Author: Valinova Team

Giulia shows up punctually to our microcycle with the recorded video.

We encounter a technical hiccup as the video sharing doesn’t start immediately: Muda of defect.

While we work to unlock the situation, Giulia begins with a verbal description of the recorded process (not of the video, mind you!) along with the procession of why’s: why do we do this, why don’t we do that, etc.

Giulia doesn’t know it yet, but she is performing muda of process—a very dangerous muda in this case for these reasons: She is narrating her mental representation of the process and, by doing so, unconsciously reinforcing it in her brain.

The more this representation is reinforced, the more effort (literally physical effort and energy consumption) Giulia will need to overcome it. Her narration influences the interlocutor, who may settle for this level of process description, considering it sufficient and not bothering to seek factual evidence to broaden the perspective: why waste further energy? We are different types of interlocutors and don’t run this risk. But what will others in the company do?

Another interesting aspect: why make a video if a narration is sufficient? One of the two: either the narration is muda, or the video is!

Finally, we manage to have the videos available for viewing; ten minutes have passed. We definitely need to review the process of video collection for subsequent sharing.

Since we have several videos and not just one, we turn to Giulia: Ugo: “What do you think we should watch now?”

Giulia: “Filming the whole process was long and boring. For me to do it and for you to watch it. I tried to film pieces that were significant.” Oh dear, a bad sign. Giulia’s intent is appreciable and understandable, but unfortunately, the keyword here is “significant.”

Significant according to what criteria? Obviously, whatever the criteria, it can only be a product of the current neural software, which has already proven to be unaware of the concept and the real substance of muda.

No matter: everything produced by the cycles is good and useful for progressing and building new neural software more effective and efficient than the current ones.

This is where we can and must start, not from anything else, to build a solid and lasting foundation enabling subjects to generate true continuous improvement.

The first video lasts 43 seconds and shows a computer monitor displaying an application interface and a person’s hand on a mouse. That’s it.

The video starts in the middle of the action; all activities equivalent to “I took paper and pen” from the muda experiment (see our article Muda – What They Are Part 1 and 2) are not filmed.

As the video plays, Giulia continues to narrate the process: she doesn’t describe what is in the video. Every action we see as it is, for example, “Operator moves mouse from one point to another,” in Giulia’s narration is “converted” into its purpose “the operator is looking for the data to associate with the serial number,” a purpose obviously not visible in the video.

Our interaction, with or without the video at this stage, occurs within the same context/environment characteristic: we are not on the gemba. I get the impression that the videos for Giulia were meant to be aids for our (mine and Ugo’s) benefit, to make her narration more understandable to us, perhaps also a kind of “this is how things are, and here’s the proof…”

The criterion behind the term “significant” begins to take shape… It would also explain the reluctance at the previous microcycle to produce the videos themselves: who wouldn’t consider it a waste of time to perform an activity for the use and consumption of almost unknown individuals to expose a process that is believed to be perfectly known and holds no surprises?

Even the time Giulia required to make the videos would take on a different meaning: making videos with this intent is far more expensive and complex than making them with the intent of improving in recognizing the muda that we have right under our noses…

I ask a question with a naïve and light tone, but it’s neither naïve nor light: Stefano: “Why did you start filming from here? I mean, at this precise point, with the software mask open, the operator in that position, and the hand on the mouse?”

Giulia: “I’ve been thinking about it for a while and… I was trying to find a way to work on it. Because there is a lot of work behind it: getting the papers, moving to the other workstation, stapling the papers…”

Stefano: “Ah, great, then we can see all this part you are talking about, which seems like a nice heap of muda?”

Giulia: “No, I didn’t film it…” General laughter. I propose moving to the next video, and without any surprise on my part, the video, as far as its form is concerned, is a perfect copy of the previous one: it also lasts a few seconds, and it also starts in the middle of the action with an operator (the same as before) holding a pen, writing on a paper. A recurring pattern begins to emerge; I proceed with naïve questions.

Stefano: “Giulia, what was your perspective in making these videos?”

