Lean Knowledge Transfer Waste Series: #5 Transportation

NOTE: This article is part 5 of our series on creating Learning Flow by cutting Training Waste. To see a list of the entire Lean Knowledge Transfer Waste Series, see "Previous Posts" in the right sidebar. 

How much training could you do if you had a sci-fi transporter beam? 

It would be so cool. You could zap trainers and materials around the world (okay, and stop for a quick lunch in Paris). Zap trainees in and out for half-hour learning opportunities. Even zap an expert from Geneva to Chicago to give a five-minute demo.

But (sigh), no beam.

Instead, what we have is Lean Training Waste #5: Transportation.

Transportation Waste is created when we unnecessarily move people, materials and equipment around the world or even just around the corner in the process of helping them learn. The waste happens when:

• Learners travel to receive training.
• Instructors travel to give training.
• Printed materials and teaching aids go from the printer to storage to the training site and back to storage again.

Transportation incurs extra steps. It costs money and time. Airfare, hotels, rentals, cars, meals and freight charges add up quickly. Then, there's all the work hours needed to make these arrangements, get approvals and actually take the trip or ship the materials.

Being away from the office creates its own waste as people reschedule or miss meetings, delay activities and decisions, write trip reports, fill out expense forms, get signatures for reimbursements and argue about the cost of that big steak dinner.

Transportation is the waste that companies focus on reducing most often. Travel budgets and time away from the job are very visible and receive a lot of scrutiny all the way up the org chart. Reducing this waste is a frequent justification for implementing elearning and mobile learning technologies.

How Can You Eliminate This Waste?

Your organization may have already tried to address Transportation Waste by simply forbidding travel or reducing travel budgets. But simply forbidding all travel doesn't address the learning need.

The best way to eliminate transportation waste is to have clear criteria about when travel is needed for the most effective and efficient method to learn.

People should travel to learn when:

1. The skills or content being taught require group dynamics or interactive teamwork: e.g., public speaking, negotiation or medical operating room procedures. In these cases the learning should be as interactive as possible, maximizing time immersed in the situation or practicing skills. Lectures should be minimized and people should be studying learning content before and after the event. 
2. The cost of potential business defects outweighs the costs of transportation if alternate methods fail. For example, when I was employee #44 at a new semiconductor fab, our Chinese parent moved 100 engineers (and their families) to the US for two years to teach us how to start up and run the fab. This was a $1.7 billion investment and the transportation costs to bring these experts to us, while high, were minuscule compared to the potential losses if the startup didn't succeed. 
3. The needed learning is emotional, physical, experiential and/or immersive: e.g., flight simulators, cultural skills, fire fighting, mountaineering. 

In all of these cases, the people who are traveling should have clear learning objectives tied to business goals and a plan to leverage what they learn on their return.

Until we get the transporter beam (or at least, flying cars), this is one waste we should all continue to work on.

Stay tuned for the next article in our Training Waste Series: "Inventory." 

Let's Ride!

Todd Hudson, Head Maverick

BECOME A CERTIFIED PRACTITIONER IN LEAN KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER

We offer yellow, green and black belts in Lean Knowledge Transfer. Great for your company and your career. Work with a certified Lean KT coach as you complete projects for your certification. LEARN MORE



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How Lean KT Can Help You Accelerate Employee Engagement

Howdy!

This week I'm taking a break from our Lean Knowledge Transfer Waste Series because I wanted to share with you my thoughts from last week's 25th International Shingo Prize Conference in Provo, Utah.

The Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence is widely considered the most prestigious award in the Lean community. The conference is a gathering of the world's foremost experts in Lean, Six Sigma and other improvement methods.

At the conference, I was surprised to discover that the presentations were not about the nuts and bolts of implementing Lean. Instead, what I heard over and over was how the success of improvement hinged on building a culture of employee engagement.

What, Exactly IS Employee Engagement? 

Some define it as having employees being so involved and enthusiastic in their work that they naturally further their organization's mission.

But as a Lean practitioner, I prefer the definition offered by Scarlett Surveys International:

"...a measurable degree of an employee's...emotional attachment to their job, colleagues and organization that profoundly influences their willingness to learn and perform at work."

Note the highlighted words. That's exactly why we need Lean Knowledge Transfer. If your training efforts are killing that willingness to learn with Over Teaching, Defects, Delay, Unused Talent and the rest of the eight Training Wastes we've been talking about, you're killing employee engagement, the one thing everyone agrees is essential for success.

Lean KT Accelerates Employee Engagement: So Why Are So Few Organizations Doing It?

As I walked the conference, I talked with CEOs, presidents, vice presidents and lean consultants, looking for examples of organizations using Lean KT principles.

To my surprise, I found that even Shingo Prize winners are not yet applying Lean directly to their training and knowledge transfer. They're missing a huge opportunity to accelerate employee engagement and build a robust Lean culture more quickly and with less cost.

Try This Simple Technique to Help You Create Your Own Culture of Employee Engagement

If you've been reading our Training Waste series, you know that the first thing you can do for employee engagement is to start cutting Waste everywhere you find it. Create willingness to learn by clearing away the things that make learning difficult, frustrating or boring.

Another thing you can do is employ a Lean technique called a Gemba Walk. On a Gemba Walk, you go out to where the value is being created. If you're a hospital, it might be the ER or a patient ward. If you're a tech service company, it might be the call center. If you're a manufacturer, it's the shop floor.

