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During my third visit to French lean digital group Theodo – read about my previous visits here and here – I am curious to understand how they manage to ramp up their activities and recruit at a speed that matches their growth. (As you will have read in the previous chapters of this story, they are growing despite the pandemic.)

Marie, the group’s Head of HR, is my host today. Staying true to her word when we planned the visit, she takes me straight to her gemba. We immediately enter a room where young men and women – all masked up – are discussing which questions can help assess a candidate’s profile during the recruiting process. “These are the Team Leaders in charge of recruitment, coming from Theodo’s various companies,” Marie confirms. “Some are fully dedicated to recruitment, while others are with us on a part-time basis. We call their teams the Growth Teams, as they recruit to keep up with our growth pace.”

The team is organized as a community of practice and meets for 30 minutes every week to share insights and learnings. Today’s subject is candidates’ interviews and Louis, one of the Team Leaders, is telling the team about his experiments with a new list of questions that were inspired by Geoff Smart and Randy Street’s book Who. His objective is to better assess profiles and improve Theodo’s right-first-time record in recruitment. The discussion is open, with Marie guiding the group on open points and what items on the list could be further improved.

Resource: https://planet-lean.com/lean-recruitment-theodo/

If you practice lean, you have likely had conversations like this. What is going on in these situations? What does the sensei bring to the party? Can’t the executive think for herself? Why does she go quiet?

When cooking bacon and eggs, the chicken is involved, but the pig is committed. To understand how people react, we need to look at where they have skin in the game. The sensei’s commitment is to the logic – and then to the gemba, the practice – of lean. The executive’s commitment is to getting things done.

The sensei is following the (lean) logic of the argument: capacity needed for a new product –> more changeovers without losing capacity –> SMED kaizen exercises with the teams to learn to realize changeovers safely, with good quality (last good part, first good part) and much more quickly. It’s a clear-cut learning curve.

The executive doesn’t disagree, but her brain is being flooded with cortisol – the stress hormone. She sees all the guys she needs to convince, all the workshop she needs to organize, all the time and expense this is going to take and the horrid risk of failure due to the usual resistance to change, all the fights with her middle managers. Her brain is cooking in stress and her body just wants to fight or flight – either get the sensei to say something else or run away.

But the executive is not stupid – if the sensei’s logic is clear enough, her neocortex will reassert itself, and she will start thinking about how to get from here to there.

Left to herself, however, the executive will find it very hard to think this through. As she plans her route to success, stress will make her disregard all the scariest ideas, those she feels won’t be possible to realize right away. Brilliant strategic thinkers are those who don’t shy away from difficulty and end up deciding that the safest place to land in France on D-Day, for instance, is on beaches with huge cliffs defended by machine guns. Crazy on the face of it, but brilliant as a strategic move – if we crack this upfront, the road beyond is a home run.

Thinking against oneself, as Jacques Chaize (one of my co-authors) puts it, is hard and an acquired skill requiring practice. This is where sensei help. They don’t need to be brilliant coaches, supernatural thinkers, or blazingly insightful. They need to know their stuff and get you to face the logic of “how” you’re going to achieve your “why.”

Without a sensei, the executive will naturally come up with a vague “Hail Mary” plan that stresses the intent but shies away from the hard waypoints, relying instead on high-level concepts and general ideas without actually setting concrete priorities and activities. And the same will happen at the plan implementation phase.

Source: https://planet-lean.com/why-is-it-so-hard-to-do-lean-without-a-sensei/

One thing Covid-19 has unequivocally proved is that global supply chains in every industry are broken. When the pandemic began, we saw this in the empty shelves of supermarkets around the world. Today, we see this in the painfully slow vaccine rollout experienced by many countries as a result of supply issues. The fact that global supply chains are broken is not new (although current conditions seem to be even more dire than usual), but the fact that now everyone knows they are broken is. Also not new is the fact that the method that could dramatically improve the situation is getting blamed for the failure: the pull system devised by Toyota more than half a century ago, known as Just-In-Time. So it is timely indeed that Christoph Roser has launched his new book, All About Pull Production.

What is a pull system? Here’s a few words of context.

Roser’s book dives deeply into the ins and outs of “pull”, a method of matching supply with demand that is widely referenced but poorly understood. The commonly accepted academic definition of pull has been offered by Wally Hopp and Mark Spearman, who claim in their influential 2004 paper (Manufacturing and Service Operations Vol. 6, No. 2, Spring 2004, pp. 133–148) that the defining characteristic of a pull system is the presence of inventory control limits: “A pull production system is one that explicitly limits the amount of work in process that can be in the system.”

Source: https://planet-lean.com/pull-production-john-shook/

A3 Thinking can be applied to any human activity and to any environment. Indeed, many people use its basic elements without even knowing. In this article, we are going to follow the story of Mr Joe (in plain text), who is experiencing some health issues that are putting his life in danger. In parallel, we are going to look (in italics) at the care Mr Joe receives, organized around the structure and basic elements of an A3, to give him a long life free of the pain caused by his bad habits.