Giulia: “I tried to capture the moment when he goes to get the data, fill in the paper to show you that… Oh, by the way, here it happened that the operator needed the pen, had to look for it, found it, but it didn’t work!”

Stefano: “Ah, great! Can we see this part?”

Giulia: “eh no, I was giving him my pen, taking it from my pocket, no, I couldn’t film it.”

Another general laughter.

Stefano: “It seems to me that you filmed pieces trying to reconstruct the process as you have it in mind, not as it is. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

Giulia: “No, I would have liked to make a 30-minute film, but it would have taken too much time.”

Stefano: “And why choose the pieces you chose and not others?”

It seems quite evident to me that Giulia has enacted a process opposite to what is needed to effectively improve processes: instead of filming what is as it is and then, from the videos, surgically and quantitatively identifying the existing muda, she started from her current idea of muda and filmed those.

Giulia wants to narrate the process at all costs; she wants to explain the why’s to us. She wants us to know that this test certificate, in her view, is muda that bothers her a lot: at the same time, without that sheet used by the client’s inspector to give his approval, the piece cannot leave the factory—Serious Non-Conformity—and thus is not billable.

Stefano: “I admit it’s a bit of a stretch, but given the current ‘external’ constraints (current regulations, the external inspector’s requirements), could we consider the certificate a component of the piece?”

Giulia: “Yes, it makes sense.”

Stefano: “Then, the ink deposited on the report, do we classify it as muda or value?”

Giulia: “It’s a good question. Instinctively I’d say muda, but actually, I’m producing value. I started considering all this stuff as absolute muda. Imagine what I didn’t film!”

Laughter

Stefano: “See? You filmed what bothered you for who knows how long, which we agreed today to be value, and you didn’t film what you couldn’t film at that moment, the muda we perform today to achieve that value represented by the certificate. You couldn’t film them because your energy, your focus, your kanshin was directed towards a different enemy: the certificate. We agree that in a perfect world, the certificate wouldn’t exist, but this presupposes a change of ‘rules’ that doesn’t depend on us. Can we say something similar about the software: surely going back and forth through the video masks is muda, but is it an immediately ‘attackable’ muda? Does its elimination depend solely on actions under your direct responsibility?”

Giulia: “Indeed…”

Ugo: “The tendency of our primary neural software is to focus on what seems immediately remediable, eliminating the annoyance, the threat, and not observing and studying the problem in its entirety. Being on the gemba forces us not to skip steps; narrating how things are allows us to skip everything we want, resulting in losing grip on the real picture.

Even the ‘preference,’ I assure you, of everyone to identify muda that doesn’t depend on us presupposes that I perceive this activity (kaizen) as a threat, something attacking me, not something I can use to make my world more beautiful.

This ‘disposition’ is also an effect of our current primary and secondary neural software, which will continue to ‘work’ this way until we modify them. And this is our task. Does it convince you?”

Giulia: “Unfortunately, I find myself in it: I clearly filmed the things that annoy me, that burn me to see, and that I want to get rid of. But it’s also true that I’m probably attacking the tip of the iceberg: the little I see, not the mountain underneath, whose extent I don’t know and on which I might be able to act autonomously right away.”

Stefano: “Great Giulia, then I propose to direct your energy, your kanshin towards another objective: from ‘Eliminate the certificate’ (what we’d like) to ‘find the way with less muda to produce the certificate’ (what we can). What do you think?”

Giulia: “Agreed!” We agree on the next cycle’s next step: a 3-minute random video this time without cuts; we’ll meet next week. We still have to overcome the pass of more frequent meetings.

Objective of the step: film ALL the muda, not just the ones we already know and bother us.

Moral of the cycle: if you don’t know what muda are, you’ll make “wrong” videos. But to learn what muda are, you need to make “wrong” videos! However, it is essential that you have someone who knows what muda are and uses these “wrong” videos optimally.

