Shipulski On Design

Some thoughts on no:

• Yes is easy, no is hard.
• Sometimes slower is faster.
• Yes, and here’s what it will take:
• The best choose what they’ll not do.
• Judge people on what they say no to.
• Work and resources are a matched pair.
• Define the work you’ll do and do just that.
• Adding scope is easy, but taking it out is hard.
• Map yes to a project plan based on work content.
• Challenge yourself to challenge your thinking on no.
• Saying yes to something means saying no to something else.
• The best have chosen wrong before, that’s why they’re the best.
• It’s better to take one bite and swallow than take three and choke.

Your business is going away. Not if, when. Someone’s going to make it go away and it might as well be you. Why not take control and make it go away on your own terms? Why not make it go away and replace it with something bigger and better?

Success is good, but fleeting. Like a roller coaster with up-and-up clicking and clacking, there’s a drop coming. But with a roller coaster we expect it – there’s always a drop. (That’s what makes it a roller coaster.) We get ready for it, we brace ourselves. Half-scared and half-excited, electricity fills us, self-made fight-or-flight energy that keeps us safe. I think success should be the same – we should expect the drop.

More strongly we should manage the drop, make it happen on our terms. But that’s going to be difficult. Success makes it easy to unknowingly slip into protecting-what-we-have mode. If we’re to manage the drop, we must learn to relish it like the roller coaster. As we’re ascending – on the way up – we must learn to create a healthy discomfort around success, like the sweaty-palm feeling of the roller coaster’s impending wild ride.

A sky-is-falling approach won’t help us embrace the drop. With success all around, even the best roller coaster argument will be overpowered. The argument must be based on positivity. Acknowledge success, celebrate it, and then challenge your organization to improve on it. Help your organization see today’s success as the foundation for the future’s success – like standing on the shoulders of giants. But in this case, the next level of success will be achieved by dismantling what you’ve built.

No one knows what the future will be, other than there will be increased competition. Hopefully, in the future, your stiffest competitor will be you.

It’s tough out there. Last year we threw the kitchen sink at our processes and improved them, and now last year’s improvements are this year’s baseline. And, more significantly, competition has increased exponentially – there are more eager countries at the manufacturing party. More countries have learned that manufacturing jobs are the bedrock of sustainable economy. They’ve designed country-level strategies and multi-decade investment plans (education, infrastructure, and energy technologies) to go after manufacturing jobs as if their survival depended on them. And they’re not just making, they’re designing and making. Country-level strategies and investments, designing and making, and citizens with immense determination to raise their standard of living – a deadly cocktail. (Have you seen Hyundai’s cars lately?)

With the wicked couple of competition and profitability goals, we’re under a lot of pressure. And with the pressure comes the danger of seeing things how we want them instead of how they are, like a self-created optical illusion. Here are some likely optical illusion A-B pairs (A – how we want things; B – how they are):

Competition is severe and the pressure is real. And so is the danger to see things as we want them to be. But there’s a simple way to see things as they are: ask the people that do the work. Go to the work and ask the experts. They do the work day-in-day-out, and they know what really happens.  They know the details, the pinch points, and the critical interactions.

To see things as they are, check your ego at the door, and go ask the experts – the people that do the work.

At every turn, lean has increased profits in the factory. Its best trick is to look at the work through a time lens, see wasted time, and get rid of it.

Work is blocked by problems. You watch the work to spot blockages in the form of piles, otherwise known as inventory. When you find a pile, you know the problem is one operation downstream.

As lean works its magic, inventory is reduced, which decreases carrying costs. More importantly, however, it also reduces the time to see a problem. Whether the problem is related to quality, delivery or resources, everything stops immediately. It’s clear what to fix, and there’s incentive to fix it quickly because with lean, the factory is more sensitive to problems.

What works in the factory will also work in the supply chain, and that’s where lean is going.

