Lean starts with kanban - Michael Balle at FlowCon France 2019

[00:00:00] Um, yeah, Demetrius asked me to to talk about Kanban. And I, I, I don't come at all from the IT or agile world. I actually come from the Lean world.
[00:00:13] And one question I often get is, lean and or agile, is agile part of lean, is lean part of agile, what is this?
[00:00:24] They just don't compare. They come from two very, very different worlds. So, on the one side, we have Lean, which is built by numerous people since 1896. So it's an accumulation of practices since 1896. And on the other hand, we have Agile, which is some very, very clever guys in 2001 agreeing on basic principles.
[00:00:56] So, it's just very different. It, it has no, these trains don't run parallel to one another, they don't run one after the other, they're running in different directions. One is built from shop floor practices over a century, and the other is an agreement on some basic practices.
[00:01:17] Is that okay with you? So, I'll talk about Lean and not Agile. And I don't, I think Agile is great. I, I just don't think it's compares. The main difference, really, is that Agile is an agreement on a set of organizational principles. So they got together and they agreed to some organizational principles, to how to create the best environment to develop good code. Lean is something completely different. It's a discipline of learning by doing. It's a thinking discipline, an acting discipline. So, it's a discipline like a martial arts discipline. It's just something else.
[00:01:59] So, Lean first started with these two gentlemen, father and son, and the first gentleman, Sakichi Toyoda, was a loom inventor. He invented mechanical looms and invented the principle of Jidoka, which is stop rather than make a mistake. Intelligence automation. So you take the human intelligence and you put it into the machine. Intelligence, not in terms of smart, intelligence in terms of judgment. The machine can judge whether it does good work or bad work. And this allows you to separate human work from machine work. The difference between cooking in a pot and you have to watch it cook, or putting in the microwave, you put in the microwave, turn the bottom, go and do something else, when it's ready, it tells you, and you use it whenever you want. So that was the first big principle. The second principle was just in time. Just in time was the idea that you only get what you need when you need it. In the quantity you needed, and this gentleman, who created the Toyota Motor Company, he didn't know how to make it work. It was a brilliant idea, but he didn't know how to make it work. Then came these two gentlemen.
[00:03:09] Taiichi Ohno, who made Just in Time work with Kanban, which we will talk about, and he found a trick to making it work. So this is a, this, this starts, but the person we know least about is AG Toyoda. AG Toyoda is the architect of the Toyota we know now. He's the guy who took a bankrupt company in 1950 and made it the number one automaker in the world. He's the man of the Priuses, he's behind the expansion, he's the guy who built the Toyota as we know it. And his contribution to Lean is Kaizen.
[00:03:42] He understood suggestions visiting a Ford plant in the in the early 50s just as Ford was stopping the suggestion program. So he says that they taught him a lot of quality statistics, which he didn't understand because they were all in English, it was very complicated. But he came back from the plant with a leaflet about the suggestion system. And he's the guy who created the slogan good thinking, good products. The idea that with a lot of small ideas, creative ideas, you could build better products. So this is a very, very important chap, and he's the one who encouraged and promoted Taiichi Ohno. But there's other people in the galaxy we don't, we hear very little about.
[00:04:26] Masao Nemoto, anybody had heard about him?
[00:04:30] So he's the guy who did the TQM part of Lean in Toyota. TQM, Total Quality Management. That doesn't mean management of total quality. That means management of total voluntary participation into quality. And they did this because with TPS, they progressed very fast on the shop floor, but then they would always backslide because they made improvements, but the policies in the back office didn't change. So they invented something to make the policies change in the back office, which was you might have heard A3s. Anybody heard of A3s? A3s, yeah. So this is a TQM part.
[00:05:12] And probably the most important man in the whole galaxy, the person who most explains Toyota's enduring success is this latter gentleman, Kenya Nakamura.
[00:05:26] who was Toyota's first chief engineer.
[00:05:30] Toyota's success is not because it produces better.
[00:05:34] It because it designs cars people buy.
[00:05:39] It's all in the design part, it's not the production part, it's the test machine for the design. So, we all got fascinated by the production because we could see it, and of course they, they showed it because they needed their suppliers to understand it, to produce like them. They never showed anybody the design part, but the whole secret of Toyota success is not just in the manufacturing, it's understanding the design, of course. And this is the gentleman who created the, the roots of what was to begin their unique design system. So, to understand what we're talking about here, they started producing looms.
[00:06:20] So, we have here an image from the 30s, the whole thing was about product. It's all about product, it's all about making the loom better and better. Since the late 1800s, since the 1890s, and they improved the loom with many, many tricks, it's about building a product. And then the second problem is manufacturing the product.
[00:06:45] So, to see Lean in its totality, you have to understand that the Lean obsession of Toyota was product development.
[00:06:54] Then from these design instructions, you set it in the factory, we make where you have production improvements.
