Reflect, Ponder, Think... Hansei
"Thinking is the hardest work there is. That's why so few people do it." Henry Ford
By far the most important step of any lean process improvement effort is to pause long enough for people to analyze, ponder, and reflect on what they have discovered. And to daydream about possible countermeasures and alternate futures.
While brainstorming and consensus-building are by nature group activities - deep thinking is by nature best done alone - in a silent, focused state of deep reverie. Knowing this, most experienced teams allow at least a day or two after identifying problems and root causes before moving into proposed countermeasures.
The Japanese word for this form of self-reflection, hansei,
correlates
with the "check" or "study" phase of the PDCA cycle.
Reflection idea-starter questions
- What does this customer really want and need? How well does this process fulfill those true needs?
- What do you see?
- What types of waste do you see?
- Which of the 4 Rules in Use are broken? In what ways?
- Where is inventory piling? Information flow stopping, clogging, and queuing? Why? How might things flow?
- Where are things being batched? Why? How might things flow in smaller clumps?
- Where are things being pushed downstream before the next process is ready for it? How might they be pulled?
- Where is there confusion, and lack of a standardized way of doing things? What might help?
- How might someone with lesser skills reliably accomplish this work?
- What policies might be affecting this process? (e.g. quarterly
quotas, seasonal promotions, etc.)
Who has the power to reconsider these policies? - Have all of the A3 Gemba Interview
questions been asked? Have we asked all of the right people?
What do we see in those answers? - Have we considered this from the perspective of the concerns of all stakeholders?
- Have we played catchball? to ask others for their thoughts, their questions, their concerns, their ideas...
- How do we know? (that our data is accurate, that our assumptions are correct, that we're making progress...)
- Why? Why? Why? Why? Why? What is the root cause of this problem?
- Have we done sufficient brainstorming of creative ideas?
- Where are we in our process improvement cycle? Which step? What's next?
- Which process improvement tools might best help with what we need to do next?
- Are we trying to narrow our focus, or expand our thinking?
- Is there any way we could do a test or pilot on a small scale?
- What have we learned?
- Once this process is perfected, how can we best standardize work? to ensure that everyone does it the best way
- Once this process is perfected, what other processes might benefit from similar changes?
Idea Generation Tools
Use the Tool Matrix to Filter for Objectives contains 'Ideas'.
Some of the more popular Idea Generation tools include:
