Daniel sent us this Review of Paul’s book, 2 Second Lean. Great thoughts!
“I just finished reading the last six chapters last night…
The final big take-away I got from the book were your comments about Kaizen events (p. 110) and how they really are an uneven approach to Lean that can be disruptive or even burdensome and thus hard to get buy-in for. I also think they are maybe a bit disempowering because they send the message that change is something we can only do occasionally with big projects, and outside of that it is business as usual. Unfortunately this is how almost all Lean initiatives start, in part I think because it is a model that works well for consultants. But governments and politicians like big projects for other reasons as well.
Contrast that to my 2 second improvement this morning. There was a hole punch that wasted about five minutes of my time yesterday because it seized up on the 24-sheet document I tried to hole-punch yesterday. Today literally 15 seconds with some shredder oil I brought from home fixed that problem for anyone else who uses that hole punch in the coming months, saving probably hours of waste all told. One beauty of this is that I didn’t need any executive sign-off or stakeholder consultations to do this. While it is small, the return is probably measurable in 1,000s of percents! If you do that every day, with everyone in an organization, how can you not have amazing results?
For myself, it also caused me to realize that hole-punching is overprocessing to begin with, I can just keep a document in a folder and it is actually easier for me to work with that way.
Even better (now that I am actually using my brain on this problem which I would have thought beneath me), I can read and annotate a document electronically and avoid even the step of printing it (Overprocessing), going to the printer (Motion), _Waiting_ for my job to come out, and bringing it back to my desk (Transportation), filing it away (Motion / Inventory), and then, all too often, realizing I actually needed a different report (Defect), or just a few pages of it (Overproduction), and while I am dealing with all that Waste I am being Underutilized by my department and wasting the customer’s (taxpayer’s) dollar. There we go, all the 8 wastes just in the act of printing a document!”