Buy the Mountain Side:

I enjoy learning about Japanese culture. I recently learned about the Horyuji Temple in Japan. The temple was founded in AD 607. This is said to be the oldest standing wooden structure in the world. This temple was completely restored over a span of 51 years by the Nishioka family and was completed by Tsunekazu Nishioka in 1985. In an interview given in 1985, the master carpenter Nishioka shared a great lesson.

“When building a temple, don’t buy trees, buy a mountain side.” He explained this as an unwritten principle given to him by his ancestors. He explained that a temple’s wood should come from a single location such that the wood can be positioned in the same orientation as the original trees – beams from the trees from north side of the mountain should go on the north side of the temple, and so on.

Each tree, shaped by its soil and decades of wind and rain, has a unique personality, artisans say. The builder, then, must understand and exploit these traits. Trees twisting slightly to the right should be used in conjunction with those twisting left, so that in the end the sum of the forces is zero.

This is a profound thought, and this applies to Teamwork. Everybody in a team works together and brings out the best in themselves and the team. Teamwork is a section of the “Respect for People” pillar of the Toyota Way 2001. In the Japanese culture, the sense of harmony is an important aspect. There is a strong effort to work together. Toyota was able to bring this regional attribute across the globe through Toyota Way 2001. Toyota strengthens their employee base through continuous mentoring and involvement. A team succeeds only when everyone understands the common goal and works collectively towards it. Toyota is able to achieve this and the end result is minimal resistance in their pursuit towards True North.

In an interview in 2007 with Yuki Funo, the chairman and CEO of Toyota Motor Sales USA, Funo also discussed the importance of teamwork with the supplier base. Toyota was entering into a new relationship with an axle supplier. The supplier was flabbergasted when Toyota awarded the contract to the supplier without any discussion about prices. The contract was awarded strictly based on the supplier’s processes and quality review. The supplier was not used to that.

“Toyota’s thinking based on the Toyota Way is teamwork with suppliers. This teamwork is going to be a long-lasting relationship. Price is only one element. Trust is a more important element. The relationship is a sharing concept, and should always be win-win. Price is important, too. But trust is perhaps more so.”

“In the church when you get married, the priest or minister doesn’t ask each partner how much each will get from the other in terms of money. You’re asked about how well you get along. What is your commitment to one another? Now, in real-life situations, some companies practice this, and some don’t.”

Final Words:

Tsunekazu Nishioka’s advice is perhaps the best advice I have heard about Teamwork – Everybody aligned in the right direction resulting in optimum results. There is a strong undercurrent of systems thinking in this. I will finish with a story I heard about 3 electricians who were working on the Apollo spacecraft:

A reporter was watching the three electricians work. He watched them intently for some time and asked each person what they were doing.

“I am inserting transistors in to circuits”, said the first person.

“I am soldering this wire”, said the second person.

“I am helping to put a man on the moon”, said the third person.

Always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Hot Dog!

Hot Dog!

One of my favorite quotes from Eiji Toyoda, former President of Toyota, is;

“Don’t think mechanically. Even a dry towel can produce water when ideas are conceived.”

Eiji was talking about Kaizen. Toyota talks about “There is always a better way”. This is the spirit of kaizen…reaching higher and challenging ourselves to find a better way in everything we do… every single day.

I recently relistened to a Freaknomics podcast called “A Better Way to Eat”. In the podcast, the host Stephen Dubner talked with Takeru Kobeyashi, a Japanese competitive eater now living in America. When Kobi, as he is called by his fans, came into the field, the world record was 25 and 1/8^th hot dogs in 12 minutes. Kobi blew the record out of water with his first appearance in the Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest, held every July Fourth on Coney Island in New York. Kobi ate 50 hot dogs in the same amount of time, almost doubling the record. The contest has been going on for over 40 years and Kobi completely broke the paradigm. Many people were in denial and some even accused Kobi of doping.

In Dubner’s opinion, Kobi looked at the problem differently thus changing the field of competitive eating forever. The question that others were tackling was – how can I maximize the number of hot dogs I eat? The question that Kobi looked at was – how can I make one hot dog easier to eat?

