I Cant Not Spoken Here

Leslie Henckler
Karyn Ross
Whether you think you cant or you think you can, youre right.
Henry Ford
Many manufacturing companies that try to implement lean tools and concepts have had
some success but find that over time, initial excitement and results are not sustained. In
fact, it has been estimated that somewhere between seventy and ninety-five percent of
lean implementation efforts fail.1 Speculation about reasons why most companies are
unable to sustain lean transformations abound and include lack of senior leadership
buy-in, incompatibility with Western culture, and misunderstanding lean as a set of
tools versus a system of thinking, to state just a few. But is the real reason that lean fails
any of the above? A combination of the above? Or could there be another, underlying
root cause?
Why does lean really fail?
How many times, when discussing the application of lean in service industries such as
banking, financial services, insurance, IT, and telecommunications, have you heard
something like this:
Lean cant work here because were too differentwe dont make
widgets or car parts that are exactly the same and come along every 10
secondsevery transaction is different and takes a different amount of
timethere are so many systems and so many decisions to makewe
CANT do anything about that, and we CANT do lean here.
Now think about the last time you either called a company to ask a customer service
question, or, if you work in a service industry, listened to the answers your customer
service representatives were giving to customers who called with questions. Do any of
the following sound familiar?

We cant reverse that transaction for you because the system wont let us
I cant help you with that because its not something my department does
We cant set up your account because we need 48 hours and theres only 24

Call or visit most service companies, and listen carefully. Within a few moments we can
pretty much guarantee that what you will hear, over and over and over again is I cant,
I cant, I cant, I cant, I cant. And the problem is, if we believe that that we cant no
matter what the request that we are trying to answer is, the process that we are trying
to improve is, or the lean tools that we are trying to learn how to use are and we say
that we cant to ourselves and our customers we will be right. We wont be able to. If
1

http://trainingwithinindustry.blogspot.com/2009/06/lean-failure-rates.html
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service organizations and the individuals who work in those industries cant, how are
they going to be able to satisfy the constantly changing needs of customers who really
only want to hear and know what can be done for them?
Lean a systematic way of thinking and working to continuously improve
processes to satisfy customers by making value flow.
Whether in manufacturing or services, when a lean implementation fails, it is generally
attributed to a failure to understand and implement specific tools and techniques, a lack
of support from company leadership or cultural barriers. We postulate that one of the
main reasons lean fails is the inability of companies to transform their underlying
cultures from cultures of I CANT to cultures of I CAN.
How CAN we change organizational culture?
The Miriam-Webster dictionary defines culture as, a way of thinking, behaving, or
working that exists in a place or organization (such as a business).2 Evidence of an
organizations culture, then, can be found both in the way that people think and how
that way of thinking is expressed as people do their work. In a culture of I CANT,
because people think and believe that they cannot do things cant reverse
transactions because the system wont let them, cant help people because their
department isnt responsible for that function, cant set up an account because of
perceived rules regarding timing they actually cant and dont!
In order to create sustainable lean transformations in any organization, what we need
to do then, is actively teach people both how to think and how to do so that they
CAN.
How do we do that?
Do or do not, there is no try.
Yoda
Think back to the last time you decided to try something new. Lets say, for example,
you decide to take up golf. Maybe many of your colleagues and customers play, or
maybe you are looking for a hobby to help you get some fresh air and exercise and help
you relax. Chances are, no matter what reason you decide to take up golf, the first thing
youre going to have to get past is that horrible sinking feeling in the pit of your
stomach, and the little voice in your head that says: Are you crazy, you arent very
coordinatedyoure going to be terrible at thisyou cant golf But, since you have an
invitation from one of your colleagues to golf with him, your boss, and a couple of your
customers, you decide that you had better start learning. Some of the steps that you
might take, before heading out to the course might be to:
Read some instructional books and/or watch some videos to teach you the rules
2

http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/culture
2

Practice on your own at the driving range

After a few weeks of watching videos and hitting balls at the driving range, nothing
much has changed. Youre not hitting the ball much better, but youre really not feeling
very confident about the upcoming game youve agreed to play. You call your colleague
to say how worried you are, and he has a couple of other suggestions:

Practice on the course with friends who already know how to golf
Sign up for lessons with the golf pro at your local course for ongoing coaching

Although swinging the club is awkward at first, and your score for the first few games is
abysmal, after a few weeks of constant practice and ongoing coaching from your friends
who already know how to play, and with specific tips to practice that the golf pro gives
you at each lesson, you find your game is really improving and that you are really
starting to enjoy golfing. You think to yourself, Hey, I guess I really can golf! Your
thinking and doing has changed from I CANT to I CAN.

