Why ‘Pulling Out All the Stops’ is Very Bad Thing

There’s an old expression about ‘pulling out all the stops’ to get something accomplished.

It basically means doing everything within your power to make sure that a task is completed.

Where Does This Expression Come From?

Now, before I dive into why this is a bad thing in a Lean process, I want to share a little tidbit I picked up while preparing to write this article. I wanted to make sure that the express was actually in common use and not something local that I picked up. So, I googled it. It turns out that the ‘stops’ that the expression refers to are knobs in pipe organs that regulate air flow. Pulling out all the stops lets more air through, making a much bigger sound.

So why is this a bad thing?

In a Lean company, processes are king. You have very little waste, and everything is tightly connected. People have very little idle time.

So, if that’s the situation, what ‘stops’ are there to pull out?

If you grab parts or materials, with little wiggle room, ‘pulling out the stops’ means shutting down future production.

If you pull a person off their job to work on something, another important task is left undone.

If you skip steps, you risk bad quality. When you have a good process, ever step is important.

If you tell people to speed up, you overstress them, and they make mistakes. Remember, in a Lean company, people are already working at a steady, sustainable pace. Go beyond that and you are no longer sustainable.

The Expression is Actually Wrong

Now, there are some levers you can pull. You can do overtime. You can have your engineers and managers grab some wrenches and start building. You may have an ‘expedite’ process to handle special orders. These stops actually do match up pretty well with the literal stops on an organ. There is something specific that is done to get a specific response, just like the controls on an instrument. The examples I gave are planned responses to defined situations, and those processes should have measures in place to get things back to normal.

But that is not how the expression has evolved. It has a lot more ‘winging it’ to it. And in a Lean company, because everything should be closely planned, there just isn’t any wiggle room to free up resources for activities on the fly.

What About CI Resources?

I will acknowledge a caveat to this. In a well-run Lean company, there should be extra capacity. I like to target about 10% so that there are always people working on projects or able to cover for absences. But that leads into my final comment on this.

The REAL Problem with “Pulling Out the Stops”

Even if you were willing to tolerate all the problems that I just mentioned, there is a big one that dwarfs all those. It is the problem of lost credibility. When you ‘pull out the stops’ to ‘make it happen’, what you are really saying to your team is that processes don’t work. When you have something really important to do, if you throw your processes to the curb, you are sending a very powerful message. A very powerful incorrect message. And if you take people off projects to ‘pull out the production stops’, you are sending the same bad message.

So, what should you do?

In the short term, you bite the bullet and deal with the fallout of not pulling out the stops. But that doesn’t mean you have to be OK with the problem. You should identify the cause of the need to pull out the stops. Was it a problem that put you behind? Go after the problem so it doesn’t happen again. Was it an opportunity that the sales team uncovered at the last minute with a short deadline? Decide if that is how you want to do business and create a process to handle those spikes in demand.

The point is that you have to think big picture, or you will be ‘pulling out the stops’ over and over, and you’ll never get better.