The takt of challenge, the challenge of takt

15 January 2016 / article

We’ll all agree that we learn by doing, but doing something, anything new is hard. The mind is hardwired to imagine a future in which we can carry on without changing our habits, opinions or place in the world. We hold to these beliefs even when all the evidence shows that things are changing, or indeed, have already change. And we reject fiercely any change that involves a loss – of any kind.

How can we then challenge ourselves to change? Set a takt, a rhythm.

Face a new challenge every year: the world changes faster than we do. Every year, ask yourself: Okay, what is the big change I need to face this year, no matter what. For instance, I’ve always been interested in Lean and Green. I drive a Prius Plug-in. But I’ve never invested much in learning and teaching about it. COP 21 was a wake up call, and my challenge for this year is to get traction on Lean and Green
Do something new or break a habit once a month: Every month we can think of a new way of doing things, or doing something completely new. In the light of trying to face the Lean and Green challenge I am forcing myself to adopt a Toyota-like way of representing process improvement points. It’s hard.
5S the work environment every week: make sure all is in good working conditions and conduct micro-changes to how you do this or that once a week. The goal here is, in fact, stability by adapting your work environment to day-to-day environment changes.
Reflect on a work problem every day: once a day you can reflect on how you’ve solved a work problem: did you understand the problem correctly? Did you find the gap to standard? Did your countermeasure work as expected? What did you miss?

Here’s an 1980s Toyota document showing sustainability improvement opportunities in the production process:

Of course, following a takt of changes is a challenge in itself. Rather than think, “I should change… when I feel like it”, you get to thinking: what shall I face this year? What should I change this month? What should I sort out this week? What did I get right/wrong today. The takt leads you to counteract our in-built resistance to change, by giving a rhythm to the change process and, in doing so, teaching yourself how to learn to change.

Tags: takt-time

Leading author, speaker and researcher, I work on both the "hard" (improve quality, reduce lead-time, eliminate waste) and "soft" (engage people in problem-solving and improvement to develop them to the fullest of their abilities) dimensions of Lean transformation.

I started studying improvement initiatives twenty years ago as part of my PhD. research on Mental Models. I was persuaded by Toyota engineers that to understand lean you had to practice it firsthand and I have been working with supervisors, site managers and now CEOs to leverage their lean efforts into market share, people engagement and bottom line results. You don't know what you don't know and the most surprising thing I've learned as a cognitive sociologist is the value of: see with your feet and think with your hands!

I co-founded the Projet Lean Entreprise and the Institut Lean France. I have written several books and articles about the links between knowledge and management (Managing With Systems Thinking, The Effective Organization, Les Modèles Mentaux), and more recently, co-authored three business novels published by the Lean Enterprise Institute, one about lean turnaround, The Gold Mine, one about lean transformation, The Lean Manager, and a novel about Lean practice, Lead with Respect as well as a Lean manual in French, Le Management Lean.