This way, we hope to understand the role of A3 Thinking in our daily lives and how using it can hugely benefit both our personal and working lives. My objective with this article is help you to learn how to create an A3 that applies to any situation you might face.

Here we go!

Sourced from: https://planet-lean.com/mr-joe-and-the-most-important-a3-of-his-life/

Imagine having to plan the launch of a new product in several countries or hoping to sell it to users with different habits. To communicate with millennials is different to communicating with boomers, and it’s essential to know where each of these categories of buyers are looking to purchase products. To know how 25-year-old John from the US makes purchases compared with 50-year-old Paolo from Italy, companies today need to embrace a structured approach to marketing that incorporates lean principles and fully leverages the power of digital applications.

By investigating and gathering data on trends (on anything from which countries see highest percentages of purchases done through smartphones to how Covid changed buying habits) we can make better decisions.

This data can come from surveys or research, but often times in these cases it’s already obsolete at the time of acquiring it. Even more so during the pandemic (think of how much things have changed between 2019 and today). What to do then? I recommend adopt a “mixed approach” that combines some of the following tools.

Source: https://planet-lean.com/lean-marketing-digital-tools/

This article is a follow-up from the co-authored November 2020 joint Planet Lean and The Lean Post article on COVID-19 vaccine process development experiences, learning, and progress that were framed around the six lean product and process development (LPPD) principles. 

Prior to the pandemic, global demand for vaccines was 5 billion doses per year. This included shots for the seasonal flu, measles, chickenpox, and more. Factoring in the much-needed Covid-19 vaccines, the new estimated global demand for all type of vaccines in 2021 is 19 billion doses – nearly four times the demand we experienced just two years ago.

This massive ramp-up of global capacity requires detailed coordination across the end-to-end value stream to ensure critical raw materials are available and bottlenecks are addressed while simultaneously scaling up new, potentially risky technologies. In this article, I will discuss how lean thinking and practice can help us to succeed at this monumental undertaking.

There are two main challenges we need to address at this stage of fighting the pandemic. I outline them below.

The 19 billion doses challenge

The first time I watched a Toyota sensei do a gemba walk in a plastic injection plant, he started with quality issues. The plant manager had put in place red bins to ensure his team checked non-quality parts coming out of the presses daily. He felt this was an extraordinary effort and complained corporate did not let him have the staff he needed to handle so many quality problems at once.

Through the interpreter, the sensei conveyed the idea that looking at quality once a day was simply ridiculous – no wonder the plant had so many quality problems. They needed to stop and investigate every defect, if they ever wanted to make money. Pointing at the hourly board that the plant manager had dutifully installed on the assembly cell, the sensei said: “This is the money board. Until every part is correct first time through, how can you expect to be profitable?”

You can imagine the rest of the conversation. “You don’t understand, we’re different.” “We don’t have the resources.” “What you’re asking is impossible.” And so on and so forth. The plant was mostly plastic injection and simple assemblies to make car components. At one point, the quality manager said, “Ok, we don’t know how to solve our quality problems. There, I’ve said it. Show us how!”

This gave the sensei pause. After thinking about it for a while he picked up a bad part from the red bin at the assembly station. “What is wrong with this part?” the interpreter asked. The quality manager looked at the component and pointed at one of the plastic parts and showed a surface defect on it. “Here – this won’t pass the customer’s inspection.”

“Where is this part made?” the sensei asked. The quality manager led the group to the injection press producing the parts. Sure enough, the red bin already had bad parts in it. The sensei looked at the press for a while, and then asked, “Where is the material kept?”

This took everybody by surprise. After some discussion, the group moved on to storage where large cardboard containers of plastic granules were stored, granules that would then be fed into the machine. “Have you checked the material?” asked the sensei. “Is it homogeneous throughout the load? Or do you have differences from one batch to the other?”

No one had thought of that before. A big quality fight in the plant was that press supervisors kept fiddling with the settings, adding instability to the process. No one had thought that maybe they had a reason for changing the settings: the fact that the material itself changed.

Value stream mapping is a great tool to get to know a plant. As you follow one product back through the process, you get a quick understanding of how it has been broken down into technical steps and develop the ability to distinguish value-adding time from stagnation time (all the time the semi-finished parts wait somewhere). The ratio of value-added time to total lead-time is usually stunningly low.

With the rapid development of the society and economy, more and more Chinese people are paying attention to personal and family health. The demand for healthcare service from hospitals and community clinics has increased exponentially, and with it the number of regulations introduced by the central and local governments.

In the face of increased demand and complexity, Chinese organizations now have an opportunity to embrace lean healthcare principles in order to fulfill the requirements for better care by shortening delivery times and eliminating process wastes. Lean is still new to the Chinese healthcare sector and we hope that the lessons included in this article – which result from Lean Enterprise China’s experience coaching 12 hospitals in southern China (providing care to some 27 million people annually) and training over 900 people – will be useful for other healthcare organizations in the country.

