“Go see the process when they’re doing the work,” said Khaled. “Watch how different people do it. Some workers are going to figure out a trick to make it go faster. You see that, and you say, ‘Okay, is that something I can teach to my other people?’ ” Maybe it was one less movement that speeds up the task. “Think about that,” he added, in the setting of workers building, repairing, or dismantling pallets all day. “It adds up.”
“Being able to see a process is a skill in itself,” he said, and suggested building up the “process-seeing muscle” by making observations while waiting in line for every day tasks -- in a check-out line at a store, for example, or at a doctor’s office or a fast-food restaurant. “What are they doing, how are they doing it, and is it different from another?”
“Get in the habit of seeing the process when you’re out there,” said Khaled.
When people come together to solve problems, he noted, they try to offer solutions. “That’s what they’re trained to do...Shoot from the hip...Here’s one solution, here’s another solution. They’re just throwing solutions out.”
They do not spend time to learn and understand the true cause of the problem, he continued. “Most people start with solutions and just go and apply them...The reality is you should take time to understand the problem and collect a little bit of data, try to get at what is the
"Get in the habit of seeing the process..."
root cause of the problem,” instead of the superficial cause.
“When you do that,” continued Khaled, “ you come up with solutions that stick long after you walk out of the room.” The alternative is “solutions that are more like band aids that fall apart after a month or two.”
“Have the discipline to take the time to get to the root cause of a problem...What is the process that we go through? That’s the minimum...Even if you’re only trying to solve a problem in one hour, use the same approach.”
Using an example from his consulting experience, Khaled described a cereal manufacturing company that was forced to consider buying more storage tanks for ingredients or simply discarding them. The problem was any given bottleneck in the production process -- such as an equipment breakdown -- that would cause the accumulation of ingredients in various earlier stages of production until the bottleneck could be alleviated. The company’s initial solution was: buy more storage tanks. The solution he developed was to slow down other processes as buffers before storage capacity was filled.
JANUARY 2018