In this radio episode, Dr. Galsworth refers to this graphic: "The Translating Information into Exact Behavior."  It is a progression in three parts.

Part 1: The goal of all management is to ensure that vital information (customer specifications and the standard procedures that produce those specs) gets translated into exact behavior. That is, managers need to make sure that people and machines execute those specs safely, with precision, and on time. That's the job of the traditional manager. 

Part 2: In the pre-visual workplace (before visual information sharing is implemented), such companies have to rely on many ways to achieve this--none of them entirely effective: classroom training, OJT, manuals, binders, memos, written SOPs (usually in all CAPITAL LETTERS), and lots and lots and lots of meetings--every day, several times a day. 

Part 3: By contrast, in a visual workplace, such vital information is translated into exact behavior through visual devices and systems of devices. These devices (or visual solutions) are imbedded into the landscape of work so that employees (you, me, the boss, anyone) can pull that information to them as needed, as close to the point-of-use as possible--without speaking a word.

In this radio episode begins, Dr. Galsworth discusses the partnership between Visuality and Lean, using the metaphor of the two wings of a bird. Here is an excerpt.

For the past twenty years or so, VTI/Lean has been the dominant improvement technology. Twenty five years ago it was called JIT (Just In Time).  It started in the USA but didn’t exactly catch on the way it did inJapan.  And then, afterJapan built the model further, it came back to theUSA. When we got our hands on it, we did what every red-blooded American does: We made it our own and, in our view, made it better. JIT evolved into Lean: establish flow, focus on standard work (make processes standardized and predictable), introduce time/implement pull, and move as close to one-piece flow as your industry can allow.

In a nutshell, I call this the work of the critical path (another word for value-stream perhaps)--but, in my view, a term that is more dynamic and insistent. I defien ciritcal path as: developing and installing a robust flow line that people and materials must follow in order to achieve the most safety, most quality, least distance, least time, and least cost. In other words, an accelerated flow that you control at will.

In its latest form, Lean is helping lot of companies. The gains are dazzling: 70-80% reduction in lead time, 30-70% increase in quality, 99.9% on-time delivery, and on and on.  Lean represents a set of powerful business and operational principles. 

In my view, however, Lean as a framework for thinking and a methodology, is incomplete by itself.  By itself, its gains are un-sustainable. At least, this has been my analysis and experience.

The missing piece?  The Visual Workplace.  Visuality is about information and it is about adherence.  It about liberating information, much as we talked about in my first show—liberating information and in the process, liberating the human will. This is the key to cultural alignment and sustainability.  Although lots of apps have been glommed onto Lean, in its actionable form, Lean is not designed to take all this--and stillbe able to accomplish the things it can do exceedingly well, well.

It needs Visuality, not as an add-on…a 45-minute training session that shows some point solutions that are then installed, cookie cutter fashion, into some leaned-out process.

Visuality is a language. A language we imbed into the physical work environment that allows that workplace to speak and to become a partner, our partner, in the pursuit of the ordinary and the excellent. It is this that renders Visuality the champion of cultural transformation, alignment, empowerment, and sustainment it has proven over the decades to be.  In this regards, it is without peer.

The visual workplace is about building compliance into the landscape of work. Compliance to what?  Compliance to your technical and procedural standards. Here Visual and Lean shake hands. Like a fine marriage, a powerful and lasting alliance formed between equals.  I call it: The Visual-Lean Alliance. 

I Think of this partnership as two wings of a bird (see InfoGraphic on left).  Which wing is more important? Ask the bird. He knows if he is going to get to his destination he needs both winds—and both well lubricated and in good repair.  Sustained and sustainable flight. The bird and its two very valuable, equally cherished wings. Lean is the wing in support of the pull and the critical path. The other wing reserved for visual’s contribution: information and adherence. 

SHOW EPISODE/PART 2: In the second part of today's show, Stewart Bellamy, Lean Manager at the Brandt Group, describes the first two examples of operator-led visuality in his discussion with Gwendolyn about the visual-lean conversion at Brandt's site in Regina, Canada. A  third example, not discussed on the show, is also described.

