Emotions at the gemba

You have been waiting for the sensei's visit for weeks. You are proud of the experiments you have carried out with the operators on the shop floor, you have uncomfortable questions you want to ask and you are eager to learn.

On the day, the sensei arrives asking: “Take me to customer service, where you receive customer returns”. You are surprised and disoriented. Nobody ever goes to the corner of the warehouse where the returns are stored. It is embarrassing to see how little attention people pay to defective products that actually reach customers. The sensei shakes his head and says something that sounds like: “Nobody here cares about quality”. “Now show me where the trucks leave from”. With renewed embarrassment, you go to the shipping dock, which is the usual mess, with boxes upon boxes of stuff waiting to be dispatched with no clear logic. The sensei rubs his tired face and sighs: “Nobody here cares about delivery either”.

By the time you reach the area you worked so hard to improve, tempers are frayed. You can feel the mix of disbelief, embarrassment and resentment in your colleagues. Some are already muttering that this is a waste of time. In the production cell, the sensei shows absolutely no interest in what you so carefully planned to demonstrate. He points to a box and asks you to explain what it is doing there. He then points to a workstation and asks: “Why are the parts so far from where the operator can reach them?”. Faces are grim, everyone is upset, and justifications (it has always been this way) and rationalizations (actually, it's good because…) fly around. You are angry and ashamed. You wish you had never suggested this visit in the first place.

Does this sound familiar? It probably rings true for anyone who has experienced working with a sensei firsthand. If sensei visits are so painful, why do lean veterans keep insisting they are the only way to really learn lean? What is going on?

Adults learn from mistakes

Like all experienced educators, sensei know that adults only learn when they recognize they have made a mistake and try to correct it. In fact, teaching theory recognizes two phases in the learning process: one consists of lighting the fire, creating and sustaining the motivation to learn; the second involves gestures and concepts that are not always right until the person gets them right. The first is fun; the second not so much – but without it no learning really happens. The gap between these two phases is bridged by engaging learners in problems they will work on until they master them and gain a deeper understanding and practical skills for doing.

But for the teacher to teach, the student has to learn, which means recognizing mistakes. Mental patterns are not changed by recognizing that something worked well. Good news is pleasant and intuitive and simply serves to reinforce existing mental connections. Learning occurs when something did not work as planned and new corrections need to be made.

Like all experienced teachers, sensei will point to problems you don't see as problems, in places where they know you will find the key to the questions you are looking for, even though you don't expect it. They say: “look there: see the mistake you made, then you will understand”. This is never pleasant. It takes us out of our comfort zone, usually leaving us exposed in front of colleagues. It triggers instinctive fight, flight or freeze responses. If we are not ready for it, anger and shame will cloud our thinking to the point where we learn nothing because our minds will be completely closed.

It is not natural: shame, blame and ridicule

Our minds hate mistakes. Our brains are wired for self-justification. Cognitive dissonance, which is the tendency to ignore evidence in favor of previously held beliefs, is one of the most empirically tested laws of social psychology, with more than 3,000 experiments attesting to it. We endlessly justify to ourselves foolish beliefs, bad decisions and harmful acts, and react emotionally when confronted with the brutal truth of it.

Recognizing that we did something that may have seemed right at the time but turned out to be completely wrong is the first step toward learning, solving and healing relationships. In Taiichi Ohno's first book on workplace management, he begins with the need to recognize one's own mistakes. Chapter one is titled “Wise men mend their ways” and begins with the saying “even a thief is right three times out of ten”. Ohno concludes that if a thief is right three times out of ten, a normal person should be right five times – which means they will be wrong five times. His second chapter is called “If you are wrong, admit it”.

The difficulty is that admitting a mistake severely attacks our sense of identity. First, our need for internal consistency and our belief superiority (being convinced that we reason better than others) can keep us from recognizing a mistake for what it is. Then our self-image is at stake. If we acknowledge a mistake, won't we look stupid, weak or foolish to others? Finally, there is a healthy sense of self-preservation – if we acknowledge that we made a mistake, won't we be blamed and punished for it?

Personally, for the ego, and socially, for fear of retribution, there is a lot at stake. No wonder defensive emotions get involved, and strongly. Emotions grow in us in two ways: type and power – quality and quantity, if you prefer. First, there is the dominant emotion you may feel, say, shame, fear or anger. Then there is the volume of the emotion, from mild to overwhelming, from unease to blind terror, and so on. In addition, emotions are usually mixed, which makes them hard to deal with. When the sensei points to something we did badly, we usually feel shame and annoyance, but also curiosity and excitement. Sensei visits are unsettling, and we hate being in the spotlight, but they are also rather circus-like, exciting and fun, and we love being there. So many emotions are triggered at the same time.

Emotional agility is a learned skill

This emotional mix will be unique to the person and the context. Still, some people have greater emotional agility than others. Emotional agility is essentially the opposite of emotional rigidity. When challenged, we tend to get hooked on an idea or emotion (or on denial). “I am so angry right now” means don't ask me to be reasonable and listen; “that's not what we were trying to do” means don't ask me to think about it any further; “I don't see what this is about” means don't ask me to consider any of it. The point is that with a strong enough stimulus, anyone will get hooked. Push the hot button, and you will get the reaction. And it is perfectly normal.

