Introduction: The endless quest for perfection
Konnichiwa! Welcome process warriors to the AI Automation Dojo! The only show that looks at the endless quest for workplace perfection and asks “Are we there yet and if so can we take a nap?”. Today we’re diving into the sacred arts of continuous improvement. We’re talking Lean, Six Sigma, Kaizen – all those methodologies that promise a world of seamless efficiency. The stuff that looks great on a whiteboard but often meets its mortal enemy in the real world: Brenda from accounting who has her own process.
I’m your host Andrzej Kinastowski, one of the founders of Office Samurai, where we look at a 100-page slide deck and ask the tough questions like “Couldn’t this have been a Haiku?”. Whether you’re a certified lean sensei who sees waste in your sleep, a manager trying to implement a Gemba walk that doesn’t just end at the vending machine, or you’re just here because you heard the word kaizen and thought it was a new type of sushi, you’re in the right place. Now grab your favorite katana or that value stream map you’ve been working on since 2018 and let’s get to it.
Today I want to tell you a story of how I was hired into a Shared Service of a big international airline group and I was hired there to fundamentally change what it is. My role was continuous improvement head. The first thing I noticed when I joined was that there is a huge culture clash between me and the rest of the organization. I have found that I was the first manager to be hired from the outside in the last something like 10 years. All of the managers and department heads have been grown within the company, which by itself is not a bad thing, but it creates a certain culture of people who have all grown together, who share the same values and the same ideas. But it can sometimes be a bad thing because any ideas coming from the outside are quite hard for them to accept or to follow. I got into so many discussions where I would be basically screaming at them saying “come on let’s just do it. It’s so simple I’ve seen it implemented a million times,” and they would be saying “you are crazy. This will never work here”. And sometimes those discussions would just turn into those times of us not really wanting to talk to each other which was way way worse.
The ant colony question: Is your organization smart enough?
My job was to implement continuous improvement culture into the Shared Service organization. When I look back at how things happened and how things develop I know that there is one question that every organization wanting to implement a continuous improvement culture needs to ask itself. The question that every organization who wants to implement continuous improvement culture needs to ask itself is this: Is my organization smarter than an ant colony?
There’s a lot of interesting things about ants but one of them is how they look for food. At the beginning a certain amount of ants will go from the colony basically in random directions looking for a food source. Sooner or later one of them will find something – something that is hopefully plentiful and nutritious, something like a dead rabbit. When it does it will take a piece of the rabbit and it will bring it back to the colony. But while it’s doing that it’s leaving a pheromone trail. A trail of pheromones that leads from the dead rabbit to the colony. The thing about this trail is that when other ants encounter it they follow it. Every ant that follows it will get to the rabbit. It will take piece of it and it will go back the same route leaving their own pheromone trail thus strengthening the original one.
Now let’s stop here for a moment and think. Do we do the same things in our organizations because I think we do. We have ways of making sure that each one of our ends once we have found a good way to do something they will keep on following the same path. We have procedures, we have standards, we have audits, we have process maps. All of those things are there to make sure that once we find a good route to do something we all follow the same path. So at this point our organizations are as smart as an average ant colony and this strategy is a good strategy but it is not an optimal strategy and ants have found a way to make it better.
Ant anarchists
In every colony there is a certain amount of ants that when they encounter a pheromone trail they ignore it and they’re going their own way. We will call them ant anarchists, ant disruptors. There’s a few different things that can happen if you are an anarchist ant.
One thing that can happen is that you will go your own way and you will find a better way to that rabbit. Maybe you will find a way that is shorter, that is safer, that is just more efficient. A quite an interesting thing is that when an anarchist ant who doesn’t follow the pheromone trails itself finds the rabbit it will take a piece of it and it will go back to the colony and it will leave its own pheromone trail and some other ants will start following it. Because this route is shorter and safer it will in time get strengthened more than the original one and it will become the default way to the rabbit.
Another thing that can happen if you are an anarchist ant is that you will venture somewhere going your own way that maybe you shouldn’t have and you will die a horrible and painful death. But what can also happen is that you will go to a place that none of the ants have gone before and you will find a source of food that will be even more plentiful and rich, something like a dead cow. You will take a piece of the cow and you will take it to the colony leaving a pheromone trail and you will forever be known as the ant that have found a dead cow.
The question is do we also do this in our organizations when thinking about continuous improvement? This is what I think about anarchy controlled anarchy but anarchy. Because changing things it does require you to be a bit of an anarchist.
Three CI methodologies implemented
I want to talk to you about three main things that we have implemented in the company I was hired into. Those are three valid ways of implementing continuous improvement culture into the company. They address different needs and they also address different people. One of them addresses all of the employees at the same time. Another teams specific teams one by one. And then another one very very specific people.
1. Kaizen: Anarchy for everyone
Let’s start with something that a lot of people have heard about: Kaizen. Kaizen is an idea that when you change things you can change them piece by piece. You can change them in small steps.
