A Job Done Well - Making Work Better

Why Continuous Improvement Programmes Fail

• Jimmy Barber, James Lawther and Hugh Alley • Season 1 • Episode 29

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Episode 29: Insights from Hugh Alley

If you have worked in a large organisation, you will have seen continuous improvement initiatives come and go with alarming regularity. Everybody knows continuous improvement is a good idea, yet few organizations can pull it off.

This week, we talked with Hugh Alley about why these initiatives fail and what organisations need to do differently to see them succeed. James tells his worst joke (to date), and we discover why most managers cause continuous improvement initiatives to fail.

To find out more:

 Web Sites:

 Mike Rother’s Kata Website - Free resources and background to help you get started.

Kata School UK – LinkedIn – Gemma Jones and Ann Hill. Interesting research and excellent practice in the UK and worldwide. 

 Kata School Cascadia - The most active kata school in the world right now, based in the Pacific Northwest of North America.

 Books:

 Bringing Scientific Thinking to Life – Sylvain Landry – an excellent introduction to the thinking process of Toyota Kata and why it is useful - Start here.

The Toyota Kata Practice Guide – Mike Rother – the definitive “how to” guide is the essential reference on the process of doing Toyota Kata

Giving Wings to Her Team – Tilo Schwarz and Jeff Liker – a novel describing how one young manager learns to do Toyota Kata and saves her plant from being closed. It’s a long book but an engaging read, so worth it.

Toyota Kata Memory Jogger – Jean-Marc Legentil, Marc-Olivier Legentil, Tilo Schwarz – this practical pocket guide breaks down all the steps in great detail. 

Toyota Kata Culture – Mike Rother, Gerd Aulinger – a great guide to how the Toyota Kata can be used up and down an organization, showing how corporate strategy can be driven down to the production floor while still leaving lots of room for creative problem-solving and difficult challenges

And, of course, you can always contact us at jimmy@ajobdonewell.com and james@ajobdonewell.com 

 



James:

hello, I'm James.

Jimmy:

Hi, I'm Jimmy.

James:

Welcome to A Job Done Well,

Jimmy:

the podcast about the world of work and how to improve the daily grind

James:

Good morning and welcome to the second of our episodes on things on wisdom that told me earlier. If you remember a couple of weeks ago, we had Hugh Ali on the show and he's going to come and talk to us about how to improve our business.

Jimmy:

And after the first episode, which was excellent. With some really simple, straightforward things that no one told me until I was in my mid fifties. Thank you, Hugh, for telling me. But now really looking forward to hearing the the second part of things I wish somebody had told me.

James:

Yeah, I appreciate you bringing that back, Hugh. I used to work for Jimmy, so I wish you'd told him 30 years ago as well.

Jimmy:

For those who didn't have the pleasure, and I recommend you go back and listen to the episode. Again, Hugh, can you just do a very quick intro of yourself again?

Hugh:

Sure. Thanks, Jimmy. So I'm an industrial engineer by training and have grown up mostly in manufacturing.

James:

It's a lot of seeing you. It's okay. I started there as well.

Hugh:

It's actually a wonderful place. People enjoy making stuff. So early in my career, I wound up working in a really toxic workplace. I couldn't believe that people could treat each other as badly as they did. And some years later reflecting on it, I realized that it was. really because the managers, the frontline leaders in that organization didn't have the skills they needed to do their work. Some years later, I was invited to become a supervisor. And it turns out, That I wasn't a very good one. And bad enough that the people that worked for me didn't really want to tell me how bad it was. And so

Jimmy:

I don't have that problem with you. The people who worked for me, I'm very happy to tell me how bad I was. I have one thing to my left who still tells me to this day.

Hugh:

I can't make any comment about that.

James:

We have a very open relationship.

Hugh:

So so some years later, having learned a little bit, I was invited by a friend to come and be operations manager for his company. And what I noticed was that my supervisors and my team leads, Didn't have the skills they needed. And at that point, I got introduced to a program called training within industry which We talked about it last episode, a program designed to help people become better frontline leaders. And it really did change my world and it changed the performance of the team. So since then I've trained over 1000 supervisors of core skills of the role, and I've written two books from what I've learned, and I now divide my time between training frontline leaders and supervisors and coaching senior operations people on continuous improvement.