Takeaway from the microcycle: identifying and recognizing VALUE, recognizing muda (NON-VALUE)—what, how many, where, when—is a continuous process aimed at eliminating or reducing NON-VALUE, thereby increasing the value generated by any productive process.

Key Elements :

1. Continuous Improvement Cycle: Emphasizing the importance of continuous improvement and the iterative process of identifying and eliminating muda (non-value).
2. Practical Learning: Highlighting the practical approach of learning from mistakes to recognize and reduce non-value activities.
3. Video Analysis: The use of video analysis to understand and improve processes, demonstrating a commitment to detailed scrutiny and refinement.
4. Collaborative Problem-Solving: The role of collaboration and shared insights in enhancing process efficiency.
5. Adapting to Constraints: Strategies to work within existing constraints and regulations while striving for process improvement.

Focus on Value: A clear focus on distinguishing between value-adding and non-value-adding activities to optimize productivity and efficiency

“To be good photojournalists, you should rub sandpaper on your eyes every morning.” Guy Le Querrec

Yes, I know we’re not here to talk about photography, but this chapter deals with a crucial step in the journey towards Continuous Improvement, where, as you will see, the eyes play a significant role. As usual, the world and humanity are divided into at least two, no, three, better four categories:

• those who know what muda are; they are the ones who are probably smiling now and saying to themselves, “Let’s see how they ruin it for me.”
• those who don’t know what muda are and might now be puzzled and not too encouraged by the idea of rubbing sandpaper on their eyes… every morning, too…
• those who think they know what muda are and are thinking of stopping here (don’t do it if you can resist the temptation) and perhaps don’t know it as well as they think.
• those who think they don’t know what on earth muda are and might be surprised at the end of this chapter.

The journey of continuous improvement that works requires always keeping action and thought, imagination and gemba (gemba is a term in kaizen jargon meaning “where things happen”) closely united, and even to “explain” muda, we need the gemba. You’ll have to trust me now; we’ll reflect later.

Now we need to get the gemba, and for that, I need your collaboration. I don’t know where you’re reading this article: at home, at work, on a train, alone, or in company. Wherever and however you are, I ask you to do this (doing is gemba) before proceeding with the reading.

First phase: write on a sheet of paper what you will see and what will happen in the next five minutes. Just this. It is very important that you write it.

Don’t do it ‘in your head’ or on the PC or smartphone. I go so far as to say that part of the value of this experiment lies precisely in writing.

Suspend reading now and start the five minutes.

Second phase: let’s reread together what you wrote.

I can imagine that on your sheet, we would read the name of some object: a desk, some books, the smartphone.

Maybe you were more general and just wrote ‘things’. Maybe something unexpected happened, and we find some action: I answered the ringing phone, someone came in to take something or ask for information, I heard the noise of an airplane.

There is nothing ‘strange’, ‘right’, or ‘wrong’ about your sheet, whatever you wrote: it is simply an account of what catches your attention now: you certainly haven’t written everything you saw or did or that happened.

There are dozens of scientific works and YouTube videos that set at about 10% the amount of visual material that, collected by the eyes, is ‘presented’ to the prefrontal cortex and thus reaches awareness.

At this point, one might have fun identifying if the things you wrote have something in common: who knows, many are the same color or shape, but this is not a psychological test, so take a sigh of relief and let’s move on; on the sheet, we find the ‘labels’, the mental categories you use daily now without thinking to classify what you see (remember: your brain, not your eyes!).

The habit of using such categories is so ingrained that it’s invisible to consciousness: nothing wrong here, it’s just how we function, and we can’t be aware of everything;

We notice that everything you wrote can only be traced back to an object (animate or inanimate, living or non-living) or an action. There are no other possibilities: ‘Out there’, at least at the level of observation that interests us, there is nothing else.

So far, we have reflected on ‘what’ you did; it’s also very useful to reflect on ‘how’ you did it. Was it easy? I wouldn’t be surprised if for at least the first minute, you had difficulty starting to write something on your blank sheet.

Were you completely at ease? Did you do the task with curiosity? Was there distrust? Annoyance?

