What is work 5.0?

Having spent more than three decades helping make improvements to the way human beings work together, the following enlightenment came to me:

The way we think about work as individuals, determines how we think we should work collectively.

The problem with this statement is, in my experience, for most individuals, our thinking on this matter is mostly flawed.

Through a combination of socialisation, education and sector specific working experiences, many people have no idea that there are significantly different ways to approach work. Fewer of us still understand that these different ways of working can lead to dramatically different outcomes. I am going to to assert that if only that knowledge was more widely spread, the resulting changes could make a difference to economies at the global level.

In my book Work 5.0 I propose five distinct models of human working 1.0 to 5.0

1.0 Artisanal - seldom connected individuals doing their own thing their own way

2.0 Craft - Individual working to common standards and principles

3.0 Push Flow - Division of labour with value flowing to build step-by-step

4.0 Pull Flow - As above but flow is triggered by demand and labour flexes to suit

5.0 Flexible Flow - Adhocracy with flexible teams used on demand

Each iteration has / does lead to measurably better outcomes for: People, Planet, Quality, Time and Financials (PPQTF) but most people are unaware of this. I also propose in my book that these five models should be seen as a progression along an evolutionary scale and one that all organisations have a choice to; either progress along (or not), or to make significant upgrades by skipping unnecessary evolutions.

A key hypothesis within the book is that many organisations do not realise this is even a choice, nor that their current paradigm has likely run its course in terms of performance. I routinely visit organisations where despite high levels of management attention, and heroic efforts from many, performance is either in slow decline, static, or not improving at anything like the rate emerging competition or market demands..

If your organisation and leadership team is engaged in lots of efforts, multiple initiatives and yet still has results that are not ‘moving-the-needle’ the chances are you are running up against the limits of the current working paradigm. If that is the case it is then a fools errand to continue as you are. Unlikely as it may seem, a fundamental upgrade to the way work is done will actually require less effort and gain superior results in a relatively short time. From work 1.0 - Artisanal working as individuals; through to the latest on-demand, flexible, flow based teamworking of work 5.0 most organsations are stuck somewhere in the middle.

The biggest problem for our advanced but stubbornly static economies is that largely, across every sector we are in a state of blind stasis. Flat productivity, unsustainable growth, poor morale and stress as the biggest work-based human illness proves this, yet, we are mostly ignorant as to how to see beyond the current paradigm.

Unless we can not only see these iterations intelligently, but also how to upgrade from one to another in any sector, it seems like we will get stuck in the status quo.

If you are curious to find out where you and your team are on this work-type upgrade model and where you could/should be: Contact us for our Work 5.0 executive team awareness day and a free copy of the book Work 5.0

Without being able to see how to do something - how can anyone expect anything in terms of results?

All over for the Lean Movement?

End of the road?

Longer Thought Piece:

At the end of the 1980’s The Toyota Motor Company raised eyebrows when it finally started to share its performance metrics with the rest of the automotive world. Toyota was not only better than all of the other players in the industry, it was; way, WAY, better. Initially their data triggered much in the way of patronising commentary, along with many false assumptions about how that performance was being achieved. Subsequent visitors to actual Toyota plants however were soon being treated to candid explanations for how they were doing it. The initial message could be summarised simply in the claim that, “We are Toyota we do things differently here”. These visits and explanations were, in hindsight, the first of many missed opportunities. To the the un-trained eye, especially at-a-glance, Toyota plants as they still do today, looked pretty much like any other car plant did at the time. As a young engineer I listened intently to the senior leaders from our Business who had undertaken such ‘Industrial Tourism’ visits to Japan - typically seeing Toyota or one of its first tier suppliers. Most of these envoys, who didn’t even understand our own manufacturing system at that time, came back singularly un-impressed. Much of that was saying more about their inability to ‘see’ any differences rather than any qualitative assessment of the superior businesses they had paid to visit. One particular comment I still remember like it was yesterday was: “They (Toyota supplier) are way behind us, our skills, machines and technology are far beyond theirs.” Right in that moment I remember thinking, if a senior leader from our business, whom I had trusted would be able to ‘see’ key information, had failed to see the massively superior productivity, quality, time based performance and deep engagement of ordinary workers in extraordinary rates of improvement then we were already in deep trouble.

How could that be?

In part therein lies one problem at the heart of The now called Lean movement. The Toyota Production System (TPS) and its foundational beliefs, The Toyota Way, require a fundamental enlightenment to actually see in full. Having done that, which few do, it also requires an honest contrast to what went before or one’s own workplace is doing right now. Only then can you honestly recognise its epoch making advances. To really get Lean deeply, such that you become fully enlightened, you can only do so by doing an upgrade yourself...