[00:07:03] It's all about the product development. Then it's all about once the design instructions are clear, then yes, you take away everything unpredictable in there. But there's a lot of unpredictability in designing the right product, of course there is. So, there are a lot of myths about Lean and about how predictable it is and how you take away variation and stuff. All this is absolutely true. In the factory.
[00:07:26] It's not true at all in the part that matters, product development. What Toyota does have that is unique are clear theories about this.
[00:07:37] So they have two clear theories. There's a product theory.
[00:07:42] And the product theory is all about understanding that a product must both be robust on the basic functions and adapted to changing taste, spirit of the times, what is going on? So that's quite tricky. But they never do product from scratch. They build it from previous products, as they had done with the looms. So they have a very, very clear theory of design, which is what do we keep? What do we change? And of course we change as little as possible, as long as it's not boring. So, I want, I once asked Toyota chief engineer what was the secret of a successful car. And he looked at me and I said, oh, did I say something wrong, you know, in the thought, but he was thinking about it and said, ah, lots of conflict.
[00:08:33] Lots of conflict about what? About what we changed, what we keep. The chief engineer wants to change everything.
[00:08:39] The functional designers, they don't, no, don't change anything because I can't make it work. Because first the car has to work, then it has to look good. And they have a production theory which is based on same thing, improvements. So they have this theory that we all familiar with just in time, Jidoka, basic stability, which is means in fact management terms is mutual trust, Kaizen. And this theory is a theory about how you drive small changes on the shop floor. So it's not a theory of production as such.
[00:09:13] It's a theory about production improvement. So what you have here that is absolutely unique is you have two theories of evolution of dynamic. One is a theory of how do you make the product evolve? And the second is how do you make production evolve? And of course they come together.
[00:09:32] So what is Lean? Well, Lean is is essentially, uh, scratching our heads to, you know, looking at what Toyota does and just not understanding anything. So, the definition of Lean is really is figuring out what Toyota does and whether it applies to what we do or not. And a lot of it, and a history of Lean has been cherry picking. Oh, I come back with this tool, I come back with this tool and I apply it. But it's a system, and so we go back to say, what did we see, what happened? And I'm just back from Japan and again we saw stuff and we're back saying, it doesn't make sense. That's not what we taught. They've changed it. No, they haven't changed it. They're just doing stuff we don't understand. So Lean is figuring out what Toyota is doing and how it applies to us. But then that gives us to the second part of Lean. Once you figure out more or less what he does, he says, it applies to this deeper thinking, say, wow, it can't possibly work, not here, not with these people, not now.
[00:10:30] Because we don't get it. And it's precisely because we don't get it that we start thinking more deeply, and that's the fun and difficult part of Lean. Um, bizarrely, this photo comes from the Kyoto National Art Museum.
[00:10:45] They have a passion for Rodin, from this Rodin statue, it's not from, it's not from around the corner here. It's, it's in the Kyoto, in the gardens of the Kyoto National Museum. So, Lean is really about deeper thinking. First is, we need to figure out what these guys are doing and it's really different from what we think they're doing. Secondly, we have to think about how it applies to us and this is where learning by doing comes into play. Thinking by doing. You think with, as they say in Lean, you look with your feet and you think with your hands.
[00:11:20] All of this was made possible, they were all concepts, they were all trying, they were all engineers, they were trying lots of stuff as you are doing in software. And it was all made possible by this manufacturing engineer chap who invented Kanban. He had a brilliant idea. He made it work, he saw pictures of a supermarket somebody had shown him, and said, oh, that's it, this is what we need to do in production.
[00:11:44] So, the thing to understand is Kanban is not an organization tool as you think it. It's a radically new way to capture value.
[00:12:00] When you're in a Toyota supplier, what you see is 15 trucks per day from Toyota asking all your parts all the time. Can you imagine the pressure?
[00:12:17] You have 15 trucks a day that you need to fill with all your parts that you deliver to them in small quantities 15 times a day.
[00:12:28] What does it mean in practice?
[00:12:31] 15 opportunities to get it wrong, so 15 opportunities to correct what went wrong.
[00:12:40] And this they do with all the suppliers in an area of 100 kilometers around the plant.
[00:12:48] You have these trucks on the road all the time. You, you would have the trucks on the road anyway, but usually in normal systems, it's the supplier that ships to the plant and handles the trucking. Here, it's Toyota. What this means also is that they have a very close relationship just by the fact of the fact of the 15 trucks with all their suppliers. So, they capture value not by extracting it with contracts. They capture value by capillarity. Drip, drip, drip, all the time, all the time, all the time, all the time. And every time something goes wrong in a very, very small way, somebody reacts. And not surprisingly, what happens when something goes wrong in a major way, as we have seen in Toyota history, there's a fire, there's a tsunami, there's something that burns down the plant, what happens? Well, you know what, people who are used to solve small problems because they know each other all the time, somehow, it's a mystery, get together and solve the big problems.
