Friday, August 31, 2018

How Does Asking Questions Create Change?

by Michael Ballé & Tracey Richardson
August 23, 2018

In a recent column that Michael wrote, Ernie and I (Tracey) shared our simple definition of lean as “the continuous process of people development.”

So what does it mean to develop people? How do we do it?

Akio Toyoda often encourages his employees to “stand in the batter’s box” and to “challenge to improve.” This involves two dimensions: one, taking responsibility for outcomes based on good processes and, two, learning to achieve measurable improvements. Which is pretty much what we’d expect from someone we’d like to work with: that they take greater responsibility for helping us with whatever we’re facing by developing discipline and accountability around shared expectations This is leading and learning at its best.

Lean is enquiry-based because it assumes that standards are known in the first place – which is far from true in many working environments. Assuming that standards are known and practiced, lean activities are all about asking “what is the metric that needs changing?”, and then “what are the causal factors impacting this metric?” to get to the one thing we want to try and change.

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