Jimmy:

And what was a real lightbulb moment for me, Hugh, in the conversations we've had is that you talk about supervisors and your, your background is, is in manufacturing, but actually, this is applicable to anyone who has to manage work and manage people, regardless of what type of organization you're in, the same things hold true. When you talk about supervisors, we might talk about, managers at any level have to do this. These are things, that we're talking about last week and this week that, that we're just not trained in. Hence the title, things I wish I'd known 40 years ago.

James:

So what are we going to talk about today then Hugh?

Hugh:

Well, last week we talked about developing frontline leaders. Why don't we talk about continuous improvement this week? Yeah.

James:

Well, we did. We talked about that. We touched on that in the whole idea of

Jimmy:

job method.

Hugh:

Yes, we did.

James:

So how's this different?

Hugh:

So the job methods model is kind of a, An episodic thing, that tends to be more of a one off kind of thing. Question is, how do you turn it into something that happens daily?

James:

Bad gag there. So job methods is continuous improvement by jerks, then?

Hugh:

Yes, you could say that.

James:

Nailed myself. Do you like that? That's very clever. Let's move on. Yeah. Sorry. Well, I think it's a very valid point, actually. Continuous improvement is continuous improvement. It's not something you do once, is it?

Hugh:

That's right. And, and you've probably lived through it where, you know, somebody has said, here's a problem we need to solve. And they spend months and months with some grand plan, developing all sorts of wonderful things. That's sort of all singing, all dancing. And they, try to implement it and it falls flat. That's because you're sort of betting the farm if you will. What we want to say is no, let's not do it that way. Let's let's find ways that we can do Really rapid small experiments try something That we can test in in 20 minutes And learn something and then go on to the next step.

James:

Yeah. Because improvement is all about learning.

Hugh:

Absolutely. this is an improvement approach that has a label and it's described as Toyota Kata. Right. Now you won't find this at Toyota. But it was developed by a fellow at University of Michigan, by the name of Mike Rother, who had two questions. His first question was, what is it about the way Toyota teaches its managers that we have missed? Because, as you've alluded to in in your previous episodes, the efforts at lean manufacturing and lean thinking have produced only indifferent results. So, Toyota uses these tools, but they keep producing stunning outcomes.

James:

You see that all the time, organizations roll something out and they roll out new methods of doing things and it's a bit like we've done lean or we've done six sigma or we've done business process, man, whatever the hell it might be. And it's a bit marginal at best, but it's kind of missing the point. It's really about the thinking behind it.

Hugh:

It's exactly about the thinking. So the question, the research question was, how does Toyota help people learn that thinking model? And then the second question was. Having identified the pattern that they use, what could we devise as a way for someone outside Toyota to learn that same mindset? That thing. Yeah. And so that's where the, the label Toyota comes from.

James:

or the cart a bit. What's the cart a bit?

Hugh:

If you or your listeners have ever done martial arts, You'll be familiar with the term kata as a pattern or a model or a standard. It's the repeated motions that you learn that create the muscle memory so that when you're actually sparring, you can just pull in that motion at will. So it's a practice routine and it turns out that that term in Japanese is not limited to martial arts, it can be applied to any skill or art form. And so we're looking at a routine or a practice for your thinking. Right, but

James:

it's not just a routine you have to practice. Follow blindly my understanding. So it's a bit like, it's a bit like when you're, this is dreadful. I remember in the eighties having the old dance steps out on the mats. Yeah. You used to practice your dance steps. Nobody expected you to do that. It was just, that was getting into the rhythm of it effectively.

Hugh:

Exactly. And so practitioners of Toyotokata, We'll say, look, if you're not doing Toyota, Kata according to the pattern in three months, that's a problem. But if you are still doing Toyota Kata, according to the pattern in three years, that's a problem. So you, it's like mastering any new skill. You need to practice it. using the model for until you really have it well embedded and then you can start improvising. You know, you think about a jazz player, they need to do scales. You can't get away from doing scales. You need to be able to play and read music and understand cording and all that stuff.

James:

It's a great example, Hugh, because we like jazz on this podcast,

Jimmy:

Torture, torture. 25 episodes in, Hugh, and we're still using the same crap jazz music that James chose because he knows it winds me up.. Poke the bear there.

James:

Yeah. Talk to me. So what are the steps then? So what do I need to be thinking about?

