Episode 60 - The War on Waste Paradox - Chapter 11 - Part 2 - Audio Book

A Consortium of Problem Solvers Podcast of Len Bertain's Audio Books

In the last episode, the problem described was a good example of Tribal Knowledge gone amok. The scheduler loved to respond to crises and he and the shop foreman had an unwritten understanding that all jobs identified as priorities by the CEO would be introduced into the schedule to meet the targeted dead line. They did this knowing full well that the consequence would be the problem identified by the team noted above. In the course of the analysis, this fact was discovered and it took a good deal of coercion to get them admit how they did the scheduling. And it turned out that the cause of their procedure was a memo from the CEO that all hot jobs would meet their delivery date. So these two guys changed the procedure themselves so that the CEO would not yell at them.

The message here is that once secretive Tribal Knowledge is uncovered, unless there is a No Blame release of finger pointing, the path to a clean solution is difficult. We got the scheduler and the shop foreman to become part of the solution by contributing ideas to the team. The end result was getting to the root cause of the problem and a complete change in the scheduling of jobs.

I would like to make a comment here about the CEO who caused the creation of the problem in the first place. When we dig into the source of many of these Tribal Knowledge wastes, they have their roots in casual comments of the CEO. The CEO might say something like, “Gee that looks like an expensive way to do that.” Or “Why are all those hot jobs not making it to the floor?” We saw the way the second comment created the problem discussed in this chapter. The CEO was responsible for the hot jobs problem from a comment that he inadvertently made to the foreman and the scheduler.

In a funny story that an associate of mine experienced, a CEO asked him to find out why the production process had slowed down so much. Upon investigation, it took my friend about 15 minutes to find the problem. It turns out that the CEO had made a casual comment about spending too much on something and so the CFO instituted a process to make sure he saw all PO’s and the Sales VP had to get a copy as well, etc and it took forever for an order to hit the floor from receipt in sales.

My advice to CEOs when they walk the floor: Be careful! Best, Len Bertain