More Warning Signs That Your Lean Initiative Is Going Off The Rails

Your visual management boards always tell a story. Too often, the tale is one of a lean initiative that is about to tumble off the rails, or already has fallen—and it has nothing to do with less-than-stellar data being penciled in on the visual boards.

Instead, it has to do with no data, or pretend data. It has to do with visual boards that start to feel like “wall decoration,” rather than “an active, living, breathing tool that’s utilized to really activate the engagement of the teams,” says Dr. Mohamed Saleh.

In this episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, hosts Saleh and John Dyer point to symptoms within your daily management system—specifically visual boards and leader standard work—that suggest your organization’s continuous improvement initiative is floundering.

It is the second in a series of podcasts on warning signs of a lean initiative in trouble.

Of visual management boards, Dyer makes two observations: “I'm looking for two things. One: Is it up to date? You'd be amazed at how many times you go to these communication boards, and all the data is from three or four months ago, and it hasn't been updated since then. Well, what use is that? That's worthless. So, it just tells me that at one point it might have been of worth, but it has faded, which is a clear sign that it's going off the rails.”

“The other thing I'm looking for is: Is it relevant? Is the data relevant to the people that are working in that area? Because if it is something that is at a macro level that the people don't understand what that means or how it's calculated, then it's worthless,” he continues.

Saleh delves more deeply into the architecture of visual boards, expanding on the negative consequences of a poorly designed tool. Done wrong, a visual board meant to drive decision-making to the lowest possible level can turn into a hierarchical structure where all decisions get made at the top, he says. Or it becomes a scrutinizing tool to place blame if metrics fall into the “red.”

“Then it does become wall decoration,” he says, because people “are going to make everything green because they know they’re going to get scrutinized.”

Saleh discusses two other visual board-related symptoms of a lean initiative going off the rails: a lack of activity on the recognition section of the board and a lack of ideas in the idea section of the board.

The duo’s conversation then moves more firmly into a second element of the daily management system: leader standard work and the associated gemba walks (going to where the process gets done).

They outline several signs of a lean initiative in trouble. The signs include:

• Leaders going to the gemba without curiosity.
• Leaders going to the gemba and failing to ask: What can I do to help? And then following through.
• Leaders using gemba walks as an inspection tool.
• Leaders doing gemba walks as a “check the box” exercise.

"If you are doing gemba walks, but you're doing it to scrutinize people, you're actually making the problem worse," Saleh says. "If you're doing your leader standard work because it's a checkbox exercise, then it becomes very shallow, and you're not really getting the benefit from it."

"Those are all things that if you see in an organization, you're either already off the rail or you're going to be off the rail."