Improve: The Next Generation of Continuous Improvement for Knowledge Work

By George Ellis

Improve: The Next Generation of Continuous Improvement for Knowledge Work presents lean thinking for professionals, those who Peter Drucker called knowledge workers. It translates the brilliant insights from Toyota’s factory floor to the desktops of engineers, marketers, attorneys, accountants, doctors, managers, and all those who "think for a living." The Toyota Production System (TPS) was born a century ago to an almost unknown car maker who today is credited with starting the third wave of the Industrial Revolution. TPS principles, better known as lean thinking or continuous improvement, are simple: increase customer value, cut hidden waste, experiment to learn, and respect others. As simple as they are, they are difficult to apply to the professions, probably because of the misconception that knowledge work is wholly non-repetitive. But much of our everyday work does repeat, and in great volume: approvals, problem-solving, project management, hiring, and prioritization are places where huge waste hides. Eliminate waste and you delight customers and clients, increase financial performance, and grow professional job satisfaction, because less waste means more success and more time for expertise and creativity.

This book is a valuable resource for leaders of professional teams who want to improve productivity, quality, and engagement in their organizations.

• Experience the proven benefits of continuous improvement
• 40%–70% increase in productivity from professionals and experts
• >85% projects on-time
• Reduce lead time by 50%–90%
• Engagement up and voluntary severance cut >50%
• Dozens of simple visual tools that anyone can implement immediately in their existing framework
• All tools and techniques applicable to both face-to-face and virtual meetings
• Easy-to-understand approach: “simplify, engage, experiment
• Presented with deep respect for the experts; no “check the box thinking or overused analogies to the factory floor

• Language: English
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Release date: Jun 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9780128097205

George Ellis

George Ellis traveled extensively in Asia in the 1970s and 1980s, writing and translating texts on Yoga, Ayurveda, and Naturopathy. He is the author of The Breath of Life: Mastering the Techniques of Pranayama and Qi Gong. George Ellis and Zhuo Zhao met in Beijing in 1985 and married in 1988.

Book preview

lot!

Chapter 1

30% of what you think is wrong

Abstract

Continuous improvement or lean thinking was born in the 1940s in the Toyota Production System. It's often called lean manufacturing. When applied to professional and expert teams like engineering, medicine, business, and finance, it's called lean knowledge. Lean thinking is based on the premise that a large portion of our workday is spent creating waste, but we are so used to it that we don't see it. The mystery of lean knowledge is the simplicity of the remedies it recommends juxtaposed with the complexity of the work that professionals do. While there are many techniques and tools, they all reduce to a combination of: (1) simplify to cut the waste we see; (2) engage the full team; and (3) experiment continuously to find waste that's hiding in plain sight. It works. Those who adopt this mindset can double the output of their groups while raising the quality of work product and the engagement of the experts and professionals who carry out the work.

Keywords

Waste; Lean thinking; Knowledge work; Simplify; Engage; Experiment

Even a wise man probably is right seven times out of ten but must be wrong three times out of ten.

Taiichi Ohno, creator of the Toyota Production System [1]

1.1 A good story

Continuous improvement for knowledge work is my favorite topic. I’ve seen so many times its benefits: customers are delighted, organizational performance improves in virtually every measure, and the experts at the center of it all take deep satisfaction from mastering their craft and growing their leadership skills. I’ve watched teams transform from okay to amazing, following a pattern:

At the start, a team of good people trying to do the right thing is stumbling: they are often late, make too many mistakes, and frequently focus on the wrong things. This happens even though they are smart, experienced, and hardworking.

Their transformation begins as we search for hidden waste in their workflows. The brilliant insight of lean thinking is that waste is always there in abundant quantities, most of it hiding in plain sight. The core of what professionals and experts do—what we will call knowledge work—is complex, even mysterious, but most of the waste it creates is tedious and predictable.

Next, we install a few techniques carefully targeted at real problems. These techniques are a combination of: simplify to cut the waste we see, engage the full team, and experiment continuously to find waste that's hiding in plain sight. A new visualization method. A regular team standup meeting. An unambiguous call to action. A Single Point of Truth to give everyone the same information. Quantifying success and then laying out a path to it. Defining the problem thoroughly before starting to solve it. Always simplifying. Always engaging. Always experimenting.

A few months later, that team is outperforming its initial level by a margin so wide it's noticed by colleagues, the boss, a few customers, and probably some family members. People in the team smile more and walk taller. At first, many stood back waiting to see results before they bought in. Now almost all are convinced that they can improve, and they want to.

The story never gets old. The people who used to fail now succeed. They always had the ability to succeed. Of course they did. Just learning a profession like medicine, engineering, or finance takes years and only the most capable people qualify. The expertise, diligence, and acumen represented in the average team of knowledge staff take decades to develop. So, the best that can be hoped for within the first months of lean knowledge transformation is to release the capability that is already there. It does. I often hear, I always knew we could do this. Usually, no one can point to exactly what changed or when, but there's always a lot of we, such as We are helping each other now or We understand each other's problems because we talk to each other. And people will notice a new common purpose: We all want the same thing. And they want more opportunities to get better at what they do, to delight more customers, and to deliver better results to their organization.