When we did our program, this is actually where the name of our company Office Samurai comes from. My team and I have hired some samurais. On a given day in our offices in Krakow, Bangkok, and Mexico City those samurai came to those offices. It’s surprisingly hard to find samurai in Mexico. Before the day we asked the managers “listen, give us the names of the people who are anarchists by heart”. They gave us the names and when the samurai came they were going from floor to floor shouting things in Japanese. They were shouting those people’s names and when they would find one of them they would go to them present a certificate, bow, say, and just go. We did this before lunch so that people have something to talk about over lunch and after lunch we sent a communication saying “yeah, so what happened was we’re going into the kaizen thinking”.
We have started a registry of Kaizens. For us a Kaizen would not be an idea for an improvement but an improvement that somebody has already implemented. We have decided to gather improvements that have actually been implemented by the people. Traditionally in production you would register ideas for improvements because a line employee most of the time cannot just change how things are being done. In business processes we have way more control over how we do things and also we have way smaller continuous improvement teams.
Every month in every center we would choose one kaizen that was somehow the best. It may be because it was giving us the biggest benefit but maybe it was the most interesting, the most innovative. The highest ranking person in the center would go to this person’s desk unannounced and they would give them a certificate and a little gift and tell them “hey I really like what you did there I think it’s a great idea Congratulations”.
Every month one person would get a kaizen of the month. And then every year we would choose one kaizen of the year. That kaizen of the year actually had a bonus attached to it. This was an airline group so the best thing we could do was to fund a ticket for two people basically to any place in the world with a return ticket. This created a lot of buzz.
Over the first 3 years of the program we got registered 3,500 kaizens implemented in an organization that was at the time something like 1500 people. This is more than two kaizens per person. In those three years more than 50% of the people have registered at least one. Those 3,500 kaizens were equal to about 12,000 hours saved every month. An average kaizen was about four hours and a median was even lower, probably something like one and a half hours. It is really important when you implement a Kaizen program to make sure that people know that even the smallest change makes sense.
We did get some really big Kaizens. The biggest one was one FTE. There was a guy in the accounting team that improved the three-way match so heavily that he has reduced one FTE and that one FTE was him. He was approached and proposed to do this for a living and he gladly agreed. So we have moved him from operations into the process excellence area.
Kaizen case studies: The anarchy principles
I want to give you three examples three cases of what Kaizen improvements have been implemented by the people in the company.
Case 1: The ticketing template discovery (the Kaizen way): The thing was we have been at the time using quite an ancient ticketing system. One of the things that it was missing were templates for replies. If you’ve worked in a ticketing system you know that if you are able to easily use templates then it speeds up your work significantly. Some of the people were kind of doing the workarounds having those templates saved in some text files or word documents. One lady was so frustrated with it that she started digging deep into the system as much as a user was allowed to. She has found that yes we do have templates in this thing. You just have to go really deep into the settings to find them and to enable them. She enabled it for herself, tested it and then she went to her team leader and said “Hey I know how to do templates How about I teach the whole team how to do it?”. When she registered this as a kaizen as an improvement she was asked to present it on lunch and learn. Documentation was done and sent to all of the employees. This way what started as one person doing things better for herself changed into basically the whole organization getting access to those templates that we didn’t know were possible to do at all. The word kaizen means change for better. Usually how we think about it is a change for better no matter how small it is. Theodor Roosevelt said do what you can with what you have where you are.
Case 2: The three-way match (Pareto principle): This is the guy I was talking about that reduced one FTE in invoice processing. He started working on a three-way match. The average automation ratio was probably like 50%. Meaning still 50% of the invoices that were coming in didn’t match. This guy started looking into why those invoices get stuck. He created a report where he looked for the vendors with the most blocked invoices. He took the vendor that was generating the most work and then he worked with the vendor to solve the problem. He was trying to do it with what we would call a Pareto principle. The Pareto principle says that 20% of the causes account for 80% of the effect. This is just a matter of thinking in a way that I want to put minimum effort and achieve maximum effect.
Case 3: Barcode stickers (the Fool principle): The system for booking documents required on every first page of every invoice to have a sticker with a barcode. When we were getting PDF invoices we had to print this PDF, put a sticker on the first page and then put the whole thing into an automated scanner. People in the scanning team started asking “can’t we just put a PDF in the system” and everybody would tell them no because if it doesn’t have a barcode it’s not going to go through. What they did was just to make an act of rebellion just to make an act of anarchy and say “Yeah really I want to try it for myself”. They just put one PDF invoice without a barcode and they uploaded it into a system and it got processed. And then they took three and put them in the system and they also got processed correctly. We have found is after many years of printing PDF invoices to slap a barcode on them we have actually found that it is not really required. This is what I would call a Fool principle: They didn’t know it was impossible so they did it. With continuous improvement very often your experience and your knowledge may as well be your biggest enemy.