When Toyodaism was codified and re-presented to the world almost a decade later it was in an attempt to mainstream knowledge of the different ways that Toyota Worked. The book Lean Thinking by Jim Womack & Dan Jones [August 1996] sought to explain from their observed first principles. What had actually amounted to a major upgrade to the normal way the automotive industry worked. The Toyota Way was a new post-Ford model. Toyodaism, which is this authors term created in deference to the Toyoda family, was enough of an upgrade to warrant a new status in the way all humans could work. Few outside the sector however embraced the opportunity.

In my most recent book - Work 5.0 ; Work 4.0 or Toyodaism (popularly known as Lean) I consider as the 4th great evolution of human work. However, even now, some four decades on from its first appearance outside its inventors organisation, the true potential of Lean remains barely tapped at all.

Why Is that?

When Toyota made its first pioneering journey of transformation it started in truly extraordinary circumstances and also at a highly relevant but always under reported starting point. In hindsight many of the circumstances Toyota faced have not been present within the many organisations seeking to recreate a so-called Lean Transformation for themselves.

Consider the following:

Firstly, Toyota had had a very damaging 16 week strike which was caused by a do-or-die post-war efficiency drive. This had been conducted via traditional time and motion study based efforts and had cost many Toyota people their jobs and mental wellbeing. The strike was called as a direct result of this efficiency drive. The strike was only ended when the company president metaphorically fell-on-his-sword by standing down and made a solemn pledge. This pledge was that if the strike was ended, no worker in Toyota would ever lose their job as a result of improvements being made.

Secondly, with the post-war entry of Western Automakers into Japan, Toyota had a compelling need for change, an urgent compete or die mission, to improve their comparatively poor performance. No one in the company, leader or worker alike, could ignore the gravity of the situation.

Thirdly, having already embraced the founders technological innovation of Jidoka (automatically stopping machines when a defects occurred and therefore leaving automatic machines to run without a full-time human observer), Toyota created a unique take on, the way things should be made. Unlike the obsession with worker ‘busyness’ and economies of scale that most of the industry had, Toyota people were already programmed to, stop work immediately when defects occurred and to fix problems at source via teams working on problems in real-time. This was in direct contrast to the industry norm where problems were taken off-line and solved later by others. In short “the more we stop (and fix things at source) the better we get” belief was unique to Toyota.

Fourthly, Toyota executives themselves personally drove the companies transformational response to their post-war challenge. They did so by re-laying out their workflow in a series of Kaikaku (Strategic Step Changes). Working with trade associations like the Japanese Management Association, adopting the teachings of W.E. Deming and via the guidance of consultants like Shigeo Shingo, their long term transformational journey was in sharp contrast to western managements orthodoxy of delegation and the pursuit of quick fixes.

Fifth, but not finally, Toyota created a human centred system by mobilising and teaching its entire workforce the fundamental principles of their vision. What they were able to see was the difference between wasteful and value-adding work and how flow based working and root cause problem solving could in the long term give an advantage. This whole team approach was done to both, cement the Kaikaku enabled building blocks of transformational change done by leaders, and to empower a team based incremental improvement ethos called Kaizen (Many small improvements) initiated by the workers themselves.

With this unique approach to the way work should be done and improved continuing for well over three decades. Toyota used their step-change improvement approach to create a real leaps forward with each new model. Its production and supply chain flows were each laid out, knowing that the workforce would build on that via continuous incremental improvements thereafter. Toyota has, since then, continued to work on its unique; backwards-thinking, counterintuitive, self-healing and self improving system as originally envisaged by Kiichiro Toyoda’s twin ideals of Jidoka attitude and Just-In-Time working.

The Just-In-Time system of people, plant and processes aims for an uninterrupted flow of value along with the lowest, class leading levels of working capital. By its very design, JIT automatically stops and shows leaders and their teams the next biggest problem that needs solving. Indeed, as long as you remember to first create flow, the system itself along with motivated staff becomes the manager of its own improvement. Eiji Toyoda has to be given huge credit for then taking the reins from Kichiiro and sticking with and continuing to drive the system forward. Instead of stopping at every problem and reasoning that Just-In-Time would never work, he realised that it was in seeking to overcome every problem, that ultimately genuine underlying performance would get better quicker. To this day I still see people giving up on Lean / Just-In-Time / Toyodaism, often right after learning its key principles and encountering the first problems they can think of. Many do so entirely intellectually in their own heads before ever trying it. “That will never work here” must have been heard many times by Kiichiro & Eiji and over decades too!
So ,what made them persevere?