Changing the way we think and do so that lean concepts and tools can be adopted
and sustained in service organizations works exactly the same way.
Lets say your service organization decides to start teaching people how to create and
use value stream maps (VSMs) to visualize the process and improve flow and service to
customers. Trainings are created and a training schedule set. Leaders, managers and
team members all attend one-hour training classes where an instructor goes through
the steps to create a VSM, including what the symbols mean, how to collect the data,
and how to work as a group to create the map. After training, all the participants receive
a PowerPoint deck to use as a guide and are sent back to begin value stream mapping in
their areas. Work gets started, but a few months later, when area leaders visit, they find
that the VSMs havent been completed and processes havent been improved. When
the VSM teams are questioned about why the work has not been completed, their
answer is, Its too complicatedwe tried, but we cant do it.

Just like learning to swing a golf club, without directed practice through constant
coaching by someone who has advanced knowledge gained from prior experience, most
people arent able to learn lean concepts and tools. Although they may try their best to
put the new concepts and ways of working into practice, they will soon become
frustrated and revert back to the ways they know how to do the work and are
comfortable with. In order for people to adopt lean thinking and tools so that a lean
transformation can be sustained, coaching must occur frequently and on a regular basis.
New ways of doing and thinking must be practiced until they become habit and
happen automatically.
1. Coach constantly to develop peoples lean capability and confidence through doing
Learning hasnt occurred until behavior has changed.
Lets think for a minute about what a coach does. In our golf example, the coach spends
time with the learner on a regular basis two or three times a week observes how the
learner is standing, holding the club, and swinging and then helps the learner
reposition feet and hands to alter the swing. The coach then watches the learner
practice the new stance and gives the learner an assignment of what to practice and
how much to practice before the next lesson. Each time the learner comes for the
lesson, the coach repeats the same steps, so that little by little, the learners stance and
swing improve, accuracy and range of hitting the ball improve, and the learner gains
confidence in their ability to try more complicated shots!
Coaching lean concepts and tools works exactly the same way. Mike Rother, in his book,
Toyota Kata, calls the practice of working in a structured way with an experienced coach
to learn lean thinking and tools the Improvement Kata.3 In Improvement Kata practice,
an experienced coach works with the learner for fifteen minutes a day and observes the
learner as they work on improving an actual work process. The coach observes the
current state of the learners understanding and ability, then asks the learner a series of
five questions designed to help the learner gain new knowledge by applying the steps of
the Plan Do Check Act (PDCA) cycle.4 Through daily iterative practice, with the help
of the coach to guide and direct practice, the learner becomes more capable and
confident in their abilities. Little by little, the new way of acting and thinking becomes
habit, and the learner moves from I CANT to I CAN in both thinking and doing!
In our value stream-mapping example, think about the different outcome leaders might
have found if an experienced coach was assigned to work with the team learning to
3

Mike Rother, Toyota Kata: Managing People for Improvement, Adaptiveness and
Superior Results, McGraw-Hill, 2009.
4
The Plan-Do-Check-Act cycle, (PDCA) taught by Dr. W. Edwards Deming is the scientific
method of "hypothesis, experiment, and evaluate," developed by 17th century scientist,
Francis Bacon. PDCA is both a standard way to think about problems, and a standard,
"scientific" method to solve problems.
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value stream map. As the learners practiced the new skills of looking at the process,
drawing the map, gathering data and looking for improvement opportunities, the coach
could guide and support, helping team members develop both capability and confidence
through real world practice. Capable, confident people know that they can!
2. Adopt and adapt lean concepts and tools based on the specific needs of your
organization
Logic will get you from A to B. Imagination will get you everywhere.
Albert Einstein
Oftentimes, the first thing that people say when discussing why lean cant work and
wouldnt be sustainable in service organizations is that Were not Toyota. Service
processes are long and complex and dont have ten second cycle times. Lean tools only
work for simple processes with short cycle times. Although service processes such as
answering customer questions in call centers, creating payroll checks and reports or
insurance policies do often have longer cycle times, a high level of variability and many
decision points, the perception that lean concepts and tools cant be applied to service
processes is a reflection of an I CANT organizational culture; with a little ingenuity
and CAN DO thinking, lean concepts and tools can be applied to any process.
As stated earlier, lean is a systematic way of thinking and working to continuously
improve processes to satisfy customers by making value flow as effectively and
efficiently as possible. Just as in manufacturing, customers of service organizations
receive the services that they require through a process. For example, in order to
produce a customers payroll, a specific series of steps is followed: the customer
provides information about hours worked by employees for the pay period; that
information is entered into the computer payroll system; the computer payroll system
calculates the net pays and payroll taxes; payroll checks and direct deposits are created;
payroll reports, live checks and direct deposit notifications are delivered to the
customer; payroll taxes are transmitted to federal, state and local tax authorities. And
just as in manufacturing, each process step needs to function as effectively as possible
so that the payroll is produced correctly as the customer wants it, and as efficiently as
possible, so that employees and taxing authorities! receive their money precisely
when they expect it!
By understanding the specific nature of the processes of service organizations in detail,
many lean concepts and tools can be adapted to fit the needs of each particular service
organization. Some examples include:

Value Stream Mapping: For customers of service organizations, the value they
expect is in the service the organization provides as a product. Although many
parts of service processes seem to take place in customer service
representatives heads, or behind computer screens, it is still possible to follow
the process and map out the different steps that service providers are taking to
create the service. Making this process visible so that everyone can see how
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value flows to the customer and where problems in the process are can be
especially helpful to uncover previously hidden areas for improvement.