Solution 1: This Brandt site designs and manufactures large and complex configurations for mining and other heavy-industries. The manufacturing process often spans five to six months. This means that set up steps are infrequently executed and not made easier by frequent repeats. The blue configuration you see here is nearly 70 feet long and must be properly balanced, a process that used to take two to three hours. Then as area operators became visual thinkers, they invented a series of visual solutions that reduced that to a 15 minutes.  

Solution 2: This yellow unit began as a white board for notices about new work orders. Then operators applied visual thinking and added functions to that base. For example, 1) yellow bins for special parts; 2) pegs for machining discs, specific to that work order; and 3) names and photos of the operator team. And there is more you will spot as you study this excellent portable center.  In visuality, we say that this unit has been "designed-to-task."  

Solution 3: Stewart and his improvement team created this sturdy layout of the production floor which they call "The Shop Road Map." Although Stewart did not have a chance to discuss this solution during the show, it's used to stimulate concepts related to project planning and continuous improvement --as well as to provide vital location information. Do you have a similar tool in your improvement tool box?

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The Building Blocks of Visual Thinking represent a pathway to a new way of looking at problems—and solving them, permanently. Visuality is a language—not just a bunch of point solutions…stacked lights, a line or two, some addresses, a placard telling us how to wrap a wiring harness or administer a medicine. Visuality is the language of your current operational system, imbedded into the landscape of work—whether that landscape is a hospital, pharmacy, military depot, factory, dry cleaners, or open-pit mine. The eight building blocks are: Standards, The Six Core Questions, Information Deficit, Motion, Work, Value Field, and Motion Metrics. We focus on the first building block—I-driven—in this show and pick yup the other seven later.

The first building block, I-driven, is at the heart of what makes visuality the most powerful process for cultural transformation and alignment on the planet today—even as it produces 15% to 30% increase in productivity (however you’d like to define that), reduces risk, increases quality and on time delivery, and dramatically lowers cost.

To get us to the starting line, here are two definitions Dr. Galsworth has formulated that are the work horses of my approach to the visual workplace. First, her definition of a visual workplace:

A work environment (a company or a department or a bench) that is self-ordering, self-explaining, self-regulating, and self-improving… Where what is supposed to happen does happen on time every time, day or night—because of visual devices.

Please notice: If you remove the last four words (“because of visual devices”), you remove the driver of the definition—and you cannot achieve that outcome. If you take the visual devices from our raods and highways--roads signs, traffic lights, lane markings, pass/don’t pass devices, if you take the speed bumps away—you not only can’t achieve a self-ordering, self-explaining, and self-regulating location, you get the extreme opposite: confusion, mistakes, frustration,  accidents. In short, mayhem.  

Galsworth's second definition is of visual thinking:

One Simple Reason: Too Many Questions

There is one simple reason why a visual workplace is needed: People have too many questions. Some of these questions are asked but most of them are not. When people don’t ask questions, they do one of three things: (1) they do nothing and just wait until the answer shows up; (2) they go hunting for the answer; or (3) they make stuff up and move ahead on their own best guess. Since the primary purpose of a visual workplace is to make the answers to vital workplace questions readily and easily available, without speaking a word, we better look at the question of questions carefully. When we look closely at all the workplace questions we ask —or anyone asks—we discover that only two questions drive them all.

The First Driving Question: The Need-to-Know

The first of these two driving questions is: What do I need to know? That is:

What do I need to know that I don’t know right now in order to do my work—or in order to do my work better? What information do I need?  Need-to-know questions can be very basic. If you work in a factory, an urgent need-to-know question might be: “Where are my pliers?” In a hospital, it might be, “Where are the patient charts?” In an accounting office, it might be, “Where’s that report I was working on yesterday?

Visuality is I-Driven

Please notice that the first driving question does not read: “What do WE need to know?” It reads: “What do I need to know?” That "I" is you. If it did read “what do we need to know,” then you’d face yet another challenge before you could convert your answers into visual devices: a meeting! If the question read “we,” you’d have to meet with others in your area to discuss and decide which are the most important need-to-know questions, what the possible answers are, and is it really necessary to bother with any of them anyway. You’d meet, present, discuss, analyze, plan, probably vote, and certainly meet again. And there is no guarantee that enough people will agree that you need to know what you know you need to know—let alone agree on the form of a visual device that would imbed the answer. A dreary prospect at best. But the question does not say “we.” It says “I”.  And since that “I” is you, you are in the driver’s seat of your own visual inventiveness. Good idea! After all, you know which questions you need answered better than anyone—because they are your questions. And you know your work. And that means you also know what stands in the way of getting that work done. We have confidence in that “I” and so do you.  That “I” is us, too.  The starting place for all workplace visuality—for you and for us—is the “I.” (By the way, this holds true for CEOs, managers, engineers, supervisors, field reps...everyone.) That’s why we say: The visual workplace is an I-driven process—an I-driven methodology.

