What we continuously observe is that Continuous Improvement is NOT Continuous Improvement: sure, there are improvements, and the commitment is ongoing, but this is NOT enough. We keep seeing that the distinction between Value and Non-Value is made using common sense rather than the scientific method.
We have 12 improvement plans to implement by 2024… We have 16 ongoing improvement actions…
Sounds good, right? These statements correspond to the responses we received from a Plant Director of an Italian “pocket multinational” and the Continuous Improvement Officer of a less pocket-sized multinational.
The first expressed great interest in applying AI to manage Continuous Improvement, such as Business Intelligence, while the second (we masked the gender identity for privacy reasons; the masculine article and adjective are expository artifices) was interested in improving project management and implementation plans related to Continuous Improvement.
What objectives does someone officially in charge of Continuous Improvement have in mind?
Let’s set aside job descriptions and get to the point concretely: the common element, the shared objective of our two interlocutors, is manifestly, indubitably, and certainly the objective of generating improvements—those improvements identified today in the plans and improvement actions.
Nothing to object to: commitment is congruent and coherent, and the objective is congruent and coherent with their organizational position.
Maybe it’s implicit, maybe it’s between the lines, maybe even digitally reported in job descriptions, but from direct interaction with these two key players, we don’t clearly and explicitly see what should evidently be their strategic objective.
We’ll get back to this shortly… a few days ago, during one of our microLABs, we encountered the first white fly in the history of microLABs: the first step in the microLABs is to get from our host the definition (or definitions) of productivity they use more or less daily to keep an eye on what’s happening.
We expected one of the variants of the hundreds of definitions we have collected, marked by the silence of the Hound of the Baskervilles (I’ll explain later), and were surprised and delighted, immediately jubilating our host for their verbatim response:
“Ratio between resources employed and commercially useful output Ratio between how many resources I use to generate something that gets paid for and how much I get paid for it”
It’s a “raw” answer; it doesn’t have the pompous form of the mathematical formulas of traditional productivity indices, nor their apparent clarity, but it’s flesh and blood: in the definitions, a “who” appears in “I get paid”—there’s someone who pays me, slightly weaker in “commercially useful.”
But we cannot doubt that in our host’s mind, when focusing on the “productivity” issue, the one who pays better, the one who PAYS US, comes into play. The proper name of WHO pays us can vary and does vary, a declension of a common name by grammatical analysis.
Our hound made quite a mess: I used the image of the Hound of the Baskervilles, taken from Sir Conan Doyle’s mysteries, to indicate the common trait of previous definitions collected from our guests, namely the absence of reference to the common name; the hound remains silent. A common name here I refuse to make explicit.
The refusal is motivated for me by the “banality” of the name in question; it’s inflated; I care about a certain stylistic decorum, don’t I?
Honestly, I think it’s also and above all due to my rural roots: that common name indicates the intruder, the stranger who appears in the yard a couple of times a year and negotiates with my dad the price of apples, pears, peaches, plums, apricots, imposing the percentage of tare on the delivered quintalage, the percentage of waste (value 5% of the “good”), the one to treat with smiles and good manners only to curse him under one’s breath once he leaves the yard.
And it disturbs, annoys, breaks the orderly unfolding of daily interactions: waking up, school, study, play for us kids, but in summer, it’s waking up, working in the fields, play-work with “the women,” the gathering was done by women, rarely was there a man; they tried to do better-paid jobs and often succeeded.
The “peasant” cultural code is so close to the primary, genetically inherited code—stranger=threat—that it largely overlaps… we cannot forget who we are or where we come from.
Important things are in the everyday, in the daily routines, knowing how to tire oneself as little as possible, not wasting the time of those working, persuading them not to fall behind, to keep up, at least as much as the others, without attacking (they will make you pay dearly), tolerating the chatter while hands move quickly, discouraging breaks and interruptions.
Farmers know and say it too: as long as we pay what we are asked for to buy what we need and take what we are given when we sell, we don’t get very far.
And the common name here unspoken is exactly the one indicating who gives us what they want, not what we deserve for our effort… the enemy, no more, no less.
Our host, immediately, without warning, without expressing particular sympathy for that common name, unlike all those before, puts it on the table right away.
And when we get to the Continuous Improvement step, it doesn’t surprise us too much that our host bursts out with, “I can’t stand Continuous Improvement; I find it useless, stupid, I am for disruptive improvement.”
Exception?
Yes, in words, we have never seen anyone so harshly slap Continuous Improvement in public… at least in words.
But we continue to see it with enormous regularity in deeds, that is, praising in words and immediately after acting the slap: it must be said, an entirely unconscious slap, NON-intentional; impossible to say here if it’s better or worse.