But from getting hooked, we sometimes get stuck, which means we cannot get past the idea, the emotion or the denial. This becomes very tricky because it not only blocks rational thinking and learning, but also creates political rifts. Once we are stuck in an emotion, we naturally justify it, looking for allies to validate that we are right to be stuck (“This is intolerable; don't you agree? – help me fight it”). Being stuck means that we not only deny ourselves learning, but also block learning for everyone, maneuvering to take the topic off the table in order to justify our emotional behavior or rigid thinking.

Emotional agility means accepting that with enough of a trigger, you may even get hooked in some way, but then practicing not getting stuck. There are many different approaches. In the Anglo-Saxon world, it is often about reflecting on our core values and realizing that we are stuck on something that really “isn't us”. In Asia, it will focus more on letting go and letting emotions and ideas pass after breathing deeply and calming down. In Latin America, it may involve the feeling that we are all in this together and keeping a sense of humor, and so on. Different cultures have different preferred ways of helping people break free, and each person is different and will find their own path to emotional agility. The starting point is realizing the universality of getting hooked and getting stuck when the challenge is big enough – and facing one's own mistakes is definitely a challenge.

From emotional to rational: non-judgment, validation, reason and generosity

Is there a way to help someone get unhooked and avoid getting stuck?

There is, and you will notice that people who have a long-standing relationship with the sensei do not react as badly as people meeting them for the first time. It is well known in the sensei-learner relationship that the post-work session is as important as the time in the gemba. That is when ideas are unpacked, beliefs are examined, learning is considered and the relationship is established.

Any experienced sensei knows that their role is to help people move from being stuck to being rational. Furthermore, they know they need good relationships in order to teach. In other words, they need to establish trust. How can they do that when a key part of their job is pointing out mistakes? Certainly, it is hard to trust someone who is likely to make you look like a fool at any moment. Experienced sensei usually realize this and have known antidotes, such as not judging, validating, reasoning and being ready to help:

• Not judging: when taken out of their comfort zone, the person feels judged – both by themselves and by others. Their self-image is attacked, which triggers defensive emotions. Sensei understand this, so they try not to express judgment – focusing more on the situation. They point out, explain and try to avoid direct judgment (there is plenty of self-judgment going around).
• Validation: sensei will also validate you by understanding what you did in context. Understanding does not mean agreeing. It means saying, under these conditions, “I understand why you did this”. “It made sense”. “It may not work because there are other factors to take into account, different theories to consider or circumstances change, but you are not an idiot for having tried”. “Fortunately you were there at the time and took charge of it, and now let's consider priorities and options”.
• Reasoning: conversations on the floor are like walking along the two banks of a river. One side is reasonable territory, usually where you discuss priorities and options. The other side of the river is the territory of insecurity, where people argue or display their insecurities in various ways. Remaining non-judging and validating people is how experienced teachers try to bring the conversation back to rational territory and keep it there for as long as they can.
• Approachable and ready to help: as you develop a relationship with a sensei, you often discover that he is not the forbidding character you initially thought. He is usually available at any time and is ready to help with advice and political support. He usually has little formal power, but a lot of influence, and is not ashamed to use it to help his students move forward. Trust grows out of the many skirmishes we fight together while helping one another.
  
  

Unfreeze – change – refreeze

The most robust model of change we have remains Kurt Lewin's unfreeze-change-refreeze model. In the 1940s, he imagined changing the shape of a block of ice by first melting it, then casting it differently and then refreezing it in its new shape. Over decades, people have looked for and tried many approaches to unfreezing, which is essentially getting others to understand the need for change and ponder its impact on them, and then to get on board and change, narrowing down the concrete before/after of the change to let people express their doubts and difficulties until they try it for themselves. Finally, refreezing means that people must adopt the new way of doing things as the new normal. Refreezing starts to happen when someone who has experienced the change starts selling it to someone else who has not.

Physical images are misleading. Change is not only rational; it is emotional too. Unfreezing is as much about dealing with defensive reactions as it is about explaining the need for change. Changing implies maintaining motivation while people experience setbacks and backsliding in their attempts. Refreezing requires people to commit to the new way of thinking and working and integrate it into their self-image – it needs a sense of accomplishment and recognition from others, with more emotions.

Kaizen literally means change for the better. Working to establish a kaizen spirit is born of the optimism of seeking the “better”, but we also need to realize that change triggers negative emotions and defensive reactions – it is all par for the course. A better understanding of the emotions involved in the kaizen process can help us accelerate kaizen across the company. We can focus on helping people work on their own emotional agility, as well as recognizing what can help when they get stuck.

There is no magic recipe for dealing with emotions, and we want to end this article by highlighting the power of being aware of emotions to ensure a successful lean transformation.

To make change, whether small (kaizen) or radical (kaikaku), you will need a climate in which conversations can flow, made possible by leaders who do not judge, who validate, who reason, who are approachable and who are ready to help. This will ensure a state of peace, trust and ambition in which teams can nurture their talents. If we do not recognize the emotional side of a lean transformation, we will find it hard to tap the full potential of our talent.