her Team, the central character Denise learns a specific type of coaching for a particular skill set -- scientific thinking.

We often think that to navigate today’s complex challenges we need decisive leaders with a clear roadmap that they rigorously implement.  In reality, the more complex the challenge the less a roadmap will be helpful.  Instead, we need adaptive problem-solving, testing ideas rapidly, and learning our way to goals.  In Toyota Kata, this way is called scientific thinking—focus on facts, formulate hypotheses, test ideas instead of making assumptions, reflect, and learn.

Toyota Kata teaches a coaching approach that enables your team to become increasingly adaptive, innovative, and resilient – fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement, so your team can meet their current challenges and be ready for more.

Question 2: How does Toyota Kata help you to become a coaching manager?

The term “kata” is used in Japanese martial arts and are the small skills the black belt teaches and then the student practices repeatedly, with feedback, until doing it the right way becomes a habit. Michael Jordan put it nicely: “You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way.” 

In the novel, Denise faces the biggest challenges of her life as a manufacturing manager and is fortunate to get coaching help from Maggie who runs the local gym.  Maggie has studied and used Toyota Kata in her gym.  She helps Denise learn to work with her team to set big challenges they can relate to, study the current condition, set short-term target conditions, and then experiment toward these targets.  Denise struggles at first, but through practice, and Maggie’s coaching, she gets better and better at giving wings to her team.  

You can learn along with Denise how to become a coach of scientific thinking and by coaching your team to achieve goals that at first seem impossible.  In this book, we go beyond laundry lists of coaching best practices and demonstrate how to develop actual skills in yourself and your team.  

We hope our novel will help you start a learning journey of your own.

What are your experiences with Toyota Kata? Have you applied it in your organization? How has it benefited your managers and teams? 

Why Do Most Companies Fail When They Strive to Become More Efficient and Resilient?

At the beginning of this month, Brian Strobel published an intriguing new book entitled Pursuing Excellence: A Values-Based, Systems Approach to Help Companies Become More Resilient, which interestingly posits that a company doesn’t implement Operational Excellence as a methodology, model, or tool. Instead, a company realizes Operational Excellence. It does so by integrating effective leadership, teamwork, problem-solving, systems thinking, and continuous improvement. It achieves this by aligning strategies, empowering employees, optimizing business processes, and improving the customer experience.

When I spoke with Brian recently, I asked him: “Why do most companies fail when they strive to become more efficient and resilient?” Here is his full answer:

I think the fact that people are starting to ask questions like this proves there’s a growing recognition our previous ways of doing things aren’t working.

The way that we’ve managed our companies has remained largely unchanged since the 18^th century. Since then, different philosophies have come and gone, but the central ideas for what it takes to manage our companies have remained fairly consistent.

And our approach to achieve continuous improvement must also change.

I believe that our legacy approaches to continuous improvement, to include Lean and Six Sigma, are failing to consider the whole system and account for the leadership principles necessary for success. These previous methods placed too much emphasis on the specific improvement methodology, without proper consideration for the entire system and surrounding culture, systems and structures, values and beliefs, and the particulars of our marketspace..

As I write in my latest book Pursuing Excellence, “our companies are struggling with ways to become more competitive, to reduce costs, and the chase unobtanium in their never-ending pursuit to do more with less. But to survive, this focus on efficiency must not come at the expense of innovation, agility, and moving fast."

The world is now a new place, with new rules. Succeeding will require new ways of looking at our problems. And the lens of operational excellence can help us view these things from a different perspective.

A lens is something that bends and refracts light to alter our vision. It allows us to see things differently. The right kind of lens takes what’s already there, and through convergence and divergence, provides a different perspective to view the subject. It focuses our vision on those things we need to see with more clarity.

These ideas that make up the lens of operational excellence, as shown here, provide us the context for what must be considered as we move towards driving change with a fundamental understanding that we must have everyone aware of why we need to change. In this regard, the lens helps guide the vision for our companies to become more resilient and move closer to achieving excellence.

What do you think of Brian's thoughts? How have continuous-improvement initiatives affected your company? 

Becoming a New Supervisor -- What are the Challenges?

During May, Hugh Alley published a book that introduces the central skills that any supervisor must master with, at least, a basic working competency: instructing, leading, and making improvements in their own area. It is entitled Becoming the Supervisor
Achieving Your Company's Mission and Building Your Team, and it presents some of the more widely used tools that a new supervisor may need. More importantly, it ties these tools and skills to solving particular problems.