[00:13:48] It's a radically new way to draw value. So when you talk about Kanbans and batches and Scrum and all these things, you're always looking at the impact of the team, what does it do to the team, how do you pull on the team? Then you try to scale it and it becomes a bit funny, I have to say, next to being, I love safe. It's historical.
[00:14:12] But you have to look at it the other way around, you have to look at it from the assembler's point of view. Toyota usually handles the designs, they even handle the manufacturing engineering, sometimes they even purchase for the supplier. But you have all these very small companies around Toyota that are where value is coming in, and many of these small suppliers were founded by ex-Toyota people. So you also have a flow of people coming out of Toyota, if you're a good guy in Toyota but you can't progress, they give you seed money to start a supplier, and you have free presses in a hangar or somewhere doing specific parts every day 15 trucks a day. Can you see it?
[00:14:49] It's a radically new way to think about value. And of course it's leaner.
[00:14:55] For instance, it's again, it's not Japanese, it's not Japanese. This is a funny photo, this is a photo of a plant we just didn't understand what it did. It took huge, um, cores of steel and cut it in small ribbons.
[00:15:10] In fact, this is Checkpoint Charlie.
[00:15:13] This is the border between the environment of 15 trucks a day, or 12 trucks I think here, to Toyota, and Nippon Steel that works with huge batches.
[00:15:24] So they have a specific supplier that all it does is put it in the 15 trucks a day format. That's all it does. And it's a supplier to itself. It doesn't buy anything, it doesn't divide anything, it works, it's Checkpoint Charlie. We have two environments, we have the capillarity environment of Toyota, and then we have the traditional batch environment of Nippon Steel.
[00:15:47] And here are the guys who are just at the border.
[00:15:52] So, what is really Kanban? Well, that's what Toyota teaches you is when you start a new part of anything, you remove a card, you put it in the mail box, somebody puts the mail box to a computer system. Right from the start, as soon as they work computers, they used to do it by hand. That sorts all these cards out, they send it to the supplier, and it gets to the supplier and somebody at the supplier withdraws a box and sends it to Toyota. That is the Kanban system, and it happens in a radius of 100, 100 kilometers around the plant all the time, 15 trucks a day. Toyota Boshoku, 50 trucks a day, first tire supplier.
[00:16:37] Now, here's the magic of it. This lady is working at a supplier, and she's working with Kanban.
[00:16:47] She's autonomous in the Lean sense simply because she doesn't have, she doesn't need a boss to know what to do. The signal comes in, she knows what to do, that's all. She doesn't do anything, everything is done for her, the maintenance is done for her, all she has to do is produce well with quality, that's already a big job. But why is she called autonomous in Lean? Because actually she's her own person, she does two things. She knows what to do because she receives a production order, and she does also her supplies because she sends the Kanbans back. So it's like really is a mini business. But do not think autonomous means that they do everything, they don't.
[00:17:27] They are autonomous because they they can work without a boss. So this is a radical shift because traditionally in the West what we do is that we have bosses that keep telling you, stop doing this, do that, we need managers to rearrange priorities. Stop doing this, stop working on this flow, stop doing this, do that. And then we have a specialist department that will control quality. And you keep the good parts, you throw the bad parts away, control quality. What they did in the 60s is they turned this around.
[00:18:00] You have a specialist department that sends these Kanban cards, and it's the responsibility of the local manager to guarantee quality.
[00:18:11] The Kanban system led them to completely turn around their organization in terms of responsibility. So what this lady really is responsible for is coming up with good quality parts. Now what is interesting here is that you see the Kanban, she doesn't have 15, you know, she doesn't have two days of work in front of her. She has two cards. What you also see in the picture is that there's a signal that if there's a third card in the box, a light will come up and call for help.
[00:18:39] This is radical, radical, radical. Because it turns the chain of command, it turns the management line into a chain of help.
[00:18:50] The moment anything goes wrong, somebody comes and helps. Bring back to standard, solve the problem. We don't need a chain of command, there's no command to be done, you know, people know what they have to do. We need a chain of help because something always happens.
[00:19:07] So I'll give you an example, um, about capturing, uh, capturing value. Uh, we're a group of us, it's like a dojo, we're a group of retired people, uh, playing sensei, trying to teach other people what we do, not very good at it, but we've been doing it for a while. And somebody asked us why, said, why don't you communicate more?
[00:19:29] And we thought, well, should we? Says, well, you guys know what you're doing, you're visible, you should communicate more. So, okay, fine. So we thought about it and we had this idea to do small videos.
[00:19:40] So with the technology, now there's a Lumen technology, I don't know exactly how it works, but it's brilliant because it does small videos. So now we're a bunch of people and we have to produce small videos. So what would be the natural way to do it? Well, naturally, you know, you would ask everyone of us, it's about 10 people in this group and say, please do a video, right? So the guy said, do I really? Okay, I'll do it, fine. I do my first video, it's hard work, I have to learn the program. And then what happens next? So everybody produces a video. communicate more. And we thought, well, why should we? We said, well, you guys know what you're doing, you're visible, you should communicate more. I said, okay, fine. So we thought about it and we had this idea to do small videos. So with the technology, now there's a Lumen technology, I don't know exactly how it works, but it's brilliant because it does small videos. So now we're a bunch of people and we have to produce small videos. So what would be the natural way to do it? Well, naturally, you know, you would ask every one of us, there's about 10 people in this group, and say, please do a video, right? So the guy said, do I really, okay, I'll do it, fine. I'll do my first video. It's hard work. I have to learn the program. And then what happens next? So everybody produces a video. Then what happens next?
[00:20:13] Well now it's time, you have to go back to them and say, please do another video. And they go, oh god, another one? I already did one.
[00:20:25] Please, that's the traditional way. We are extracting value. We have to squeeze value out of people. Now, the other way to do of doing it is find a leader. Some of you know Sabrine?
[00:20:41] Find a leader. To find a leader, she does great videos and find a leader and set up a Kanban. So here you have a Kanban plant, so we have the, here we have the guys who do the videos, here we have a tact time, a rhythm at which we achieve after you produce videos. As you can see, uh, it's a lot, it's a bit easier for Michael and Jack to produce videos, so they come up more often.
[00:21:10] And we have Kanban.
[00:21:13] So the trick here that is not shown is that I get an email, say, can you send me a video? Now the trick is, that is a purely Kanban trick, is, I know that one I've produced one video, I start producing the next immediately, so it's in what we're called a shop stock. So I'm not surprised when the message come, I just ship it and then make the next. So I have one ahead. So you see how it works.
[00:21:34] Now, this system, we have 12 contributors, 50 videos, 100, 150,000 views on LinkedIn. We have no idea whether it has any impact, whether it's useful, whether people even watch them, to be honest.
[00:21:55] But what we do have is 50 videos.
[00:22:00] We are not begging every person to please do another video.
[00:22:05] The Kanban system is pulling the value in through capillarity. We do have a problem though, which is what?
[00:22:16] Quality.
[00:22:18] Quality, making sure that the videos we produce are still a high value a high quality videos. Because now that the machine is working, but people still get tired, still get bored and produce whatever they produce. So we have these discussions. Now it's very interesting because we we work as a dojo, so each video produced is an opportunity for what?
[00:22:40] Discussion, observation, improvement and thinking more deeply.
[00:22:48] That's how Kanban works.
[00:22:51] Kanban is a tool of Kaizen. Kanban is not a tool to organize your production. Kanban is not a tool to get the software out.
[00:23:02] It's a tool for improvement. It comes out of a theory of improvement, but it only makes sense if you have a theory of the product. So how does it work in real life?
[00:23:13] Well, this is uh, any of you familiar with Aramisoto? So you the company, there's uh two two guys, uh Guillaume and Nicola, who start with a PC on a desk in a studio and built what is now a 720 million company, euros company, if I'm not wrong. So quite a spectacular success. So Nicola, the CEO is is is lenient in a big way and here we have an example from this company. So here, Juliette has a Kanban.
[00:23:46] A Kanban, this is like she's doing, she does home delivery. So if you buy a car with Aramis and you want it delivered to your home, it gets to her team. And basically the Kanban is that like like in the production you have all the demands that fall one after the other and one one a demand is sorted, it disappears from the screen. And what the Kanban really does is change management.
[00:24:10] Because every day that her team works, she deals with unhappy customers for extra reasons, a late card, a difficult work for some operator and some other unexpected obstacle. So here you see the first step of Kanban.
[00:24:26] Kanban is dealing with daily changes in order to still deliver to quality.
[00:24:32] Then you have this next level. The next, I think this is Kejia, I'm not sure, but the next level is, as we have some recurring problems, we start going into problem solving with the team. This is not about solving the problems, this is not about pulling all the grains of sand of the process so the process runs perfectly. This is about deepening our understanding of what goes on. So the problem solving is like in medicine. This is problem-based teaching. This team learns because it looks into the problems that come from the Kanban.
[00:25:06] And then we get through the third thing of Kaizen, we have two things, we have quality circles, which is teamwork to improve their processes, and we have creative ideas.
[00:25:17] So, three aspects of Kaizen, one is care in daily work.
[00:25:23] Care, just care, finishing touch, quality checks. Second is team Kaizen to improve the process and third is creative ideas from anybody from the team.
[00:25:36] Uh, the results are quite impressive, uh, Nicolas from across the company.
