Ease of Making Changes vs. Willingness to Change

The ease of making a change is correlated to the willingness to make a change. This is a critical concept to understand when trying to create a continuous improvement culture.

A big part of a CI culture is the expectation that everyone contributes. Great Lean companies have participation from people at all levels of the organization.

The willingness of people to actually make changes is a function of several factors. I’ll leave the concept of change management out of this discussion, though it plays a role in whether a person is even open to the idea of change. Most people suffer from inertia. They tend to be more comfortable with the status quo than with diving into the unknown. But let’s assume that people have gotten over that emotional hurdle, and are open to the concept of trying new things.

What are the tangible barriers that hold them back?

Authority

Team member must feel like they have the authority to make changes, or at least know what changes they can make and what they can’t do. Engineering changes are probably off limits. Most employees couldn’t change a part even if they wanted to, though. It would be hard to change a vendor part or create a new drawing for a laser cut part. Now, frontline team members should still be suggesting changes to these items, if they see opportunity, but that is not the only product change a person can make.

For example, team members could swap out a fastener for one that is easier to use, without fully understanding the durability or strength issues. Or they could change where glue is applied without engineers checking things out. Even though they could do these things, they shouldn’t. It opens up liability risk.

But they can certainly change how parts are installed, move tools around, modify work stations, help create new fixtures, make rolling parts carts to hold a kit, and do about a million other things.

The key is that they really have to feel like they have the authority to make these changes. They must know the process to change things. And if they get something wrong, but were trying to improve things, they should feel insulated from consequences. This can’t be lip service. If leaders are critical of failed change attempts, people shut down the pipeline.

Relationships

Making changes in a Lean organization affects other people. You will likely move around and will probably have to help each other out. Sometimes, when one person makes a change, another person will not like it and will change it back.

You can get into power struggles here. You need a way to make it easy to manage these issues. When there is a disagreement about the best way to do things, you’ve got to have a process for settling things quickly and without hard feelings. If you don’t, it can feel too hard for people to make changes.

Remember this well: For many people, their relationships at work are among the most important factor for their job satisfaction. Don’t make people choose between relationships and improvements.

Resources

If you want people to make changes, you’ve got to give them time, tools, and money. It is unreasonable to expect people to improve their process while doing their production work. It is also unreasonable to make them scrounge up tools and materials to do a project.

If there is even a little bit of a challenge in getting what they need for a project, especially considering that the person knows that they might spend a whole lot of time searching for something they possibly won’t even find, many people will give up. It just isn’t worth the effort.

Documentation

I preach doing Standard Work documentation by hand, or at least put some marks on any printed copies. There’s a mental barrier to changing a pristine document that was created on a computer.

And consider that most production teams don’t have access to computers. So, when they have an idea about a process change, if it is going to be a monumental effort to do something like simply changing a sequence, then they probably will just continue doing things the way they always have.

Knowledge

If you know how to do something, it is easy. If you don’t, you’ve either got to learn how to do it, or you’ve got to find someone who can. Both of these are significant barriers.

You can mitigate it by training people in improvement skills. Even if the person making the change doesn’t know how to do something, if they know a person who does, and has easy access to that person, the knowledge barrier gets much smaller.

Confidence

Some people just worry that the change they make won’t be a good one. This is closely related to all the above barriers, but some people, regardless of how capable or open to change they are, won’t try things for fear of failing.

The key here is to push people to make small changes. Get them out of their comfort zone in low risk situations. Nothing creates confidence like success.