Link to full article

Doing new things doesn’t take a long time. What takes a long time is seeing things as they are. Getting ready takes time, not doing new. Awareness of assumptions, your assumptions, others’ assumptions, the company’s – that’s critical path.

An existing design, product, service, or process looks as it does because of assumptions made during long ago for reasons no longer relevant (if they ever were). Design elements blindly carried forward, design approaches deemed gospel, scripted service policies that no longer make sense, awkward process steps proceduralized and rev controlled – all artifacts of old, unchallenged assumptions. And as they grow roots, assumptions blossom into constraints. Fertile design space blocked, new technologies squelched, new approaches laughed out of town – all in the name of constraints founded on wilted assumptions. And the most successful assumptions have the deepest roots and create the deepest grooves of behavior.

Cows do the same thing every day. They wake up at the same time (regardless of daylight savings), get milked at the same time, and walk the same path.  They walk in such a repeatable way, they make cowpaths – neat grooves walked into the landscape – curiously curved paths with pre-made decisions. No cow worth her salt walks outside the  cowpath. No need. Cows like to save their energy for making milk at the expense of making decisions. If it was the right path yesterday, it’s right today.

But how to tell when old assumptions limit more than they guide? How to tell when it’s time to step out of the groove? How to tell a perfectly good cowpath from one that leads to a dry watering hole? When is it time to step back and create new history? Long ago the first cow had to make a choice, and she did. She could have gone any which way, and she did. She made the path we follow today.

With blind acceptance of assumptions, we wither into bankruptcy, and with constant second-guessing we stall progress. We must strike a balance. We must hold healthy respect for what has worked and healthy disrespect for the status-quo. We must use forked-tongue thinking to pull from both ends. In a yin-yang way, we must acknowledge how we got here, and push for new thinking to create the future.

There is no progress without decisions. More strongly, decisions are unsung heroes of progress.

Decisions are powerful – things are different after a decision. (You are different after a decision.) Before a decision it’s one way, and after, another. And once a decision is made, the follow-on actions are clear, straightforward, transactional. In fact, the follow-on plan is justification for the decision. Decide this, do that. Decide the other, do something else. But decision is the hard part.

Progress is born from decisions and follow-on actions, but actions get attention and Gantt charts and decisions get short-suited. There is no project plan for deciding, no standard work. And it’s often unclear when a decision is made. Rarely is a decision documented. And once the organization recognizes a decision has evolved to stand on its own, the rationale and ramifications are unclear. And it’s unclear who birthed the decision. (The genetics of the parents define the status of the decision.)

There are two types of decisions: made decisions and unmade decisions. Made decisions are the ones we know, but it’s the slippery unmade decisions that are the troublemakers, the devious gremlins. Unmade decisions have a life force – they want to live, to remain undecided. (When unmade decisions are decided, they die.) That’s why it’s so hard to decide.

Over the millennia unmade decisions have developed natural defenses. Their best trick is camouflage. They know if they’re recognized, there’s a good chance they’ll be decided, and it’s over.  When they go to the meetings they hide in plain sight. They blend in with the wood grain of conference table or the texture of the ceiling tiles. They’re there, but hiding.

Unmade decisions know when they’re about to be decided – much like migratory birds sense gravitational fields. When they’re almost snared, they create complexity and divide into many, small, unmade decisions (think cellular division) and scatter. The increased complexity requires more decisions and enables at least some of themselves to live to fight another day.

But there’s hope. Unmade decisions get their life force from us – we decide how long they live; we choose not to see them; we choose to create complexity.

We must learn to spot unmade decisions, to call them out, and help our teams decide. At your next meeting, ask yourself if there’s an unmade decision hiding in plain sight. If there is, call it out, and decide if it should be decided.

Year-end numbers, quarter-to-quarter earnings, monthly production, week-to-week payroll.  With today’s hyper-competition, today’s focus is today.  Close-in focus is needed, it drives good stuff – vital few, productivity, quality, speed, and stock price.  Without question, the close-in lens has value.

