An interview with Michael Ballé

Citation

O'Connor, P. (2015), "An interview with Michael Ballé", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 29 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/DLO-03-2015-0027

An interview with Michael Ballé

Article Type: Leading edge From: Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal, Volume 29, Issue 3

Michael Ballé PhD has studied lean transformation for many years and is the co-founder of the French Lean Institute and the Projet Lean Enterprise With his father, Freddy, he is the co-author of three volumes of business novels, the latest being Lean with Respect. He is a co-author of the paper “Inclusive versus exclusive learning: the secret ingredient to creating a truly ‘lean’ and ‘learning’ culture” which appeared in Volume 29, Issue 1 of “Development and Learning in Organizations”.

Why did you choose to use a story for the book rather than a “how to” manual?

Three main reasons. First, lean is a system, which makes it very hard to describe sequentially as elements can’t be taken into account independently. For instance, just-in-time can’t work without stop-at-defect, and conversely, you’ll never achieve stop-at-defect without just-in-time. The novel format makes the back and forth easier through conversation. Secondly, lean is very much a performance improvement technique that relies on people development, and I’ve found over time that “organizational” language is very poor in describing people involvement and learning. Using characters and storied situations can showcase the profoundly human aspects of grappling with challenging situations, struggling with learning, and dealing with each other in an uncertain context. Thirdly, I have to confess, writing novels is much more fun than writing manuals – hopefully, it is to read as well.

In the early part of the book, the “customer” Andrew tells the company’s CEO Jane “the problem is you.” How challenging is it for senior managers to be told that?

Of course, they hate it. But any company is a mirror of its CEO – a distorting mirror, for sure, but a mirror nonetheless. The CEO makes decisions that impact everyone, not always in foreseen ways. The CEO also models behaviour, whether they see it or not, and that effect is far stronger than we anticipate rationally. The trouble is that CEOs lead from their attitudes, positions and behaviours, not by what they say. As Chris Argyris has shown a long time ago, espoused theory (what people say they hold true) and theory-in-use (how they behave in practice) are not always aligned. The fact remains that the CEO is, well, the CEO. In the story, however, “the problem is you” statement is also a test. You can’t teach someone who is not convinced they have something to learn. By addressing the issue directly, Andy is making sure that Jane understands she has to learn something, not do something to her team.

Jane says lean’s reputation is one of “relentless productivity gains, management by pressure, people working until they drop. Grinding suppliers into the ground. Scraping up pennies where you can find them” and describes it as a “cultish program” – is that a common held view?

Toyota has taught us a way to seek significant performance and productivity gains through the development of every person and growing an atmosphere of mutual trust. Unfortunately, our taylorist conditioning is so strong that many companies have cherry-picked Toyota methods, ignored the system, and used specific techniques to reduce costs in the mainstream way, calling it “lean” to make it more fashionable. These brutal interpretations of lean have done the movement and the real message considerable damage by confusing every issue, but this is unfortunately real. The only way to know whether a company is pursuing “real” lean is to go to the workplace and see whether management’s effort is really in developing the kaizen spirit of every person and every team. If what you see is applying lean tools to every process to generate productivity, you’re dealing with fake lean. The “cultish” part comes from the fact that, unfortunately again, the few people with experience with real lean tend to talk about something hard to comprehend without immersing yourself in it: you learn by doing.

Andrew responds: “Real lean is most emphatically not about making people work harder. We strive every day to make people work smarter […]. Lean is about kaizen and respect!” is more work needed to get that message across?

Every day. Lean management is about organizing for learning. Lean techniques deliver superior performance because they are based on developing everyone, every day, everywhere. The development tools are standards, problem solving, kaizen and teamwork, but none of it will happen without real respect for people’s experience, situations and opinions. “Respect” in the lean sense doesn’t mean being polite in order to avoid confrontation. Respect means taking people’s opinions very seriously and looking into what makes them think.

Jane is aghast when she realises Andrew is offering to “teach” her. This is a fictitious scenario in the book, a role reversal. Can and does it happen in real life?

Originally, lean diffused through Toyota’s supplier network – to perfect their own just-in-time system, Toyota needed its suppliers to adopt it, so what happened to Jane would have happened to many supplier CEOs in Japan. Toyota did try to teach its suppliers the same way in both the USA and Europe, not always with the same degree of success. Here’s one of my favorite Taiichi Ohno (one of the key inventors of the lean system) stories from the old days. Ohno visited a supplier from which Toyota was buying seventy thousand parts a month. The plant manager proudly told him that they had enough manpower to cope with any order from Toyota even if they needed a hundred thousand parts. “Then”, asked Ohno, “do you currently close your operations ten days a month, since we are only buying seventy thousand parts?”

