Of course, “lean manufacturing,” or lean anything (as in, avoiding/eliminating waste)  is still a useful approach for certain situations, assuming it is implemented in a smart way. That is true with everything. The odd thing is that the “lessons learned” are the same every time no matter which trend you are dissecting.

• You need employee involvement/engagement
• You also need for leadership support and ownership
• Always tailor the <insert technique or method name here> to your situation — don’t use a cookie-cutter approach
• Don’t expect the new thing to solve all your problems while requiring no work or discipline to implement it.

This is all common sense though. Why do we not learn it?  I am pretty sure that if I went on the speaker’s circuit with the above message, I would gain exactly zero traction…why not? (I once had an article for publication rejected because the reviewer thought that “everyone knows this already. We don’t necessarily do though…you are right about that.” I don’t know what to say about that. It may be that as simple as “common sense and thinking are hard to do…so we want a magic bullet…even if we know there is no such thing, do you have one”?

Or is it just different people learning these same lessons every time? Do we just not know how to pass on this kind of wisdom? Does everyone get promoted during the initial hysteria and the next crop of people repeat the same process because they saw that it worked for the previous person in their role?

On the other hand, maybe we need a new thing every now and then to get excited about and recharge our organizations. Once it is implemented and the benefits are gained, maybe it is reasonable at that point to start looking around for the next thing. The article on lean (mentioned above) indicated that many organizations did have initial gains but then plateaued.

I think one aspect is that people often want to make a career out of a specific technique. Whether that is Six Sigma, Lean, or something else, this allows you to differentiate yourself in the market (whether inside or outside a company). It provides opportunity for visibility and advancement. So if you are a line manager and you get efficient with your process you get some recognition/reward. If you have a swat team that comes in and “fixes” lots of peoples’ processes, you get even more recognition/rewards. But then the “thing” has become the primary focus, rather than the business.

Oh well, it seems unlikely that any of our services are at risk of becoming a fad in the near future (but if one did, I’d be OK with that). In fact, our entire approach is based on the assumption that we need to understand client/business needs first, then figure out how best to improve things, and then design and implement a solution. It’s a lot like that unpopular common sense approach described above. Wait…maybe that could become the next new thing after all. If I could just come up with a catchy name for it…

The strangest thing was that, once the monkey learned how to do this, he would no longer use his hand to move the cursor. Even when they disconnected the electrodes, he still sat there  trying to move it with his mind (presumably, based on brain scans). (If you want to see for yourself, start reading on page 195  of this book.)

As a performance consultant, there were some things of specific interest to me. One was that the monkey seemed to have an innate sense of efficiency. When he had a way to do something with less effort, he refused to go back to a way to achieve the same thing with more effort. (It did hurt his productivity though.)

People do that. Once you know you can do something on a computer, people resist writing things out by hand. Think about how so many of us have shifted our bill paying or shopping from a manual process to a computer process. If you do that enough, the thought of actually getting in your car and driving to the store is something we try “actively” to avoid. And, in business, there is a real push right now to shift more and more of the work from an operation that happens in the physical world to an operation requiring a set of decisions entered into a computer.

• Part drawings are entered in a computer and just downloaded to the machine for fabrication
• The process of invoicing and collecting is often not much more than a structured email
• Companies prefer to throw information out over the web or through elearning rather than assembling people for meetings and training

In a way, this seems like an extension of the way documentation sort of replaces actual work. We had a project once to analyze the capabilities and design performance tests for a number of roles in a manufacturing organization.  There was a role called “Quality Assurance Rep” whose responsibility was to approve manufactured lots of product for shipment. You might think that they checked samples, walked around the production area, etc. but you would be wrong. (There is a Quality Control Rep that does that.)

The QA Rep basically verifies that the documentation is good. They do look at the test results and verify that all the tests were done and that the results showed the products to be within spec. They checked the manufacturing information and verified that key temperatures were logged and that they were within spec. They confirmed every production task was initialed by an operator and that the operator was qualified (that is, that his or her training was up-to-date…they checked that on the computer). But they really don’t know if that lot is good or not. They only know if all the boxes were checked and that everyone wrote down what they were expected to. I am not saying this is wrong but it certainly seems almost like a lot of effort just to make sure the record or evidence of performance is acceptable.

The question here is “where is work headed?” There are still plenty of people who physically do work. Doctors talk to and check out patients. Mechanics fix cars. Carpenters build buildings. But lots of the wealth today is generated by people working with information which draws more people away from actual tangible outputs. Will we get to the point where we expect to just sit at our desk, type, and click?

We like to challenge that tendency when we can. For our projects, we frequently go into the workplace and observe the performance. (On one project, we were at the clients pharmaceutical plant by 5am to observe set up and shift kick-off. When we finished work at 3pm it was mighty strange to go back to the hotel ready for dinner…) But often getting physically active, even if it is just going into a meeting room and writing on some flipcharts or sorting Post-Its(r) or index card really improves the energy level and ideas. And there is that nagging bigger question…if all we do is manipulate pixels all day and, in return, someone sends us a representation of money…is that really creating a more fulfilling work environment or only just a way to expend less energy?