I spoke with Hugh this month and asked him: “What are the common mistakes many new supervisors make?” Here is his complete response:

I’d say that there are three common mistakes among new supervisors.

First, they are not clear enough with their employees when they assign work. They’ll describe what need to be done, but they’ll skip over the details of how the work is to be done. These details are what set the orders apart, and they are where the mistakes happen. You need to go over them with your employee. And you need a conversation about how long the work will take. When that happens, both supervisor and worker can agree, and the supervisor’s stress goes down.

Second, they act without thinking through a situation when something is amiss. Usually that’s because they don’t have a structured way to approach this sort of problem. In the book, Julie, the GM, introduces Trevor, the young supervisor to the Job Relations approach, which gives a nice structured way to think about any situation. I’ve seen team leads charging across the floor to “deal with” someone stop in their tracks and reconsider when they remember the steps of the Job Relations program. It’s very powerful.

Third, they don’t pay enough attention to standard work. They don’t make sure that people are using the best way to do a job that the organization currently knows. That consistency will typically increase productivity by 10%. The best route to that is a good job breakdown, and the concepts of the Job Instruction module from Training Within Industry are very helpful here. In the book, Trevor learns how to do this, and it solves several problems. I’ve seen it reduce the time to get new staff up to speed from three months down to one month.

If new supervisors can get those three skills nailed, they’ll be much better off. From there, they can learn all the other skills. 

What is the quality of the leadership training within your organization? Do you agree with Hugh's assessment of common mistakes by new supervisors? Has your company experienced the benefits of a training within industry (TWI) program?

Reactive Improvement and Effective Daily Management

In December, Ross Kennedy published a book entitled Understanding, Measuring, and Improving Daily Management: How to Use Effective Daily Management to Drive Significant Process Improvement . This book explains the critical parts of a continuous improvement strategy to achieve operational excellence and where reactive improvement through effective daily management fits in.

During a recent conversation with Ross, I asked him: “What is reactive improvement and why aren’t more companies embracing it?” Here is his complete answer:

To achieve operational excellence, organizations need a continuous-improvement strategy that includes reactive improvement to ensure you have effective daily management, stable production, or work plan to minimize fire-fighting caused by unplanned changes and proactive Improvement to take you to your improvement vision of world-class performance. Unfortunately, many organizations get so focused on proactive improvement through capital projects or operational excellence initiatives such as Lean, Six Sigma, or Total Productive Maintenance (TPM), that they lose sight of the importance of reactive improvement and having a stable production or work plan.

Reactive improvement develops the capability and discipline within the organization to be able to rapidly recover from an event or incident that stops you from achieving your expected or target performance for the day, shift, or hour and most importantly, your ability to capture the learning and initiate corrective actions so that the event or incident will not re-occur anywhere across the organization.

As such, reactive improvement focuses on improving daily management through your daily review meetings, your information centers supporting the daily review meetings, and your problem-solving root cause analysis capability at all levels, especially at the frontline.There are seven key elements of reactive improvement that must work in concert for effective daily management: 

1. A supportive organization structure to support development of your frontline people so they have ownership and accountability for the performance of their area of responsibility. 
2. Effective frontline leaders to ensure everyone else in the leadership structure are not working down a level. 
3. Appropriate measures with expected targets that are linked to the site’s key success factors for operations to ensure goal alignment and are relevant for the focused areas. 
4. Structured daily review meetings to identify opportunities (problems/incidents) and monitor progress of their solution so they don’t happen again. 
5. Visual information centers that visually display daily and trending performance along with monitoring of actions to address problems/issues raised.
6. Frontline problem-solving root cause analysis capability across the site. 
7. Rapid sharing of learning capability across shifts, departments and the organization. 

What do think of Ross's overview of reactive improvement? Do you practice this technique in your company?

What are the Key Ingredients for a Lean Culture?

Paul McCartney, while in the Beatles, famously claimed that “money can’t buy me love" --  According to author Richard D. Brimeyer, money also can’t buy Lean. Rick’s book Working Great! Lean Leadership Lessons for Guiding Your Organization to Excellence contains 52 lessons for leader-managers, each with challenges for applying the lesson. The format is particularly conducive to a leader’s book club.

