’5 Why”s is a lean tool that is taught by lean practicioners as a key tool in problem solving. The crux of this skill is too keep asking ’why’ about something until you get to a potential root cause. Most of us learn this long before we are introduced to lean enterpise. Its the game we played with our parents (and dove them nuts) as we explored the world as young children. Little did we know, we were practicing a skill that would be very useful to us in the business world. At the risk of being obvious, the delivery should be a bit more mature as we get older.
How this works, is that each time you ask ‘why’ you peel back a layer and eventually you get to a fact that will lead you to a solution. One of my favorite applications of this is in vetting suppliers or to prepare for negotiations. In both of these situations, the truth may be hiding behind veils of spin and smoke. The success of any negotiation is driven mainly by how well you prepare for it. Knowledge is power and what you don’t know will hurt you.
The higher the stakes the less you can take at face value and the harder you need to work to get to the truth. Ask the same question over and over again, phrased differently and to different people over time and you’ll get to the truth. If there is any deception or ‘spin’, the more people you ask, the more likely you’ll catch one or more that is off their guard. Talking to those not direclty involved in planning the negotiations can be particularly revealing. Take this to another level by assigning someone on your team to do the same thing.
No, this is not a post on ‘Texas Hold ‘em’ as I have yet to be bitten by the Poker bug. The intellectual exercise is intriguing to me. Sitting in one place for extended periods is not. This post is about an important lesson to never take anything for granted and speak what is on your mind – especially where people are involved.
I was a supervisor in an engineering department at a Fortune 100 company. My boss told me that two engineering sections would soon be folded into one group and it would be reporting to me. It made sense. I already had one of the two groups and both groups did very similar work. The other supervisors and managers in the department were very good about sharing their experiences with the people in my new section and helped me prepare for what I was about to take on.
One very interesting case was ‘Bill’. I was told by more than one of my peers that ‘Bill’ was a constant problem. He didn’t perform as well as the others in his group and managing him would be a challenge for me. Prior to the switch taking effect, I reviewed each person’s file and what I found in Bill’s was astounding. He was definitely lagging behind the rest of the group, but he also had a list of patents as long as my arm. The issue was not his technical skills. There was an almost two year period where he had a lot of absenses and an extended leave for medical reasons. This leave was coincident with the end of the patent list. I asked HR about it an was told he had some health issues, but without discussing the exact nature of his illness, he was now ‘well’ and had a very clean bill of health.
Our one on one finally came. He reviewed what he’d been doing. I went over my expectations, but intially avoided any mention of his relative performance gap. I tried practicing how I would bring it up, but I didn’t like any of my approaches. I wound up putting my quandry to him directly in the form of a question. What was preventing someone of his strong technical background from keeping up, if not passing, his peers in terms of the amount and quality of work being done.
I was sure he was going to get defensive. He looked at me puzzled for a minute and said. “Wow…..No one’s said that to me before”. He was actually very appreciative that I had been honest with him, He said he do what ever needed to keep up with the group. You know what? He did just that starting the very next day and it continued up to and beyond my leaving the group. From that day on, he was a star employee.
How could this happen? There were years of performance reviews without any mention of an issue, but you could see between the lines by comparing what he was getting done to the others in his group. I can’t be sure, but what I think happened, is that no one pushed him after his medical leave. I was too embarrassed for my peers who were his previous supervisors to make an issue of it. He was also much older than his peers (and I) and another issue was fear of what he’d do or say if someone challenged him kept them from facing the brutal facts.
I took away a couple of things from this that I have not forgotten. I had at least one or two peer supervisors who needed to up their game in handling performance appraisals. Always be up front and honest with people in performance appraisals good or bad. Challenge your assumptions about what was or was not done in the past – or how well it was done.
Anyone who has been in business for any length of time has been wrong at least once in their career. Learning from our mistakes is how we grow, right? One of my personal growth opportunities was a senior manager in strategic procurement for a Fortune 100 company. Outside consultants had sold management on their leading us in an accelerated commodity strategy process combined with a ‘free markets’-style Internet auction.
