Recently shred this with a team member and figured it would be of use to someone else.
I use a a table like this for recording stakeholders
| Role | Stakeholder Organization (e.g. Department, Function) | Name & Title | Pains | Gains | Impact of Proposal on Role | Importance of securing stakeholder support | RACI |
Like most facilitators I have strong opinions on brainstorming. And like a lot of the soft side of quality, these facilitation skills can really open themselves to a criticism of the vulnerability of scientific claims and there is a fair amount of justification for criticisms of the pursuit of novelty over truth. Add to it that there is this major pipeline of junk psychological science and there are good reasons for challenging these opinions.
It is for this reason I do less and less brainstorming as a verbal exercise, and rely more on brainwriting as I discussed in the post “Brainstorming usually sinks your ship.”
In the article “Should we allow criticism while brainstorming?” by Dylan Walsh we are exposed to some research from Jared Curhan at MIT that shows when criticism should be leveraged in brainstorming exercises. Well worth the read.
In the post “Design Lifecycle within PDCA – Planning” I laid out a design thinking approach to planning a change.
Like most activities, the level of effort is commensurate with the level of risk. Above I provide some different activities that can happen based on the risk inherent in the process and problem being evaluated.
This is a great reason why Living Risk Assessments are so critical to an organization.
Gemba, as a term, is here to stay. We’re told that gemba comes from the Japanese for “the actual place”, and people who know more than me say it probably should translate as “Genba” but phonetically it uses an “m” instead and as a result, it’s commonly referred to as gemba – so that’s how it is used. Someday I’ll see a good linguistic study of loan words in quality circles, and I have been known to fight against some of the “buzz-terminess” of adopting words from Japanese. But gemba is a term that seems to have settled in, and heck, English is a borrowing language.
Just don’t subject me to any more hour-long talks about how we’re all doing lean wrong because we misunderstood a Japanese written character (I can assure you I don’t know any Japanese written characters). The Lean practitioner community sometimes reminds me of 80s Ninja movies, and can be problematic in all the same ways – you start with “Enter the Ninja” and before long it’s Remo Williams baby!
So let’s pretend that gemba is an English word now, we’ve borrowed it and it means “where the work happens.” It also seems to be a noun and a verb.
And if you know any good studies on the heady blend of Japanophobia mixed with Japanophilia from the 80s and 90s that saturated quality and management thinking, send them my way.
I think we can draw from ethnography more in our methodology.
Gemba is a principle from the lean methodology that says “go and see” something happening for real – you need to go and see how the process really works. This principle rightly belongs as one of the center points of quality thinking. This may be fighting words but I think it is the strongest of the principles from Lean because of the straightforward “no duh” of the concept. Any quality idea that feels so straightforward and radical at the same time is powerful.
You can think of a gemba through the PDCA lifecycle -You plan, you do it, you decide on the learnings, you follow through.
This is all about building a shared understanding of problems we all face together by:
Gemba walks demonstrate visible commitment from the leadership to all members of the organization. They allow leadership to spread clear messages using open and honest dialogue and get a real indication of the progress of behavioral change at all levels. They empower employees because their contributions to site results are recognized and their ideas for continuous improvements heard.
| Plan Effectively | |
| Define your goal | What is it that you want to do a gemba walk for? What do you hope to find out? What would make this activity a success? A successful walk stresses discovery. |
| Set a scope | Which areas will you observe? A specific process? Team? This will allow you to zoom into more detail and get the most out of the activity. |
| Set a theme | What challenges or topics will you focus on? Specific and targeted gemba walks are the most effective. For example, having a emba focusing on Data Integrity, or area clearance or error reduction. Picking the right challenge is critical. Workplaces are complex and confusing, a gemba walk can help find concrete problems and drive improvement linked to strategy. |
| Find additional viewpoints | Who else can help you? Who could add a “fresh pair of eyes” to see the big questions that are left un-asked. Finding additional people to support will result in a richer output and can get buy in from your stakeholders. |
| Get support | Bring visibility and sponsorship for your gemba. Ensure all stakeholders are aware and on board. |
| Plan the Logistics | |
| Identify Suitable Time | Find a suitable time from the process’ perspective. Be sure to also consider times of day, days of the week and any other time-based variations that occur in the process. |
| Find right location | Where should you see the process? Also, do you need to consider visiting multiple sites or areas? |
| Map what you’ll see | Define the process steps that you expect to see. |
| Build an agenda | What parts of the process will you see in what order? Are there any time sensitive processes to observe? |
| Share that agenda | Sharing your agenda to get help from the operational owner and other subject matter experts. |
| Doing the Gemba Walk | |
| Explain what you are doing | Put people at ease when you’re observing the process. When you are on the walk you need to challenge in a productive yet safe manner to create a place where everyone feels they’ve learned something useful and problems can be resolved. It pays to communicate both the purpose and overall approach by explaining the why, the who, and the when. |