[00:25:44] And as you can see, it has a, the impact is, is, is impressive. Their on-time delivery, this is, what you've just seen is wall-to-wall in the company. The on-time delivery move from 50% to 80%. I think it's better now still. And interestingly enough, this is the, uh, the, the human resources core. Are you familiar with the NPS, Net Promoter Score for customers? Their ENPS is the internal employee promoter score. And this is what happened.
[00:26:20] This is what happened when you turn the chain of command into a chain of help.
[00:26:28] So, back to Agile.
[00:26:31] Yeah, okay, I I worked with what I had, guys. I'm sorry. I will not disclose where this comes from. But this is a typically agile board. This is not a Kanban.
[00:26:44] This is a backlog management tool.
[00:26:48] Because when you have the tickets in there, you take the tickets you know how to do, you leave the tickets you don't know how to do, you do not, it doesn't force you to solve your problems. You juggle the tickets around and you do what is completely natural for human beings, you work on what you know how to work and you don't work on what you don't know how to work. So what happens sooner or later? The part you didn't know about, you're going to have to tackle it, right? Then what happens?
[00:27:16] You discover that precisely because it was difficult, the solution you finally find changes everything else. So you have to redo the whole thing.
[00:27:27] Never happens in software development, right? Never happened to any of you. I knew it. You have a special crowd here. Agile really works. Look at them.
[00:27:37] So this is not a Kanban board. Why? Because this is a Kanban, this is a board to handle tickets, this is not a board to support Kaizen. You see the difference?
[00:27:50] Now, these smart guys moved to this.
[00:27:56] That's really interesting because it gets crowded. Now here the ticket has only one ticket can move at a time. What does that mean?
[00:28:05] First it gets everybody grumpy, why? Because you have to tackle the problems that appear.
[00:28:12] You can't put the problem aside and work on something else. You have to solve the problem. And if you can't, this is the other room, chain of help, nobody deals with a problem alone, you call for help or support or a second pair of eyes or just looking at it, you do not, you do not leave people alone with the problem. And if it's a bigger problem, well, you it escalates. So this is a Kanban.
[00:28:37] This is a Kaizen machine. The aim of the Kanban, the purpose of the Kanban is not to sort out your production, is to reveal problems. You still have to solve them. Doesn't change anything.
[00:28:51] Makes you face them.
[00:28:56] So the people development side of the equation lean is very clear. We teach people to better formulate problems. We teach them to seek root cause. We teach them to try one new thing at a time. And this is Don was talking about the, you know, New Zealand ships and versus the American ships in the America's Cup. Well, this is what we do, you know, rather than solve every problem at one time with a big computer, we solve them one at a time. And most importantly, when people have come up with a solution, we teach them to study their own solution and think about it more deeply.
[00:29:32] Now here's the trick.
[00:29:35] See, these gentlemen will never understand the important part of the presentation.
[00:29:40] Goodbye.
[00:29:43] It's all about the product. It's all about the product. The production techniques that you see, the Kaizen, is the test machine for your design instructions. What sells cars is good design. Yes, it's great that they're well produced. But, you know, every other, every other auto maker also produces cars pretty well by now. What matters is the design, is the value in the design. So here is the interesting loop is that on the one side, the design instructions are tested in the production improvement environment, which feeds back production knowledge so that you can design better cars, so you can design better cars, more robust, better quality, better value. Value.
[00:30:33] Services divided by cost.
[00:30:37] Better solve customer problems and reduce total cost.
[00:30:42] So, the step one is change management.
[00:30:46] You have, there is the value of what you do every day. And the first thing is how do you guarantee value when there is, hey, you organize conferences every day and suddenly all transport stops working in the country. Well, you're still here. They did a great job. They did change management. They did what the Kanban leader does, is you deal with the changes and you maintain the quality. And I have to say, good job team, because you did a splendid job on that.
[00:31:15] So this is a last trip in Japan, we have a daily change point management. This is not daily management to get production. They do that as well. But this is managing whatever happens in the day to keep with the 15 trucks a day.
[00:31:34] Truck. The truck is coming, or the truck is leaving, the truck is leaving, the truck is leaving. We have a transport truck, ah, yeah, the truck is leaving. What do we do?
[00:31:43] Step two, value analysis.
[00:31:47] So you improve processes in the current products in production. What you're currently doing. To improve quality, make work easier, reduce lead time. And this reduces total cost for what is currently in production. So here's an example from Aramis.
[00:32:07] By putting a pull system in their delivery, in their sales point, they managed to reduce their promise of delivery under eight days to delivery under six days. It's the same offer, it's the same process, it's improved, they create more value, this distinguishes from their competitors, but it's the same process.
[00:32:32] So step three, so you learn from this and you start offering new features.
[00:32:37] Uh, so here's the story of Aramis, what they've done like any company that grows and sustains growth. is they keep, they progress from feature to feature, that's from their website, you see them progress from feature to feature and one interesting one is 2016, the new feature they're offering customers, which is home delivery.
