standard work

Learning what works and what doesn’t work is driven by experimentation, real-world trials that inform us about cause and effect. How do we improve the ability to experiment? By reducing the cost, the effort, the friction required to test what works. As we continue my effort to de-jargonize (ok, that’s

In 2016 I am trying, with my column Lessons from the Road, to stretch people’s thinking and not just refine it. I hope that most of my columns will generate some disagreement or at least some questions. This month in White space for important work I am addressing Leader Standard

How do I get engaged communication going with my team? How do I reach them? How do we get people talking without it dragging into an endless venting session? These are questions many leaders struggle with. In an effort to engage people, they open up Pandora’s Box of issues and

“Clean your room” “I did” “It doesn’t look like it” Did they or did they not accomplish the task? It depends on who you ask because there are differences in the expected outcome. One person’s version of “clean” and another’s version are different. Ambiguity in outcome expectations, whether for a

This post originally appeared on The Lean Edge: The question asked is “Are work standards individual or collective?” Standardization is a very difficult topic for most people in lean. The difficulty starts with a past practice and perception that standards are something we give people to force them to do

Standard work takes many different forms once it is applied. In an assembly environment with 90 second cycle times, it may lay out step-by-step precise activities down to the second and whether you use your left hand or your right hand. When people see those examples, they think standard work

My latest column for Industry Week, Lessons from the Road, titled “Building Manager Standard Work” has been posted. Here is an excerpt:   …People resist building standards in knowledge work because of natural variation. Yet if you already have variation, why would you want to add more by having no

  You haven’t gotten any sleep all week, so you try to get one night of 12 hours to make up for it all. It doesn’t work very well, does it? You haven’t worked out in a month, so you spend all day in the gym to make up for

At the moment, I am teaching a Lean Experience at our Center for a group of mixed companies that include retail, transportation, micro-brews, and more. Recently, we delivered a private session at the company where lean blogger Matt Wrye works. Matt converted several of his lessons from the class into

I recently recorded a podcast with Joe Dager of Business901. I’ve done a previous show with him on The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Lean. In this episode we cover Control Point Standardization after Joe read my recent Leading Lean column on the subject. Check out Joe’s website and my podcast with