Podcast #212 – David Mann on Creating a Lean Culture for Manufacturing, Healthcare, and Beyond

Dr. Mann’s original thesis was the best way to change behaviors is to change the way we act. From the interview and listening between the lines, I think Dr. Mann no longer believes that and neither do I. Put in huddles, idea boards, visual controls, multi-level follow-up and leaders and staff will adopt a lean mentality. My own data point also says that this isn’t true or only true to a limited degree. Put in these lean tools or systems and five years later many leaders, including executives, are no more effective (dumber) than they were before they started. Dr. Mann says that executives can chase down the weak link by going out and rounding and asking the right questions. What if the weak link is the executive? Does anyone believe that the executive will self-identify that they just don’t get it or that they’ve failed to communicate what is important to their next level down?

Dr. Mann says that the lean folks should treat executives like customers. Maybe so, but in my own mind it is hard to believe that leaders at any level in Toyota consider themselves customers. I could make the argument that we treat executives too much like customers and by doing so we are doing Lean in places that are doomed to failure. In essence, we skip a vital step in order to get Lean underway, but by skipping this step we are limiting how successful the Lean implementation can be or are dooming the Lean transformation entirely.

I think the real problem in most Lean implementations is that the Lean transformation community ignores the necessity to bring the c-suite executives up to a certain level of personal mastery of some very basic (but not easy) Lean concepts before moving forward with implementation. Learn-as-you go doesn’t work well for the C-suite compared to learn-in-advance.

Karen Martin recently wrote that in a Lean leadership learning activity she lead, only 2 percent of the participants were readily able to identify the the problem for a situatation that was posed. Really? Should we not question the competency of the other 98 percent of supposedly competent leadership? How can we effectively be leading Lean when such a basic skill such as problem identification is missing?

I do appreciate Dr. Mann identifying that there are clear differences between tactical and strategic lean leadership and his description of unit assessments. I am looking forward to applying this more specific approach.

I am also intrigued with Dr. Mann’s comments about how surprised he was with the many successful adaptations of Lean he has seen. I have seen too many “by the book” Lean transformations where indeed, leaders and implementers are just going through the checklist but not really fundamentally improving.

I should have two copies of Dr. Mann’s 3rd edition on my desk come Monday morning; one for me and one for my boss.

Thank you Mark for making this kind of stuff available.