Teamwork on value, the value of teamwork

14 January 2016 / article

Value is what customers come looking for when they talk to you. Value they can’t find anywhere else is the key to scale-up. But value is also very, very hard to pin down. What can we do today to please customers and make some money?

Value remains a mystery: let’s accept it. The only way I know to keep the company focused on creating value is to constantly seek value. If not, everyone starts getting on with their job, realizing transactions, and stop worrying about the meaning of what we do and how this touches customers, so they convince others to become customers.

The path of least resistance is that every one focuses on doing their job well in their role and trusts that overall, this will produce the kind of value customers expect. How likely is that?

Teamwork is the key to value: when department heads get together and figure out how the various technical functions of the product or service come together to deliver the benefits customers expect – and how competitors attempt to do the same. There is no other way than looking at this again and again, together.

The tool is the QFD matrix:

customer benefits are checked against technical processes
main interactions between technical processes are highlighted
competitor performances are compared
target costs are studied function by function

And out of these various links one can establish target performances at target cost, to discuss together what kind of value we want to aim for.

Doing this repeatedly creates teamwork as function heads better understand each other’s problems and come to share each other’s vocabulary. Certainly, departmental specialties are important to become any good – engineers need to work on their specific tasks. But at department head level, creating a common understanding of where the product or service currently is and which way it needs to move to capture customer’s hearts and wallets, is what makes the difference between sustainable success and, well, every one else.

The value problem is never solved as customer tastes evolve and their environment changes. For each product or service we need to ask ourselves: what greater value could we have offered? And how will we do so in the next product? Profitably? Together.

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.