I chatted with Rick recently to discuss his assertion that sustained Lean success is driven by a handful of critical behaviors by managers at every level of the organization. Here are some of his comments:

Unlike so many management fads (reengineering, quality circles, etc.) that have come and gone over the decades, Lean owes its endurance to the fact that it benefits all stakeholders -- customers, owners/funders, and employees. Waste doesn’t help anyone. Unfortunately, I believe a lot of organizations embark on a Lean expedition underestimating the behavior changes required of managers at every level.

Although important, the ultimate measure of success for any Lean expedition is not how many kaizen events are completed, but rather how many improvements occur outside of formal events. The latter ultimately comes down to creating a place where employees care, where they are willing to expend discretionary effort, and feel competent solving problems and removing waste. Creating that place is almost totally reliant on the behaviors they observe from their leaders day in, day out to ensure:

• Everyone understands the relevance of their work. 
• Employees feel appreciated for who they are as well as what they do. 
• Pathways for growth are evident. 
• Successes (and efforts) are regularly recognized. 
• A fair and responsive system exists for dealing with performance issues when they occur. 

Regardless of what we say, employees believe what we do. So being clear on key behaviors for leader-managers is very important. Ironically, these behaviors are consistent with any excellent supervisor, regardless of whether they are working in a Lean environment where flow and pull are practiced or not. Thus, the word “Lean” in my subtitle is practically superfluous, but these key behaviors are absolutely essential for establishing a Lean culture.

My goal for the book Working Great! is to provide a simple and useful resource for leader-managers, regardless of their level or experience. I hope to take the mystery out of culture by tying it to the behaviors to which they can hold themselves, and each other, accountable.

What do you think of Richard's points? Does the behavior of leadership at your organization reflect the true goal of the Lean initiative?

How Can We Overcome Toxic Conformity at Work?

Why are many of our organizations almost allergenic in their responses to innovation? Why do we penalize those courageous individuals who challenge the status quo by swimming against the tide? What can we do at work to ensure that dissenting voices speak up and make us reflect on where we are going and what we are really trying to achieve? 

 I recently put these questions to Bill Templeman, author of the just-published book, Leadership Basics for Frontline Managers: Tips for Raising Your Level of Effectiveness and Communication. I wanted to know why this dynamic happens and what managers or anyone in a leadership position can do about it. Here is his complete response:  

All organizations with any sort of hierarchy are prone to believing in their visions and plans for the future; the stronger the culture, the greater the belief that “We are on the right path!” It is no secret that business plans become documents of faith, just like party platforms become documents of faith for politicians. The CEO of a major hi-tech firm recently said that he measured his executives’ teamwork skills by assessing their degree of commitment to the corporate business plan. But what if this plan is flawed? 

Admiral John Godfrey, the former Director of Britain’s Naval Intelligence Division, in analyzing "Operation Mincemeat," a highly successful World War II espionage operation, identified two major weaknesses of the Nazi’s command structure: "wishfulness" and "yesmanship."

Wishfulness is that tendency among individuals and organizations to believe information that supports their own view of reality while simultaneously to reject all contradictory information. Yesmanship is the tendency of those with less positional power to agree with those who have greater power, mainly out of fear. Yesmanship is an enabling behavior for wishfulness. 

What can we do to ensure that wishfulness and yesmanship do not distort our business planning and decision- making? How can we encourage people to speak their truth?

• Be the change you want to see in your people. If you want the truth, you must speak the truth and be the truth. 
• Encourage debate and dialogue. Welcome ideas that conflict with your own assumptions. 
• Hire people who are likely to disagree with you on business issues. 
• Instead of arguing with dissenters, ask for explanations of their thinking. 
• Treat everyone according to a set of worthwhile values.
• Build a culture of trust by demonstrating trust.
• Show your commitment by demonstrating everything you believe in through your own behavior.
• Cherish your dissenters and critiques. 

How far would Bill’s ideas go in your organization in terms of encouraging new thinking that goes against the current? Are there other ways you could discourage the toxicity of conformity at work?

There are Problems and There are Paradoxes

Information is at our finger tips. We are able to communicate with anyone around the world instantaneously for free. We have specialists in every field who have spent years learning and mastering technical information. Yet on matters most critical for our success and areas where we know we must change (e.g.,the economy, healthcare, the environment), we often struggle to succeed. The same forces at play within society often exist in organizations, families, and even inside ourselves.