Lean knowledge releases the capability that was there already.

Continuous improvement was born in the 1940s in the Toyota Production System. Its roots are on the manufacturing floor where it's often called lean manufacturing. When we apply it to what Peter Drucker called knowledge work—engineering, medicine, business, finance, and essentially any professionals working in teams—we'll call it lean knowledge.

It's surprising that the same thinking works on the factory floor and in the professional office. The mystery of lean knowledge is the simplicity of the remedies it recommends juxtaposed with the complexity of the domains where these people work. Knowledge staff such as doctors, engineers, coders, scientists, and lawyers are smart…really smart. Lean techniques aren’t designed to bring them new domain expertise. Lean thinking is based on the premise that it is rarely a lack of expertise that holds back these teams; it's almost always a preponderance of simple failures: failing to define goals clearly, failing to identify errors and resolve them, failing to solve problems at their root, or failing to communicate with colleagues or customers. Lean knowledge targets these sorts of failures.

1.1.1 Dangerous assumptions

Assumptions, as we will use the term here, are unvalidated conclusions that form a foundation for action. Our lives demand assumptions. I’m going to assume my car will start tomorrow morning. This assumption is not a deeply held conviction. I know there likely will be a morning when my car doesn't start. But tonight, I'm not taking any actions to validate (such as asking a mechanic to look at it) or creating any countermeasures (such as arranging for a friend to pick me up). I'll act as if my assumption is true and deal with the problem if it presents. I'll also assume that the road system will function well enough to get me to work. That my card key will open the building door. These and a hundred other assumptions are necessary just to start the workday.

We must make many assumptions just to function at home and at work. The problem is that some of those assumptions in the complex domains of knowledge work are going to be wrong—not dead wrong, but wrong enough to create a great deal of waste. Some of the most dangerous assumptions are among the most common:

•This is how we've always done it and it works fine.

•Someone I trust told me, so I don't need to see it myself.

•It seems logical, so it probably works.

•It's not working because other people are not trying hard enough.

So how often are our assumptions wrong? In the routine parts of life, it may be rare. I don't remember the last time my car didn't start. But assumptions about knowledge work are different. A small misunderstanding of a customer's need or a problem's root cause can render a large effort entirely wasteful. Quantifying how often our assumptions are wrong is difficult, so let's defer to Taiichi Ohno, the creator of the Toyota Production System and one of the first lean thinkers. The opening of this chapter quoted him as saying the wisest of us is right only 7 out of 10 times. Put simply, at least 30% of our assumptions are wrong.

1.1.2 The dilemma of lean knowledge

This is the dilemma of lean knowledge. You must make assumptions to function, but many of those assumptions will be wrong and you have no idea which ones. You understand most when you realize there's much you don't understand. The height of poor understanding is to think you understand everything. Or, as Ohno is often quoted, having no problems is the biggest problem of all. This dilemma never resolves. It never becomes intuitive to distrust your intuition. And this is why lean knowledge rests so heavily on experimentation. New ideas always require assumptions, some of which you won't even be aware you're making. No matter how smart or hardworking you are, a large portion of your assumptions are going to be wrong. The only way to find them is to experiment: measure the results and compare them to what you expected. This may seem like common sense, but it's an uncommon way to think. This is why a great deal of this book is spent addressing that dilemma with examples and experiences. There is also a healthy dose of references from those who went this way first: the pioneers who applied lean thinking to the manufacturing floor like Deming, Ohno, and Shingo. But more on that in Chapter 2.

1.2 What problem are we trying to solve?

One of the most important aspects of lean knowledge is effective problem solving. So, let's start our journey by defining the larger problem we are trying to solve using two techniques we'll cover in detail later: the canvas view from Chapter 8 and formal problem solving from Chapter 12. A problem statement that forms the premise of this book is shown in Fig. 1.1; it is a high-level view of this book. In later chapters, we will zoom into areas of interest again and again. But for now, Fig. 1.1 tells the story.

Fig. 1.1 The premise of this book written as a formal problem statement.

1.2.1 The need

The problem statement begins with the need, the purpose of taking up the problem at all. In this case, the need is inarguable. Knowledge organizations from product designers to business developers to IT groups to scientists address some of the most important issues their organizations encounter. An organization's health now and in the years to come depends on the solutions that knowledge staff create. New products. New acquisitions. New markets. New channels. Work product for critical clients. Problem solving. All require a great deal of work from some of the organization's smartest, most educated, hardest-working team members.

Organizations aren’t getting the performance they need from their teams [2].

1.2.2 The problem

The problem is that knowledge work frequently causes disappointment to the organization. Why? Normally, the people doing the work are competent and dedicated, but that doesn’t guarantee good results. Far from it. From running projects to hiring top talent to simply managing ordinary work, everyone with a few years of experience in a knowledge organization has stories about mediocre results peppered with the occasional spectacular failure.