[00:32:57] Disaster.
[00:32:59] Because producing offering a new feature is not enough. The more features you have, the more complexity you add on, the more legacy you have. So the problem is not just proposing a new feature, but making sure it doesn't deteriorate the quality of service on the other features, right? Now it gets really tricky, one is okay, two is okay and then it gets tricky. So here we have the impact of pull system on the home delivery. So the the customers were complaining, saying this is ridiculous. Eight days to get the car in the sales point, 20 days to get the car delivered at home. Come on, guys.
[00:33:37] Disaster.
[00:33:40] So they worked out through the Kanban.
[00:33:45] And progressively, as you see, the number of deliveries increases, on-time delivery increases, delivery lead time decreases, customer satisfaction increases day after day after day after day after day.
[00:34:02] So, what has, what is happening is that it's all about the product architecture. If you look at the product architecture, you're doing some services for, you're delivering services to the customer. These services are delivered through features. These features depend on tech.
[00:34:20] Now, an innovation usually happens when something really radically lowers the price of some tech. The cloud of tech, for instance, going AWS, going on the cloud, radically lowers the cost of holding data. Or, in the case of Aramis, the radically lower cost of doing business through the internet. When this happens, you offer new functions.
[00:34:43] New features. Which hopefully gives new service. If it does give new service.
[00:34:51] Which actually, the more complex your product is, the it rarely does. Unless you have a mechanism to make sure that it does. So, innovation succeeds if one you find an opportunity in technology that is an enabler. It actually really fits a current need, not a future need. It solves in a new way a problem people have today. That's the trick. You use technology to solve a current problem, not a future problem, a current problem.
[00:35:25] The features that you develop actually succeed as services. People are actually happy about them. But both the features and the service are useful.
[00:35:35] It means that they work. They actually work and they don't degrade the rest of what the the product was doing.
[00:35:42] And fourth, they have to be adopted. First politically inside the company and then socially out there.
[00:35:53] Back to Toyota.
[00:35:56] Once you have on the same production line all your cars, different models on the same line, when you come up with your new model, you don't have to bear the cost of an entire new line or entire new plant. You massively reduce the cost of introducing an innovation. Because it goes on the same assembly mechanism.
[00:36:20] And come, and what you have here is Kaizen. What you have here is a change of rhythm of the cards on the line, which means that you have to reorganize the task all through the line, which creates a need for Kaizen, not an opportunity for Kaizen, a need for Kaizen. So every time a Toyota plant changes its rhythm, it creates a need for Kaizen. This need for Kaizen creates creative ideas which are just fed back into the product. And of course, all of this works on the step four if you can offer opportunities for people to participate because they themselves see that they benefit from the ideas that they propose.
[00:37:05] Who's read, anybody read Pentland?
[00:37:09] Alex Pentland? The, the guy, the professor who taught all the guys from the Silicon Valley.
[00:37:18] Well, the big idea is that It's okay to, it's okay to read a book, guys. You know, I know you're developers, but, you know, it it can't hurt.
[00:37:28] So, this is, this is, this is the guy, his theory is that your productivity, productivity is wealth and your productivity comes from the flow of ideas through your company. So what the magic of Kaizen and Kanban is that we get creative ideas from everybody, not from one brilliant guy and then execution from the rest.
[00:37:50] So, I'm a strong believer in Lean. I know, I know, after after what 25 or 30 years, get a life, man. Dude, as they say, get a life. Why am I a strong believer in Lean? Well, we do have a problem.
[00:38:09] We do have, I love it how Greta Thunberg gets middle-aged white men so infuriated. Why are they so angry? Because the reality of the problem is that they created this mess and nobody knows how to fix it. So we do have a problem of our footprint on the planet. What I see in Japan in the Toyota environment is clearly a part of the solution. I see no scrap, no defects.
[00:38:40] I see every new plant is 50% reduction of footprint.
[00:38:45] I see machines replaced with mechanical smart devices from Kaizen so you don't use machines. And I see cleaner cars being designed out of this process.
[00:38:57] So this is not about having great initiatives or deciding not to take planes anymore, all the things we do. This is about facing the fact that everything we do works, but our footprint is terrible because of the waste.
[00:39:12] The 15 trucks per day would happen anyway, except that in the Toyota method, the trucks are optimized and they are full of parts. The trucks are rightly dimensioned. We don't have half empty trucks on the road. And that works with every step of the process. And this is, strangely enough, what delivers the Prius, what delivers the the Mirai. It's this search for a lower footprint for industrial products in production and in design that delivers these new products that radically lower our footprint. So I'm a great believer in Lean as a part of the, not all the solution, but certainly a part of the solution, and the key to a waste-free society. Thank you very much.
[00:40:09] Thank you, Michael. Um, we have a few minutes, uh, for questions.
[00:40:16] Um, so if anybody
[00:40:17] Or insults.