Putting my Lean glasses on, this made me think about the mass production versus one-piece flow production paradigm. The thinking at that time was to simply eat more hot dogs without analyzing the process. Kobi, however focused on eating one hot dog and making that process easier. Kobi researched the sport and came up with several strategies that gave him a superior edge over the competition. Some of his strategies were to split the hot dog into two and eat with both hands; and the other was to dunk the bun into water, squeeze it into a ball and gulp it down. The splitting of the hot dog came to be known as the “Solomon Method” after the story of King Solomon who settled a maternity dispute by saying that he would cut a baby in half. Several competitors started copying Kobi’s strategies and were able to double their eating intake resulting in improved performances.

In the podcast, Kobi gave the following advice about breaking the more than 40 year old artificial barrier;

I think the thing about human beings is that they make a limit in their mind of what their potential is. They decide I’ve been told this, or this is what society tells me, or they’ve been made to believe something. If every human being actually threw away those thoughts and they actually did use that method of thinking to everything the potential of human beings is great, it’s huge, compared to what they actually think of themselves. That is a factor that…If everyone could use it for everything, everything could be much better.

Final Words:

There is a similar lesson from Jesse Itzler, author of Living with a SEAL: 31 Days Training with the Toughest Man on the Planet. The lesson is as follows;

When your mind is telling you you’re done, you’re really only 40 percent done.

Always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Toyota, The Green Tomato.

Toyota, the Green Tomato:

Toyota is referred to as the #1 car manufacturer in the world today. Toyota sold 10.15 million vehicles worldwide in 2015 and remained the world’s top selling carmaker for the fourth straight year. I recently came across an interesting metaphor depicting Toyota that I have not heard used before. The book “Extreme Toyota” documented an interview with Jim Press, former President of Toyota Motor North America, in which he said that Toyota wants to be a green tomato. His point was as follows;

“Green tomatoes know their futures are still ahead of them, while red tomatoes quit growing”.

One of the authors of the book, Hirotaka Takeuchi, explained this further by saying that Toyota sees itself as always growing, and always incomplete. This way, Toyota accepts that there is room for improvement, and that “tomorrow will be better than today”. Hirotaka used the working title of the book as “The Incomplete Company”.

The metaphor of a “green tomato” is beautifully deep and underlines the idea that being complacent is bad. Toyota has become the number one car company in the world. However, seeing itself as the top company is akin to being like the red ripe tomato which would soon fall off and rot. This same idea is repeated by the former President, Katsuaki Watanabe;

“At the very instant we become satisfied, at the very moment we think that the status quo is good enough, that’s when we start to decline.” He continued, “We’re still not there. There are a lot of things we need to do.”

Final Words:

Being complacent is being ignorant and being in denial. Being complacent urges you to remain in your comfort zone. Any new information that indicates that something is wrong does not get registered. As one of my wise friends once told me, once you are complacent, you get busy trying to put up the outward appearance that everything is fine. You create a picture in your mind that everything is great and you hold on to it. The more things that go wrong, the stronger you hold on to your ideal image and continue to be in denial. Be the green tomato, and think of yourself as “still a little more to go”.

I will finish this post with a great Zen Koan by the 1^st century Zen master Linji Yixuan. He said;

“When you meet Buddha on the road, kill him”.

There is a little shock factor to this koan. But once you go deeper, there is a beautiful and profound lesson in this. The road is interpreted as your journey in search of enlightenment. The Buddha in the koan is our own idea of perfection and enlightenment. And if you think that you have attained enlightenment, you surely have not attained enlightenment. You have to “kill” that thought, and stay incomplete. Be like a green tomato.

Always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Information at the Gemba.