Answer: They had no choice, they had to make it work. The threat of their competition was ever present and ready to eat them up.

People in the middle of Lean transformations often ask me: “When will the tipping point come? When will our new way of working sustain itself without reverting back to the old way?

The quick answer these days is “when the pain of pursuing the new way is clear and obviously less painful than the rose-tinted memories of the old way of doing things”. Realistically this takes about three years with a strong and relentless pace of top-down / bottom-up transformation.

So with all that said it is no coincidence that Toyota, almost uniquely, kept a leadership and workforce alike engaged in solving underlying problems such that their counterintuitive way of organising work became their new normal. To do this and for it to endure, they have had to have now four generations of leaders commit to the approach and to never ever let-up on making it the way they do things.

So, apart from a few limited examples outside of Toyota where a so-called Lean transformation has endured beyond a leadership change and some partial aspects having been adopted in other sectors - Noticeably - Just In Time Logistics, I would claim that the full potential for Lean Thinking has remained lamentably unfulfilled.

This leaves the following question, is it ever going to be possible to see a wholesale adoption of Lean Thinking?

This author remains sceptical for the following reasons:

Why?
Although the knowledge has superficially existed for more than thirty years, much of it has been watered down through either: increasingly complex derivations of the basic principles and at the same time number of people available with the ability to teach from first principles at an enterprise level has not grown at the rate required. The former has increased steadily with every newly minted internet enabled Lean Expert and the latter has in been in steady decline during the same timeframe due to old age and retirement.

Why has the knowledge taken the path it has?

1. When the Knowledge of Lean came to the west in the 1980’s our teachers were either current, or ex-senior leadership post holders. As well as these executives there were also the creative elders of the Toyota system and their Keiretsu (business network) disseminating the knowledge. As a result most were either close to retirement or indeed already retired from the very organisation they had transformed. This first generation of teachers were what this author calls the actual architects, builders and transformers of the system. They were the ones that physically re-configured their own conventional factory layouts for flow and built pull systems in intensive step-change focussed Kaikaku events. They were the ones who then connected these changes and had to create practical solutions like, Team based problem solving, Kanbans and Jidoka devices to make the new way or work succeed. The next generation were equally committed to these new ways of working, having seen the benefits but in my personal experience, were now more the sustainers and incremental improvers of the system. They were, as a result, through no fault of their own, noticeably lacking when it came to guiding radical transformational change. So whilst these new generation of teachers were fully competent to facilitate and teach ongoing Kaizen, few could guide leaders through the fundamental end-to-end upgrade drive via Kaikaku. This critical knowledge gap between the two was already there by the 1990’s

2. As Lean Thinking broke cover and went from an underground thing of a few organisations doing transformation under the guidance of the elders mentioned above, the Leader-read-a-book effect, and traditional consultancy approaches took over. In the west in particular, Lean Thinking became a victim of western leaderships propensity for delegation and also to hire the cheapest help it could find in the lowest cost quote traditions. This was, an instinctive but fatal error of judgement in most cases. With the responsibility for transformation now delegated to those with the least power to enable it, many tasked with such work, found it an impossible task. Lean Thinking’s core ideals, as proved by the limited number of success cases, are very leadership intensive to implement and require multi-year, cross-functional focus. In short, to do the heavy lifting of lean transformation, you have to do so despite the typical organisation structure and existing ways of doing things. That takes leadership at every level and that, in this authors experience, means that almost everyone involved has to act at least a half-step above their current pay grade to ensure success. People prepared to do this are again in vanishingly short supply.

3. Next, the lack of what I call stop-its within the majority of Lean transformations mean that instead of Lean Principles proving the truth of the name, many organisations, once they have made some transformation, fail to actively capitalise on it. The best way to do this is to increase demand by selling the benefits of higher capability to customers. This is best done by selling increased speed of response, higher quality and better value. The resulting growth avoids the short term instinct for downsizing but at the same time we must actively remove the old ways of working instead of leaving them lying around ‘just-in-case’. This is common all over improvement practices not just with Lean per se. What does the new way allow us t remove?

Without freeing up existing capacity for growth, further improvement cannot take place. Without leaders attending to these specifics of transformation it means that the sustaining aspects such as; find a problem, stop, swarm, study, and improve becomes optional. If that happens the gains will be marginal at best. This critical follow-through can only be pursued with continued leadership attention and hands-on engagement.

