Food for thought...

At the Lean Transformation Summit in Orlando last month I was blown away by a powerful presentation by Margarette Purvis, CEO of Food Bank For New York City. With the help of Jamie Bonini of TSSC they looked closely at the distribution of the food to their clients. Kaizen activities helped to solve a big problem, the lines. People stood in line for hours waiting for their food, outside, in the cold or heat, visible for all to see. They optimized the distribution of the food using Lean principles, trained the staff and got rid of the lines. Big difference for the people in the lines having to go through this every week. But no lines, no problem right? Wrong, the problem is now hidden inside. And even though I think no one should have to stand in line at the foodbank….they eliminated a symptom, not the problem. 

What is the biggest problem for a foodbank? Let’s dive into the facts for a moment.

Food banks emerged in the United States in 1967 and the idea worked its way from Canada through to Europe. France opened the first European food bank in 1984. Belgium followed in 1986. Meanwhile, food banks in 17 European countries have joined the European Federation of Food Banks. In the course of 2009 the food banks also felt the economic crisis , businesses sit on their stocks longer and only allow their excess inventories to go to food banks just before the expiry date. This while the growth in the number of families that need the foodbank increased. Reality hits in 2013, food shortages at the foodbank. This led to waiting lists at various food banks. Reasons are companies are more efficient in production, and there is less waste. For food banks, it is becoming more challenging to get food. Food that would otherwise be wasted.
Paradoxically only 0.3% of the amount of food wasted in the Netherlands reaches the food banks (Source: estimates by WUR and food banks Netherlands).

Aha! So our efforts as Lean guys and girls, eliminating waste in (food) companies, actually increases the problem of food shortage at the foodbanks! I wonder how many people at the Transformation Summit made this connection? The story was so moving and we all felt for the people in the pictures  standing in line waiting for food. I got teary eyed and saw that the other people in the room did too. But, back to reality, we need to force ourselves to take a step back and analyze. What can we do at the foodbank to impact the bigger (economic) problem? What can we do at the foodbanks to decrease the time someone needs help from the foodbank? How can we create jobs through or at the foodbank? Food for thought…

So, as ‘punishment’ for the impact of your Lean activities and its results for the hungry people at the foodbank, I am assigning all of you Lean guys and girls some homework:

• Think about how the foodbank process could create jobs, and share with your local foodbank
• Think about possible countermeasures to decrease the time a client needs the foodbank, and share with your local foodbank
• Email or call your local foodbank and sign up as a volunteer. To make right what you have caused down the line for the hungry.
• Optimize your local foodbank through Kaizen activities (for free).

Now? Yes right now. Thank you.

Sources:
http://www.10jaarvoedselbank.nl/historie.html
http://voedselbankennederland.nl

Accumulating Knowledge Vs Learning

I'm an IT guy. I've been working for 25 years in this business doing just about any job you can think of. I've been working in different industries, different countries, using different types of technologies, from IBM Mainframe technology built in the 60s to 00's avant-garde mobile start-ups.

My strategy to survive in this fast-pace changing business has been to think in patterns. This comes from IT industry standards called Design Patterns. The baseline is : for every problem that will slow you down you while designing a software solution, someone has already bumped into it and standardized a generic design solution.

This is both a bless and a curse. This is a bless because it has saved me time, it has allowed me to easily navigate the IT world and be somehow successful. The curse is that it has deeply shaped the way I think : rather than really trying to understand the problem, I've just tried to recognize known situations to apply prepackaged patterns : talk about preconception and jumping to solutions ! What's more, this thinking results in over-engineering (a disease of Java programming language and more generally enterprise software) and a tendency to tackle world complexity with abstract, generic and complicated solutions while forcing patterns where they may not have necessarily applied.

This is just a continuity of the way I've been educated : building stocks of knowledge (accumulating patterns as "how to" or anti-patterns as "how-not-to"), thinking the more stocks I have, the more weapons I will have to shoot problems and discordant voices down. The issue here is that you don't eradicate problems this way, just their symptoms : the difference between fast thinking and deep thinking. Not to mention that in the process you don't really show much respect to people.

For the last couple of years it has just occurred to me that lean thinking is different. It aims at really showing respect to people while trying to understand the problem (and being kind to it), then making hypothesis, testing them and learning while measuring the difference between the expected result of hypothesis and the real world. Learning while doing and fully, deeply understanding what hinders our thinking process while surfacing our preconceptions. As Joshua Foer puts it, this helps in trying not to stay too long on the OK plateau and the comfort zone to get back to the cognitive stage.

 
Design Patterns are stocks of knowledge and, as such, static entities, which make every problem looking like the proverbial nail. Learning is a dynamic discovery process. Accumulating stocks of knowledge is not learning : this is what Lean has helped me to clearly see.

For a better tomorrow (tomorrow)

It's been now many years since I hear agile practitionners, learning organization advocates, or lean evangelists yell the same incantation :

- organizations do not empower their stakeholders and generate lots of waste

- respect, autonomy and trust are not valuated,

- cynism, division and control are the real values of most organizations once greater than fifteen people,

- this should change.

Althought all those leaders have come up with great toolsets for people to shift towards more productive and fun ways of achieving their goals at work, their real impact is still quite modest. Who can quote a great lean bank? a great agile telco? a great learning organization embodied by a public service?

Some new players like Google or Wikipedia seem to have embedded the values of trust and autonomy in their DNA. Most former empires don't.

Of course. Culture hardly change. And when it does a bit, "Chassez le naturel, il revient au galop". In fact no large culture shift can be achieved in a massive way (in a democracy say). Hence most of this evangelistic activity is waste.

The only concrete thing we can do is creating hotbeds of such social innovation. With volunteers only. We give them the full autonomy to solve real issues, and a commitment to reach their market (whatever it is, even internal) in less than six months.

We have developed and executed such a method in large French corporates and administrations. It may be slowyer, but it is safer. We call it "trust-based debureaucratization", and it is embodied today by several "nation startups" inside the government and the administrations. The new open data portal new.data.gouv.fr has been released this way in less than six months, not only creating a unique social network between government and citizens, but also dividing its running costs by 10. Following this success, a new nation startup has started to simplify the public bidding system. "Apply for a public RFP with your company number, no other documentation". This wish that it should be easy for the end user, not for the administration, is a major cultural shift that could only occur outside of the empire ...

This method is highly reproductible and can be deployed anywhere as soon as a manager allows people to spend a few hours a week on solving any problem they choose, without asking for permission. As incremental solutions arise, the manager may invest more and more in the de facto internal startup, gathering the multidisciplinary team able to address the root causes of the issue. In such an environment, operational people, which are often separated from staff, can stop complaining about other departments ravages, and start solving the issues that matter to them, most often by lowering the walls and fostering collaboration among departements. The processes they rebuild are typically supported by IT systems that look more like "Corporate Wikipedias" than the typical "accounting fortresses", recurrent mirrors of bureaucratic organizations ...

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