The anarchy principles for the Kaizen thinking are: first the Kaizen way: do what you can with what you have where you are. Two: think in a Pareto way when you’re trying to solve problems: minimum effort, maximum effect. And then the Fool principle: they didn’t know it was impossible so they did it. Always question what you know or what you think you know. Kaizen is your way of saying to your whole organization: “it’s okay to be an anarchist a little bit all of the time”. Doing just doing the work just following the protocols is no longer enough.
2. Lean action workouts: Team-specific transformation
Another big thing in our continuous improvement program were lean action workout projects. The original GE Workout was designed for manufacturing. We basically rebuilt it from scratch to match the business process environment. We planned going team by team through the whole organization in two years. The scope for the whole project was about 1,500 people. Each of those projects would take about 3 months to go through.
The idea for a three-month project is basically this: we start with trainings. For line employees we would have introduction to continuous improvement a training with a simulation that would show people the basic concepts of lean management things like Kaizen and Poka-Yoke workload management. For the leaders and managers we had lean leadership trainings where we would go way deeper into the concept. After this was done we would start measuring. We had a tool where people would measure themselves. They would choose the process they are doing right now from a drop-down list, press start. When they stop they would just press stop. When you put this data together you get really good information on what’s going on in your processes. This phase would take a month and a few days. You need at least one full month worth of measurements. Then we go into the workshop phase and this phase would take three to four weeks. First we would start with mapping their processes. We would do simplified value stream maps. The mapping was to make sure we get a snapshot of how the processes are really done. Step two was problem solving. We would have brainstorming sessions where they would come up with as many problems that they have. We would get anywhere between 40 and 100 different problems written down for every team. Together with the team we would come up with possible solutions, next steps, a deadline to solve it and a person responsible for solving it. The person responsible for solving it should be somebody from a team and not the leader. The third part of what we were creating were the dashboards for their daily meetings. If you let the team build their own dashboard it’s their own dashboard, and they will be way more willing to work with it.
After the workshop phase we would have about four to six weeks to implement the changes. They would already start meeting every day by the dashboard at exactly the same time for no more than 15 minutes. After the first week the team leaders were not allowed to run dashboard meetings. Part of continuous improvement culture is the idea of self-managing teams. Visual management and those daily dashboard meetings were usually the thing that would get the most push back during the workshops. But after they have actually tried it, nine times out of 10 visual management would get the highest grades. At the end of the project the team would prepare a final presentation. Lean action workouts are our way of going to specific teams and telling them: “listen for the next three months we are all anarchists, for the next three months nothing is off limits”. We were able to save more than 100 FTEs with those changes.
3. Six sigma: Empowering the best anarchists
The third methodology that we have implemented was Six Sigma. In the business world the problem with Six Sigma is that 99% of the problems we have in the business processes they do not require Six Sigma approach. Using Six Sigma for 99% of the problems is like nailing in nails with a calculator. We decided two things. First we’re going to give Six Sigma trainings only to the real anarchist ants. We would only do something like two trainings a year. We would only choose the people that have either been really really active and contributing a lot during lean action workouts or in the Kaizen program. The second thing was we have changed the program of the Six Sigma Green Belt training. We have trimmed down a lot of the statistics. We have of course left the main things (standard deviation and the five sigma level). We have removed the more advanced statistics and we have added a lot of lean tools that we knew work really well. We chose the anarchist ants and we told them: “Here are the new tools, here are the more advanced tools, go and use them and make things better”.
Three rules for CI culture implementation
The Kaizen program, the Lean Action Workouts, and the Six Sigma were the three most important things. There’s three things you need to remember when implementing a continuous improvement culture in your organization:
- Use different tools: You need to have different tools and methodologies to address different kinds of problems. You use the Kaizen to address the whole organization. You use Lean Action Workouts to address specific teams. And you use Six Sigma to get the best anarchist ants.
- Anarchists at the top: If you want your organization to embrace the continuous improvement culture you have to have anarchist ants at the top. My boss would find 15 minutes every month for me to come to him to tell him what the Kaizen of the month was and for him to go down to somebody’s desk and to congratulate them. You have to walk the talk.
- Choose the right tool for the problem: Remember there’s more than one way to get to the dead cow. You need to see what kind of problems you have and then you have to choose tools that will be the right ones to address it. Don’t do it the other way around because you’re going to end up starting with 5S in the office and that’s going to be a disaster.
I do believe that if you follow those three pretty simple rules your life and the life of your organization is going to be full of big fat dead cows.
Conclusion
The final value added step of this episode has been completed. That’s all for this edition of the AI automation dojo for joining our little rebellion. A huge thank you to the sensei of our production Dojo and Anna Cubal who continuously improves our podcast. This episode was recorded at the one and only Wodzu Beats Studio our very own Gemba where the process magic and the occasional process breakdown happens. Until next time remember if someone tells you that’s just the way we’ve always done it that’s your cue to grab a katana and politely ask why.