I asked Ralph Jacobson, author of the just published book, Getting Unstuck: Using Leadership Paradox to Execute with Confidence, to explain this widespread phenomenon and his understanding why this occurs and what can be done about it. Here is his complete response:

Problems have answers. Humans and organizations are often effective at solving them. But we face issues that are more complex. Many have no easy to implement solutions. They harder we try to fix some of these, the more futile it feels. In most organizations there are stories of, “We first had this same problem 15 years ago, nothing we have done has worked... guess this is just how it has to be.”

That’s an important clue that we are not dealing with a problem that can be solved. Instead, we have a paradox that has to be balanced. The last time most people encountered that word was in a college philosophy class. That’s unfortunate. The reality is that most of the issues that keep us up at night, keep companies from being successful, and societies from making progress is because they are better perceived and understood from the perspective of paradox. And, there are easy-to-use approaches and ways of seeing paradox that can reduce silos, create new pathways for success, help companies succeed, improve leadership, facilitate the implementation of change, and help people sleep better at night.

It is crucial to make the distinction between problems which can be solved and paradoxes that must be balanced. Once the effective solution has been applied to a problem, it ceases. But paradoxes must be balanced, they exist in perpetuity. Once we understand that paradoxes have two polarities that can be both right and wrong at the same time we have a new lens to view the issues that defied resolution. How do you find the critical paradoxes? Look for the tension -- "the heat." Look for issues that defy resolution. Look for things that have more than one good, usually opposing answer. Rather than running away from them or fix them, see them for what they are -- paradoxes.

What do you think of Ralph's ideas? What are some of the paradoxes that are important for your career and the success of your organization?

Process Problems -- Just Five Types?

I recently spoke with Kicab Castaneda-Mendez, who recently published a book titled What's Your Problem? Identifying and Solving the Five Types of Process Problems, about root cause analysis and his definitions of process problems. I asked him specifically: "How is reducing process problems to just five types a breakthrough in process improvement? What are the key benefits?" Here is his complete response:

Typically, root cause analysis is taught by explaining a variety of tools that requires users to gain considerable experience before being able to apply them correctly in the proper settings. To provide practice, tools are often taught without context which results in users not knowing when to apply them. A third common condition is when problem solving is taught as a sequence of expansions and contractions, specifically in finding root causes and solutions.

By reducing all process problems to just five types based on the cause, we eliminate the need to search for what the cause is. Since these specific causes can be addressed in time-proven ways, the search for solutions is also reduced. The result is that we can significantly simply process problem methodologies to a three-step procedure:

• Identify the type of problem,
• Find the root cause (where it occurs -- we know what it is), and
• Address the root cause.

We benefit in several key areas: vastly simplified teaching, learning, applying, and mentoring. Because virtually every adult has solved these types of problems using the proven techniques, we can easily create lessons that build on this knowledge without burdensome language. With training time reduced by as much 50% to 80%, students can go through multiple cycles of practice on the three-step procedure on all problem types versus at most one cycle of other methodologies on one problem.

Isn’t that what process improvement is all about: increasing quality while reducing costs and time?

What do you think Kicab's methodology? Do you think all process problems can be reduced to just five types?

Product Improvement -- Which Approach?

Jay Mandelbaum, along with three co-authors, published a book titled Value Engineering Synergies with Lean Six Sigma: Combining Methodologies for Enhanced Results, and I recently had the chance to ask him a few questions during a phone conversation. I wanted some more clarification on value engineering, but more specifically, I asked him: "Why is it important to use more than one approach to product improvement?" Here is Jay's response:

Different process and product improvement methods were developed under different circumstances -- each has its own unique strengths and weaknesses. Value Engineering (VE) is a practice that is distinguished from other techniques by three elements -- analysis of functions; a multidisciplinary team approach; and the step-by-step VE Job methodology.

VE works synergistically with all other continuous improvement initiatives. It makes any project better by using a unique approach to problem solving that includes the analysis of the functions of an item or a process to determine best value. More specifically, VE systematically determines all of the necessary functions of the item or process, identifies those functions that cost more than they are worth, and brainstorms alternative ways to perform those functions for further evaluation. This distinctive approach drives innovation because it encourages people to think about solutions in atypical ways.