I wasn’t happy about it and I wasn’t alone. I’m a “do-it-myself” kind of guy and I don’t need other people taking care of my business. We had a lot of good people. We knew our commodities. We were taking cost out at a competitive rate based on the commodities, but I couldn’t argue that our business was in trouble from a profitability standpoint and needed help. No one was getting a vote on this and it was up to all of us to get on board and move forward.
To make a long story short, it was a very successful undertaking. We saved more money and we found more new suppliers than we would have doing business the same old way. The outside consulting group helped us in a lot of ways. They added people to the mix that allowed us to do things faster than we could have on our own. Yes, those outside people needed to be brought up to speed, but that could be said about anyone we would have put into a special task force initiative like this. The consultants value add was process knowledge. They had been through this drill before. On different commodities and in a different line of businesses, but it was successful all the same because the process really doesn’t change all that much. We knew the process, but had run it less aggressively and at a more relaxed pace with team leaders and members that were taking time out from the day to day tactical side to drive this strategic initiative. We learned how to do it better and faster than we had before.
One very important factor in my mind, was that by bringing in someone from the outside with strong top management support and visibility, it sent a very strong signal inside and outside the company that the game was being changed and pushed people outside of their comfort zones. Current suppliers responded more competitively than they had in the past. The aggressively competitive bids of outside suppliers could not be ignored and forced us to add suppliers we may not have considered as strongly in the ‘business-as-usual’ process. The next time your business needs a strategic kick start, don’t be shy to engage outside talent. I know I won’t.
I joined a discussion a couple weeks ago and generated a bit of a firestorm. Someone posted a question about how forecasting helps you become lean. It’s one of my hot buttons, so I couldn’t help myself. The best characterization I’ve heard for forecasting is that it’s either ‘lucky’ or ‘lousy’. I don’t remember where I first heard it, so I must apologize for not being able to properly throw credit for this gem. In all the lean training and literature I’ve been through, I can’t recollect a mention of ‘Forecasting’ being on the critical yet never ending path to ‘The Goal’.
Forecasting is nothing more than an educated guess. Until the day that lead-times all go to zero and the supply chain response is infinite, forecasting is a necessary evil. Obviously, the more resources that have to be committed prior to receiving an offsetting commitment from a customer, the higher the exposure and forecasting becomes increasingly important. As lead times decline and responsiveness increases, the forecast becomes less important, but the necessity for it will never completely go away.
The goal should be to be able to effectively satisfy customer demands despite greater and greater deviations between foretasted and actual demand levels. The only way to do this is to reduce the lead time between customer ‘stimulus’ (pull) to supply chain ‘response’. The companies that are on the real road to lean understand this and the ones are trying to take the back alley short cuts do not.
Are you taking lead-time as a given? Do your suppliers embrace lean and tools like SMED, small lot production etc? Are you buying mostly on price and not total cost? Are you buying in volume and taking the discounts when smaller quantities may be better for both you and the supplier – so they can serve you and their other customers? I’ve seen all too often when a volume discount was based more on the incentives for the salesman than on the physics and logistics of the transformation.
If I can draw a correlation between the discussion activity centered on forecasting vs. lead-time reduction, collectively we’re not spending enough on the latter. Effort spent on forecasting today must be re-spent on it tomorrow. A lead-time reduction improves your ability to serve the customer for time eternal moving forward. Spending a bit more time here will pay huge dividends down the road.
I must say it’s taken me some time to finally get here. For those of you contemplating their own blog, I must say it is much easier than I made it out to be. GoDaddy made it very easy and very inexpesive. Most of my time was spent fretting about what I wanted to write about, what the domain name should be, on and on. I finally just decided to get ‘myname.com’ and just get going. If we always strive for perfection, what we have at any given moment is most often much more than others expect.