There would be nothing wrong: after all, a stranger from the pages of a book invited you to perform a strange and obscure task. There is a particular action you must have performed if you strictly followed my instructions: please verify, did you write: “I took paper and pen”?

It’s an action that (again, if you followed the instructions) you surely performed. I don’t know its duration, extent, or magnitude; you might have had to move to another room or several rooms (where is that blessed pen?) and come back, or simply reach out on the desk or the front pocket if you’re an ‘old-style’ engineer like me, but you certainly did it.

And it’s also the first action you performed (or maybe the second if you were particularly diligent and started a stopwatch to keep track of the five minutes). Do you find it on your sheet? I’ve conducted this experiment many times with many different people, and very few have reported this action.

Maybe you did. If you did and the concept of muda was new to you, I congratulate you: you’re a white fly and will have great satisfaction in applying the method. But even other ‘common mortals’ like me can be reassured: it is perfectly normal that at this moment, you overlooked this action.

It won’t necessarily be like this forever; we learn and change, each of us has done so many times. It seems that our brain ‘erases’ that action: it’s not important, it’s taken for granted, it’s obvious that if I have to write by hand using paper and pen, I need paper and pen.

It’s entirely possible that we place it ‘outside’ the exercise or before the five minutes, but if you reread the instructions I gave you, you’ll realize that getting paper and pen is fully part of it.

In the next article, we’ll move on to the third phase of the experiment and introduce muda. (To be continued in part 2)

Keys:

1. Introduction to Muda: Highlighting the concept of muda and its importance in the journey of continuous improvement.
2. Engagement with Readers: The interactive approach that engages readers in practical exercises to understand key concepts.
3. Focus on Awareness: Emphasizing the need to develop awareness of everyday actions and their value.
4. Continuous Improvement Philosophy: Reinforcing the philosophy of continuous improvement by integrating thought and action.
5. Practical Learning: The importance of hands-on learning and reflection to truly grasp and apply kaizen principles.
6. Human-Centric Approach: Focusing on the human aspect of learning and change, encouraging readers to see improvement as a personal and collective journey.

Let’s set aside for the moment the enormous practical advantages that this form of learning support presents compared to more traditional forms; we will discuss these in detail later: here we try to account for a much more pressing evidence concerning the fact that the use of the microcycle is enormously more effective (and efficient) than using the so-called traditional methods.

I resist the temptation to illustrate the current state of the so-called “Sciences of Learning”; the literature on this topic is not vast but quite substantial. Although the evidence provided by various researchers deserves respect as the fruit of their best field observation work, test construction, and experiments, I think it is crucial to focus on the critical point common to all the theorizing formulated upstream and downstream of field research.

In other words, those “explanations” (those theoretical models) end up explaining nothing; they do not give us the answer we seek: they do not tell us why.

It is almost incredible, despite enormous investments of money, time, and energy, they do not even tell us how to safely accompany a human learning process; they cannot even provide a shred of a hypothesis on why (yes, the why of earlier) this or that “educational model” works or does not work.

We know, or at least some of us know, the ultimate limit of human knowledge: we do not know what energy is and consequently what matter is.

Our knowledge reaches up to that point to the undeniable evidence that something we call matter exists, that it is one of the possible transformations of energy, and that something we call energy exists. Period.

Beyond that limit, no human thought can go with certainty and scientific security; beyond that limit, we can go with magic or faith, not with science.

Science deals with what is in between, what goes from us to that distant point that is the beginning of energy (assuming it has a beginning; we do not know), of what comes from that distant point that is the beginning of energy and reaches each of us.

Good science connects point by point without leaving gaps, without skipping steps, allowing us to trace back step by step from any configuration of the environment (as we will see better later, real-real environment and virtual-real environment) we deal with to its ultimate root.

