A client CEO recently suggested he wanted to demonstrate his commitment to the company’s Process Excellence efforts by participating as a team member in one of the organization’s next Lean Events. This approach is fairly common. Executives often participate in Green Belt courses, some will act as Executive Sponsors for one or more projects led by Belts within their organization, and a few will even lead their own DMAIC projects. These types of highly visible activities usually result in the intended increase of organizational change momentum, but it is often only short lived.  Why?  Because the Executives are only “walking the walk.”

Oftentimes after the act of demonstrating their commitment, except for the occasional progress review, organization leaders revert back to their old familiar behaviors and work routines. They delegate the pursuit of Process Excellence to those beneath them in the organizational hierarchy. For Process Excellence to weave deep and permanent roots in an organization, leaders need to do more than “walk the walk,” they need to “live the life.”

“Living the life” entails making Process Excellence (including Lean and Six Sigma) a part of everything you do.  It includes:

• Personally striving to continually improve the efficiency and effectiveness of all your daily activities.
• Employing Process Excellence as the primary vehicle for achieving the organization’s strategic objectives.
• Utilizing Process Excellence concepts to improve decision making, such as applying the Pareto principle to focus on the critical few items; responding appropriately to special-cause and common-cause variation; asking to see the statistical significance when someone says “something has happened;” and drilling down to identify deep root causes rather than fixing symptoms of poor performance.
• Continuing to investment in Process Excellence, even when times are tough.
• Rigorously monitoring Process Excellence progress and results, and taking appropriate action to improve performance when necessary.
• Linking a large component of company leaders’ compensation to the internalization and effective application of Process Excellence within their organizations.

To gain a better understanding of how much, as a leader, you “live” the values needed to sustain Process Excellence - or Lean Six Sigma - success, download and complete the assessment contained in the following link:

http://proficiencysystems.com/media/Leadership_Self_Assessment_Form%20v1.0%20(090608)_.pdf

Identifying deep, root causes of poor performance is one of the key tasks that project teams encounter as they work to improve process or product performance. In my experience, the most commonly identified root cause - by far - is “lack of training.”  Unfortunately, “lack of training” is not a root cause; instead, it points to a solution.

The problem with listing a potential solution as a root cause is that it can lead to the implementation of something that doesn’t significantly impact the performance of the process - “more training,” for instance, without exploring other solutions that would lead to improvement.  I am willing to bet that as a reader of this blog, you have seen resources (time and money) spent on training, with little or no resulting improvement.

To see the impact that limiting solution options too early can have, let’s first identify the true root cause. When someone says, “The problem is caused by a lack of training,” I ask, “So why would additional training help?”  The answer typically is, “It would help ensure they have the proper skills and understanding to do the job.”  There’s the root cause - insufficient skills and understanding, rather than a lack of training.

Now that the root cause has been identified, are there more solution options beyond just training? How about simplifying the process or product to lower the level of skills required? How about implementing mistake-proofing methods to make it impossible to do something incorrectly? How about implementing clear, easily understandable visual work instructions that can be used as a guide when doing the work?   Etc. Etc.

I’m not saying that training is never an appropriate solution, but look at the additional options that open up when you first start with a root cause, rather than a preconceived solution.

Last week’s blog entry discussed John Kotter’s new book “A Sense of Urgency.”  In the book, Kotter states that a key component in creating a true urgency for change is the relentless purging of non-important activities.  While he may not have realized it, this links directly to a key continuous improvement concept, the Pareto Principle.

The Pareto Principle, sometimes known as the 80/20 rule, is based on the common natural occurrence in which a large proportion of effects result from a critical few causes.  While the concept first gained popularity as a tool to help improve product and process quality - 80 percent of defects result from 20 percent of the causes - In today’s complicated and fast-paced world, it is proving to be an extremely flexible and powerful management tool that can be applied to many situations.

For instance, in his 2007 bestselling book “The 4-Hour Workweek,” Tim Ferriss employs the Pareto Principle when he recommends firing the 80 percent of your customers who take up the majority of your time and focusing on the 20 percent who make up the majority of your profits.

The Pareto Principle can be applied in almost any situation where there are a large number of items vying for attention - part SKUs, software bugs, potential Lean Six Sigma projects, change related activities, etc.  In these cases, treating every item with equal importance can overwhelm the system and make it difficult to make any progress.  Instead, apply the Pareto Principle so the critical few items receive the vast majority of attention.  The time and energy that would have been spent on the trivial many can now be fully focused on the things that really matter, resulting in the most impact with the least amount of effort.

I suggest using the Pareto Principle as an ongoing reminder to spend your time and energy on things that are really important.  Don’t just work hard, work hard on the right things.

At the peak of this election season and the ongoing financial crisis, the call for change seems to be everywhere. As a reader of this blog, it is very likely that you are also focused on change within your organization - moving from the current state to one where Lean and Six Sigma principles are interwoven into the fabric of your company, and your processes are performing at the highest levels of quality and efficiency. But what is the most important factor in driving real change?

In his most recent book, A Sense of Urgency, Harvard professor and respected change expert John Kotter argues that “urgency” - as the title suggests - is the single most important factor leading to true, positive change. Interestingly, Kotter splits urgency into two categories:

1. A False Sense of Urgency:  Depicted by lots of energetic activity, with people running from meeting to meeting, creating endless PowerPoint presentations, and managing long action item lists. These people appear to want to abandon the status quo and seem to have a high sense of urgency; however, more often than not this behavior is driven more out of past failures or some form of intense pressure put on them. People in this environment tend to feel angry, frustrated, anxious and tired. While there is lots of activity, it is often focused on protecting themselves or pointing the blame at others, rather than a disciplined, productive focus on real issues and opportunities.  … Hmm, this sounds a lot like the behavior of the U.S. Congress during the recent Wall Street bailout issue.

2. A True Sense of Urgency:  Depicted by an alert, fast-moving approach, highly focused on the most important external (marketplace) issues. It is also accompanied by a relentless and ongoing purging of non-important activities to free up people and other resources to focus on what matters, without burning them out. People in this environment feel highly energized and have a deep desire to move and win, now.

Based on Kotter’s research, he views a false sense of urgency to be just as insidious as complacency in preventing true change from taking hold.

So how do you increase true urgency? Kotter suggests that while it can start with giving everyone the necessary important facts, it needs to go further. By connecting to people’s emotions, it’s possible to win over their hearts as well as their minds. He lays out four key tactics to build emotional buy-in, leading to a true sense of urgency:

1. Bring the Outside in:  Ensure that external opportunities and hazards are consistently made visible to all, using emotionally compelling video, people and data.
2. Behave with Urgency Every Day: Don’t act content, angry or anxious. Instead, demonstrate - as visibly as possible — an ongoing consistent sense of urgency in all of your actions and communications.
3. Find Opportunity in Crises:  Look at the “glass is half-full” side of crises to find opportunity rather than pending disaster.
4. Deal with the NoNos: Remove or neutralize all the urgency-killers - not the people who are healthy skeptics, but those who are determined to maintain the status quo and potentially create false urgency.

While Kotter doesn’t explicitly state it, his focus on relentless prioritization of activities, as part of true urgency, links directly to the use of the key quality tool, the Pareto Principle..  I’ll talk more about that in next week’s blog entry.

For now, you can click on the following link to learn more about Kotter’s new book:

Kotter, John P., A Sense of Urgency, Boston, MA, Harvard Business Press, 2008