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|29 Jun 2013|System UserAssessing Kanban, change, and leadership
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Authors of this article are Sigi Kaltenecker and Klaus Leopold. We decided to publish this article on klausleopold.com altough it is the output of our joint work. We are currently working on a solution of how to publish our joint work in the future.
Like last year, this year’s Kanban Leadership Retreat took again place in the beautiful village Mayrhofen in Austria. The idea of the retreat is pretty simple: bring together smart people and evolve Kanban. And exactly this happened.
In our session we briefly introduced our Kaizen assessment as a tool to define the current state of continuous improvement in your organization Since Kanban mechanics are not enough to create a culture of continuous improvement the assessment combines Kanban with state-of-the-art leadership and change practices. The Kanban practices are measured using the “How deep is your Kanban” assessment (see end for references) which basically quantifies how well the six Kanban practices are integrated in your working context. For the change and leadership parts of our Kaizen assessment we defined the following state-of-the-art practices which we think are crucial for any Kaizen culture:
- Change
- establish change principles
- clarify responsibilities
- involve stakeholders
- manage change flow
- apply emotional intelligence
- respect culture
- Leadership
- frame
- scan
- communicate effectively
- resolve conflicts
- make decisions
- grow together
You can imagine that assessing practices like “apply emotional intelligence” or “resolve conflicts” is rather hard because there’s usually no real common understanding of what the it means. Therefore, we highly recommend to mindfully clarify where you start from before using the assessment. For some groups, input and even training might be helpful to better understand each core practice, especially in the change and leadership area. For others, more experienced and mature groups, a brief introduction is probably enough. We have elaborated statements that further explain the change and leadership practices which is usually discussed and slightly tailored in our Kaizen workshops before we start with the assessment. Here are two examples:
- Apply emotional intelligence
- We are convinced that emotions are a key driver of change.
- We respect and value these emotions.
- We know how to provoke passion and engagement for change.
- We also know how to deal with concerns, anger or disappointment.
- Resolve conflicts
- We know our conflict patterns, i.e. how we usually deal with tensions and disagreement.
- We professionally handle uncertainties and differences.
- We address important hidden conflicts as soon as possible.
- We know when we have reached the limits of our own conflict resolution capabilities and when we need external help to proceed.
The Kaizen assessment is meant to be the key driver of a regular improvement workshop or retrospective in your company, ideally with all stakeholders of your system or at least with a core group of people involved in continuous improvement. Once the workshop participants have got the basic idea of the Kaizen assessment, they evaluate the current state of each practice. They do that by using a simple scoring system from 1 to 6 according to the relative depth of implementation of each practice (1=very shallow implementation, 6=very deep implementation). At the end of the scoring process the individual results are brought together in a radar chart-like picture to finally create a kind of a spider web like illustrated in the picture below.
Why this assessment?
Although the three areas of Kanban, change, and leadership are interwoven and dependent on each other, a simple scoring of these core practices allows you to
- start a conversation on continuous improvement,
- nail the jelly on the wall and quantify cultural dimensions,
- get an overview where you currently are in regard to a culture of continuous improvement,
- see what works well and where you still have to improve on,
- align different points of view,
- enter into focused conversations about interesting perspectives, conclusions you can draw and next improvement steps you can recommend
- define concrete next steps,
- see development over time by regularly using the assessment and comparing its results
Feedback on our session
After having introduced our ideas, we invited the session attendees to discuss in smaller groups. Specifically, we asked three questions:
1. Does it make sense to you to see Kanban, change, and leadership as key drivers of Kaizen?
2. Does it make sense to nail the jelly on the wall by assessing Kaizen with core practices?
3. How do these practices resonate with your own understanding of Kanban, change, and leadership?
Here are some of the most interesting answers and hints we got out of the table groups and the follow-up fishbowl discussions:
- Combining Kanban, change and leadership does make sense, better understanding these areas as well
- Context is king when it comes to apply the assessment – not just the way you introduce the assessment but also the specific practices should be context appropriate (including the right language)
- Kaizen should be connected to business goals – this would help people to see what´s in it for them: how do I benefit from Kaizen? Why is it important?, and the like
- It is important to create a safe space before you assess your current Kaizen condition and define the next target condition and/or improvement steps.
- Rethinking the number of practices might be helpful: how can we boil them down to a reasonable, less overwhelming, more pragmatic number of say 3 x 3?
- What about principles and values? Do we have to make them more explicit?
- Story telling might be a good starting point to better understand the whole assessment and its main areas: story telling would also allow to build more on the context-specific experiences and pull know-how instead of pushing “best practices” on them.
Many thanks to all the session attendees for the valuable feedback. It will definitely drive us forward on our journey of continuous improvement. We are are already working on the next, hopefully better version of our Kaizen assessment and we will be happy to share it again with you.
References for the “How deep is your Kanban” asses
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