UPSIDE DOWN EXCELLENCE

Quality that's simple

Week 3 of Paul O’Neill’s Playbook: Make It Visible

We’re continuing our study of Paul O’Neill (the leader whose approach 7x’d Alcoa in the 90s) and why his principles work far beyond safety.

If you strip away the labels, safety and quality follow the same pattern:

1. Understand what could go wrong.
2. Create a plan to prevent it.
3. Teach the plan.
4. Audit the plan.

Different department names. Same muscle groups.

This week’s focus: visibility.

Week one: find common ground.
Week two: measure your improvement.
Week three: make it visible.

Visibility is clarity. It turns assumptions into shared understanding. And shared understanding turns scattered effort into aligned action.

When people don’t share the same definition of success, they work hard… in different directions.

A story about expectations.

I was going to tell you about a friend of mine, who told his teenager to put something in his bedroom, until this happened.

We got home Saturday after running to Target to pick up a few things. We bought a new garbage can for the bathroom. The instructions were to put this in our (parents') room.

Here’s what he got:

The garbage can is technically “in” the room. I mean he made it. The blue line clearly delinates the hallway from the bedroom. Perhaps there was a better spot, but that wasn't in the directions.

The directions weren't clear.

Unclear expectations always lead to unexpected results.

Make it visible applies everywhere:

• Metrics displayed where work happens
• Clear tool locations
• Marked machine settings
• Visual standards for “done right”
• Simple cues (like tape on the garage floor to know when to stop the car)

Set clear expectations. Measure them. Tie them to common ground.
Do that, and alignment becomes your default state.

Changes you can make this week:

Ideas to get you thinking about how to make a change this week.

1. Walk the front line. What do you see them doing that isn't in the standard work documents? What do you see the experienced people doing differently from the new people? Identify areas where expectations are implicit and make them explicit.
2. Pallet Colors. Go to a cluttered area of the shop, a place where material handlers like to dump stuff. Add a color system for the days of the week (Monday=Green, Tues=Yellow, etc.). Then set the rule that items can't be there for more than 24 hours.
3. Workstation. Find a cluttered workstation. Figure out what is needed to run that operation each day. Clear everything else off that workstation. Take a picture of the clean workstation. Post the picture at the workstation. Every night, the expectation is that the workstation looks like the picture. This works for churches and offices too. The church I go to has pictures of what each room looks like when clean. Whomever uses it has a visible standard of clean.

Happy improving.