Owen

Two questions come to mind. The first is whether the Seven forms of Waste have been a help in reducing waste, and whether they required the additions and modifications that CLOSED MITT represents. (I am also concerned about the image CLOSED MITT conjures up: closed to new ideas!) Thanks to George A Miller we know that Seven is the “magic” number, the number of things (+/-2) that the average human being can hold in working memory. So why increase the categories to 10 unless they improve our abilities to see Waste in all its forms? My feeling, unless an army of Boeing’s Gemba workers have passionately bought into CLOSED MITT, is to stick to the Seven and INCLUDE the Eighth, the most corrosive of all the Wastes: unutilised human ability. What is revealing about Boeing’s leadership is that this Eighth waste is excluded from CLOSED MITT. Hummmm…… My second question is who exactly is CLOSED MITT aimed at? The people of the Gemba, or their supervision, management and leadership? Do we really need Labor (or Labour) which is a waste of the workforce’s time and a combination of waiting and walking (VELACTION’s definition: https://www.velaction.com/closed-mitt/)? Surely, the biggest source of wasted labour time is poor (not Lean) leadership. A now retired Master Coach I know at Toyota was trying to get the management in his factory to behave in a “consistent, congruent” way. Has anyone defined the waste of poor leadership which tends to lead to a host of different forms of waste? If not, why not? Space: surely, if one considered Inventory as a Waste (boldly standing up to Accountants who think it is an asset) space would be freed up as a consequence of good, sustainable inventory reductions. I don’t think it is needed. Energy: a guarded yes, if the workforce (including those nice people with titles beginning with “Chief”) is disciplined about turning off computers and lights. But that may just be the mote. Are we ignoring the beam of unnecessary transportation and the carbon footprint of the leaders flying across the world at the drop of a hat in this digital age? Materials: I can’t help feeling this is a duplication of Inventory and ignores what a really good 5S programme can do. Yes, Henry Ford had people looking for unburnt coal along the tracks of the Rouge estate, but looking in the dumpster for scraps might be distracting. Where this form might have value is not smashing old computers in dumpsters because of software licencing agreements. This is a real example and cause great distress to the workforce and the security guard who was tasked to do the smashing. There were and possibly still are schools and communities who could have benefited from those old computers. Idle Inventory: is this just replacing Inventory to make a good acronym? I’m not sure what increased value it adds over good old Inventory? Time: I cannot help feeling that this is potentially pious nonsense. If the management were trained to be “Consistent and congruent” in their behaviours think of the time this would save. Complexity: the great Peter R Scholtes (The Leader’s Handbook; arguably the best book written on Lean without mentioning the term once) describes Complexity as a waste a combination of “waiting, unnecessary motion and correction”. Yes, it could be considered a waste, which will lead to other forms of waste such as defects and waiting, but again, I would like to k,now just who this form is aimed at: the people of the Gemba or their leaders? If this is an opportunity to discuss the various forms of waste, may I suggest another defined by Peter Scholtes: Bureaucracy! Peter quotes Russel Ackoff defining bureaucracy “as a form of waste which is the result of what happens when people with no real work to do impose needless demands on those who have real work to do”. The Seven or Boeing’s CLOSED MITT? Well it would depend on how effective they have been in developing a kaizen culture within Boeing. The question I ask organisations when they say they are Lean is how many improvements per person are done every year. And by “per person” I include the leadership. The most common response is that they do not have this as a KPI and so they do not track it. If that is the case, then I’m not sure either TIMWOOD or CLOSED MITT is of any real and sustainable benefit. Here is a challenge! The way these definitions are usually used is to improve the work on the shop floor or in the supply chain. Yes, they are of benefit, but think how much more waste could be eliminated if we had a list of the forms of waste that management create knowingly and unknowingly. Can we please define Consistent & Congruent leadership?