Information at the Gemba:

Uncertainty is all around us. A lean leader’s main purpose is to develop people to tackle uncertainty. There are two ways to tackle uncertainty; one is Genchi Genbutsu (go and see) and the other is the scientific method of PDCA. Claude Shannon, the father of Information Theory, viewed information as the possible reduction in uncertainty in a system. In other words, larger uncertainty presents a larger potential for new information. This can be easily shown as the following equation;

New Information gain = Reduction in Uncertainty

Shannon called the uncertainty as entropy based on the advice from his friend John Von Neumann, a mathematical genius and polymath. The entropy in information theory is not exactly the same as the entropy in Thermodynamics. They are similar in that entropy is a measure of a system’s degree of disorganization. In this regard, information can be viewed as a measure of a system’s degree of organization. Shannon recalled his conversation with Von Neumann as below;

“My greatest concern was what to call it. I thought of calling it ‘information’, but the word was overly used, so I decided to call it ‘uncertainty’. When I discussed it with John von Neumann, he had a better idea. Von Neumann told me, ‘You should call it entropy, for two reasons. In the first place your uncertainty function has been used in statistical mechanics under that name, so it already has a name. In the second place, and more important, nobody knows what entropy really is, so in a debate you will always have the advantage.”

I loved the encouragement from Von Neumann that Shannon would have an advantage in a debate since “nobody knows what entropy really is”.

In this post, I am not going into the mathematics of Information Theory. In fact I am not even going to discuss Information Theory but the philosophical lessons from it. From a philosophical standpoint, Information Theory presents a different perspective on problems and failures at the gemba. When you are planning an experiment, and things go well and the results confirm your hypothesis, you do not learn any new information. However, when the results do not match your hypothesis, there is new information available for you. Thus, failures or similar challenges are opportunities to have new information about your process.

There are seven lessons that I have and they are as follows;

Information Gain ≠ Knowledge Gain:

One of the important aspects from the view of the information available at the Gemba is that information does not translate to knowledge. Information is objective in nature and consists of facts. This information gets translated to knowledge when we apply our available mental models to it. This means that there is potentially a severe loss based on the receiver. A good analogy is Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson at the crime scene – they are both looking at the same information available, but Holmes is able to deduce more.

Be Open:

When you assume full knowledge about a process, you are unwilling to gain knowledge from any new information available. You should be open to possibilities in order to welcome new information and thus a chance to learn something new. Sometimes by being open to others viewpoints, you can learn new things. They may have a lot more experience and more opportunities for information than you may have.

Go to the Gemba:

The majority of times, the source of information is the gemba. When you do not go to the source, the information you get will not be as pure as it was. The information you get has been contaminated with the subjective perspectives of the informer. You should go to the gemba as often as you can. The process is giving out information at all times.

Exercise Your Observation Skills:

As I mentioned above in the Holmes and Watson analogy, what you can gain from the information presented depends on your ability to identify information. There is a lot of noise in the information you might get and you have to weed out the noise and look at the core information available. One of my favorite definitions of information is by the famous Cerbernetician Gregory Bateson. He defined information as “the difference that makes the difference.” The ability to make the difference from the information given depends mostly on your skill set. Go to the Gemba more often and sharpen your observation skills. Ask “For what Purpose” and “what is the cause” more often.

Go Outside Your Comfort Zone:

One of the lessons in lean that does not get a lot of attention is – “go outside your comfort zone”. This is the essence of Challenge in the Continuous Improvement Pillar of the Toyota Way. When you stay inside your comfort zone, you are not willing to gather new information. You get stuck in your ways and trust your degrading mental model rather than challenging and nourishing your mental model so that you are able to develop yourself. Failure is a good thing when you understand that it represents new information that can help you with understanding uncertainties in your process. You will not want to try new things unless you go outside your comfort zone.

Experiment Frequently:

You learn more by exposing yourself to more chances of gaining new information. And you do this by experimenting more often. The scientific process is not a single loop of PDCA (Plan-Do-Check-Act). It is an iterative process, and you need to experiment frequently and learn from the feedback.

Challenge Your Own Perspective:

The Achilles’ heel for a lean leader is his confirmation bias. He may go to the gemba more often, and he may experiment frequently. Unless he challenges his own perspective, his actions may not be fruitful. My favorite question to challenge my perspective is “What is the evidence I need to invalidate my viewpoint right now, and does the information I have hint at it?” Similar questions ensure that the interpretation of the information you are getting is less tainted.

I will finish off with a funny story I heard about Sherlock Holmes and Watson;

Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson decide to go on a camping trip. All the way to the campsite, Holmes was giving observation lessons to Dr. Watson and challenging him. After dinner and a bottle of wine, they lay down for the night, and go to sleep.

Some hours later, Holmes awoke and nudged his faithful friend.

“Watson, look up at the sky and tell me what you see.”

Watson replied, “I see millions of stars.”

“What does that tell you?” Holmes asked.

Watson pondered for a minute.

“Astronomically, it tells me that there are millions of galaxies and potentially billions of planets.”
“Astrologically, I observe that Saturn is in Leo.”
“Horologically, I deduce that the time is approximately a quarter past three.”
“Theologically, I can see that God is all powerful and that we are small and insignificant.”
“Meteorologically, I suspect that we will have a beautiful day tomorrow.”
“What does it tell you, Holmes?” Watson asked.

Holmes was silent for a minute, then spoke: “Watson, you idiot. Someone has stolen our tent!”

Always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was The Pursuit of Quality – A Lesser Known Lesson from Ohno.

The Pursuit of Quality – A Lesser Known Lesson from Ohno:

In today’s post, I will be looking at a lesser known lesson from Taiichi Ohno regarding the pursuit of Quality.

“The pursuit of quantity cultivates waste while the pursuit of quality yields value.”

Ohno was talking about using andons and the importance of resisting mass production thinking. Andon means “lantern” in Japanese, and is a form of visual control on the floor. Toyota requires and requests the operators to pull the andon cord to stop the line if a defect is found and to alert the lead about the issue. Ohno said the following about andons;

“Correcting defects is necessary to reach our goal of totally eliminating waste.”

Prior to the oil crisis, in the early 1970’s in Japan, all the other companies were buying high-volume machines to increase output. They reasoned that they could store the surplus in the warehouse and sell them when the time was right. Toyota, on the other hand, resisted this and built only what was needed. According to Ohno, the companies following mass-production thinking got a rude awakening in the wake of the oil crisis since they could not dispose off their high inventory. Meanwhile Toyota thrived and their profits increased. The other companies started taking notice of the Toyota Production System.

Ohno’s lesson of the pursuit of quality to yield value struck a chord with me. This concept is similar to Dr. Deming’s chain reaction model. Dr. Deming taught us that improvement of quality begets the natural and inevitable improvement of productivity. His entire model is shown below (from his book “Out of the Crisis”).

Dr. Deming taught the Japanese workers that the defects and faults that get into the hands of the customer lose the market and cost him his job. Dr. Deming taught the Japanese management that everyone should work towards a common aim – quality.

Steve Jobs Story:

I will finish with a story I heard from Tony Fadell who worked as a consultant for Apple and helped with the creation of the IPod. Tony said that Steve Jobs did not like the “Charge Before Use” sticker on all of the electronic gadgets that were available at that time. Jobs argued that the customer had paid money anticipating using the gadget immediately, and that the delay from charging takes away from the customer satisfaction. The normal burn-in period used to be 30 minutes for the IPod. The burn-in is part of the Quality/Reliability inspection where the electronic equipment runs certain cycles for a period of time with the intent of stressing the components to weed out any defective or “weak” parts. Jobs changed the burn-in time to two hours so that when the customer got the IPod, it was fully charged for him to use right away. This was a 300% increase in the inspection time and would have impacted the lead time. Traditional thinking would argue that this was not a good decision. However, this counterintuitive approach was welcomed by the customers and nowadays it is the norm that electronic devices come charged so that the end user can start using it immediately.

Always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Challenge and Kaizen.

Challenge and Kaizen:

Toyota describes the two pillars of the Toyota Way as “Continuous Improvement” and “Respect for People”. Of this, the continuous improvement pillar is comprised of;

Challenge
Kaizen (change for the better), and
Genchi Genbutsu (Go to the source and grasp the actual facts)

In this post, I will be looking at the “Challenge” aspect of the Continuous Improvement pillar.

Challenge – Why?

The secret to Toyota’s success is its ability to maintain itself as a learning organization. In 1967 P. M. Fitts and I. M. Posner identified three progressive phases of learning a new skill;

The cognitive stage – we understand the skill, but we make plenty of mistakes in the process. We are identifying strategies to do better.
The associative stage – we are getting better and making less mistakes.
The autonomous stage – we are pretty good at this point and can do the task on autopilot

The danger of the autonomous stage is that one starts to create a comfort zone for himself and stops “learning”. Thus, he reaches a plateau and his performance begins to degrade. He begins becoming complacent and accepting his performance saying that “this is good enough”. Unfortunately he is in a blind spot at this point and does not realize what is going on. This atmosphere is detrimental to kaizen.

“Challenge” thus becomes an important factor to sustain kaizen. The “challenge” is not necessarily personal as in challenging the employee to work harder. The “challenge” is in asking the employee to do his best and change the status quo – to be outside his comfort zone. The employee is allowed to make mistakes and in turn is expected to learn from mistakes. The employee continues improving through continuous learning.

Final Words:

Yoshio Ishizaka, a Toyota veteran explained challenge as follows;

Challenge guides us to setting higher objectives for achieving an ideal condition and continuously realizing such goals with courage and creativity.

I will finish off with a funny Zen story about learning;

The son of a master thief asked his father to teach him the secrets of the trade. The old thief agreed and that night took his son to burglarize a large house. While the family was asleep, he silently led his young apprentice into a room that contained a clothes closet. The father told his son to go into the closet to pick out some clothes. When he did, his father quickly shut the door and locked him in. Then he went back outside, knocked loudly on the front door, thereby waking the family, and quickly slipped away before anyone saw him. Hours later, his son returned home, bedraggled and exhausted. “Father,” he cried angrily, “Why did you lock me in that closet? If I hadn’t been made desperate by my fear of getting caught, I never would have escaped. It took all my ingenuity to get out!” The old thief smiled. “Son, you have had your first lesson in the art of burglary.”

Always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Monument, Dynamo and Suitcase.

Monument, Dynamo and Suitcase:

There is a concept in Lean called a “Monument”. This refers to a large machine, equipment or something similar that cannot be changed right away and so you have to plan your processes around it. This generally impedes the flow and frequently becomes a hindrance to your lean initiatives. A monument is the opposite of the “flow” and “no waste” concepts of lean. Monuments do not always refer to an equipment or similar hardware. The worst kind of monument can sometimes be the culture or the mental models prevalent in the company. This results in the following excuses;

It might work in Japan but not here.
But we have to do it this way.
This is how we have always done it, and this is how I was taught.
How does cutting down inventory help with my production?

The Story of the Productivity Paradox – Computer and Dynamo:

Paul David, an economic historian wrote a wonderful paper in 1989 called “Computer And Dynamo: The Modern Productivity Paradox In A Not-Too Distant Mirror”. In the paper, he talked about the first productivity paradox involving steam engines and electrical engines. The steam engine was an outcome of the Industrial Revolution in England. All of the factories were using steam engines as a source of energy. The steam engine required all of the equipment to be clustered around it. This was the most efficient way of running equipment since there was only one major steam engine and all of the equipment ran from the steam power. The electric motor was an outcome of the technological innovations in America. Electricity was introduced to the factories as early as 1890. Everybody understood that electrical power is far more efficient than steam power. However, this did not result in an increase in productivity. The productivity remained fairly level even with the introduction of electrical power in to the factories. This was later termed as the “productivity paradox”.

The reason for the lack of increase in productivity was due to the factory layouts that were implemented for the steam engines. The Industrial Engineers replaced the steam engines with electrical engines. They did not rearrange the equipment to utilize the flexibility that was offered by the electric motor. They were constrained by their mental models. Even when new factories were built, they followed the layout that was being used with the steam engines. All of the equipment was clustered into one place hindering the flow. It is said that the factory layouts did not change for about 30 years when the old management was replaced with new management personnel. At this point, the layout was rearranged to follow the flow of materials, and this caused a spike in productivity. All of the engines had its own motor and this allowed the equipment to be spread apart from one another. Each operator was now in full control of his equipment. The monument was broken down since the management was not tied down to the old ways of thinking.

Final Words:

Everybody works from their own mental models. A company’s culture is a collection of these mental models at an equilibrium state. The Dynamo story teaches us the importance of learning from experiments and self-reflection. This is part of the “Check” face of the PDCA cycle. The feedback loop is the only way that one learns the best. I have heard that “we are going 70 miles per hour to get this done, and we do not have time to stop and change the tires.” We need to find time to step back and reflect. The system is trying to talk to you and we should heed its words. Sometimes we get caught up in the firefighting and we stay in that mode for a long time even though we keep fighting the same fires on a daily basis. The feeling of déjà-vu is an indication that we need to stop, step back and try to see the big picture. It is time to reflect.

I will finish off with a similar story about suitcases. I heard this first from my brother:

The “trunk” style of suitcases was the prominent form of luggage in the late 1800’s. People started traveling for leisure during the early 1900s which caused manufacturers to come up with new designs. These trunks were heavily built and weighed quite a lot. The term suitcase was introduced since these cases were used for holding suits. The suitcases became prominent in 1930s with the advent of commercial flights. Even at this time, they were not the light weight type that we have today. The addition of a wheel to the suitcase did not come till 1972. Up to that point, the suitcases were carried around by hand. The use of trolleys to transport luggage were seen as a sign of weakness. Even after the wheels were attached to the suitcases, it did not take off immediately. They were seen as mainly for stewardesses or women. Men were seen as wimpy if they used the wheel on the suitcase (talk about men-tal models!).

In about 1989 (after more than ten years of having wheels), a Northwest Airlines pilot named Bob Plath came up with a vertical case with extendable handles and two large wheels on the side. It took another 15 years to have a 360 degrees spinning wheel to be on the suitcase. Samsonite introduced this model in 2004.

The suitcase is a fairly straightforward design, and it took us about 70 years to achieve our present state.

Always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Dr. Deming and Value Stream Mapping.

Dr. Deming and Value Stream Mapping:

Value Stream Mapping (VSM) has become an essential part of Lean. There have been several books written specifically on this topic. VSMs are not widely spread at Toyota. VSM is a creation of Mike Rothers and John Shook. This was based on the “Material and Information Flow Maps” at Toyota. The VSM was created as a means to systematically roll out lean implementation, and looked at current and ideal states from a system standpoint. The intent was to give the “big picture view” that was missing from lean implementations. The Material and Information Flow maps were used by a few specialists at Toyota as part of line conversions, and these later were used to help suppliers view the production system as an end to end pull system ultimately ending with material delivery to Toyota.

Dr. Deming’s Flow Diagram:

Dr. Deming was invited to Japan by the Union of Japanese Scientists and Engineers (JUSE) on July 15, 1950 to teach them about Quality Control. His teachings paved the way for a great change in regards to Quality in Japan. Dr. Deming taught the Japanese that production should be viewed as a system. The diagram below was taught first in August 1950 at a conference with top management at the Hotel de Yama on Mount Hakone in Japan.

Dr. Deming felt that his flow diagram was the spark in 1950 and onward that turned Japan around. It displayed production as a system to top management and engineers. He also viewed this as a type of diagram that showed the flow of materials and information. In his words;

To the make the flow diagram work, the flow of material and information from any part of the system must match the input requirements of the next stages. Thus, the aim in the flow diagram is for the material to come in at the front, and to emerge at the end as usable product or service. The flow diagram describes not only the flow of material, but also the flow of information needed to manage the system.

Source – “The New Economics For Industry, Government, Education” by Dr. Deming.

Dr. Deming described the diagram as a map for viewing the production system. He identified a feedback loop for continual improvement of products, services and continual learning, by keeping the consumer a part of the system.