But there’s a downside to this lens.  Like a microscope, with one eye closed and the other looking through the optics, the fine detail is clear, but the field of view is small.  Sure the object can be seen, but that’s all that can be seen – a small circle of light with darkness all around.  It’s great if you want to see the wings of a fly, but not so good if you want to see how the fly got there.

Millennia, centuries, grand children, children.  With today’s hyper-competition, today’s focus is today.  Long-range focus is needed, it drives good stuff – infrastructure, building blocks, strategic advantage. Though it’s an underused lens, without question, the far-out lens has value.

But there’s a downside to this lens.  Like a telescope, with one eye closed and the other looking through the optics, the field of view is enormous, but the detail is not there.  Sure the far off target can be seen, but no details – a small circle of light without resolution.  It’s great if you want to see a distant landscape, but not so good if you want to know what the trees look like.

What we need is a special set of binoculars. In the left is a microscope to see close-in – the details – and zoom out for a wider view – the landscape.  In the right is a telescope to see far-out – the landscape –  and zoom in for a tighter view – the details.

Unfortunately the physics of business don’t allow overlap between the lenses.  The microscope cannot zoom out enough and the telescope cannot zoom in enough.  There’s always a gap, the middle is always out of focus, unclear. Sure, we estimate, triangulate, and speculate (some even fabricate), but the middle is fuzzy at best.

It’s easy to manage for the short-term or long-term.  But the real challenge is to manage for the middle.  Fuzzy, uncertain, scary – it takes judgment and guts to manage for the middle. And that’s just where the best like to earn their keep.

The next level of factory simplification won’t come from your factory.  It will come from outside your factory.  The next level of simplification will come from upstream savings – your suppliers’ factories – and downstream savings – your distribution system.  And this next level of simplification will create radically shorter value streams (from raw materials to customer.)

To reinvent your value stream, traditional lean techniques – reduction of non-value added (NVA) time through process change – aren’t the best way.  The best way is to eliminate value added (VA) time through product redesign – product change.  Reduction of VA time generates a massive NVA savings multiple. (Value streams are mostly NVA with a little VA sprinkled in.) At first this seems like backward thinking (It is bit since lean focuses exclusively on NVA.), but NVA time exists only to enable VA time (VA work).  No VA time, no associated NVA time.

Value streams are all about parts (making them, counting them, measuring them, boxing them, moving them, and un-boxing them) and products (making, boxing, moving.)  The making – touch time, spindle time – is VA time and everything else is VA time.  Design out the parts themselves (VA time) and NVA time is designed out.  Massive multiple achieved.

But the design community is the only group that can design out the parts. How to get them involved? Not all parts are created equal. How to choose the ones that matter? Value streams cut across departments and companies. How to get everyone pulling together?

Watch the video: link to video.  (And embedded below.)

Fun is no longer part of the business equation. Our focus on productivity, quality, and cost has killed it. Killed it dead. Vital few, return on investment, Gantt charts, project plans, and criminal number one – PowerPoint.  I can’t stand it.

What happens when you try to have a little fun at work? People look at you funny. They say: What’s wrong with you? Look! You’re smiling, you must be sick. (I hope you’re not contagious.) Don’t put us at ease, or we may be creative, be innovative, or invent something.

We’ve got it backward.  Fun is the best way to improve productivity (and feel good doing it), the best way to improve work quality (excitement and engagement in the work), and the best way to reduce costs (and feel good doing it.)  Fun is the best way to make money.

When we have fun we’re happy. When we’re happy we are healthy and engaged.  When we’re healthy we come to work (and do a good job.) And when we’re engaged everything is better.

Maybe fun isn’t what’s important. Maybe it’s all the stuff that results from fun. Maybe you should find out for yourself.  Maybe you should have some fun and see what happens.

There’s an unnatural attraction to lean – a methodology to change the value stream to reduce waste.  And it’s the same with Design for Manufacturing (DFM) – a methodology to design out cost of your piece-parts. The real rain maker is Design for Assembly (DFA) which eliminates parts altogether (50% reductions are commonplace.) DFA is far more powerful.

