June 23, 2011

The Gemba Walk

Jim Womack
Senior Advisor, Lean Enterprise Institute

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Today’s Presenter
Jim Womack
Founder & Senior Advisor, Lean Enterprise Institute
(LEI) a nonprofit
(LEI), nonp ofit education,
ed cation publishing,
p blishing conference
confe ence &
research company; founded in 1997 to help companies
create more value & eliminate waste

Co-author of lean classics:

• Lean Solutions (Simon & Schuster)
• Seeing The Whole: mapping the extended value stream (LEI)
• Lean Thinking (Simon & Schuster)
• The Machine That Changed the World (Simon & Schuster)

• Commentator & Keynoter on management issues

• Author of 100+ essays and articles on management

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Jim Womack’s Latest Book
Gemba Walks
(LEI, March 2011)

• Collection of eletters and

essays; updated & new
material
• Available
A il bl now as a bookb k
and ebook
• Read & download selected
essays: lean.org

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Bring Jim Womack to Your Gemba

Have the leading

g lean management
g thinker helpp you
y and
your team:
• Tie together Purpose, Process, People
• Develop the all-important “horizontal” view of value
• Frame problems in new ways
• Assess your progress

Get details at: Lean.org/Womack

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 Lean.org/Womack

A new mini-site on lean.org

g focused on gemba
g experiences
p

• Featuring new columns from Jim Womack

• A wall to share experiences, ask questions, and offer
advise to others in the community
• A repository for articles and videos about going to the
gemba

And more…

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 June 23, 2011

The Gemba Walk

Jim Womack
Senior Advisor, Lean Enterprise Institute

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 The Gemba Walk
• The purpose is to grasp the situation:
Go see
Ask why
Show respect
• When there is an issue (a “problem”) or…
• An opportunity/need to improve

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 Who Should Gemba Walk?
• Someone at a higher level or with a broad
span of responsibility.
responsibility Who should:
Observe the actual work being done to create
value and achieve some organizational (and
customer) purpose
Focus on a particular process (value stream)
Start at one end & walk to the other
Engage the people touching the process

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 Who Should Gemba Walk?
• Line managers, to grasp the situation in
processes over which they have authority
• Individuals taking responsibility for
understanding and improving processes
over which they have no authority
Value stream “manager”
manager (or “responsible”)
responsible )
Improvement team members
Consultants
Me!

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 Things to Avoid While Walking

• Doing harm!
• Giving answers!
• “Management by walking around”
• Going
G i alone
l

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 Focus for Gemba Walks
• Technical (“Taking a Value-Stream Walk
at Firm A”)
• Social ((“Making
g Everyone
y Whole”))
• Organizational (“Becoming Horizontal in a
Vertical World”)
World )
For the remainder of this webinar let me
focus on the “organizational” gemba walk.

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 Three Simple Observations
• Value streams in all industries flow
horizontally across complex organizations
But…
• Almost all complex organizations are
vertical in orientation
• In consequence, smooth, rapid, waste-
f
free fflow ( = lean) is difficult
ff to achieve

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Vertical Orientation of the World

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 What This Means
• Lean thinkers now need to learn to:
Think horizontally ( = see the flows from
end-to-end)
Act horizontally
h ll ( = collaborate
ll b across
verticals to optimize the flows)
• T
To provide
id ever more perfect
f t value
l with
ith
less time, effort & cost (waste) = lean
Taking a gemba walk is a great way to
learn!

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Horizontal Focus for the World

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Changing Focal Planes Is Hard
• We struggle with authority (vertical)
versus responsibility (horizontal)
(Matrices simply create conflicts of
horizontal versus vertical authority)
• We lack a context (and a mechanism) for
a creative conversation to optimize the
horizontal flows
Gemba walks can help create the context.

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 Authority vs. Responsibility
• We all understand (and seek) authority, a
vertical concept
concept.
• We neither understand nor feel comfortable
with responsibility as a horizontal concept
concept.
But…
• We can’t turn organizations sideways
sideways.
• So…we need to experiment with assigning
responsibility for value streams to individuals
with no authority…………
who can lead the gemba walks!

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 A Context for a Conversation
• The walk should lead to a conversation
across the
h verticals
i l about:
b
Current performance of value streams
The gap between current & needed
performance to achieve a purpose
R t cause(s)
Root ( ) off the
th gap
The most promising countermeasures to
close the gap
Who must do what when to introduce &
sustain the countermeasures
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 Why This Is So Hard
• The conversation uncovers all of the
contradictions and conflicts between the
verticals.
• Most senior managers have no means to
see their core p
processes,, are paralyzed
p y
by conflicts between the verticals, and
don’t know how to respond (so…they
don’t and the most powerful vertical
wins!)

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 Mechanism to Help the
Conversation
• While walking, agree to create a value-
stream map showing the performance of
every step in the process/value stream:
Engaging everyone touching the
process
Embedded in an A3 to permit PDCA
• Then
e ass
assign
g sosomeone
eo e tthe
e responsibility
espo s b ty to
periodically repeat gemba walks along
every value stream….forever!

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What Senior Managers Must Do

• Listen to the value stream conversations

• As necessary, go see (join a walk), ask
why, and show respect
• Avoid giving answers; just ask questions!

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What Senior Managers Must Do

• Hold joint conversations with the leaders

of the verticals (who still have authority)
and those assigned responsibility for the
horizontals on how the behavior and
mission of each vertical must change to
optimize the horizontal flow of value.

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 Do We Know
How to Do This Today?
• No! So what we need now is:
Horizontal, cross-vertical gemba walks,
leading to experiments with ways to
optimize different types of horizontals
((“The
The life of lean is experiments.
experiments ”))
Wide and rapid sharing of findings
I’ll try to do my part as I continue my
gemba walks and share my findings!
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 The Gemba Walk

Questions & Answers

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