The terrible critical point common to all so-called learning theories fundamentally consists of three serious violations:

1. The first is in the almost always tacit and undeclared adoption of models of the human mind, theories of the human mind that are undefined or extremely limited: from the legendary black box to the cybernetic mind.
2. The second violation consists of implicitly or explicitly considering the evident absence of explicable connections between different theoretical formulations (their “explanations”) and other decidedly important pieces of each of our lives as non-relevant: even when the learning process is considered to occur in a context, the context becomes the limit beyond which we do not go.
3. The third serious violation consists of ignoring, beyond words, the indissoluble connection between learning and survival in the specific and distinctive forms of survival of the subject of the species homo sapiens.

Only recently have attempts appeared by scholars who have adopted the fundamental elements of what can legitimately be called Systems Theory (many authors have contributed to this fertile theory, which, however, is far from being fully developed) generating a different and better observation, analysis, and understanding of human learning processes.

It is based on these systemic elements that we are better able to explain which “methods” of accompanying the learning process can work and which do not within the normal contexts in which humans live and act, not in research laboratories.

It is from the use of a systemic model of the human mind that it becomes possible, for example, to almost entirely eliminate the use of the group—the millennial form of the educational/training setting—from the teaching method of knowledge and skills related to kaizen: in this case, as in many others, the group is a process muda, no more, no less.

We did not arrive at this experimentally through trial and error without an explanation of why yes or why no: we arrived at it with a strong hypothesis (all knowledge is ultimately only more or less strong hypotheses) about the systemic configuration of the so-called human mind once faced with the seemingly naive or heretical question, “Is the group useful?”

We all know that the group, the class, has been and is massively adopted, that in any Kaizen program (or Lean or whatever they want to call them) a large part of the “work” is expected to be carried out in a group: for what reasons?

All the “explanations” that are ordinarily provided, as is easy to demonstrate, have nothing to do with the systematically observed learning process: the learning process is “closed” within each subject, governed and determined solely by each individual subject.

The work of elaborating and generating new neural software is carried out (or not carried out) by each individual subject assisted by an expert, a master: how can the group contribute to the particular task of acquiring Kaizen knowledge and skills?

To a systemic observer, as to any expert in the field, it is entirely evident the particularity of this specific learning task compared to other learning tasks: the particularity described in common terms is constituted by the high rate of “training in thinking” and the concomitant low rate of “training.”

As systemics, we know that this condition has significant implications regarding the choice of method and tools to accompany the learning process, implications interpreted very differently from current non-systemic “theories of human learning”: one of these implications is the absolute preference for the 1-2-1 setting.

A second implication invisible to non-systemic observers concerns 1) the duration 2) the frequency and 3) the “calendar” of training sessions: if the focus is the learner’s learning curve and not the presumed and illusory “economies” of both the organization and the master, for us systemics, it is evident that little-and-often is far more favorable than much-every-now-and-then or much-and-concentrated.

Practically, it is to be avoided with all care except in specific and rare cases of the learning path, sessions longer than 20-30 minutes, acceptable also sessions of 10-15 minutes or even less (my personal record is 8 minutes, and I plan to improve it further).

“Often” here means 3-4 times a week, even 5 in the initial phase, each time seeking the best possible compromise between the learner’s agenda and the master’s: this also plays a significant role predominantly ignored by non-systemic human learning theories; agendas reflect life, they are not a calendar of occurrences.

Finally, the systemic accreditation process of the master.

Everyone has had experiences with teachers with whom and from whom it was relatively easy to “learn” (very few generally) and others with whom and from whom it was substantially impossible: the dismal lack of a convincing model of the mind by non-systemic scholars has relegated this key factor to the realm of “natural” idiosyncrasies, “character incompatibilities,” or neuroses (mostly attributed to learners) and other ramblings of that kind.

For us systemics and kaizenists, it is evident, thanks to the adoption of a less indecent and tattered model of the mind that we have wanted and been able to develop, that the articulations, the nodes, the hysteresis of the process of accompanying learning and the concomitant learning process have so far been only partially intuitively grasped, never captured in their nature nor even partially described: certainly, we cannot claim to have exhausted the task of new exploration and minimal re-understanding of this extremely complex field, but we can affirm to have written some chapters of a book that before us was substantially blank with too many scribbles and messes in the written part over thousands of years.

