The power of personal yokoten
I have written a lot about yokoten in recent years – the practice of spreading good (lean) ideas horizontally across organizations from their initial point of success (“yoko” means horizontal in Japanese). As it turns out, this is hard, even for the methods and tools needed to create lean value streams. Lean requires practice, even when the theory is clear and simple, and it is hard to find teachers with enough experience and time to lead the practice cycles needed for sustainable yokoten.
As a result, it is common to see isolated improvements – points of light – in otherwise dark organizations, long after the lean tools and methods that would dramatically improve performance were transplanted from other organizations and proven in one place.
Recently, and perhaps it is a matter of age, I have been thinking about a different kind of yokoten, the yokoten of spreading new beliefs – about management and leadership rather than methods and tools – to the next generation. Most of my work these days (as far as the pandemic allows) is helping managers who are twenty, thirty or even forty years younger than me learn how to run A3 cycles in their organizations.
On the face of it, these exercises are about mastering a management tool – A3 analysis – through cycles of experimentation and learning. But, at a deeper level, these exercises are about changing personal beliefs in the organization – vertically, if you will – about what managers at all levels need to do and what leadership means. I call this personal yokoten, focused on one person at a time, individuals who can then transfer these beliefs to the teams they have built.
For example, I have recently been working with some brilliant young people on an A3 about the future of personal mobility. The problem can be broken down into several parts, which in turn leads to several A3s. The team leaders' instinct is always to learn fast (“we learn fast”), to consult only a few people familiar with the actual conditions of the gemba (“we already have plenty of data to analyze”), to stick to one knowledge silo (the one they understand best) and to jump to solutions without ever really understanding the problem. Above all, they feel the need to provide the answers instantly when their teams start to struggle. Wow. And, don't forget, these young people are “brilliant”.
My job is to slow this pace down, to devote what seems like an excessive amount of time to studying the current situation and identifying the root cause of the problem, and to explain continually that their brilliant logic becomes useless if they do not know the context.
My hope is that, over time, I can change the way these young people think about problems, solutions (or, more precisely, countermeasures) and the role of the leader. I do not want to “solve” the problem, but to create and sustain a social process in which problems can be continuously addressed by a team that includes everyone who is in direct contact with the problem.
And this is my greatest belief. Personal yokoten to teach new mindsets and attitudes is an activity all of us can carry out in the world every day with every manager, team leader and team we meet. Moreover, we can carry new, lean ideas about management and leadership into our civic roles and even into our families, as we think through difficult issues. It is a gift we can all give, and one this confused world truly needs, where everyone is talking louder than the next person and jumping to complicated solutions.