We had the “fortune” to closely share a piece of one of the improvement actions, part of what was planned to achieve a 50% increase in finished piece production, a two-million-euro investment to move a key machine from where it is to a different position, expected completion within 180 days.
The numbers were calculated well, the project presented to those who understand it was clear: this line modification will allow us to reach the goal, that’s the bottleneck to widen, and we’ll make it, the project is approved, the action has begun.
Good, right?
No.
Not from the point of view of Continuous Improvement: we can certainly call that action Improvement, it’s evident we can improve by 50% production and lead time, okay, but it’s not a child of Continuous Improvement; it’s rather a child of what our white fly host declared to be his preference, “disruptive improvement,” the fruit of a stroke of genius by someone pointing and saying, “Hey, there’s the bottleneck, just remove it, and we’re done!”
Could it have come from something else? How?
For me, it was exciting to accompany the Project Leader on a slightly more extensive reconnaissance, not only considering the problem of better using that beast in the meantime, which will end up in a different place from where it is now but also a piece of what’s before and a piece of what’s after… yes, improvement is needed and can be made there too, evidently.
At this point, we both had a sort of cathartic experience for different reasons but happily simultaneous: after some practice of identifying muda (Non-Value), he looked at me, surprised, worried, and bewildered, and said, “Look at this, by removing these muda, we can do much better and much more than moving the beast…”
Nothing strange in what he said, someone experienced like him had taken lean courses, experienced kaizen in a critical department years ago, receiving confirmations and accolades from sensei, and participated in two weeks of full-immersion work with a famous team… of course, he knew perfectly the muda, the classification of Non-Value, intellectually let’s say.
Using them on the gemba is another story.
Which, how many, what impact, the degree of removability estimated, etc., of the entire process he is responsible for? Oh no, I don’t know.
Here, my dear reader, is the abyss, the trap not to fall into: the path is NOT “let’s now analyze all the muda we find in the process.”
So what is the path?
First, let me tell you about my and the Project Leader’s catharsis: my partner, cautiously as if walking on eggshells, which struck me and later I greatly appreciated, asked the Project Leader, “So how did you identify precisely that form of improvement?”
The immediate, honest, and sincere answer was: “It has always given us a lot of problems, and everyone was fed up with it still being there; it used to serve a different process, and now it bothers us too much.”
The mood, the expression, was of someone who connected the pieces, at once happy and dejected, with the light to follow.
And I? Ach so! Not new neural software closer to scientific thinking, to the logic of lucid observation of what is Non-Value and what is Value, systematic and systemic PDCA, but the execution of “good old software” to protect and conserve and response to the incessant need to find confirmation of one’s good functioning, individual, group, department, management… once again.
And from there, from that sort of “virtual prison” of unnoticed slavery, we can redeem ourselves… once again.
I had seen it happen hundreds of times in multiple fields, even very different from each other, also different and far away: for my discipline, when facing new and unknown fields, I erase and ignore everything I think I know or at least I try very hard to do so, and it seems I succeed to some extent, I know I need confirmations of my good functioning, of my software’s good functioning, I try to curb the hunger, waiting for a more opportune and less dangerous moment.
And often the “right” moment arrives: ach so? Yes, sometimes I indulge in old memories; it’s said to be Immanuel Kant’s last words, spoken with the tone of someone surprised, delighted by what he finally found and understood. Ah, so that’s how it is! I’m fond of it…
What is the path then?
It is to recognize what is under our nose, what is this? Non-Value or Value, value or muda? By golly, look, it’s a MUDA.
Which, for us microkaizenists, means asking: and why isn’t there what should be there? What experiments can I do to achieve the target condition? Measures? Verifications? Actions? Follow-ups? Questions and issues are the good meaning of any muda, once recognized as such, as Non-Value; each muda is essentially a question seeking its answer.
Let’s return to our two officers and the unexpressed, untraceable, if not absent, strategic objective… if it is truly Continuous Improvement (what Toyota, Komatsu, Honda do…), then the strategic objective is to improve every day in the direction of making one’s organization STABLY CAPABLE OF CONTINUOUS IMPROVEMENT.
Isn’t it enough to improve? Eh no, unfortunately not, not to survive in a market economy like the one we deal with.
To our exquisite white fly host, I hope it will be pleasing to see that it is possible, that we are much more in tune than it might seem: we too are not okay with Continuous Improvement as we see it predominantly interpreted today; if we continue like this, the extinction of the fifth lean generation is inevitable (see Womack).
And so, to the current real interpretation of this Continuous Improvement, we too prefer Disruptive Improvement strictly MUDA-Based, which for us essentially coincides with the Scientific Method… our white fly host calls it logic; for us, it’s the same.