[00:40:18] Insults. Not on my board, please.
[00:40:24] She's making faces at me. What?
[00:40:28] Some questions? Yeah.
[00:40:34] Thanks for the presentation and I just had one question for you. If you have to reinvent the Lean now. What are the suggestion or the improvement in the Lean mindset itself that you can suggest?
[00:40:08] Hello.
[00:40:09] Thank you, Michael. Um, we have a few minutes for questions. Um, so if anybody or insults.
[00:40:18] Hm, insults.
[00:40:20] Not on my board, please.
[00:40:24] She's making faces at me, look.
[00:40:28] Some questions? Yeah.
[00:40:34] Thanks for the presentation and I just had one question for you. If you have to reinvent the lean now.
[00:40:46] What are the suggestion or the improvement in the lean mindset in self that you can suggest?
[00:40:56] We are talking about digital, we are in new era. So, uh, you you spoke about the lean uh, one 100 year yet. So, if you have to apply a change on the lean mindset itself, what are the delta? Thank you.
[00:41:19] Well, I'm afraid this is a bit above my paygrade. I'm still trying to figure it out, man. I mean, we are talking about 100 years of of of thousands of people um building this system step by step. Uh, I'm I'm not smart enough. I I'm literally still trying to figure it out. So, a key thing in Lean is that we do not try to understand things by understanding the right thing. We understand things by clearing out misconceptions. Like Michelangelo finds the statue in the stone by taking the stone away. So, I have no idea. Um, I'm still trying to clear out my misconceptions of Lean to figure out what it is. I I wouldn't know how to answer. Interesting question though.
[00:42:09] Is can somebody give me an easy question? I mean, something I can answer.
[00:42:25] Thank you, Michael. Um, uh, why do you think all the source of Lean is coming from Japan?
[00:42:34] That's a very interesting one. It's actually not.
[00:42:38] Lean is the first global method we have. The thing is we have to understand how deeply conditioned we are by the American methods, the MBA method. It's like the air we breathe of the fish in the water, we don't see the air, but we really are conditioned by it. And in Japan, they attribute the fact that Japan disappeared from the industrial world because it was successful and the MBAs came in and screwed it up. As they screwed her up. So, what we have here are Japanese guys, the the created the the car company with money from selling their patent for their looms to the British. Their engineers were trained during the first the Second World War by Germans aeronautical engineers. Lean was they they expanded internationally. Lean was invented by Americans. I'm a Frenchman and I sell books in China.
[00:43:35] Lean is fascinating because it is truly a it happened in it didn't happen in Japan particularly, it happened in Toyota in Japan, but it's it's clearly is a global method.
[00:43:48] in which every country around the world is involved in that those slides here.
[00:43:58] Ah. Did I have that many slides? You should have told me. I had too many slides. Look.
[00:44:07] Here. And every country in the world is in the lean world is involved with just still scratching our heads. So Lean is built from TPS in Toyota and Lean is the the kind of answers we find. So it's a very global method. I don't think there's anything specifically Japanese.
[00:44:27] Because when you go to Japan, actually, you find factories, uh, with huge inventories, with armies of people, uh, doing quality control, I mean, you find exactly the same places as us. I mean, it's Toyota environment that is different. That's very clear.
[00:44:47] Remember, easy questions.
[00:44:53] What do you, what would you think from this sentence, same root causes, causes the same effect?
[00:45:02] Does it fit in Lean or not?
[00:45:07] Well, it sounds really good. I don't know if it's true. I think it really depends on context.
[00:45:14] I think the same root causes in the same context might, if we're lucky, cause the same effects. Uh, it's uh, I would have to answer technically, it's a Taguchi problem. It depends how close to the cliff you are. So, one thing we do in Lean, the way we think about anything, and it goes to your way, is like we look at every process, at what is predictable and what is unpredictable. It is completely predictable that you're going to stay until a certain hour when you just have enough of hearing me and you will leave. So there's I know, I can predict that you're going to stay until the end of the presentation, I could no longer predict predict what happens afterwards, yes?
[00:45:54] Once we cut the predictable and the unpredictable, we look at the unpredictable. And then again, we try to cut what is predictable and what is unpredictable. Do you see what I mean?
[00:46:05] So, we keep looking at predictable, find the root causes, understand it, then there's an unpredictable part we don't understand. And sometimes we don't want to for instance, engineering has to have some kind of pizzazz, some kind of unpredictability to it. But then that part we can still cut it into what can we predict here, and what can we not? So, I would agree with your statement in the predictable part of the world.
[00:46:30] On the unpredictable part of the I haven't got a clue. Anything can happen.
[00:46:37] I understand that Lean was massively reject in France in the beginning of 2000. Probably because Lean was masqueraded by lots of people and wasn't really Lean anymore. What do you suggest to agile people today to avoid that same mistake?