More than 50% of all engineering projects fail to meet their goals [3].

1.2.3 The root cause

There are multiple root causes for why knowledge work fails to meet expectations. The hypothesis of this book is that a great many of those causes fall into the broad category of hidden waste. Hidden waste is, of course, exceedingly difficult to measure. After all, if you can measure it, it's not hidden. So, the quantification is an estimate, but experts in the field of lean transformation commonly peg the proportion of waste in our workday at about 85%. In other words, about 1 hour in 6 is spent on something that a customer really wanted. The rest is spent working on problems that customers care little about, creating solutions that don’t solve problems, passing on mistakes that will have to be corrected later, writing long and angry emails to colleagues, and so on and so on.

Most business processes are 90% Waste and 10% Value-added work.

Jeffrey Liker [4]

About 15 years ago, when I first heard that 85% of our effort generated waste, I thought, Not us…we’re better than that. Today, I’m convinced of it. Consider one definition of waste: the effort it took to do something of value minus the effort it would have taken had it been done perfectly. Occasionally, we do something almost perfectly—we catch every substantial mistake, we listen to everything the customer or client asked for, and our leadership coordinates every person to get something genuinely complex out the door on schedule. It happens that way sometimes, but more often we push and strain and get things done, wondering why it's so hard. That frustration comes from waste like mistakes, false starts, arguments, finding out you’ve been working on the wrong problem, weak solutions, and indecision. From that perspective, comparing the actual effort to the perfect effort, 85% can seem optimistic!

1.2.4 The solution

The obvious solution to this problem is to reduce hidden waste. The good news about waste being so large is that small increments of waste reduction deliver large opportunities to increase value. Consider this example: assume that waste in our knowledge organization is 85%; what if we could reduce that by just 5% in 1 year? That may seem a small gain: 80% or 85% waste both seem dismal. But let's look at what happens when we use that 5% to increase value. If we go from spending 15% of our day creating value to 20%, that's an increase of one part in three. That's enormous! Now, let's say we install a culture where every year we chip away a few percent of waste. In 3 or 5 years, a team can double the value it creates per year!

If we could convert all the waste to value-creating time, we would increase our development throughput by a factor of four…

Ward and Sobek [5]

I recall a telling conversation with one of my team members 2 or 3 years into knowledge work transformation. We had made a series of changes in how we planned and executed knowledge work, and his team was firing on all cylinders. We were delivering most of our projects on time with fewer errors and more innovation, something that had hardly seemed possible when we had started that journey. The team was obviously more engaged whether you measured it by our ability to meet product launch dates, improved quality in our work product, higher annual employee survey scores, or a lowered voluntary severance rate. Late one evening, we were wrapping up a project review and, for no particular reason, my team member said, I think we’re getting twice as much done today as we did with the same people a few years ago. I'm sure he was right. That was the moment in his journey where he saw we had cut so much waste that we had doubled our output.

1.2.5 The countermeasures

Kaizen and innovation are the two major strategies people use to create change. Where innovation demands shocking and radical reform, all kaizen asks is that you take small, comfortable steps toward improvement.

Robert Maurer. One Small Step Can Change Your Life [6]

The final part of the problem statement holds the countermeasures: the actions to take to implement the solutions. There are dozens of tools and techniques in this book that are countermeasures to waste. And there are many more than these. But, as large as the set of countermeasures is, they all reduce to a combination of simplify, engage, and experiment:

•Simplify

Make something complicated easier to understand or perform. We'll use five main categories:

○Simplify complicated workflows.

○Simplify repeated workflows.

○Simplify knowledge transfer.

○Simplify ambiguous signals; in other words, clarify calls to action.

○Simplify long task queues to reduce oversubscription and multitasking.

•Engage

Answer the four needs every knowledge staff member has:

○Inspire: I want to share the ideals and vision of my organization.

○Connect: I want to be part of a team that listens to and supports each other.

○Protect: I want to be confident our brand is respected.

○Challenge: I want to win within the rules.

Different people feel these four needs in different portions, but every team will have members who keenly feel each. So, as we develop techniques in this book, we will ask how we craft solutions that Inspire, Connect, Protect, and Challenge.

•Experiment

Systematic experimentation is the most difficult of the three countermeasures. To learn, we must first accept that we don’t know something; in fact, there are many things we don’t know, and worse, we aren't even sure which are the most important. This begins the search for the bottleneck—one thing that, when corrected, will make the most difference. The most complex aspect of continuous improvement is that there are many good things to do, but at any given moment only one or two will produce results large enough to measure. Improve something that cannot be measured, which is to say, something that isn’t noticeable for the organization, and the lesson those around you will learn is this stuff doesn’t work.

Since the strength of the chain is determined by the weakest link, then the first step to improve an organization must be to identify the weakest link.

Eliyahu Goldratt [7]

Experimental thinking starts by doubting what you think you know and then demands that when you try something, you create a reliable measurement for what you're working to improve. Then collect data to see if what you did produced the results you expected. It often won't the first time, so don't be surprised if you need a few iterations to get it