The cost for a designed out part is zero.  Floor space for a designed out part is zero. Transportation cost for a designed out part is zero. (Can you say Green?) From a lean perspective, for a designed out part there is zero waste.  For a designed out part the seven wastes do not apply.

Here’s a recipe for unreasonable profits:

Design out half the parts with DFA.  For the ones that remain, choose the three highest cost parts and design out the cost.  Then, and only then, do lean on the manufacturing processes.

For a video version of the post, see this link: (Video embedded below.)

A Recipe for Unreasonable Profits.

It’s been a long slide from greatness for US manufacturing.  It’s been downhill since the 70s – a multi-decade slide.  Lately there’s a lot of hype about a manufacturing renaissance in the US – re-shoring, on-shoring, right-shoring.  But the celebration misguided.  A real, sustainable return to greatness will take decades, decades of single-minded focus, coordination, alignment and hard work – industry, government, and academia in it together for the long haul.

To return to greatness, the number of new manufacturing jobs to be created is distressing. 100,000 new manufacturing jobs is paltry. And today there is a severe skills gap.  Today there are unfilled manufacturing jobs because there’s no one to do the work. No one has the skills. With so many without jobs it sad.  No, it’s a shame.  And the manufacturing talent pipeline is dry – priming before filling.  Creating a sea of new manufacturing jobs will be hard, but filling them will be harder.  What can we do?

The first thing to do is make list of all the open manufacturing jobs and categorize them. Sort them by themes: by discipline, skills, experience, tools.  Use the themes to create training programs, train people, and fill the open jobs. (Demonstrate coordinated work of government, industry, and academia.)  Then, using the learning, repeat.  Define themes of open manufacturing jobs, create training programs, train, and fill the jobs.  After doing this several times there will be sufficient knowledge to predict needed skills and proactive training can begin.  This cycle should continue for decades.

Now the tough parts – transcending our short time horizon and finding the money.  Our time horizon is limited to the presidential election cycle – four years, but the manufacturing rebirth will take decades. Our four year time horizon prevents success. There needs to be a guiding force that maintains consistency of purpose – manufacturing resurgence – a consistency of purpose for decades.  And the resurgence cannot require additional money. (There isn’t any.)  So who has a long time horizon and money?

The DoD has both – the long term view (the military is not elected or appointed) and the money.  (They buy a lot of stuff.) Before you call me a war hawk, this is simply a marriage of convenience.  I wish there was, but there is no better option.

The DoD should pull together their biggest contractors (industry) and decree that the stuff they buy will have radically reduced cost signatures and teach them and their sub-tier folks how to get it done.  No cost reduction, no contract.  (There’s no reason military stuff should cost what it does, other than the DoD contractors don’t know how design things cost effectively.) The DoD should educate their contractors how to design products to reduce material cost, assembly time, supply chain complexity, and time to market and demand the suppliers.  Then, demand they demonstrate the learning by designing the next generation stuff.  (We mistakenly limit manufacturing to making, when, in fact, radical improvement is realized when we see manufacturing as designing and making.)

The DoD should increase its applied research at the expense of its basic research.  They should fund applied research that solves real problems that result in reduced cost signatures, reduce total cost of ownership, and improved performance.  Likely, they should fund technologies to improve engineering tools, technologies that make themselves energy independent and new materials.  Once used in production-grade systems, the new technologies will spill into non-DoD world (broad industry application) and create new generation products and a sea of manufacturing jobs.

I think this is approach has a balanced time horizon – fill manufacturing jobs now and do the long term work to create millions of manufacturing jobs in the future.

Yes, the DoD is at the center of the approach. Yes, some have a problem with that.  Yes, it’s a marriage of convenience. Yes, it requires coordination among DoD, industry, and academia.  Yes, that’s almost impossible to imagine. Yes, it requires consistency of purpose over decades. And, yes, it’s the best way I know.