The human side of Lean

Lean is an emotional Journey: BTFA if you want to successfully PDCA

Published on 14 August 2020

In 2008 I joined the newly formed Lean team at Royal Philips, which was tasked with deploying the Simply Philips Operating System, and the team started in its forming phase with a two-weeks 'Kaikaku experience' to Japan. It was an eye opening visit in which we spent the first week establishing the fundamentals of the operating system and our team values, and the second week visiting world-class Lean organisations.

It was during this visit that I had the first realisation that my then nearly 20 years of experience in industry, with more than 15 years of practising Lean, had been based upon a considerable misunderstanding of what Lean really is. As an engineer, I'd enthusiastically embraced the Lean and Six Sigma toolkit and seen great results in the projects that I'd run.

However, I'd always wondered why the dramatic improvements in the focus area of the project had not always translated into overall improvements in the value stream and, as I saw more of how those companies had embedded Lean into the very fabric of their organisation, the proverbial scales started to fall from my eyes. This would become even clearer over the next few years as I gathered more evidence of how the behavioural and system elements of Lean were far more important than the tools themselves.

Consider the development of what we now call Lean, which has a long history and a journey which many companies, including Toyota, began as early as the 1910s but essentially evolved from the Japanese shortage of resources and capital after World War II, and specifically the way that Toyota adopted and adapted western quality tools to create what became the Toyota Production System (TPS) and further evolved into the Toyota Way.

Studies by Womack, Jones and others resulted in the transfer of TPS into the Western world through the many books, articles and other publications released since the late 1980s and, as part of this, the term Lean was coined by John Krafcik, who was a graduate student at MIT working for Lean Enterprise Institute founder Jim Womack on the research into 'The Machine that changed the World'.

The scientific approaches of the west, developed by the likes of Taylor, Shewhart, Deming et al were adopted by the Japanese but merged with their culture, developing into an operating system built around a philosophy of people-centric problem solving. Unfortunately, as Lean was welcomed into western practices, it was the toolkit that was readily embraced, whilst the philosophy behind its success was mostly ignored. This isn't surprising, as it took me many years to fully understand what Lean really means and the importance of the intangible behavioural aspects of a Lean Operating system, as opposed to the concrete tools that can be used with a misleading sense of confidence.

While we were on the Japanese Kaikaku experience, the team coined the slogan for Simply Philips: 'Simple systems; Smart behaviours' Those 'Smart Behaviours' were about developing the right behaviours to ensure that we could remove the barriers to our success, those things that cause delays, frustration and excessive working hours

The behavioural aspects of Lean are well described by David Bovis in his BTFA (Believe, Think, Feel, Act) model, which explains the interaction between the logical, PDCA (Plan,Do, Check, Act), and emotional parts of our Brain as we experience change activity.

Many readers will already be familiar with the Deming / Shewhart, or PDCA, cycle, which explains how change is a cycle of:

Whilst this is very logical, and especially attractive to those of us who are engineers, scientists, accountants, or other professionals who tend to deal in 1+1 = 2 types of problem solving, what it doesn't adequately demonstrate is how the Humans in the change process react in reality, which ironically includes those of us who pride ourselves in the application of logic.

What the Bovis cycle helps to explain is that, as we run through the logical PDCA cycle, there is an emotional BTFA cycle also at play:

It explains why new ways of working, new theories or practices, which are strongly rooted in logic and fact, can take years, if not decades, to be fully accepted and adopted. It's also worth mentioning at this stage that the BTFA cycle isn't a sequential, or one-way, cycle. The brain, triggered by fear or other stimuli, can run either in the BTFA or AFTB direction.

Consider ideas such as the Earth being spherical (rather than flat), Heliocentrism rather than Geocentrism (the world revolving around the sun rather than the other way around), universal suffrage (the democratic vote for all), or the equality of all people under the law. All of these concepts have sound evidence and logic behind them, which was well known over many decades of unacceptance, denial and outright opposition by many in the establishments of the Aristocracy, Government, Industry, Media and Religion. In fact, a great number of lives have been lost over the centuries because what was logically right was not emotionally accepted due to vested interest or, simply, complete denial.

A great example of this is that of Joseph Lister, a Scottish-British surgeon who applied Louis Pasteur's advances in microbiology to champion the use of antiseptic in surgery, subsequently distinguishing him as the 'father of modern surgery'. Nevertheless, it wasn't something that was earned overnight, as despite overwhelming evidence of the success of his antiseptic methods, demonstrating significantly higher survival rates (lower mortality rates) for surgery patients, it took over a decade for the Doctors and Nurses of King's College Hospital, where he was professor of surgery, to accept his work.

I'm certain that you will have your own experiences of this kind of inertia, where changes that seem clearly to be the right thing to do are either not implemented, inexplicably modified, or take an inordinate amount of time to adopt, and I hope that this article has helped you in thinking about how you can transition to an approach that considers the emotional (BTFA) aspects of change as much as the logical (PDCA).

This article is an extract from Philip's upcoming book: Living Lean.