“Gemba” (Japanese term) means “The real place”
Purpose:
- Observe the actual process
- Engage with employees
- Identify OFIs (Opportunities For Improvements)
- Encourage a culture of continuous improvement
Who Should Gemba Walk?
- Executives and Senior Leaders
- Middle Managers and Supervisors
- Lean/Continuous Improvement Professionals
- Cross-Functional Teams
Things to Avoid While Walking
- Doing harm
- Giving answers
- Management by walking around
- Going alone
Focus for Gemba Walks
What are you looking for when you walk around?
Some examples:
Safety: Is everyone working safely?
Quality: Are we making good products?
Process: Are people following the right steps?
Efficiency: Is anything slowing us down?
Cleanliness: Is the area neat and organized?
Pick one thing to focus on each time.
This way, you don't get distracted and you find more useful things to improve.
Lean thinkers now need to learn to:
Think horizontally ( = see the flows from end-to-end)
Act horizontally ( = collaborate across verticals to optimize the flows)
To provide ever more perfect value with less time, effort & cost (waste) = lean
Taking a gemba walk is a great way to learn!
Changing Focal Planes Is Hard
We struggle with authority (vertical) versus responsibility (horizontal)
(Matrices simply create conflicts of horizontal versus vertical authority)
We lack a context (and a mechanism) for a creative conversation to optimize the horizontal flows
Gemba walks can help create the context.
Authority vs. Responsibility
We all understand (and seek) authority, a vertical concept.
We neither understand nor feel comfortable with responsibility as a horizontal concept. But...
We can't turn organizations sideways.
So...we need to experiment with assigning responsibility for value streams to individuals with no authority.
who can lead the gemba walks.
A Context for a Conversation
The walk should lead to a conversation across the verticals about:
Current performance of value streams
The gap between current & needed performance to achieve a purpose
Root cause(s) of the gap
The most promising countermeasures to close the gap
Who must do what when to introduce & sustain the countermeasures
Why This Is So Hard
The conversation uncovers all of the contradictions and conflicts between the verticals.
Most senior managers have no means to see their core processes, are paralyzed by conflicts between the verticals, and don't know how to respond (so...they don't and the most powerful vertical wins!)
Mechanism to Help the Conversation
While walking, agree to create a value-stream map showing the performance of every step in the process/value stream:
Engaging everyone touching the process
Embedded in an A3 to permit PDCA
Then assign someone the responsibility to periodically repeat gemba walks along every value stream....forever!
What Senior Managers Must Do
- Listen to the value stream conversations
- As necessary, go see (join a walk), ask why, and show respect
- Avoid giving answers; just ask questions!
- Do We Know How to Do This Today?
No! So what we need now is:
Horizontal, cross-vertical Gemba walks, leading to experiments with ways to optimize different types of horizontals ("The life of lean is experiments.")
Wide and rapid sharing of findings
I'll try to do my part as I continue my Gemba walks and share my findings!