“We wouldn’t do anything that silly,” the production manager answered “we are building a warehouse for the excess production.” Ohno then explained to the manager that by building the warehouse he would probably lose his contract with Toyota since the additional overhead would make his parts too expensive. He explained that the idea was to have only the equipment and workers necessary to produce what was actually sold. Future production increases should be obtained by improving efficiency rather than adding additional manpower or equipment. That way, if sales declined, the company could remain profitable since its overhead hadn’t been increased to meet peak demand. I think it sums up very well the spirit of lean – and the fact that it couldn’t have been easy to hear for the supplier at first.

Should more managers “go and see”?

Go and see is very different to “management by walking around”. Go and see is a specific discipline. You don’t go to the workplace to see what is going on and tell people what to do. You go to the workplace to get the facts, get people to agree on what their problems are and coach them to work skills, problem solving skills and improvement skills. To do so requires elements of visual management to be able to discuss facts, and without visual management, senior management visits can be very disruptive as the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion, HIPPOs as Google calls them, is rarely the most informed.

The importance is made of engaging everybody – customers, employees and suppliers – in problem solving. Is that being done enough?

Every one engages in problem solving all the time, that’s part of life. The lean trick is to make the problem solving explicit and an opportunity for learning. By detailing what problems are, one by one, looking into root causes, and studying countermeasures, one develops both the autonomy of the person and the teamwork across functional boundaries. Problem solving is an occasion for observation and discussion. All in all it’s an exercise in developing waypower – the ability to find a way through difficulties – and willpower – the resilience not to give up in the face of difficulties, as well as doing it with others. As the African saying goes, he you want to go fast, go alone, but if you want to go far, go together. By working together on problem solving we build both competence and esprit de corps.

As people in organizations are often looking for something new, what is it about lean that is still relevant for today?

In a sense, lean is still “new” since so few people have truly explored the lean lessons from Toyota – how many people do actually understand that the point of leaning the business is to develop people who contribute to superior performance and adaptability in changing markets? How many senior leaders truly grasp the power of putting customers first, built-in quality and just-in-time operations? I have been practising lean for twenty years at the workplace, and it hasn’t gone old yet. What has happened over these two decades is a lot of weird hybrids of this and that lean, such as lean six sigma, lean coaching, lean whatever, that latch on to one specific aspect or tool of lean and make a big thing out of it without embracing the full system. Real lean is a radically different way to seek superior performance that flies in the face of taylorist heads/hands distinctions (and the organizational staff/line fixation) and aims to renew customer value on-goingly.

Many senior executives might think they could not make the time to get involved in the day-to-day challenges of people at the front line. What advice would you give them to create space in their diaries to start working in a different way

Well […] lean is not for everybody. Lean is a system, a method to achieve goals by developing people. It rests upon, first, a serious commitment to superior performance. Secondly, the belief that indeed, superior performance will result in more autonomous, more motivated people working better together. Many executives I meet are not that serious about seeking superior performance – they’re quite happy to move from action plan to action plan thinking that the next plan is going to be the big one. They’re also convinced that commercial success will come from negotiating better deals, with distributors, with vendors, on the supply chain. They have absolutely no notion of how much productivity is underfoot in their own operations. With this mindset, lean can’t really do much for them – or worse, they’ll turn it in a taylorist program as many do. My colleagues and I have dedicated our careers to explaining what lean is for the leaders who are serious about learning lean – we have no intention of convincing anyone else. I certainly have no advice to give any senior executive on how to run their diary. I can show them the waste in their own operations, and teach them the disciplines that can involve people in rethinking their own working methods to better service customers and eliminate some of this waste – but that’s as far as I’ll go. I have no opinion on whether they should do it in the first place.

How disciplined do you have to be to learn the lean system? Is it suitable for all businesses?

Lean is suitable to any business because it’s a way to look at organizations that aims to provide top of the class quality and service to users, to do so by developing each employee’s potential in an atmosphere of mutual trust and to work with people to both come up with new offers for customers and eliminate waste by developing more flexible ways of working and avoiding unnecessary costs. In itself, this applies anywhere, but, yes, indeed, it requires discipline. To be precise, it requires learning discipline. The keystone of lean is a leader’s commitment to their own self-development and then to develop others around them. This means having the discipline to let people do their job, even when one has another idea, and then spend the time to get them to reflect on what they’ve done and how they’d do it differently. Lean is suitable for all businesses, but not for all leaders. It won’t work with take-charge leaders who have all the answers and believe that things would work out right if people just did what they were told. Lean is a specific method, with lots of technical aspects to learn, for adaptive leaders who want to work with their people to turn their organizations into top-of-class providers of services and products. In the end, the key lesson of lean is that in order to work well, you’ve got to aim to work better. Learning comes from seeking dynamic gains, not static optimizations and this, in itself, is a radical perspective change for many executives. It’s also what makes lean so much fun to work with, as no solution is ever final and as, when people face their challenges together confidently, they come up with new ways of doing things no one had foreseen. Because no process is ever perfect, the opportunities for improvement are infinite.

Patrick O’Connor - based at Nottingham, UK.