Today, we also found a new one: trust in the master hinders learning; it will be a funny little chapter.

For a while, this worried us: how dare we insignificant short-lived beings challenge what has been handed down for thousands and thousands of years by hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of other humans who have dedicated their lives to the study and exercise of the art of teaching?

Well… now we don’t worry about it anymore. This is Kaizen, what else?

“Yes, we are doing well; we closed with an EBITDA increased by 30% compared to the previous year, going from 15% to 22%, robust investments, new six-axis machining machines… the workshop can do much better, my goal is to increase productivity by 30%.”

We are all squeezed on the usual eighteen-inch screens, except for one of us—I use a 50-inch monitor. Videoconferences are convenient, and the loss of effectiveness, as recent research has shown, is negligible… we are physically hundreds of kilometers apart, trying to understand if and what we can do together.

Our interlocutor is a General Manager (we call them DJs, a local folklore note), around fifty years old, an engineer heading a medium-sized manufacturing company specializing in iron and steel processing.

We try to understand what he means by “productivity.” We know that trap well; almost always a piece of the main thought is producing more, then others follow—faster, with more profit, reducing costs, reducing waste, retraining staff—damn, finding good staff continues to be very difficult; I can’t do smart working here; there are pieces of iron and steel to handle, from small ones to fifty quintal pieces…

We need a workshop manager who knows his job. The one we have is a hybrid; he can’t do it, but there’s another person involved who, on the organizational chart, is the workshop manager but has never done it—he’s super-good with the machines, the first worker hired by the company…

The story of the rather messy situation (but practically all situations we encounter are messy) continues; we stay alert, ready to catch the thread of productivity as soon as possible… but we do not neglect the value of the story the DJ is telling us: these seemingly marginal aspects invariably turn out to be among the key result factors, enormously important to us. Our goal is to transform the current organizational machine into an organizational machine that relentlessly generates improvements every day.

We are also particularly lucky—the DJ, in a previous role, was impressed by a process fanatic of kaizen and the things he saw him do… but we note that from that exciting experience, our DJ didn’t take away one of the most important pieces: there’s no trace of MUDA in his rich description.

Stefano is a kaizen fanatic; sometimes he seems more persecuted than a fanatic—he sees muda everywhere. Sometimes I doubt he can actually see anything else. Under his guidance, I train a bit, but compared to him, I’m a baby with a brand-new rattle… devastating.

Maybe Stefano will decide to explain well what MUDA is, present well the 7 canonical MUDA+1. In our work, more than in others, it is crucial to deal with the eighth before all the others… huh? Oh yes, it’s MU-KAN-SHIN, the non-interest… I briefly mentioned it to the DJ in a previous meeting, it amused him…

In the elements gradually filling the meaning of “productivity” for our DJ, the closest to what we are tracking is common waste, the Western translation of the concept of MUDA… now we don’t want to do a linguistic dissertation, no no, we are practical people attached to the gemba (if you’re not familiar with kaizen jargon, you’ll be less confused… if you think you know what the gemba is because maybe you’ve had an overdose of it, you’ll struggle more… but then it’ll get much better). We’ve seen over the years that it’s better to know what we’re stepping on.

MUDA, as you’ll find in the slightly more evolved literature, is NOT waste and is not visible in anything the DJ has told us so far about what he means by “increasing productivity.” On this point, we totally agree—it is good, required, essential to constantly improve (of course, we are kaizenists, what else would you expect?) and get feedback that we have succeeded by measuring productivity as precisely as possible.

MUDA is a nasty and demanding beast that forces us to keep our heads up and constantly look far away, not just here where even an incompetent can spot an unpleasant waste.

To identify MUDA, as Stefano repeats (yes, to the point of annoyance and beyond sometimes), you can’t just look here at the gemba; you must always also look there where the customer is, whoever they are, and know that there the customer always and only asks one very nasty question: what value is there for me in what you are doing?

