|
 The Culture Thing
Reprinted with permission from Target Magazine, the award-winning publication of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence.
In a recent survey, AME members said that
their hottest topic is working culture. Art,
music, and tribal anthropology may characterize
ethnic culture, but what about working
culture? Anthropologists agree that,
like jazz, words inadequately describe any
culture to someone not directly experiencing
it. We "dig it," or we don't. Much about
culture is implicit — sensed — not explicitly
discussed. And the culture hardest for us to
see and describe is our own, like that old
conundrum: Does a fish see the water it
swims in?
Despite the caveats, an emerging definition
of working culture is, "How we do
things around here." It is the collective
behavior of people using common habits,
words, goals, systems, and symbols; and
interwoven with processes, technologies,
significant events, training — and a slew of
other stuff that no one can explicitly gather
in mind at once. All this melds and clashes
to form our present working culture.
In addition, different individuals bring
to the workplace their own uniqueness,
ethnic culture, and life experience. From a
managerial view, the quickest, easiest way
to impose order on this mess is by command-
and-control. Hierarchies form naturally,
both in nature and in human society.
Children on a playground establish a pecking
order pretty fast.
If work isn't complex, command-andcontrol
gets it done. It worked well in closeformation
warfare. Generals with a "commanding
view" of a battlefield ordered into
formation troops who abided by that famous
line from Rudyard Kipling, "Ours is not to
question why; ours is but to do or die."
By the end of the 19th century, closeorder
formation battles had gone the way of
the cannonball. Individual soldiers had to
employ more and more personal judgment.
The military began to evolve away from
detailed command-and-control.
In a complex environment, commandand-
control breaks down. Bosses get overloaded.
They take on staff — bureaucracy.
Decisions may be better considered, but they
take time. Control becomes more indirect,
by systems like budgets. If quality performance
requires tending to a host of details,
staff and management bog down in that too.
Capable people doing first-line work have to
do it — in factories and elsewhere. But for
this, they need systems of rapid lateral communication,
like lean, high-visibility operations.
High visibility should also prompt
everyone to engage in process improvement
daily, but they learn to do that only if leadership
does more than "implement lean tools."
They must develop people to the maximum,
creating a working culture to seize and overcome
every problem. "Lean tool deployment"
is symbiotic with developing a working
culture in which all people constantly see
and solve problems.
In this light, why is Ford's Model T line
obsolete? Ford engineered a lean physical
flow, but ran it by command-and-control.
Not only factory workers, but many others
did only rote work. Managers, staff, and
skilled trades did nearly all the process
thinking.
The first Model T had 812 part numbers
and no variations. Today, vehicles are
much more complex; no two of them built
on the same line may have exactly the
same combination of features. Even little
errors cause rework — or much worse.
Completing each unit fault-free requires
constant mental engagement. The need to
constantly improve processes is obvious,
but staff and management direct episodic
process improvement. Befogged by their
work role legacies, they can't discern their
major responsibility, which is developing
workers to constantly improve processes.
The intent implicit in the Toyota
Production System is to stimulate people to
think constantly — a "self-running, selfimproving"
system. Everyone, not just
managers, can see what's happening, and
workers can whip problems at a more
detailed level than staff. Ideally, even every
bobble from a standard process by either
man or machine should prompt why questions.
That's a new work culture. Creating
this culture has been termed, "nemawashi,"
thoroughly preparing enough soil for a
transplanted tree to grow.
Such growth implies that a learning
culture must permeate an entire company —
or an entire enterprise. Excellent production
doesn't grow in isolation; it dies if a product
is poorly designed. Customer satisfaction
results from enterprise-wide performance,
from initial customer contact to end-of-life
product disposal. To grasp the scope of this,
try mapping the customer experience from
beginning to end, if you can. Or map the
path of all material from "dirt to dirt," or "cradle
to cradle." The need for a "lean learning
culture" in a total enterprise becomes obvious,
but conventional business organizations
can't begin to see this, and even
today's lean companies can't begin to do it.
Can a working culture be transformed?
Yes, but only if we realize that
implementing lean is really planting the
roots of a new working culture tree. The
principles underlying TPS apply to any kind
of work. Lean tools help apply those principles
where the objective is exact replication,
time after time. Not all work has that
objective, and tools may vary; but all work
involves processes, so all of it is subject to
learning. Some learning is individual; some
is organizational; and some is process.
Process learning is another way to describe
process improvement. For example, we
might learn how to create high-efficiency,
easily-modified vehicles lasting a century
or more in service, a process whopper in
scope, in which initial production would be
only one small phase (a green version of
the 15 year old three-day car scenario.)
Reality is that tackling the tamest version
of any such ambition takes an enterprise-
wide working culture revolution. In
this issue, the Plug Power story describes a
company consciously transforming its
working culture to attain a vision closer to
here-and-now.
Yes, a culture for working excellence
can be created, totally changing "how we
do things around here." However, leadership
to sustain anything that sweeping has
to come from "the top." Vacillation by new
ownership or new management can confound
it. An enterprise half one thing, and
half another, isn't pursuing excellence.
|
