“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
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We offer these events called “Gemba Visits”. It’s a chance for our member organizations to “go see” what others are doing. They are pretty popular and we’d like for them to be done well - people expect us to be the examples of the good application of lean.
After each visit we ask ourselves “how did that go?” and “what could we do to make the next one better?” We ask our customers the same thing. We’ve gotten more specific about how we do this - see the diagram below. Part of our standard work.
Lots to say about this (especially when, and when not, to adjust), but I might save that for a future reflection. But I want to say more about step 1 - tell the host organization what a “great visit” looks like.
Our team did some brainstorming on the attributes of a “great gemba visit”, then we organized them into the 4 categorical principles of the Shingo “house” model which describes the 10 guiding principles of lean we are trying to follow. That description was put into the diagram below:
Very nice! That ought to do it. We’ll share this with each host organization up front and show them what great looks like and we’ll be more likely to get great gemba visits.
But we soon realized that we needed to do more at step 5 - when we asked our host organization and our HVN team to describe (measure) how well we did in each of these categories.
This exercise reminded me of a presentation by Tom Nolan (who was one of the people who worked very closely with Dr. Deming years ago). In the presentation, Tom described how he and his wife would try to get an understanding about how their 2 sons were doing in school. ”How’s it going in chemistry?”, they would ask. ”Fine”, their sons replied. ”How’s it going with that new math teacher?” ”Fine”, they said. Always, the answer was “fine”. When report card time came there were always surprises. What’s with this D in english? So, Tom and his wife had some data when they asked their son’s - fine, fine, fine. But there was no variation and very little chance to dig deeper. Tom devised a simple data collection tool that they could use each week for with their sons. For each topic, there were three choices on the question: How much help do you need on this - none, a little, a lot. When they tried this, they got more variation and more discussion. They then knew how things were really going and what they needed to do to help. The power was in the discussion, not in the score.
So, we tried an experiment with our gemba visit feedback and came up with what we thought would be a useful survey. Here’s a picture of what some of the questions looked like on the survey.
So, we got some data and it told us something and produced more discussion about what a great gemba visit looked like. The point was not the score, the point was (and is) to understand what great looks like. (Prior to this, we would ask people, “How did that gemba visit go?” ”Fine”, they would respond.)
But, we needed to do more. It became apparent that we needed some operational definitions (another Deming term - actually, attributed to Walter Shewhart) about what we meant at each level. So, our team has done some more work on this and now we have some definitions at each level. Here’s a picture of what that looks like.
So, we are getting closer and I thin our discussions about what “great” look like will be a lot more meaningful. Stay tuned as we test the use of these definitions against our survey.