| Use your agenda | Keep some flexibility but also make sure to cover everything. |
| Ask open questions | Open discussion and explore the process challenges. |
| Ask closed questions | Use this to check your understanding of the process. |
| Capture reality with notes | Take notes as soon as possible to make sure you recall the reality of the situation. |
| Coach | As a coach, your objective is not to obtain results – that’s the person you’re coaching’s role – but to keep them striving to improve. Take a step back and focus on dismantling barriers. |
| What did you learn | What did you expect to see but didn’t? Also, what did you not expect to happen? The ask questions, coach, learn aspect can be summarized as:
|
| After the Gemba Walk | |
| What did you learn? | Were challenges widespread or just one offs? Review challenges with a critical eye. The best way I’ve heard this explained is “helicopter” thinking – start n a very detailed operational point and ascend to the big picture and then return to the ground. |
| Resolve challenges with a critical eye | Define next steps and agree which are highest priority. It is a good outcome when what is observed on the gemba walk leads to a project that can transform the organization. |
| Take action | Follow-through on the agreed upon actions. Make them visible. In order to avoid being seen only as a critic you need to contribute firsthand. |
| Hold yourself to account | Share your recommendations with others. Engage in knowledge management and ensure actions are complete and effective. |
You can standardize a lot of the preparation of a gemba walk by creating standard work. I’ve seen this successfully done for data integrity, safety, material management, and other topics.
Build a frequency, and make sure they are often, and then hold leaders accountable.
| Who | Best Practice Frequency | Minimum Recommended Frequency |
| First line supervisors | Each shift, multiple times | Each shift |
| Team leaders in individual units | Daily covering different shifts | 2 per week |
| Unit/Department heads | 1 per day | 1 per week |
| Leadership team | 1 per day | 1 per month |
| Internal customers and support (e.g. purchasing, finance, HR) | 1 per month | 1 per quarter |
These same principles can apply to golden-hour deviation triage and root cause analysis. This form of gemba means bringing together a cross-functional team meeting that is assembled where a potential deviation event occurred. Going to the gemba and “freezing the scene” as close as possible to the time the event occurred will yield valuable clues about the environment that existed at the time – and fresher memories will provide higher quality interviews. This gemba has specific objectives:
You will gain plenty of investigational leads from your observations and interviews at the gemba – which documents to review, which personnel to interview, which equipment history to inspect, and more. The gemba is such an invaluable experience that, for many minor events, root cause and CAPA can be determined fairly easily from information gathered solely at the gemba.
One of the great tools of root cause analysis, planning, process improvement and knowledge management is the interview. Properly used the interview allows one to gather a great deal of information and perspective and ferret out hidden information.
For interviews to be truly effective, we have to understand how the function and apply a process. Cognitive Interviewing, originally created for law enforcement and later adopted during accident investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), provides an effective framework. I was first introduced to this at my previous company, where it has become a real linchpin, so I share it here.
The two principles here are:
Based on these two principles there are four components:
| Component | What It Consists of |
| Mental Reinstatement | Encourage the interviewee to mentally recreate the environment and people involved. |
| In-Depth Reporting | Encourage the reporting of all the details, even if it is minor or not directly related to the purpose of the interview. This is intended to improve the detail and accuracy of memory. For example, if investigation a computer error, you would encourage the interviewee to discuss everything they were doing around the event. You would hold the interview at the station the error happened, ideally using the computeras much as possible. |
| Multiple Perspectives | Ask the interviewee to recall the event from others’ points of view. For example, the person upstream or downstream, or a partner or observer. |
| Several Orders | Ask the interviewee to recount the timeline in different ways. Beginning to end, end to beginning. |
A key part of this is that retrieval cues access memory. This is why doing the interview on the scene (or Gemba) is so effective.
The basic behaviors you want to bring to bear are:
Active listening is key here.
At the mouth of the funnel we begin with an ‘open’ question. This question is intended to give the interviewee the widest possible scope for responding. Sometimes it may be necessary to repeat or rephrase this question to give the interviewee more thinking time and further opportunities to raise information. Working down the narrowing body of the funnel we use a series of probing questions to draw out further specific information and help complete the picture. Closed questions then have their place to draw out, check or confirm specific pieces of information, or to get the interviewee to commit on a point more precisely. This then brings us to the bottom of the funnel where we clarify, using a short summary, what we have got out of the discussion, aiming to check our understanding of the main points. The question sequence might go something like this:
A good interview requires preparation. Have opening questions ready, ensure you have all the right props and the right people involved. That extra hour or two will pay dividends.
Here is a helpful worksheet.
Investigations of a Dog 