“gemba walk” (lean thinking term) to go to the actual place where value is added + “walkabout” (Australian aborigine) a short period of wandering bush life engaged as an occasional interruption of regular work
———————————————————————————————————-
When Dr. T. makes a powerpoint presentation, he always features hand-made videos of staff applying lean thinking. One of the most powerful videos is a VP and manager talking at a visual management board. The VP asks “do you have any quality problems with patients?”. The manager responds, “I’m so excited! I’ve got a red dot!”. She points to a graph which shows that there was a problem with a patient’s medication yesterday. On the video, they trace through the problem-solving and current state.
Dr. T points out that most of us would not be excited about showing a red dot to our boss. We want everything to be green all the time. On a recent visit to an organization last week, Dr. T. said, “when I look at a visual board and I don’t see about 50% red, that tells me there is a problem”. I am reminded of the quote attributed to John Shook and his work at NUMMI plant, when the Sensai stated “no problem is a problem”.
We’ve been trained for years and years and years that green is good, red is bad. We’ve been rewarded for green and punished for red. I think we simply don’t believe people when they say “red is good”. I think it’s more complex than that.
We had a gemba visit at one of our member organizations and they showed us the work they were doing on daily management boards. Good work. The boards showed green dots and red dots. You could tell people were proud of the green, apologized for the red and there was not a lot of excitement about digging deeper to get to root causes.
Our team meets frequently during these gemba visits and we had a discussion at the end of the first night to review the day. There were green dots, but also a lot of red ones. We acknowledged that this made us uncomfortable. We want everything to be green - all “5s” on the evals. But we talked through the causes, what we could have done to improve the process and what we could be doing to minimize similar mistakes at upcoming gemba visits. We too are driven by strong systems to avoid talking about red dots.
I think about the 10 guiding shingo principles and in particular “seek perfection”, “focus on process” and “embrace scientific thinking”. It takes real effort (and humility) to realize we have red dots and to see them as something that is good - that will help us learn. It’s easy to focus on people, not the process.