The Second Driving Question: The Need-to-Share

So maybe you are you saying: “I” “I” “I”—that sounds pretty selfish. Where do other people fit in? What about teams? What about “we?” Good point. But don’t worry. The “we” in a visual workplace enters powerfully into the picture with the second question that drives workplace visuality: “What do I need to share?” That is: What do I know that others need to know that I need to share in order for them to do their work—or in order for them to do it safer, better, faster or at less cost? What information do I need to share? Notice this second question is still formed around the “I.” It is still I-Driven. But instead of you driving the question, this time you respond to it. The second question drives you. Where? To the next level of visuality in your area, triggered by the needs of others. Your focus, which was squarely on yourself before, is now turned outwards to others. “How may I help you?” is another way to say this.

At the heart of this second question is the recognition that each of us has knowledge and know-how that other people need in order to do their own work better and/or more safely—whether those other people are co-workers; a supervisor or manager; internal suppliers and customers; or external suppliers or customers. They are all our colleagues, our work companions. We are all on the same team, whether we will ever sit together in the same room. And they are all customers of the information you know.

The impact of turning your need-to-know questions into visual devices has a powerful multiplying effect--because others are doing the same thing in their areas as well. The result is far greater than simply counting the number of devices. Similar to dropping a pebble in a stream, the ripples last far longer and reach much further than the first splash. We see other visual thinkers-in-the-making doing the same thing: creating ripples of control in their corners of the world as well. Rippling out. Rippling out. In this way a kind of fabric of control spreads across the company and a new level of individual competency and pride is acheived. 

When we add the need-to-share (the second driving question), we reach beyond our immediate locus of control and define a sphere of influence. We help others. Doing so creates a fabric of intention, improved performance, and good will across the organization that connects us and weaves the enterprise together—area by area, person by person, and visual device by visual device.

The Ten Doorways: Creating a Workforce of Visual Thinkers

To become a robust visual work environment, your enterprise must engage everyone in making a visual contribution. Each employee must open a door that leads to higher and more complete levels of visual information sharing, relative to their own work.

Everyone must become a visual thinker: you, supervisors, managers, material handlers, executives, planners, schedulers, doctors and nurses, machinists, assemblers, engineers, buyers, purchasing, marketing and sales staff—everyone. And when that gets going, its time for your supply chain to get on board.   

There are ten such doorways in a fully-functioning visual workplace, each one opened by specific (and sometimes different) organizational groups or levels. Each organizational level gets involved—and has to get involved—in creating a fully-functioning visual workplace and precisely what category of visual function each of those levels is accountable for—which doorway each “owns.”

But be careful, the notionof "owning" does nto confer exclusive rights. For example, engineers and supervisors own Doorway 2: Visual Standards. But that doesn’t mean that value-add associates are not allowed to create visual standards. They almost certainly will and should. It simply means that the company holds managers, engineers, and supervisors responsible for distributing accurate, precise, and complete technical and procedural standards across the organization—and then making them visual. 

Area associates own Doorway 1: Visual Order/Visual Inventiveness, (Visual Where). But that doesn’t mean that engineers and supervisors—and all other employees—are not expected to also implement visual order (the visual where) in their respective work locations. They are!  And they definitely will as visuality picks up speed and focus in the enterprise. But associates take the lead in operations—because, above and beyond everyone else, the visual where is critical to their work there. It is they who have an urgent and on-going need to know where the things of daily work are—instantly. As a  group, they are also acutely aware of where that where should be. 

The point is The Ten Doorwas framework is not meant to be restrictive or exclusive. Anyone in the company can contribute a visual solution for any doorway. But specific groups are held accountable for making sure that specific categories of visual function are implemented in the enterprise, no matter what.  (For more, see Dr. Galsworth's book, Visual Workplace/Visual Thinking.)