Final Words:

It may be argued that Dr. Deming’s flow diagram is not similar to a Value Stream Map. However, I am positing that his lesson of seeing the system as a whole (end to end) laid the framework for the Material and Information Flow Maps. The first step of any implementation activity is to have a model of the system so that the cause and effect links in the system can be understood, first by theory and then by experiments. I will finish off with a funny Dr. Deming story;

One of Dr. Deming’s clients called him and said that he was having too many fires at his plant. Dr. Deming plotted the occurrences of fires on a control chart and determined that it was indeed a stable process.

“No, you are having just the right amount of fires,” he said, and then proceeded to explain the control chart to the client.

Source: Deming’s Profound Knowledge and Leadership, Carder and Monda.

Always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Eight Lessons from Programming – At the Gemba.

Eight Lessons from Programming – At the Gemba:

In today’s post, I will be writing about the eight lessons I learned from Programming. I enjoy programming, and developing customer centric programs. I have not pursued a formal education in programming, although I did learn FORTRAN and BASIC as part of my Engineering curriculum. Whatever I have learned, I learned with an attitude of “let’s wing it and see”.

Be Very Dissatisfied with Repetitive Activities:

Our everyday life is riddled with repetition. This is the operative model of a business. Design a product, and then make them again and again. This repetitive way of doing things can be sometimes very inefficient. The programmer should have a keen eye to recognize the repetitive non-value adding activities that can be easily automated. If you have to generate a report every week, let’s automate it so that it is generated every week with minimal effort from you.

There is Always a Better Way of Doing Things:

Along the same lines as the first lesson, you must realize that there is always a better way of doing things. The best is not here yet, nor will it ever be. This is the spirit of kaizen. Even when a process has been automated, there is still big room left for improvement. The biggest room certainly is the room for improvement.

Never Forget Making Models:

When a Lean Practitioner is looking at a system, creating a model is the first step. This model could be a mental model, a mathematical model or even a small scale physical model. This model can even be a basic flowchart. This is part of the Plan phase of PDCA. How do the components work with each other? How does the system interact with the environment? What happens when step A is followed by Step B? A good programmer should understand the system first before proceeding with creating programs. A good programmer is also a good Systems Thinker.

Keep Memory in Mind:

A good programmer knows that using up a lot of memory and not freeing up memory can cause the program to hang and sometimes crash. Memory Management is an important lesson. This is very much akin to the concept of Muri in Lean. Overburdening the resources has an adverse impact on productivity and quality, and it is not a sustainable model in the long run.

Walk in Their Shoes:

A good programmer should look at the program from the end user’s viewpoint. Put yourself in their shoes, and see if your program is easy to use or not. Programmers are sometimes very focused on adding as many features as possible, when the end user is requiring only a few features. There is some similarity with the use of lean or six sigma tools at the Gemba. If it is not easy to use, the end users will try to find a way around it. This brings us to the next lesson.

Listen to the Gemba:

One of the lessons I learned early in my career is that I am not the owner of the program I write. The person using the program is the owner. If I do not listen to the end user then my program is not going to be used. I do not make the program for me; I make it for the end user. Less can be more and more can be less. The probability of a program being successful is inversely proportional to the distance of gemba from the source of program creation.

Documentation:

I wrote at the beginning that I learned programming from a “winging it” attitude. However, I soon learned the importance of documentation. A good programmer relies on good documentation. The documentation should explain the logic of the program, the flow of the program, how it will be tested and qualified, how the program changes will be documented and how the bugs will be tracked. The simplest tool for documentation can be a checklist. My favorite view on using checklists is – not using a checklist for a project is like shopping without a shopping list. You buy several things that are not needed, and do not buy the things that you actually need.

Keep a Bugs List – Learn from Mistakes:

Bugs to a programmer are like problems on a factory floor to a lean practitioner- it depends on how you view them. For a lean practitioner, problems are like gold mine. They are all opportunities to improve. In this same line of thinking, bugs are also a programmer’s friends. You learn the most from making mistakes. No program is 100% bug free. Each bug is unique and provides a great lesson. The goal is to learn from them so that you do not repeat them.