[00:46:58] Oh, it's happening to you too, hey, consultants got involved! Yeah!
[00:47:07] I'm just I'm just finishing a a chapter for an academic uh book in the states about Lean in France. And strangely enough, Lean was massively adopted and government sponsored in France all through the years.
[00:47:22] But it's not Lean.
[00:47:25] It's like government push programs, anything, anything could be called Lean. So there is a few guys who are CEOs who are trying to figure out what Toyota does. Again, these guys.
[00:47:37] These guys.
[00:47:39] Then there's a lot of old tailory stuff that people call Lean, well, you know, you study the process, find the one best way, apply it. And there's there's traditional French modernity programs, you know?
[00:47:52] So nobody the functions rule and then we have to modernize the company, we call Lean as well. So yeah, there's a whole bunch of stuff called Lean, this is why this is why this is why my definition of Lean is operational, this is it. As far as I'm concerned. But then I don't own the term and anybody calls it what he wants. It wasn't massively rejected.
[00:48:15] This is France. The unions figured it out before the managers did. That's what happened. What really happened is our bosses are far worse than our unions.
[00:48:26] Far worse in terms of waste, of very smart jerks and stupid decisions. That cost millions. So you can strike all you want, you'll never reach that degree of waste.
[00:48:41] But the unions did realize very early on that when you do apply Lean, your relationship with your people changes. And that's and I've seen it happen for myself several times. As your results improve and you set up a chain of help, the relationship changes. And the union doesn't know quite exactly and for instance, in every case we had industrial problems, we actually worked very closely with the unions and it it was fine.
[00:49:06] But the central parts of the unions whose job it is, saw very early this on. And they fought against Lean before anybody thought there was a problem. That's what happened. We even had a um candidate, what was his name? The socialist candidate. It's disappeared now. The socialist party imploded, yeah, but what was the name of the candidate? Uh, le candidat socialiste. Yeah, Benoît Hamon who actually actually spoke badly of Lean in political rallies and I thought, wow, man. Hey, thank you. Glory Lean. On the natural stage. So two lessons here, so sometimes you get famous, it's not necessarily a good thing. And the second lesson is, do not speak badly of Lean because look at what happens to you afterwards.
[00:49:54] Thank you very much. Thank you for your questions.
[00:50:01] I keep one personal question. Uh, it's Lean and Agile doesn't compare, but what is the Lean Manifesto?
[00:50:11] We tried that once already. We tried that.
[00:50:14] It's an easy one.
[00:50:15] All right. Um, there can't be a Lean Manifesto.
[00:50:20] It it doesn't make sense.
[00:50:26] A manifesto implies that some people decide what is right. So they get together, they decide what is right. So they they find the problem, they decide what to do. Then the manifesto is there to drive the solution and push it on other people. And then deal with the unexpected circumstances or such as safe.
[00:50:54] Fancy footwork, yeah. Sorry, do you know the story of Karl Marx coming back to Earth? No, and and going to Stalin? And Stalin, you see Karl Marx is a bit. And Karl Marx discovers television and say, wow, wonderful television. Can I go on TV? Can I go on TV?
[00:51:14] And Stalin can't say no, it's I mean, it's Karl Marx. So Karl Marx goes on TV and says, Workers of every countries, please forgive me.
[00:51:24] So that cancels what happens with manifestos. So Lean doesn't worry that way. Lean works with I wrote I wrote an entire book about this.
[00:51:32] Lean works differently. First, you are with your people, you find problems before they decide what the problems are, you find what customers' real problems are, what people's real problems are. Then you face them and that's the difficult part.
[00:51:45] It it's very difficult humanly to face problems you don't have a ready solution to. You face it. Then you frame the problem, which is mean you explain the problem in a way that everybody can understand. And in Japan, we saw a lot of framing, a lot of framing. For instance, we look a guy during the Shinkansen seven-minute miracle, seven minutes to clean a train. For a wagon for a team, what. They're very good at framing, how they say new factory, half the footprint. Okay. So it seems impossible, but everybody understands the problem. And then you form the solution from everybody's contribution. So, um, I you got me really thinking about that question because we we we wrote a paper on this. And it doesn't make sense to have a Lean Manifesto. And you know what we actually I have to confess. We tried. I wrote one. Nobody would sign it.
[00:52:49] Because that's not the way we work. We work like this, this one and this one.
[00:52:58] There this is Lean is not an organizational method on which we can agree.
[00:53:05] Lean is a discipline of learning by doing that each person individually can practice.
[00:53:14] You can't manifesto this.
[00:53:18] You can only go and look with your feet and think with your hands. That's what you can do. But you can't manifest this. It's a it's a personal practice. It's it's not a an agreement.
[00:53:33] We we can try for you.
[00:53:34] Oh, thank you very much. Thank you, Agile.
[00:53:38] Thank you, everybody.

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