Hugh:

So there are two elements. There's the improvement cycle. Yeah, and there's a coaching cycle and they play together. So the improvement cycle sounds on its surface, very simple. Grasp, understand the direction or challenge. Two is grasp the current condition. Three is establish your next target condition. And step four is experiment toward the target condition.

James:

When you say condition, what do you mean by condition?

Hugh:

So have you had, ever had anybody set a target for you? You did have an episode about targets.

Jimmy:

Always.

James:

We've had plenty of targets in our time. Yeah.

Hugh:

Yes. And so typically what happens Is the manager comes along and says, right, James, I need you to get the call time down by 45 seconds, and they tell you nothing about how you're going to do it.

James:

Yeah.

Hugh:

Right. It's just a number. A target condition is a hypothesis. It says we think that If we give people a button on their desk that they can bang when they're annoyed, it will let them shorten their calls by four seconds. May or may not work. We don't know. That's our hypothesis. And so the target condition is, well, here's, here's an example. I did worked with a quarry on this. And their hypothesis was that If we bring a one truck of large rocks down from the quarry every week, we'll be able to shorten the lead time for our custom cuts by three weeks.

James:

Right.

Hugh:

So it's a condition. It's two parts. It's how you're going to operate that's different, and it's what the result is that you'll get.

James:

So the first question is

Hugh:

is Is understand the the challenge or direction And typically this will be driven by what the company sees in the market, you know

James:

It would be how can we reduce the time it takes us to Send out custom cuts of rock.

Hugh:

Yeah, in order to play in the market, it needs to be at four weeks. It's described as the challenge and then you say, okay, so step two, what's the current condition? What do we know about how things are running now? We'll want to track performance. We may want to track some process metrics, some of the underlying things.

James:

Okay. It's understanding what the drivers are of current performance.

Hugh:

And then once you have enough of a grasp of that, then you, then you start to have a grasp of what are the levers you can pull

James:

so it's a manufacturing example, I used to make sweets for a living and we had a problem, which was we were losing raw materials. Yeah. But actually when you step back and looked at it, well, you're either dumping them down the drain. Or you were sending out sweets, which were too heavy, or it was going up the stack or it was going in a skip. There are only about four or five places it could be going.

Jimmy:

It's understanding those drive. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yes.

Hugh:

So, so you may say, gee, our target condition is we've learned that our that our sweets are all are running five grams overweight. Everyone. Well, that's a lot, a lot, that's a lot of loss. It is a lot of loss. Yeah. Right. So, okay. Our target condition may be to say we, not only do we lose an average of five grams, but we notice that sometimes it's zero and sometimes it's 15. Yeah. So maybe our target condition is just, we want to get it absolutely consistent at four grams. Okay. Cause once it's consistent, then we can move it. So you, the target condition might not be all of what you want to get. Because, you know, it's thinking if, if you've ever thought about running a marathon, you know, you don't start by saying, well, gee, I think I'll run a marathon tomorrow. You know, my, my first step is I'd like to be able to walk a block.

Jimmy:

Break the, break it down to management pieces. Yeah. let's just hold that thought for a second. back to that after we have a word from our sponsors.

James:

We cover a whole host of topics on this

Jimmy:

Purpose to corporate jargon.

James:

but always focused on one thing, getting the job done well.

Jimmy:

Easier said than done. So, If you've got Unhappy customers or employees Bosses or regulators Breathing down your neck

James:

of control and your costs are spiraling and that big IT transformation project that you've been promised just keeps failing to deliver. So

Jimmy:

Can help if you need to improve your performance, your team's performance, or your organization's. Get in touch at jimmy at jobdonewell. com

James:

Or james at jobdonewell. com.

Hugh:

so a good example of that would be if you want to run a marathon, that might be your challenge. You know, I want to run the Vancouver Marathon next May. But you're not going to start by running a marathon tomorrow. The first thing you're going to do is say, okay, where am I now? Well, I can comfortably walk for an hour. Okay. So that's my current condition. And, but I need to take Three rests in the course of that hour. So now I have an understanding of what I can't get what what is now and I say, Okay, what's my next target condition? Well, I'd like to maybe be able to run for 20 minutes. And I'd like to run 20 minutes at an 8 minute per kilometer pace.