An example recently came to my attention. The New York City FAIRTAX software integrates 40 major systems, 3,000 programs, and 1,400 job streams into seven subsystems, incorporating state-of-the-art technologies and an advanced development environment. The subsystems are: Taxpayer ID, Returns Processing, Property Management, Charge Processing, Accounts Receivable, Collections, and Case Tracking. The amount of information that needed to be input exceeded the capacity of all existing technologies. A Value Team analyzed the functions of the system architecture, software development, hardware, implementation plan, and staffing requirements. The study produced a change in the program to reduce the computer capacity requirements and a revised implementation and staffing plan which yielded monthly savings of $325,000.

What do you think of Jay's response? Do you have any experience using value engineering?

Problem Solving and the Lean Journey

Samuel Obara has published a great new book titled Toyota by Toyota: Reflections from the Inside Leaders on the Techniques That Revolutionized the Industry. This book comprises chapters written by former Toyota associates from locations around the world detailing their experiences learning, understanding, and leading Lean culture and methodologies.


Samuel was the main editor and composed a chapter on the problem-solving PDCA (plan-do-check-act) method. I recently asked him: "Why is problem solving so important along the Lean Journey?" Here is his response:


When introducing and implementing Lean techniques, one will certainly face many problems. For example, we cannot connect processes without hitting several problems; we cannot lower inventory levels without unveiling new problems; we cannot adjust to Takt time without encountering all sorts of problems.


With so many new problems being created so fast, solving them in an effective way becomes vital to solidify the success of each step in the Lean journey. Adopting early a methodology that has been proven effective can avoid the frustration of the constant hitting or missing. In today’s competitive environment, the winner is whoever misses the least.


One question that can start an effective discussion is: How well are we using the problem-solving methods that are widely available and have been proven effective? Sometimes the impression is that we overlook the connections between the facts and always end up with the solution we had preconceived way before we started.


Another question is: Why are we so afraid of problems? In many organizations people simply abolished the word problem. This forbidden word has now officially been replaced by opportunities. This attitude tells me people really have great fear of problems. As my colleague and mentor Darril Wilburn always says, "Opportunities are taken, problems must be solved.” He reminds me that problem solving is such a fundamental and intricate element of TPS/Lean that Toyota calls problem solving "the Toyota Business Practice." In reality, the common job description of all associates is problem solver.


Because a Lean journey implies that problems will always be created, we must ensure that we develop problem solvers that truly state the problem and understand the root causes. The better we are the less we fear.

How does problem solving function in your company? Does your company use a specific methodology?

What is Applied Concept Mapping?

Brian Moon of Perigean Technologies recently co-authored a book titled Applied Concept Mapping: Capturing, Analyzing, and Organizing Knowledge, and I asked him, quite simply, "What differentiates Applied Concept Mapping from other knowledge diagramming approaches?"

Brain gave me a clear and succinct answer, so I thought I'd post it here:

Applied concept mapping is the application of concept mapping to problem solving in the workplace. Concept mapping is a theoretically and scientifically grounded diagrammatic method of knowledge representation developed by Joseph D. Novak in the 1970s and originally intended for educational purposes. In the past couple of decades, concept mapping has been applied to a myriad of knowledge problems in the workplace, many of which are covered in our book.

While there are many approaches to “mapping intellectual landscapes," “idea mapping,” and “visual thinking,” applied concept mapping is distinct in many ways. Few if any, are grounded in as extensive a theoretical and scientific base as concept mapping. None require the level of specificity that is the hallmark of an effective concept map. Indeed, concept maps require not only the articulation of key concepts, but the specification of the nature of the relationship between them. This specification, as well as the semi-hierarchical shape of the map and the extensive use of ‘cross-links’ that emerge as otherwise disparate concepts are connected, distinguishes concept mapping from other approaches to knowledge diagramming.

When created in the CmapTools knowledge modeling software kit, concept maps can be put to a vast array of uses: knowledge elicitation, transfer, and management; lexicon and ontology development; modeling; training and organizational learning; product, software, cognitive systems, and organizational design and engineering; stakeholder engagement; analysis; and distributed planning. This flexibility in application is a major differentiator – innovations in application spring readily from the basic notion of representing key concepts and specifying their relationships.

Has any reader of this blog ever used concept maps as a problem-solving tool? Did they effectively help improve the process?