It seems like a persecutory deity, an annoying and intolerant parent like the one emerging from the parable of the talents, ready to save those who tried and didn’t succeed, those who enjoyed themselves without bearing fruit (at least they enjoyed it), certainly to recognize greater merit (don’t talk about merit to Stefano, he will mercilessly bite you… and those bites are good; they pull away pieces that don’t help or serve a good life) to those who bring back increased riches, ruthless with those who, out of fear of failure and losing entrusted riches, bury them and do nothing with them.

The DJ has already committed his first mortal sin (oh, we know he will commit countless others): he doesn’t constantly keep in mind the true Kaizen deity, the damned, arrogant, presumptuous, insatiable Customer, the task given to us by handing over the equivalent of the talents in the parable: everything you do that has value for me I like, and everything that doesn’t have value for me I don’t like at all… don’t mess it up.

For Stefano, this cannot and must not happen: if it happens, when it happens (and it happens with unimaginable frequency), the real productivity decreases.

At one point, with the smirk of when he’s about to play a trick, he says: “Can I propose a definition of this productivity KPI to include with the others? Let’s measure productivity (we necessarily have to measure it, no escape) also by looking at it as the ratio between the generated value expressed in current currency (let’s use the euro?) and the value of NON-Value (literal meaning of MUDA) present in the process whose productivity we are monitoring.”

The DJ nods as if to say, well sure, why not… from my monitor, it seems they look at each other and smile knowingly: the DJ is an engineer, Stefano is an engineer, they understand each other instantly. It also seems sensible to me, even if I’m not an engineer… and then something shakes me, hey, wait here, he’s tricking you, watch out… numerator okay, value produced, in short, revenue better income, the share the workshop generates, what’s needed… at the denominator, what do we put? The value of NON-value?!?!?

The formula makes sense, no doubt: the smaller the denominator, the greater the “productivity coefficient” and vice versa… but we don’t have that number, right? Do we have to put Zero? So, the productivity index goes to infinity due to the known property of fractional numbers…

We could at least start with waste, the term with which Westerners generally translated MUDA… but Stefano, I already know, will kick me if I dare to agree to this improper translation… no no, hunting waste is not harmful in itself but is very harmful if used instead of Kaizen outside the rigorous and ruthless framework of hunting NON-Value, hunting MUDA. Why?

I understood this almost immediately: outside that framework, it cannot be guaranteed neither that what is identified as waste is MUDA NON-Value for the Customer, nor especially that what is NOT identified as waste is not instead MUDA NON-Value for the Customer, which is certainly the most frequent case: waste is the result of a judgment formulated predominantly within the framework of how we do things now under the tacit and unspoken condition that we support the goodness of how we do things now, which is the best we can do, nor that the remedies we find for eliminating waste in turn generate MUDA NON-Value for the Customer to an even greater extent than the waste-muda we thus think we have eliminated, a condition that is most likely to occur… the proverbial patch worse than the hole.

So? It is good to accept that this specific KPI initially does not present a reference value (a serious flaw for any standard KPI)… and it is a first reversal compared to “tradition.” If we accept—and no one can afford not to if only to avoid looking like an idiot (and no one wants to look like an idiot)—that by eliminating NON-Value (well beyond waste and always correlated to more or less easily measurable costs, including the well-being of the people who work, which costs when it is non-well-being) from the production process, the generated value increases in absolute terms (even those with high school-level math skills like me can get there without being engineers), then the fact of not having an initial reference value (infinite by definition is not a measurable value) is not a problem but a happy condition. Why?

Because it means that our first job is precisely to rigorously identify what NON-Value there is for the Customer in our production process and give it a monetary value, immediately placing that value in place of the initial Zero: this is work of research, exploration, discovery that satisfies a primary need of all humans… oh, you didn’t know? Each of us is, even if we don’t know it or it doesn’t seem so, a problem-solving machine that tirelessly aims to bring order to disorder, to connect what was not connected before.