As you walk around, your objective is to engage with people doing the work to find out what knowledge or skills they need to acquire to do their jobs better. Observe. Ask questions. Dig until you get the answers you need.

(Important note: You're NOT looking for physical things that need fixing, or management problems, or missing tools. On this Gemba Walk, you're only trying to find out what's missing from, or broken in, the knowledge transfer process.)

Then, bring what you discovered back to your office and start figuring out how to deliver that missing knowledge as efficiently and effectively as you can.

Remember, learning affects every single person in your organization. If you want to build a culture of employee engagement, then Lean Knowledge Transfer is essential.


Well, that's all for this week. I'm off tomorrow to ASTD International in Dallas to teach my sold-out (!) Lean KT workshop. If you'll be at the conference this Saturday, be sure to find me and say hi.

And stay tuned next week as our series on Lean KT Waste resumes with Training Waste: Transportation.

Let's Ride!


Todd Hudson, Head Maverick

BECOME A CERTIFIED PRACTITIONER IN LEAN KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER
Want to learn more? We offer yellow, green and black belts in Lean Knowledge Transfer. Great for your company and your career. Work with a certified Lean KT coach as you complete projects for your certification. LEARN MORE

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Lean Knowledge Transfer Waste Series: #4 Unused Talent

Note: This article is part 4 of our series on creating Learning Flow by cutting Training Waste. To see a list of the entire Lean Knowledge Transfer Waste Series, see "Previous Posts" in the right sidebar.

Do you dream of having a huge, nearly endless pile of resources for fast, efficient corporate learning? 

You probably don’t know it yet, but you already do. And there’s just one tiny, simple thing you need to do to access that hidden trove. 

Get out of the way. 

That's right. Most organizations have all the learning resources they need  -- and then some -- in the form of inside and outside experts. The problem comes when Training gets in the middle and becomes a bottleneck, creating Lean Knowledge Transfer Waste #4: Unused Talent. 

Learning that's Just Ripe for the Picking

Unused talent is one of the saddest training wastes. Here you have all this expertise and learning content just ripe for the picking (and, often, combined with a perceived shortage of training resources), that just sits there for lack of access.

Unused Talent occurs when: 

• People with credible expertise and experience are not tapped to help employees learn.
• Your experts are unknown (or unfindable) by learners who need to learn from them.
• Experts retire or change positions without passing on what they know.
• Knowledge sits unused in databases, in notebooks and in people’s heads. 

Unused Talent waste is caused by many factors. Here are just a few:

• Too much focus on professional trainers such as classroom facilitators, instructional designers and content authoring experts.
• Teachable expertise drawn from on the basis of title and position rather than on experience, wisdom and performance. Or drawing expertise only from people who are “recognized” or “acknowledged” experts.
• Unused external expertise, such as customers, suppliers, contractors, consultants, industry associations, government agencies, retired employees, interns, bloggers, Tweeters and even competitors. When the focus is all internal, you spend valuable time and resources re-creating learning content that already exists elsewhere, which in turn robs you of the resources to create original learning content that you can’t get from other sources. 
• Knowledge sharing issues: Experts can’t easily share what they know, and/or learners can’t easily access knowledge from experts. 

To Eliminate this Waste, Pull Down the Barriers

Eliminating Unused Talent means creating an environment where anyone with expertise can teach anyone who needs it. 

Learning tools facilitate the fast and effective transfer of knowledge between experts and learners. Be sure to choose technologies that are familiar or intuitive. For example:

• Your busy senior scientist may not have time to learn a complicated content authoring software to create a course. He/she is a lot more likely to shoot a five-minute video with a smartphone about a recent discovery and post it to a simple YouTube-like site.
• Have your traveling employees take videos and conduct short interviews with suppliers, customers and contractors. Post and tag those to an easy-to-access site for other employees to learn from.
• Give your key suppliers, customers and contractors access to your learning site and ask them to create and post short learning lessons.
• And make sure people can comment on learning content. They may have great thoughts to add, points of confusion, or updates and corrections to contribute. Keep the learning ball rolling!

The Role of Training

If the experts will be doing the teaching, then what is Training’s role? Don’t worry, you’ll have plenty left to do. 

• Strategy: Make sure learning stays focused on solving high priority business problems. 
• Clearing the Bottlenecks: Pull down the barriers to learning and implement solutions that make it fast and easy for experts to teach and learners to learn. 
• Curating Content: Learning content, both internal and external, is plentiful. Some of it is excellent. Some of it’s crap. Assume responsibility for separating the wheat from the chaff, ensuring quality and helping learners find the best resources. 

Training’s highest and best role is to leverage the knowledge and wisdom of the entire enterprise. When you do, you’ll see that you have an enormous wealth of learning resources to tap. All you need to do is get out of the way. 

Stay tuned for the next article in our Training Waste Series: “Transportation.” Available in two weeks.

Let's Ride!

Todd Hudson, Head Maverick

BECOME A CERTIFIED PRACTITIONER IN LEAN KNOWLEDGE TRANSFER
Want to learn more? We offer yellow, green and black belts in Lean Knowledge Transfer. Great for your company and your career. Work with a certified Lean KT coach as you complete projects for your certification. LEARN MORE

LEAN KT WORKSHOP AT ASTD INTERNATIONAL IN DALLAS
Attending ASTD ICE? Todd's pre-conference workshop is nearly sold out. Sign up before you miss out! May 18th. Hope to see you there.

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