4. Without a burning platform and a do-it-to-survive reason for transformation, the initial hard yards often seem too high a price to pay and soon people talk themselves out of transformation before they have even started. The majority of leaders in the current world of work are not transformational leaders, they are Managers. Many Managers will do anything for a quiet life and most have a short term tenure view of their career. As long as, not much goes wrong on their watch, that is seen as success for most. Transformational leaders on the other hand are in much shorter supply. They are mission driven towards significant transformations and step-change and therefore view success more by the lasting legacy they leave rather than the day-to-day.

5. Finally, in this admittedly limited list of failure modes, the pandemic and its, do we do remote working or not-do remote working debate has taken inquiry and demand for new ways of working down a bit of a narrow cul-de-sac. Yet again we seem to be at another juncture that presents the way we work as a mere style, or personal preference choice, rather than a qualitative and quantitive selection to be made.
If you and critically your customers you serve, are happy with the outcomes that working at lower levels of human working such as 1.0 to 2.0 create then to work remote or not hardly seems to matter at all. If however you feel like you are always running to stand still and sense that you need to be working at a higher levels (4.0 and above) to compete and achieve goals then a work upgrade path is urgent and vital.

And so what of the initial question - Is it allover for the Lean Movement?

I would say yes, in the current form, with the current knowledge base missing so many of the vital elements and the lack of people of the calibre required to make sustainable improvement, we need a more comprehensive way of upgrading the way things are done that has forever results. Places where work 1.0/2.0/3.0 are the norm will be likely wiped out in many sectors before they realise “what happened?” and only those that consciously upgrade holistically will survive.

In areas where work 4.0 (Lean) has already evolved to work 5.0, the lean movement has been built upon, but now in some ways been left behind. As so-called Agile Working and an On-Demand Economy better serves customers it means that some form of hybrid working may well become the norm for most workers. Again we have to have a much better way of getting there and ensuring that we don’t simply create hybrid versions of lower forms of working.

With new start-ups it is vital that they do not have to go through any unnecessary lower evolutions of work as quicker more enlightened competitors will inevitably start with more advance models and get there first. Starting at work 5.0 should be a deliberate act for any new start-up designing its business model.

So where does all that leave the Lean Movement?

There are now a multitude of Lean initiatives ongoing and an excess of Lean Consulting companies to serve them buried in the middle of organisations doing Kaizen activities here and there. Typically working with internal change agents instead of the leadership, both produce results and positive change but nothing like what is possible or sustainable for the long term. No surprise then that such work seldom connects together in a rational way, nor shows tangible results at the P&L level. Sure the celebrations at the end of these activities fill the internal magazines and create warm feelings but the end customers and wider stakeholders mostly feel nothing. I call this the Ghettos Of Excellence problem.

With flat-lining economies and productivity being static for decades, it is time we go beyond this current state of affairs and take more holistic approaches to upgrading work that get results at a meaningful level and ultimately are more sustainable and speak to more than just limited process process improvements.

If you would like to continue the discussion in the light of your own workplace and Work 5.0 feel free to contact us.

Project Work, Gantt Charts and Work 5.0

When work is not repetitive, how do we optimise the workflow and reduce waste?

Henry Gantt was a contemporary and colleague of FW Taylor [The father of Scientific Management]. In 1887 Gantt joined Taylor in applying Scientific Management principles at Midvale Steel and Bethlehem Steel. He worked there with Taylor until 1893. It was however in his later career as a consultant that he created the Gantt chart for which he is most known today. There is however an almost catastrophic misunderstanding around his most famous invention. Gantt never used the charts for any kind of project work. The initial problem he was seeking to solve was to find a way of showing visually the flow of materials through a manufacturing facility. For this purpose the chart was ideal. All it had to show was an overall deterministic process based on a series of known durations for the individual discrete processes required. In such situations inconsistencies and differences such as batch sizes and lead-times are known overall but create float and variation. With the Gantt chart you could see what was possible and impossible and therefore target where improvement, if any, should be made. When, some time after this use case was established, people asked Gantt whether his charts would have any utility for managing projects he suggested not. His reasoning at the time was “As soon as the plan is made, it will likely become very quickly out-of-date” and the historical record shows that Gantt never used his charts for such a purpose. Even when he had a seemingly strong case to do so - he was tasked with managing performance in building the US liberty ships - he suggested that “a better measure of performance and progress would be something simple like the number of rivets driven”. Having been intrigued by the disdain for Gantt chart based project plans in my early experiences within technical projects, I soon found that most technical staff treated any form of project management like ‘homeopathy’ and of questionable added value. Project managers whose careers started in production tended to believe the project staff were being deliberately evasive and obtuse but over time, when I got into the work, being obsessed with how people work collectively I began to see the real flaws and understood why people thought the way they did.

