Continuing my series on applying lean/agile manufacturing principles to selling, I was reminded by Charles Green and Dave Jackson about an important aspect of these principles that is never mentioned by those promoting lean/agile in our sales assembly lines.
When you actually spend time on a manufacturing line, you see how problems are resolved on the assembly line. It’s called Jidoka or Autonomation. It means “automation with human intelligence.” If the machine or a human operator determines a problem an Andon cord is pulled. It immediately stops the manufacturing line, lights go on to identify the problem area.
The team, that being the manager and the factory workers in the immediate surrounding steps get involved in diagnosing the problem and suggesting a solution. This problem solving process is driven by the people responsible for doing the work. It’s because they have the deepest understanding of how the work gets done.
Sometimes specialists may be involved in supporting the team, but the team is responsible and accountable for solving the problem and getting the manufacturing line working as quickly as possible. Sometimes for very serious problems, the team seeks a temporary fix and a team of specialists does deeper investigations to develop a permanent fix to the problem.
And insights from solving the problem are leverages as part of the continuous improvement process, which is also a cornerstone to lean/agile.
Contrast this foundational principle of problem solving with how we address problems in our GTM and selling efforts. It’s almost the opposite!
First, when performance problems occur, we don’t hit pause to figure out what the problem is and how to fix it. We tend to keep doing the work that creates and aggravates the problem, creating more waste, and more problems.
Then when we identify the problems, we take the problem solving process away from the people doing the work. We give the responsibility for solving the problem to the people most distant from the work itself. Whether it’s a management team, rev-ops, sales enablement, or another group, they aren’t doing the work–and often have no experience in doing the work. But we expect them to solve the problem.
They tend to rely on indirect indicators of the problem, they leverage data an other analytic techniques to characterize the problems and address them. Then they initiate a change, telling the “workers” what they need to do differently to solve the problems. And too often, the problem isn’t solved, but the data has been tweaked to acknowledge the performance difference. Or their solutions don’t recognize the reality of doing the work.
As you look at this, some things pop out, one is there is a tremendous time delay in recognizing and addressing the issues. This represents waste, lost productivity, and continued low performance. Second, the people who may have the best understanding of the problem are not involved in the problem solving process.
What if we learned what lean/agile manufacturers really do? What if we started to trust our people to recognize and solve problems that occur in their work? What if we encouraged them and their colleagues to swarm the problem and begin to solve it. Of course, management needs to be involved in helping with the process, and they may need to bring in specialists to help.
But they are the people who have the deepest experience in the issues and can make huge contributions in the speed and effectiveness with which problems are solved.
Before we can fairly expect our people to solve the problems they encounter, we have to do a few things:
- We have to equip them with the skills and tools to do problem solving.
- We have to provide the support to help them solve the problems.
- We have to make them accountable for identifying and helping solve the problems.
- We have to trust them to do the work.
Think of how this might change the engagement of everyone in the organization. Think of how we can more effectively and efficiently address key issues. Again, like in manufacturing, there are some problems that need to be taken “off-line” to study and address, but the week to week, quarter to quarter issues we encounter in our GTM performance can most often and most effectively be addressed by the people that do the work.
And there’s an added bonus! The more effective our people become in understanding and solving their problems, the more effectively they can lead customers in solving their own problems.
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