Turning people into robots is a waste.
I recently had a conversation with someone who asked me to explain the concept of the Lean Enterprise. I quickly pitched my best elevator speech on the virtues of waste and value, to which he sarcastically responded, “Yeah. That works great…..if you want to turn everyone into robots.”
It was then that I realized 2 things:
- I need to work on my elevator speech.
- There’s still an enormous gap in people’s understanding of waste & value.
In the mind of the person I was talking with, any suggestion over approaching work with greater efficiency meant not surfing the net or talking at the water cooler. Anything people did other than that was value-added, because they were busy working and, therefore, adding value as long as they weren’t goofing off.
Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth.
The vast majority of work people do adds nothing to the end customer, which is a hard, difficult and bitter pill for most people to swallow when they first hear it. Nonetheless, it is true. Efficiency is about eliminating the non-value added work people do so that they can use the natual talents they have been blessed with: Creativity and Intellect.
Eliminating waste is the process of turning the mindless automatons who do work because, “This is the way we’ve always done it” into actively thinking, perceiving, feeling and innovating beings. If people are not doing these things, then they are simply doing things according to the way in which they were programmed. Becoming more efficient requires breaking this programming!
Efficiency is not achieved when all people are turned into robots. Efficiency is achieved when no one is a robot.
David – interesting perspective, and I agree – no one should be a robot. Often when we speak of increasing efficiency, increasing productivity, and value or non value added activities at the organizational level people do get defensive. It is as if they believe that we are saying that they are inefficient or unproductive by suggesting it. Like innovation, the ultimate goal of a lean enterprise is to look for new ways of doing things that make life better for the employees, customers, business partners and owners of the enterprises. When we find new ways of doing things that continuously improve our products, services, and processes, we move closer to our overriding goals. It is important to note that when the perception of value is ONLY being tied to creating customer value we may be missing opportunities. There are many roles within the enterprise that will never directly create value to a customer, that does not make them any less important to the organiztaion. A good example of that would be the tax department in a company. It can be argued that this creates no value for customers, yet a well run tax department can save its company a LOT of grief. So whether we call it LEAN thinking, innovation, or simply good business practice, the goal is to get people thinking, talking, and acting in new ways that make things better. When this happens, increased efficiency and reduced waste are a welcome result.
Yes, we often equate activity with value and that’s far from the truth. Staying busy is often just being busy rather than adding value to the customers we serve or being efficient. Being lean–or efficient–requires a totally different mindset.
Lean does itself a bit of a disservice with the terminology it uses. (Ironically enough, a lot of time is wasted explaining the non-intuitive meanings of the terms!). Lean waste has 2 types: Outright waste that should be eliminated immediately, and Necessary Waste, which includes administrative processes and regulatory requirements.
A faltering tax department can certainly cause grief – what Lean would certainly consider a Waste, due to both the lost time and money but also due to the introduction of grief into the workplace! (More on that in an upcoming post.) The word I like to use for “Leaning out” necessary waste is “Optimizing” those functions (borrowing a term from the CMMi model).
The necessary, administrative, regulatory, managerial, etc. aspects of running a business still won’t directly add value to the end customer, however, they do add value to internal customers. If optimized, they provide a powerful impact on the business not necessarily by eliminating Waste, but certainly by not creating it.
Thanks so much for your comments. They really helped push the conversation further!
Hi, Liz!
Thanks for your comment. Creating a Lean culture is an enormous challenge. To my way of thinking, that’s where genuine transformation occurs – when people aren’t looking for efficiencies because they HAVE to, but because they WANT to. Allowing that kind of intrinsic motivation to come out is an enormous challenge all by itself, yet I think it is at the core of developing a highly efficient, and high-performing workplace.
Thanks!