In their latest episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, podcast hosts John Dyer and Dr. Mohamed Saleh continue their series examining the behaviors necessary to make popular lean tools effective in the workplace. In this episode, they discuss the popular Plan, Do, Check, Act (PDCA), and discuss why you should consider it a learning cycle for solving problems, rather than as a checklist for implementing solutions.

What follows are several excerpts from the episode, lightly edited.

John Dyer: A lot of times we talk about the tools, but we don't really talk about the cultural changes and leadership behaviors that are necessary for that tool to be 100% effective. Today we're talking about one of my favorite tools, and actually it's more of a methodology, if you really think about it. It’s called Plan, Do, Check, Act. We're all familiar with PDCA. I think it's one of the most brilliant methodologies or tools that are out there. It goes by many different names, but some call it the Deming cycle, and it allows people to experiment and fail, and I think that's critically important. We talk a lot about the need to drive out fear, and one of those fear factors is the fear of failure, the fear of being blamed when things go wrong. Well, Plan, Do, Check, Act is designed to allow people to try something new and fail, and then learn from that and move on.

Mohamed Saleh: Problem solving is the heart of almost every lean tool, right? We make problems, waste visible, or problems visible, and that we're trying to solve for them. But if we try to understand what this discipline is all about, what is this choreography all about … PDCA is, you start off with Plan, which helps you understand the problem. You go into kind of predicting the why behind it. You go into the Do, where you test a hypothesis, a countermeasure. You Check to compare the actual result with what you predicted and if the hypothesis came true, and then you Adjust. And I think one of the learning that comes from this and makes it such a powerful behavior is that a lot of times we actually don't do it for the sake of learning. We do it for the sake of checking off a box.

MS: I've seen it done wrong, I've done it wrong and I've learned from how to do it as well. And one of the things that I've noticed that people do is that they confuse this exercise of the four boxes and just checking off boxes or creating a project checklist. And when you create a project checklist, the project management mindset is ‘How do I implement a solution?’ not ‘How do I learn?’ And so the framework in which you entered it is ‘How do I implement a solution?’ and so the Plan becomes really the steps that are required to implement a solution, which doesn't leave room for learning. I think one of the critical differences here is that sometimes activity gets confused with improvement. I think that actions are completed, but the problem still remains, and the team repeats the same mistake with just new project names. I've been in companies that do PDCAs as new kaizens or new projects, and they're just repeating the same exact problem. And so PDCA doesn't ask only did we complete the actions. It asks did the action produce the results that we predicted, and if not, did we learn? What did we learn?

Plan, Do, Walk Away

JD: You’ve probably heard this Plan, Do, Walk Away, right? Where we don't do the Check and we don't do the Act because the team or even the individual is convinced they know what the answer is, and so they're just going through the motions of Plan and Do, but they're then implementing their solution, maybe without even knowing what the root cause is of that particular problem, and then they walk away maybe because they're so busy they don't have time, and so they never do the follow up, and then they miss that tremendous learning opportunity because there's a lot of times when it doesn't work, and you have to go back to Plan and come up with a new strategy, a new solution.

JD: Another one that I talk about quite a bit is in Act. I think Act is one of the most difficult steps because in Act you have to decide, after you've done your Checks, you have to decide: Did this solution work or not? And again, typical human behavior: We don't like our babies called ugly, and if this was my solution, this was the thing I wanted to implement, and all the data is showing it's not working. Well, the data is basically calling my baby ugly.

When PDCA Ends

MS: PDCA never ends if you entered it with the orientation of learning. If you entered it with the orientation of checking off a box, of executing on a solution, of course it ends.

JD: The whole point of this is for everyone in the organization, especially those people closest to the process, to learn how to go through this methodology, real time, to solve real problems as they occur. All of a sudden the line goes down because of a major quality issue that just popped up. Everyone on that team, everyone in that process, should then instantly think, ‘All right, let's do Plan, Do, Check, Act. What's the problem? What’s the root cause? Let's do the Five Whys. Let's come up with a possible solution. Let's get that solution implemented and then check to see if it actually worked, and get this thing going real time as rapidly as possible.’ And everyone in the organization should develop those skills, should develop those competencies so that it becomes second nature.

MS: I think it's really an important leadership acknowledgement that when we recognize people's PDCA cycle, we focus our attention on the learning. What did we learn from that? Not focus on you did your PDCA cycle. Did you get your ROI or not, and let's celebrate if you got your ROI. … if we could focus our recognitions and our appreciations and our gratitudes towards the learning, I think will reinforce a cultural change that is often missing in the PDCA cycle.