Standardized Work: Many service processes have cycle times that may take
weeks or months to complete such as billing cycles or the renewal of insurance
policies. And although it might seem, at first, that each customers needs are
unique, and every payroll produced, or insurance policy issued is unique, when
the process is examined closely, it is possible to find common, repeatable parts:
specific decisions that must be made every time, and ways that information
must be entered into the system for the service product to be produced
accurately and efficiently. These critical and repeatable parts of the process can
be standardized so that customer service representatives have a specific set of
steps to follow. This is especially helpful in organizations where multiple service
representatives do the same type of work.

Waste elimination: Just as in manufacturing processes, the seven wastes of

transportation, inventory, motion, waiting, overproduction, over-processing and
defect, exist in all service processes. Think about payroll information sent to a
customer service representative by email: that information is waiting in
inventory to be turned into value. Using the PDCA process, wastes can be
eliminated from service processes to make them flow more efficiently.

Working with a coach through experimentation and hands on practice to determine

which lean concepts and tools to adopt and adapt to your particular service
organizations is one of the best ways to change organizational culture from I CANT to
I CAN. Determining what works for your service organizations specific needs will build
capability and confidence while improving service for customers.
3. Focus really FOCUS on the customer and what your organization CAN do for them
The difficult is what takes a little time; the impossible is what takes a little longer.
Fridtjof Nansen
Is your organization internally focused or externally focused? An easy way to find out is
to take a walk in any of the areas where customer service representatives are creating
value for your customers. Ask a customer service representative to tell you about a
problem they are having. If the problem is something like the system runs so slowly
that I am late for lunch every day, and has no tie to how the problem affects service
quality or efficiency for the customer, then your organization is probably internally
focused.
Another good way to find out is to listen carefully to how those representatives talk
about your customers and answer their questions. Do your representatives refer to your
customers as people or do talk about them as service requests or work orders?
This service request has been sitting here for three days because its missing

information Do they talk about them by name or do they refer to them by account
number or customer number? Account number 1234 is late reporting their payroll
again If your customer service representatives refer to customers as work orders,
service requests and account numbers internal, system generated, non-human items
you can be pretty sure that your service organization is focused internally on its own
procedures and processes. And the problem with that is that often times when we focus
on our own internal procedures and policies, we forget that our customers are human
beings with specific wants and needs; it is much easier to say I CANT to a non-human
service request or work order, than it would be if a real live customer were standing
right in front of you waiting for service!
In order to change from an internally focused organization with a culture of I CANT,
to an externally, customer-focused culture of I CAN, it is necessary to humanize
your customers and understand what they want and need as people from your
organization. Some ways to do that are:

Have customer service representatives refer to customers by name so that they

always remember that they are people
Visit your customers on an ongoing basis and specifically ask them what it is they
want and need from your organization
Focus your improvement efforts on solving problems that directly affect the
quality and efficiency of your services for your customer
Use lean tools such as value stream mapping and visual management to make
customer needs and requirements visible to all at all times

Conclusion
If you are not willing to learn, no one can help you. If you are determined to learn, no
one can stop you.
In order for lean transformations to be successful, organizations need an underlying
culture of I CAN in both their ways of thinking and their ways of doing. As
educators, and lean coaches, we must constantly model and reinforce I CAN thinking
in our own language and practice so that others learn:

Use affirmative words and phrases such as We are going to and We are able
to instead of I think, I hope or Were going to try to. If we dont
believe that we can, others will not believe that they can either!
Look and listen carefully for I CANT thinking and behavior in in those you are
teaching and coaching and in all areas of your organization. When you find it and
recognize it, actively work to change it to I CAN thinking and behavior.
Organizational culture can be shifted one person at a time!

By continuously coaching people to adopt lean concepts and tools and adapt them to
their organizations specific needs, and by focusing externally on customers actual

wants and needs, it is possible to change an organizations culture from I CANT to I

CAN.
Once an I CAN culture begins to flourish, organizations will soon find out that when a
customer calls, instead of saying I CANT they will be able to say, Of course I CAN do
that for you theres always a way! And isnt that exactly what our customers want to
hear?