Performance Improvement expert and MPI’s VP of Research George Taninecz on the art of the huddle, the role of lean in healthcare, and his new change management novel, Winning Innovation.
MPI Insight: George, you’ve spent your career as a student of performance improvement, in particular lean manufacturing. You had a front row seat to the advent of lean in manufacturing while you were an editor at IndustryWeek and then you eventually became a partner and VP of Research at The MPI Group. What is your work like with performance improvement at MPI now?
George: MPI comes at it from a couple perspectives. One, we do research studies for ourselves as well as for clients where we’re putting some real data behind the use of these practices and the outcomes that they deliver. When taking on a study, there’s always something new emerging and it’s incumbent upon us to keep up with the latest methods. Some may be associated with lean. Some may not, but they are whatever is the latest in process improvement.
The other side of my work at MPI is writing process improvement stories. I spend a lot of time talking with manufacturers, and I also write quite a bit about lean in healthcare. Those are incredible stories because it’s not just, “Oh, I’m able to make a product faster, or better.” It’s more: “We were able to save lives today because of this change.”
MPI Insight: I know lean and other methodologies started in manufacturing, or had their development in that industry, and have since spread to other sectors such as healthcare. I’m curious about the differences you see between your work on improvement in manufacturing vs. healthcare?
George: In some ways the healthcare industry has gotten more to the heart of what lean is. It’s how do you improve, enhance customer value? For a hospital, that’s how do we deliver better care? And how do we take better care of our employees while doing that?
I think they understand that it’s more than, “Here’s a tool that can help us.” Many healthcare providers start at the bigger picture — systemic elements — and then build from those. They’re asking, ‘What is our objective here?’ It’s to provide the best care possible to patients and, in doing so, give gratifying work to employees, physicians, everybody else. Then they work to develop behaviors and apply principles and systems that will help them to achieve that.”
MPI Insight: I know that some of the principles employed by Toyota and lean involve the relationships with customers and among employees; in particular, starting from a position of empathy for what is valuable to people, as opposed to a purely profit-centered concept of value. There’s this deeper sense.
George: Absolutely, and you don’t get to that deeper sense by simply changing a process. You really need to approach it with behavioral concepts. It’s respect for people, mutual trust, humility, developing listening skills, modeling appropriate behaviors. That’s where I think, in any industry, those that really get lean, they work hard at that foundational level. They realize, “OK, if we do these things involving people, they will want to find problems and use tools that help them do their jobs better, and deliver better value to customers. We’re not going to dictate the process to employees, but instead engage them, empower them, educate them, support them, so that they can choose the means to succeed, whether that’s lean or otherwise.”
MPI Insight: That makes sense. You start with the leaders, whether that be somebody who’s a team leader and is managing frontline workers or somebody who’s in more of an executive role, and work with those managers and coach them about values that you want to embrace as an organization.
George: Right. But some of these companies are huge, including many healthcare companies, with tens of thousands of employees. You have to systematize it in some way that allows the frontline and leaders to interact, and that’s where lean has documented, proven ways to do that. Good organizations have these tiered huddles where, be it on the shop floor or on a patient care floor or at the executive level, the staff meet for 15 minutes every day, talk about what they really need to focus on that day, and address the problems from yesterday that haven’t yet been solved.
Especially at the frontline, huddles have a visual component to them. There’s a board in the area where people work that shows performance to their three to five key objectives—maybe it’s employee safety, patient safety or whatever — they know immediately how well they did that day or the day before. They know if something is approaching that they need to be aware of. They’re not asking each other, “Hey, do you have anything for the huddle?” They’re looking at a board and they’re looking for a red or green. What they need to do is apparent at a glance.
Then they address what they can — and what they can’t do on their own, they push up to a manager or a supervisor huddle. That group also has huddles, and they may push the problem up to an executive-level huddle. And then it comes back down with a message of, “OK, we can get you resources, or we can do X, Y, Z,” but everybody’s quickly informed of the problems throughout the company. Instead of having things that would’ve festered for days or weeks, within a day or less you get senior leadership aware of something that could be an opportunity — or a disaster.
MPI Insight: Let’s turn now to your latest book, Winning Innovation, which you’ve just published along with your co-author, Norbert Majerus. In the book, you follow characters who are implementing an “innovation excellence” methodology. I’m curious about that methodology. Can you tell me more about it?
George: “Innovation excellence” is Norbert’s term for the methodology in the book because we’ve brought together a lot of things that are beyond just lean methods— as they’re applied in innovation and R&D — so there are a few distinct methodologies that come into play.
The first, of course, are lean innovation concepts and principles, so there’s things like understanding the cost of delay, which is, what does it really cost us for every day that we don’t get a new product to market, and how can we eliminate the wastes that cause delays? Things like standardized work, concurrent engineering, pull, and kanban to improve the speed and quality of development.
Second, the book also includes innovation management concepts, things like idea-suggestion systems, the use of hackathons, and knowledge capture. How do you make sure that, when your senior engineers retire, they don’t take that expertise that’s unique to them, and now it’s gone forever? You have to have ways to capture that knowledge, codify it, share it, and then encourage people to reuse it.
A third piece, which we’ve been talking about, is huge — and it comes out in the book in a lot of unique ways: change management. That’s one of the reasons Norbert wanted this to be a business novel, because he does an enormous number of speaking engagements about innovation around the world and he always asks people: “What’s more difficult to change, a process or a person?” They usually answer, “Oh, no question. It’s harder to change a person than it is a process.” Then he asks: “OK, how many of you spend as much time working to change people as you do to change the process?” Literally no hands go up. Change management has to occur first.
In the book, we’re able to show how behaviors change, especially for the CEO of the company. He goes from one perspective to then gradually getting it. He begins to change his behaviors and helps to change other people’s behaviors. That’s a core piece of it. It’s hard to get the impact of that by putting a bulleted list together and saying, “Do X, Y and Z,” but when you put people’s voices to it ,and their actions, I think it makes it more understandable and enjoyable. You picture yourself in that situation and go along for the ride.
MPI Insight: That makes sense. Since you’re writing about a transformation that’s going to involve people, it’s helpful for somebody who’s envisioning their own transformation to watch these characters live it and think, “What might it look like on my team? What kinds of behavior changes might I see? What kinds of reactions, responses might I expect from the characters in my own world?”
George: Absolutely, and we’re by no means the first to do this. It goes back to the Eli Goldratt’s The Goal and The Gold Mine by Freddy and Michael Ballé. Those were great business novels that also dealt in this process improvement space. It’s a way to teach this material that’s helps people implement it better and faster.
Winning Innovation: How Innovation Excellence Propels an Industry Icon Toward Sustained Prosperity by Norbert Majerus and George Taninecz is available now at Routledge.com.