In Lean the “Gemba” is where everything happens. It’s the crime scene, the shop floor, ground zero. In manufacturing, the Gemba is a physical location, filled with gear, that you can walk along and evaluate for operational productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness. This is called a “Gemba Walk.”The Gemba is also synonymous with the people who work there. So, if you are a manager and you notice something is amiss, you can “Go to the Gemba” and ask the people there what they think. The Gemba will then help you find a solution tempered with both management and line-worker sensibilities.In knowledge work, however, we have no Gemba. If I go do a Gemba Walk, I will walk around a bunch of cubes and everyone will look like Dilbert. By and large, in knowledge work, there is simply no physical representation of the work. I would, and management consultants often do, have to rely on asking everyone “What do you do, how do you to it, where are things good, where are things bad, etc.”And, everyone involved in the day to day work will tell me their views, which are all slightly or not-so-slightly different. Then I’d have to make sense of it all and then give the client some sort of report that is a mix of spot-on-brilliance derived through finding the common wisdom in what I heard and cumulative error by chasing threads of little value.And why was I hired? Because neither the managers nor the line-workers knew what was really going on in the first place. They all “knew” - meaning they believed their own interpretations - but no one seemed to realize that all the interpretations were different because they were all ill informed.So the kanban shows us all this. It shows us what the team is doing, the steps they take to do it, where things are breaking down, where people are working together, what options are coming up, and so on.By now, at Element 12, we know all this.The kanban, then, becomes a symbolic Gemba. It gives everyone a physical artifact, much like the assembly line, for everyone to go to, have conversations, and engage. We don’t fight over interpretations, we merely suggest new ones. And we suggest the new ones in context - standing in front of the board and saying things like, “This outsourcing partner seems to be slowing us down - can we get them more information up front that could help them process our work faster?” or “If we moved some of the graphic designers to the front of the project, we could work with better designs throughout product development.”We can do Gemba Walks of our teams and others by simply walking the board.This is #12 in a 13 part series on the elements of kanban. Read them all!
The Language of Metrics: Lean Muppets Series Post 4
It’s like a really heavy iPhone.
muppet brrrring scale
Silly aliens!In business, we mistake inanimate objects for our customers, our employees, our teams, and everyone else. Our inanimate objects are metrics. Just like the telephone, they are things we make to convey information, but we make a key mistake: we believe that metrics are in some way arbiters of reality.But just as we are what we eat, we become what we measure.The aliens here are vice presidents coming down to talk to the workers.They descend in their ship and approach the area in which their intelligence tells us the workers reside.In lean parlance, they are going to the gemba.Now, here's the really funny bit: the telephone really isn't the metric. The worker is the worker.These are workers who have been supplying management with meaningless statistics that measure output on a dual axised BRRRRRRRING scale. The longer and louder the BRRRRRRRING the better.The managers approach the worker who, after getting three consecutive raises for BRRRRINGing like there's no tomorrow, is on the fast track to becoming an alien. That worker, after a time, does everything to satisfy the metric - to the point that it becomes the only way he can conceive of doing his job.Initially, the managers approach the worker and try to discuss things in English, then hunt around for other languages, only to learn that BRRRRING is all anyone can say.And the scary part is the end, where they are happily BRRRINGing along with the employee, because now it's the only thing the company can say.In his 14 Points, Deming said "Eliminate management by numbers and numerical goals. Instead substitute with leadership." The more we rely on metrics to tell us what happened, the more we distance ourselves from the actual work being done. We lose sight of changes in context and cannot deftly react when necessary. Further, we build games and systems that reward paying attention to the metric and not the success of the company.People will care about what the system cares about. If your company has reams of reports generated daily or weekly, you are not "managing by the number" you are building a culture of BRRRRRRING.This is fourth in a series of Lean Muppet posts. For a list of Lean Muppet posts and an explanation of why we did this, look here. -> Lean Muppets Introduction