Our observation of how we work is poor in tools, perspectives, knowledge—we confuse reality with what we see, rarely understanding what is beyond what we think we see… yes, seeing is never just recording images, it’s much more, incredibly more. But undoubtedly, the kanshin, the interest that awakens in all those we consult, to whom we ask to discover what initially is not seen, protecting them from the fear of appearing inadequate, of risking looking like idiots, supporting them in giving value to what they find step by step, especially to the mistakes, sharing interest in their discoveries no matter how “small” or “big”—continuous improvement is almost never generated by total upheavals but by a patient, tireless dedication to micro-steps, infinite experiments through which to eliminate NON-Value, turning it into process value.

Productivity is reversed; this KPI serves to monitor and measure the productivity improvement of our community, not closed in on itself but open and in constant interaction with the environment where the Customer is the beacon indicating the safe harbor to reach. Productivity that has value “only” as an index of survival probability, success, of being able to sustain the life and well-being of the community and each individual.

Comparison with competitors is not harmful but is far from enough: nothing stands still; we can only rely on the effectiveness, the goodness of our way, our method of succeeding in satisfying the insatiable Customer. This keeps us alive, in the race, in the condition to compete and survive.

It is a diabolical KPI, and only a bizarre and diabolical mind like Stefano’s could come up with it: we reach the KPI value at the end, not the beginning. Bizarre, diabolical, and insatiable—worse than the Customer out there: and when we get there? We reset everything and start again… Of course: once identified, measured the NON-Value, and placed it at the KPI denominator, the KPI will show a value—let’s imagine 10—the generated value is ten times greater than the NON-Value, voilà finally… and then what do we do? We eliminate the NON-Value, update the KPI denominator, and go back to having the INFINITE value… unacceptable. Diabolical.

Unbearable? No, from experience… Stefano is also the one who says, you know, I don’t believe for a moment that Toyoda (yes, the founder of TOYOTA, that TOYOTA) when he was in front of the looms next to the worker who had to ensure the loom didn’t run idle (threads are woven; threads can break; at that time around 1930, it often happened… even today), looking for MUDA and improvements, had the Customer in mind… he was next to a person who had to spend his working hours (to get paid, what else?) watching that the loom produced fabric and didn’t run idle, stopping the machine when it happened quickly, then fixing the broken or interrupted thread problem and restarting the machine… eight hours, ten hours, twelve hours…

A person like him, not an engineer, it’s true, but a person like him… all that attention focused on the damn thread, it took a fraction of a second to make a mistake… I believe, says Stefano, that what drove Toyoda to invent a runner connected to a switch that stopped the loom while simultaneously turning on an alarm light was finding it unacceptable that a poor soul had to do that job that way to survive.

Did life for the worker improve after the runner? A little yes, he no longer had to strain his eyes to watch the thread for eight, ten, twelve hours; the machine “called” him when needed… oh no, of course not, he didn’t have time to sleep. Instead of just one loom, then he had to monitor ten… but the quality of his work improved a bit compared to before… and certainly, the Customer got their share of Value, and Toyoda also pocketed some money. For nothing, the blind man doesn’t sing, my mother used to say.

Stefano nods and concludes: for me, the first and last source, the true inspiration for continuous improvement is not the Customer, who is instead a reliable and effective feedback; the Customer is not the source… for me, after many years and having seen all sorts of things, the source is the people you work with.

Keys:

1. Focus on Continuous Improvement: Emphasizing the relentless pursuit of daily improvements through the elimination of non-value activities (MUDA).
2. Customer-Centric Approach: Highlighting the importance of always considering the value for the customer in every process.
3. Collaboration and Learning: Showcasing the importance of collaboration and continuous learning within the team to drive productivity.
4. Innovative KPI Definition: Introducing a new KPI for productivity that includes the ratio of generated value to non-value, pushing the boundaries of traditional measurements.
5. Historical Context and Examples: Using historical examples like Toyoda’s innovation to illustrate the importance of practical improvements.
6. Real-World Applications: Demonstrating the real-world application of kaizen principles in a manufacturing setting, focusing on tangible results and worker well-being.