Thoughts and Insights from the Shop Floor
What is the role of your lean facilitator? This question comes up now and again, was recently posed on the LEI forums by someone looking for help with a job description. I extrapolated from his question that he was looking to the job description as a line of defense against dilution of the facilitator’s focus …
Once again I am going through old files. These are some notes I wrote back in 2005 that I thought might be interesting here. Looking back at what I was writing at the time, I think I was thinking about nailing these points to a church door somewhere in the company. That actually isn’t a …
Many years ago I wrote an article for SME called The Essence of Jidoka. In that article I described a four step process designed to improve productivity and drive continuous improvement. Since then these four steps have been picked up and incorporated into the training materials of many consultants, used to write the Wikipedia article …
I was going through some old files and came across a pocket card we handed out back in 2003 or so. It was used in conjunction with our “how to walk the gemba” coaching sessions that we did with the lean staff, and then taught them to do with leaders. There is a pretty long …
This is the first in series of posts I am drafting about what I saw, heard, learned at KataCon6 in Austin. I was originally writing this up in huge chunks, maybe two posts. But when I bounced the “Part 1” draft off Craig Stritar, I got some good advice – there are a lot of …
Last week (February 17-20) I attended (and presented at) the TWI and Toyota Kata summits put on by my friends at Lean Frontiers. As always, I took a few notes and I would like to share some of those notes and thoughts with you here. To be clear, what follows are my impressions and thoughts …
In my last post, If the Student Hasn’t Learned…, I made the point (again) that sometimes trying too hard to impose a formal structure on a learner can impede their progress. Since writing that, I have been doing a bit of reflection on my own development as a coach, and I need to give credit where it is …
Imagine a factory with a large monument machine. It takes several days to set up. When it does run, it runs very fast, much faster than you can actually use its output. Therefore, you take the excess output and store it to use later. Actually, you don’t know how many items you need to make, …
Here is another test or quiz question that showed up in my search logs: a machine tool is producing 90 pcs per day .using improved cutting tools,the output is raised to 120 pcs per day. what is the increase in productivity of the machine? I guess the answer seems pretty obvious… 90 x 1.33, rounded …
One of the things, perhaps the thing, that distinguishes “scientific thinking” from “just doing stuff” is the idea of prediction: When we take some kind of action, and deliberately and consciously predict the outcome we create an opportunity to override the default narrative in our brain and deliberately examine our results. The Toyota Kata “Experiment …
Continue reading “The Importance of Prediction for Learning”