Another important lesson is – ensure that fixing a problem does not cause new problems. A programmer is prone to the law of unintended consequences. Any change to a program should be tested from a system standpoint.

Final Words:

I will finish off with my favorite anecdote about programming:

When Apple introduced the IPod, they were very proud of its “shuffle” feature. There is no accurate way of truly randomizing songs. However, there are several algorithms that can generate a pretty good random order. Apple utilized such an algorithm. It was so good that the users started complaining because sometimes the same song was repeated, or the same artist was played repeatedly. That is not how random should be – the end users argued. Steve Jobs then asked his programmers to change the algorithm so that it is less random.

The Digital Music Service company, Spotify faced the same problem. As they explained on their blog;

“If you just heard a song from a particular artist, that doesn’t mean that the next song will be more likely from a different artist in a perfectly random order. However, the old saying says that the user is always right, so we decided to look into ways of changing our shuffling algorithm so that the users are happier. We learned that they don’t like perfect randomness.”

The perception of random for the end user meant that the songs are equally spaced from one another based on how similar they are. The end user did not want randomness in a theoretical sense. They wanted random from a human practical sense.

Spotify changed their algorithm in 2014. “Last year, we updated it with a new algorithm that is intended to feel more random to a human.”

Always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Be Like Coal At the Gemba.

Be Like Coal at the Gemba:

One of the lessons I learned as a child from my mother was about being like coal and not like paper. Her point was that coal may not be fast to catch fire, but once lit the coal will retain heat for a long time. Paper on the other hand, catches fire quickly and burns out. The lesson was about persistence and not jumping on the band wagon only to lose interest quickly – about making decisions with level headed thinking for the long term.

Coal is also good at filtering water (information). When you are asking or looking for information, you get information along with opinions. You should be able to filter out the opinions and be able to find the information to make good decisions.

Observe, Gather Data, Gain Consensus and Then Act for the Long Term:

Toyota is famous for observing, gathering data from the gemba, and getting consensus before acting. This is the type of thinking that Toyota enriches in its culture. All decisions are based on long term thinking, and this goal does not lend itself to quick decisions or acting on fads. This is the essence of being like coal – slow to get hot but stays hot for a long time.

Filter Information – Don’t Jump to Conclusions:

Any information that is out there is information coated with opinions. Coal (activated charcoal) is used for purifying water. Using this analogy, you should train yourself to discern fact from opinions. Lean Thinking encourages coming up with hypotheses and running experiments to validate your thinking. The act of filtering data to “purify” or distill information is akin to the ability of coal to purify data. This requires constant reminding and practice from your part.

Final Words:

I will finish this post with the three filter story about Socrates. Source – Unknown

In ancient Greece, Socrates was reputed to hold knowledge in high esteem. One day an acquaintance met the great philosopher and said, “Do you know what I just heard about your friend?”

“Hold on a minute,” Socrates replied. “Before you talk to me about my friend, it might be a good idea to take a moment and filter what you’re going to say. That’s why I call it the triple filter test. The first filter is Truth. Have you made absolutely sure that what you are about to tell me is true?”

“Well, no,” the man said, “actually I just heard about it and…”

“All right,” said Socrates. “So you don’t really know if it’s true or not. Now, let’s try the second filter, the filter of Goodness. Is what you are about to tell me about my friend something good?”

“Umm, no, on the contrary…”

“So,” Socrates continued, “you want to tell me something bad about my friend, but you’re not certain it’s true. You may still pass the test though, because there’s one filter left—the filter of Usefulness. Is what you want to tell me about my friend going to be useful to me?”

“No, not really.”

“Well,” concluded Socrates, “if what you want to tell me is neither true, nor good, nor even useful, why tell it to me at all?”

Always keep on learning…

In case you missed it, my last post was Dharma, Karma and Quality.

Harish's Notebook – My notes… Lean, Cybernetics, Quality & Data Science.

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