Jimmy:

It's driving improvement towards an end state. But doing it in stages. And presumably the stages therefore are more manageable than just trying to say, Right, day one, I want to achieve a marathon. The marathon is the direction of travel. Thank you. The challenge for today is to walk a block, run a block. Yeah.

James:

And by doing that, you don't scare the bejesus out of everybody because it's about what's, what's possible and how we could make that happen.

Hugh:

And it becomes something you can experiment on. You can say, well, gee, I've no, I, I wonder if the fact that I'm only getting three hours of sleep a night is affecting my running time. Okay. Let me, let me. Increase my sleep to five hours a night and see if that changes my running time

James:

And likewise, but then it's about stepping back I suppose and understanding what all the drivers of that are because it's not just your sleep It's what you're eating how many cigarettes you smoke or whatever. It might be.

Hugh:

And you may not understand them all to start You can still get started just with what you know, and the things that you don't know will show up as obstacles somewhere along the way.

James:

And then the question then becomes, what are the obstacles, what's getting in my way?

Hugh:

And then once you reach your target condition, you go back to the start and say, okay, is the challenge still relevant? You know, maybe the world has changed, and I've decided that I don't want to do a marathon, I want to do an ultramarathon. Your challenge might be modified somewhere along the way.

Jimmy:

Yeah, it just allows for the fact that over time, sometimes context changes and therefore end goal changes, it's just always sensible to be checking back that you're still aiming for the same thing. Otherwise you can spend. your year learning how to run the marathon and actually turn up and you're actually in an ultramarathon, it's not going to be terrible.

James:

I understand the questions and I can absolutely see how they drive you through that process. You're breaking it down into steps, what's in the way, what we're going to fix, da da da, and it just reinforces that process, yeah? Yep.

Hugh:

So we've got the improvement is Four steps. understand the direction for the challenge, understand, grasp the current condition, the target condition, and experiment toward the target condition. That's the four steps of the improvement to Cata. and what the coach does is, On a daily basis, they meet with the person who's improving and asks so a reminder, what are we trying to achieve? What is that challenge?

James:

Yeah.

Hugh:

And then, okay, what's the target condition you're actually after today? Okay.

James:

Yeah.

Hugh:

And there's a subset of questions in there about what did we learn in the last cycle? Then what's the actual condition now? Because it changed from yesterday. We learned something. And then you say, what are the obstacles and which one are you working on? One, not multiple. Because you want, this is, this is all about a scientific mindset. Got it. Where you're only changing one variable at a time, and then you ask, what's the next step and what are you expecting to see or learn? And the last question is, how soon can we see what we've learned? And the how soon is because we want this cycle to go very fast. Sometimes, You can do more than one cycle in a day or maybe it's just tomorrow.

Jimmy:

So just one for me. So if I am a manager of a team or a unit, And, and so I've got to get my head around the improvement cut up, but who's, who's the coach? Am I the coach to my team? Is somebody coaching me? How does that kind of work?

Hugh:

Ideally, what will happen is that, and this is what happens is each person's boss is their coach. Their, their direct supervisor is the person who's responsible for developing their ability to think. And so,

James:

But there's the rub, right? Because In most of the organization, not all, but most of the organizations that I've worked in, the boss sees his job as to dole out a target and on you go, pal.

Jimmy:

Not to teach. We don't see managers or leaders as teachers. So, therefore, you're kind of, yes, they might set the target condition, in essence. But they won't help you achieve your target condition.

James:

Well, yeah, but the way they set the target condition, because the target condition is the first step. What they'll do is they'll set the direction of travel. You know, we want to run the marathon. Yeah, but yes, that's what I mean.

Jimmy:

They'll effectively give you that end, but they won't help teach you how you get there.

James:

In any way, shape or form.

Jimmy:

So I think this is an interesting point, which is in order to achieve the improvements that you're talking about, you have to have a plan. Leaders have to change their mindset from being, I just set the target I walk off to, you know, we agree the target and then we talk about the, way of doing it and how you do it and I'm there to support you and challenge you through that process. Yeah. On a long term basis. And that's how you achieve continuous improvement. And I think that's a, an interesting switch in mindset for people.

James:

Yeah. Cause it culturally, it's totally, it was totally different because it's almost like here's the, here's the target. You're going to hit the target or you're going to fail on your go

Jimmy:

I'll see you when I do your year end.