Our purpose at Lean Enterprise China is to improve the quality of healthcare in China, the working lives of hospital employees and the overall performance of hospitals. We do so with the Lean Healthcare Greenbelt Program, an approach that combines coaching and training and that includes: 40 hours of lean healthcare classes and gemba activities to introduce lean healthcare concept and methodologies; online learning to strengthen the trainee’s understanding; the completion of an improvement project (of 12 weeks on average) to connect theory to the daily work; the presentation of an A3 to report the lessons learned during the project; and an evaluation of the A3 and project by LEC.

The main goal of the program is to develop problem-solving capabilities and we are very grateful for the engagement we have witnessed from many of the hospitals’ top management teams. We have held over 30 Greenbelt Programs at different hospitals, mostly in GuangDong province, with about 30 students in each class. We are confident that the over 900 lean seeds we have planted will continue to grow.

In this article, we would like to share some of the best projects we have seen to date.

Full Article: https://planet-lean.com/bringing-lean-to-chinese-hospitals/

You may have read my previous article on the Theodo group. It was an account of the day I spent with Caroline, COO of Theodo France, and it focused on sales and project management at the company. I then decided to go deeper in my analysis of the company, taking you readers on a complete tour of this successful lean organization operating in the digital world.

I think it is a great opportunity to explore how lean techniques and concepts originally developed in the automotive industry have progressively been transposed and merged into the DNA of the tech world. Each of the steps above will be the object of an article, from customer to people, from tech and learning to strategy.

FOCUSING ON CUSTOMER VALUE PAYS OFF

This article focuses on customer value, which is more than a buzzword for the company I am visiting today, Sipios. If the proof is in the pudding, it should suffice to say that, in 2020 alone, its turnover grew fivefold!

The Theodo Group is a galaxy of spin-offs and Sipios, a fintech created in 2017, is one of them. (If you aren’t any more familiar with the term than I was prior to my visit, know that a fintech is an innovating start-up that uses technology to offer new or redesigned banking and financial services.)

Sipios’ offices are located on the top floor of the Theodo building, near the Parisian district of Montmartre. Young start-ups need to attract both customers and talent to thrive, and I bet the view from the rooftop is a big selling point for them!

Rodolphe, co-founder and CEO of Sipios, joined Theodo in 2015 with a Legal and Finance educational background. He started Sipios two years later. “I had done a traineeship in a bank during my studies, and I knew from the very first day that it was not me. I created my own company soon after, but swiftly understood that I needed more experience and understanding of the trade. I wanted to remain in the tech world, learn from more experimented people and join a growing company. This is why I sold my start-up and joined Theodo,” he tells me.

Founding a spin-off barely two years after joining the group can easily be seen as a great success, but it wasn’t exactly a walk in the park. In fact, 2019 turned out to be a difficult year for Sipios. “Offering to deliver an app based on specifications issued by a customer is all well and good, but the problem is that many other companies can code and do the same. We needed something to help us stand out from the crowd,” Rodolphe explains.

We lean thinkers tend to make a rather indulgent use of Japanese words. At times, this can put people off, but I believe that there is no reason why we shouldn’t use Japanese terms, so long as we understand why we are using them and where they come from.

One of the most interesting ones, in my opinion, is kamishibai. In Japanese, this translates into “paper drama”, referring to a form of street theater that became popular in Japan during the Great Depression. In a kamishibai performance, travelling storytellers use paper scrolls to tell stories to their audience. Kamishibai has a strong educational component to it, which makes it very popular in kindergardens for example.

In the lean world, we talk about kamishibai boards (which, like many other tools and techniques, have been borrowed from the Toyota Production System). These are directly linked to organizational learning, having come to represent a fundamental tool for process confirmation and a powerful driver for improvement. Let’s see how they work.

When using a kamishibai board, a manager or supervisor picks one card from the board – either randomly or based on a schedule. Each card shows a specific task or element of the standardized work that is then checked upon (typically as part of a gemba walk) at a working cell or workstation. The card tells the supervisor what she is going to observe on a specific day, ensuring that standards are maintained and that quality controls are held on a regular basis.

In a Schneider Electric factory here in Colombia that I visited recently, day after day the manager and his team picked four cards from the board to go visit four random areas or sections of the line. (Interestingly, their inspiration to introduce kamishibai boards came from a seminar they attended, held by Dr Frederico Pinto, CEO of the cancer treatment center IOV in Brazil – a powerful example of yokoten.) There, the team of managers initiated a dialogue with the production team, starting from the questions shown on the cards they had picked from the kamishibai board. All questions are related to the standardized work in use at the cell. During my visit I saw how managers carry out this enriching exchange about how the work is done and, one more time, I was reminded of how different it was from traditional auditing – a trap it is all too easy to fall into when at the gemba. The team was asked about the different cycles of their daily management, the different meetings taking place and their purpose. Of course, the questions displayed on each card can focus on anything, with huge implications for safety, machine maintenance, quality and, of course, the flow of value towards the customer. It was exciting to see how the Schneider team leverages tools such as this to strengthen their management system, and even more to see how they have been able to take these constructive conversations to other areas of the business, including Engineering and (soon) in Warehousing. Experimentation with kamishibai is leading to great learning across the business, proving that this approach works well in all settings, from manufacturing to administrative tasks and office work.