Articles

Let’s start again from three, buoyed by the results we’ve achieved in these first two years of experimenting with the new method that enables continuous generation and increase in productivity and margins.

We’ve changed some things, but the fundamentals of our work remain stable and affirmed.

• What not to do: do not copy, do not import, unless it adds value or removes non-value from processes and systems.
• What to do: daily hunt for non-value, daily actions to eliminate or reduce it, oversee the generation of value and daily actions to increase the value generated.
• How to do it: find and enable support where we are; the support indispensable to any organizational protagonist (and we all are), enable ourselves to support, to be the support for another, another protagonist.

The words are simple, the actions are not: we’ve also had to change the words we use to describe things, to avoid remaining trapped in old, limping, and misunderstood imported words like muda, value stream, senpai, kohai, sigma, which have clouded our vision for decades.

Let’s focus on the real processes, let’s ignore the gemba; it sounds cool to know and use it, but it muddles the mind, which is often confused on its own, a normal state in our glittering world: let’s go where things happen, observe what happens, not the reports, those as little as possible, fully aware that being able to see what’s there, the things, the actions, to accurately identify what is value and what is non-value, is hard.

It’s not easy to change the thinking that guides action, that decides, before we realize it, what is important and what is not, the why and the meaning of what we can no longer observe, to see it for what it is.

Everyone remains disappointed and angry when they discover that the value percentage of any production process, of tangible and intangible goods, is ridiculously small compared to the percentage of non-value, of ‘unbillable’: yet, without this lucid and ruthless awareness, we cannot improve, progress, generate continuously increasing margins, increasing productivity.

But we manage, we succeed, we are increasingly and more effectively able to recognize that each day presents us with a ‘new reality’, different from how we saw it yesterday, every piece we see poses a question that deserves our answer. The questions, fundamentally, are four:

1. How do I remove this non-value?
2. How do I increase this value?
3. How can I be a good support for the other, for the protagonist?
4. How do I ensure that my support realizes with me, the protagonist, a good performance today, a good day, today?

And it is formidable to find, every day, that we can do it, we can manage, and that this is a source of great satisfaction, perhaps even more important than productivity and margins… let’s be clear, without maybe, this is more important than productivity and margins, much more, this is the engine.

Productivity, marginality… those are just side effects