James:

Yeah. I suppose.

Hugh:

Yes.

James:

Yeah. We're going to help you work your way through this, and we might hit it or we might not hit it, but we've got a process and a way of thinking about it, which will take us in the right general direction.

Hugh:

And you know, back to our, the last episode where I talked about the two responsibilities of anybody who's in a leading role, it's achieve the mission of the organization and look after your people. And part of looking after your people is developing them back to that job relations thing about make best use of people's abilities. We want to build those thinking skills.

James:

Okay, so I get that now. So I haven't quite twigged that. That's really quite powerful. But it is, to your point, it's really about changing the way in which you approach it. It's not about here's the method, we are going to do Six Sigma. It really is about changing the way you think about the problem.

Hugh:

And if Six Sigma is a tool you need, then fine, use Six Sigma. If all you need is a tick sheet, Then that's fine too.

Jimmy:

I think it's a hugely interesting subject your average manager says, I want you to run a marathon. See you in a year when the marathon kicks off. Whereas what this is saying is. Let's agree. You're going to run a marathon in a year, but the first step we're going to take, we are to establish your, your aren't really unfit. So therefore the first step we're going to work on together is how do we build your fitness?

Hugh:

only thing that I will sort of caution there is that it's not that your boss tells you Okay. They are helping you think it through it's up to you, what's the next step you need to achieve.

Jimmy:

Yeah, but the difference is your, your boss is your coach to help you figure out what's the next step. So you and I have agreed the end target that you really want that I really want for you that that will be great for the organization is to run a marathon. Then your boss is your coach to figure out, well, how do you break that down? How do you test some things out? How do you improve? How do you learn so that eventually, we go on that journey together, but as your boss, I'm there to help you. With that journey as opposed to we agree the journey in and destination walk away. See you in a year's time. It's different. It's a different approach.

James:

Well, it's boss as coach. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not even boss's leader. He's boss's coach, isn't it? It's yeah.

Jimmy:

And again, a little bit like managing work, coaching is something that, anyone who leads people, it should be a fundamentally important part of their job. Actually, to my point, and I'm falling back into my my natural state of coaching is to instruct, whereas actually what you're talking about is, how do you support somebody in their thinking, so they figure out genuine coaching, as opposed to just directing people.

Hugh:

Yeah, and it's totally fair for the boss to assign the challenge, right? Because it's probably something being driven by the market. So it's not that the boss is just being capricious. The boss is responding to the fact that

Jimmy:

one of the, one of the things that we argue a little bit in the Hughes is you're right. There is an external factor that is driving. And in a required improvement or a target it's how do you get that person or into that end target

James:

Yeah, there's a, there's a lovely old, sorry, Deming quote, which is a goal without method is cruel. Yes. Yeah. What you've got is you've got the goal and you've got the methods.

Hugh:

Yes, exactly.

James:

But you do need to think differently about it. So in the interest of not chatting on forever, if I wanted to learn more, Where would the best places for me be to go looking?

Hugh:

The absolute best place to start is the website that Mike Rother runs. And so the link will be in the show notes. There is also Akata School UK. So it's run by two amazing women, Gemma Jones and Anne Hill. And they run regular programs on that, that help you get started how to school Cascadia, which is Cascadia is my part of the world is a really good website with resources on it, which I would encourage people to have a look at. And there are five sort of key books in the subject. Again, You'll have that in your show

James:

notes to make sure people got access to them. Super. Giving me something to think about. Yeah.

Jimmy:

Well, thank you very much, Hugh, You've been very generous with your time. And you shared some fantastic insights with our audience that, I know they'll really enjoy, but also in terms of our our overall mission of improving performance and engagement at work, there's some really fundamental things in there that are amazingly useful.

James:

So thank you for both your time and your insights. You very much.

Hugh:

It's been a wonderful pleasure.

James:

Wonderful pleasure. Well, I've gone that far. Anyway, thanks very much.

Hugh:

Perfect. Very good. Thank you very much. Thank you. Really interesting. Thanks. Take care. Bye.

Jimmy:

If you'd like to find out more about how James and I can help your business, then have a look at our website at ajobdonewell.Com.

People on this episode

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James Lawther

Co-host
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Jimmy Barber

Co-host
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Hugh Alley

Guest