Check out this clip from A Spotlight on Leaders: What We Can Still Learn From Danaher and Wiremold, where lean trailblazer Art Byrne explains how “learning by doing” with lean can lead to a more responsive and dynamic improvement cycle.
Lean pioneer Art Byrne, author of The Lean Turnaround and The Lean Turnaround Action Guide, recently shared these thoughts about the need for people learning lead to do so not in a classroom–but by testing out these ideas in a hands-on approach at the gemba. Find a lightly edited transcript from his recent webinar below:
“Learning by doing is really the bottom line here. You know, think about if I gave you a contract, I’m going to put all my people through X number of weeks of lean training. It’s going to cost me a lot of money. I’m taking them off the regular job to do this stuff, but they’re not doing anything. They’re just getting training. They’re getting books and they’re looking at movies or whatever training we’re doing. If instead I gave you a couple of hours of training and then put you on the shelf floor and I gave you a target for the Kaizen that had huge stretch goals in it, a 90% reduction in up that would make you think upfront, well, how are we going to do that? But at the end of the week, you achieve 90%.
Well, that’s a game-changer. Everything changes when that happens, right? So, I got learning and training, but I’m also doing it at same time. So, I look at these companies that want to do this massive training exercise. I just say, ‘don’t do that.’ Do a tiny bit of that, but you take the same time from these people now to make some real changes on the shop floor. You’ll get a big change by the end of the week. So that’s the key, that’s what Shinjitsu taught us. They never gave us a PowerPoint presentation by the way, they never gave us any written presentation. We just said, look, here’s the mess we want to fix this week. They just dove right in and showed us how to get the waste out.”
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