I can summarise these insights as follows:

1) What makes projects distinct from regular, repetitive, recurring and routine work is that projects at their outset always contain (currently) unknown work that requires time for discovery and exploration before the full extent of the project is understood. Very often the required time and work required to achieve this is compromised by both, organisation structures and time based pressures, to get more tangible things done to give a concrete impression of progress.

2) I soon learned that most project Gantt charts unwittingly encourage the wrong things being done at the wrong times and don’t facilitate what really adds value. This is especially true in two key areas of the work.

3) I witnessed first hand that the switch from face-to-face negotiated team working to the phenomenon I called ‘technical tennis’ enabled by e:mail, was seemingly invisible to the Gantt chart. In short, people who would have previously reached a compromise quickly via real-time, real-world dialogue could now engage in ‘technical tennis’ matches facilitated by a new low bandwidth form of communication. I soon saw project timelines stretch out and nothing within the project management orthodoxy or the Gantt chart and individual task lists could stop it.

4) Thinking it was a behavioural issue I pioneered the use of multi-disciplinary team-working in a single open spaces which had some benefits but also lead to a lot of unnecessary costs due to ‘technical tourism’. I realised we had to create and plan the required flow in new way distinct from the Gantt chart and the then project management orthodoxy.

We started by seeking to understand what the actual work was and concluded the following:

There are 5 distinct project work type elements:

a) Flow of Discoveries

b) Flow of Decisions

c) Flow of Definitions so that

d) The flow of physical Doing tasks could take place

e) Throughout the above a flow of Documentation

We also learned that unlike the Gantt chart temptation, any chance to sequence any of the above concurrently must be resisted until:

We identify the multi-disciplinary-team required for the most efficient flow of each distinct work element. Each work element must be designed to be executed by an optimal team specific to the task. Only when you see the demands this flow of work places upon the people as the critical resource can you begin to see if things can be done in parallel without introducing lots of wasteful activities downstream. With regard to timelines we were able to use 5D to see at-a-glance where breakthroughs were needed in order to secure the time based performance of any project. To date every project planned and executed by 5D has delivered on-time, cost, quality and morale.

We have also used the 5D template for senior leaders to manage work upgrade transformation itself to great effect reducing the need for complex X-matrix style policy deployment.

If you would like to learn more about creating dramatic improvement within project work please contact us for a free senior leadership overview of the method and your role within project performance transformation.

Succesful Enterprise Upgrades - People

There comes a time in all leadership careers when you realise that sticking with the existing paradigm, no matter how hard you and your team work, will not create the level of success expected of you and your organisation. Reaching the natural end of a work-type-paradigm is something I have seen often and is hard enough in itself but nowadays we are increasingly competing with customer expectations coming from different paradigms and sectors. This means that for many people succeeding under the current way of working is ultimately impossible.

As we increasingly live in an on-demand world where, for many, delivery tomorrow is expected as a the norm, in stark contrast there are so many parts of our lives that are stubbornly lagging behind. Being obviously rooted in previous paradigms not only creates intensive customer dissatisfaction but in extreme cases things are actually getting worse and regressing over time.

How can this be and how can we change things before its too late?

The first is to start working on our fundamental beliefs with regard to human beings and our reaction to change. Much of what we think about change is unsurprisingly base around our perception of it. I like to think of three types of change and two ways of dealing with it.

Type 1: Change that is clearly change for the better

We see it understand it and embrace it because even from a cursory glance its is a ‘no-brainer’

Type 2: Change that is better on-the-whole but from a localised view the juice doesn’t look worth the squeeze. We see it often, don’t understand it in context and so we have to work to minimise the local impact to get the greater gain

Type 3: Change that is not better and will clearly make life worse for all

How we deal with change: Depends on our life experiences of change. If we have had good experiences of negotiating change we most likely:

A) Embrace it as a necessary constant in life and seek to work within it

Or if we have had bad experiences or can see flaws in proposed change we likely:

B) Resist it and / or seek to negotiate through it.

In general people LOVE change - the evidence is everywhere of people initiating and managing changes throughout their lives - generally HATE being changed, especially if that is change for the worse.

LOCERN is all about understanding this and ensuring that the upgrades it helps make happen endeavour to be positive changes for all.