Seeing What Makes Processes Tick

Daniel Weil is a partner of Pentagram and a Senior Fellow of the Royal College of Art.  Daniel has been working as an architect and designer since 1977 and his projects have included products, packaging, interiors and art direction for such companies as Swatch, Lego, and United Airlines.  Recently, Daniel was privately commissioned to create a gift for an architect.  The result was a one-of-a-kind clock that is both simple and complex and reflects his interest in investigating not only how objects look, but how they work.

“Objects like clocks are both prosaic and profound,” says Weil.  “Prosiac because of their ubiquity in everyday life, profound because of the mysterious nature of time itself. Time can be reduced to hours, minutes and seconds, just as a clock can be reduced to its component parts. This doesn’t explain time, but in a way simply exposes its mysterious essence.”

In addition to being a functional work of art, the clock represents a great example of the role visual management should play in process improvement.  While good visual systems don’t explain every detail of a process, they should allow a team see how a process works in real time and help “expose its mysterious essence.”  Further, by designing visual management systems which allow the team to see and easily interact with the inner workings of a process, it becomes easier to maintain, repair and improve the process as needed.

Like Weil’s clock, visuals should help explain, very simply, and elegantly, what make’s the process tick.  When done well, the blend of visual displays, visual controls and systems design give the team the opportunity to easily see the nuts and bolts of a process as they work the process.  Armed with the ability to “see” the process and its problems, teams are better able to both understand what impedes productivity as well as suggest ideas for improvement.

Contrary to the old saying, when it comes to visually management, I don’t just want to know what time it is…I want to know how to build the watch.

“Seeing” Red

In 2009, Charles Jacobs published a book entitled Management Rewired: Why Feedback Doesn’t Work and Other Surprising Lessons from the Latest Brain Science.  In it, he discusses the power of mental paradigms and what leaders must do to change behavior.  According to Jacobs research, we interpret the world and structure our behavior according to a narrative of our own creation.  A story we repeatedly play in our heads which helps us define, analyze and categorize all we see and experience.  More importantly, it is a story with an implicit set of rules that define the way we believe the world works and dictates how we behave in response to it.

Because this story defines our mental paradigm, is self-reinforcing and drives our daily behavior, the only way to change behavior is to invalidate the current paradigm and replace it with a “new storyline.”  To do this, we must create cognitive dissonance and demonstrate that the rules that govern the current worldview no longer apply.  We need to shock the system and interject something new…something unexpected.  By introducing information that runs counter to what is expected, the right hemisphere of the brain fires up, takes a step back and reflects.  Since the right hemisphere is responsible for reflective consciousness, processing “big picture concepts” and creative expression, we need to have it engaged for people to drive daily innovation.

So how do we do this?  Since the brain is programed to reinforce the status quo, how do we introduce new information in a way that stops the brain in its tracks?  Visual management.

When done right, a simple visual (coupled with clear expectations) provides the brain with new information about the status of a process and presence of an abnormality.  Team members are quickly able to see whether the process is performing as expected or a problem has occurred.  Whereas without the visual, the story told may have reinforced a worldview that everything was “ok,” the presence of the visual forces the brain to take a step back, reflect, and reconcile its current paradigm with the new information.

So when driving continuous improvement, never underestimate the power of simple meaningful visuals.  Our brains are programmed to see, analyze and interpret information based on a self-reinforcing story playing in our head.  We construct our own view of the world and the only way to change our thinking (and thus our behavior) is to be presented with new information in a way that can’t be ignored.  Often the simple act of creating “a spot of red in a sea of green” can be the catalyst for significant behavioral change.

The Problem with Most Visuals

After spending countless hours analyzing visual management boards in office and manufacturing environments, many fail to live up to the expectations we set for them and die a slow and painful death. Here are three simple mistakes I routinely see made when designing and implementing visual boards:

1.  The boards are overcomplicated and fail to simply and effectively show normal versus abnormal
2. There is very little challenge build into the boards…they are way too “green”
3. The boards are boring…they look the same and lack any emotional connection or creativity

The following is an example of an executive assistant’s board which illustrates these key points:

This type of visual board can be seen in many office environments where the staff has been challenged to “implement visuals in their area” and become lean. In this particular case, the board focuses on scheduling, emails, travel packets and document management. With each category displayed, the goal is 100% (or very close to it) completion of the activity, with a weekly audit established to check on the progress. On the surface, the board is well organized, displayed openly and updated regularly. Upon closer look, however, the visual has a few problems which keep it from being effective as a tool for driving daily continuous improvement.

First, if all the goals are 100% and the assistant can easily achieve them, there is no challenge for her and thus “no problem” identified on the visual for her to solve. Second, this board only displays status on predetermined activities and fails to integrate steps taken to achieve an improved state. It lacks both a challenging vision of the future and clear aggressive targets which stretch the assistant and create “problems” she can then solve through daily improvement activities. It is only by creating this gap between what is possible and what currently is that she can be put into a position of growth and challenged to innovate.

As easy as this may sound, there are a number of issues that arise as soon as you want to make these changes to her board. First, the assistant needs to be open to the idea of wanting to take a risk and progressing toward a challenging goal. She needs to be ok with posting a board that says she is not perfect, but is working on it. Second, she needs to set aside time for addressing the problems that arise and coming up with new ideas to improve. Third, she will most likely need help in both the identification of issues as well as the creativity needed to solve them. If she is like many of us, she may be too close to her own process to be able to innovate. Her role may be better suited to identifying and finding the root cause of the problems, not creatively finding an solution. This puts the burden on the manager to not only follow up and ensure her progress and use of the visual, but assume the role of a mentor and help her develop into a daily problem solver, who is motivated by taking risks and challenging herself to redefine what it means to be an executive assistant and creating value for the organization.