Standards, Abnormality and the Ideal

Wow! This will be the second post of yours that I’ve linked to in my blog. Thanks for the mental firestarters!
You’ve really helped me crystallize why I’m unhappy with my current work situation. I have great respect and belief in the core business of my company, but I’m very frustrated by the tolerance/expectation/acceptance of waste, and the constant “we don’t have time to think” kinds of attitudes I run into trying to improve that business. I want to not only respect the core business of the company, I want to respect the company itself. As in – how it handles everything else – like people. I don’t like that there is a division between the business and the people who are making the business (if that makes any sense).
I want this to be a place that pushes to healing the sick and makes healthy people healthier. That makes learning instead of training. That isn’t scared to have people be better than they are. And that figures out how to replace fear with hope.
Now the question really becomes, how can I start making that happen? 🙂
Thanks for the boost!

Great post, Jon. Way to emphasize that the true goal of kaizen is to continue to improve the standard until we reach the theoretical ideal. However, I am not sure I agree with the “less is more” philosophy. If zero is great, is negative necessarily better?
Isn’t negative inventory also muda? Large OEMS hold orders to buy components in bulk. This defies the “batch size of 1” or “1 piece flow” philosophy of lean, doesn’t it? Shouldn’t the target be to pull from shipping through assembly and procurement. (Even Toyota has not reached the goal of a true pull system since some of the stamping and body components must be built in batches.) Allowing negative inventory to move too far from zero creates waiting, longer lead times, and runs the risk of throwing off the work balance and creating overproduction. From the customer standpoint, a negative inventory is a backlog and waiting.
Are negative defects a good thing? One way I can think of to generate negative scrap is by reworking defective parts to correct the defect. While this reduces wasted material by eliminating scrap parts, it is over-processing because it would have been better to make the parts correctly the first time. I suppose if quality is defined as meeting the customer’s demands, then you can create negative defects by exceeding those demands. But holding tighter tolerances for the sake of holding tighter tolerances is also over-processing, not to mention that by holding tighter tolerances than specified, you may accidentally create a poor quality part. Example: a customer specifies a maximum surface roughness on a sealing surface. To exceed customer demand the supplier puts a mirror finish on the part, and because the part’s surface is TOO smooth, the part is difficult to assemble or the assembly leaks. By trying to surpass the customer’s surface roughness spec, the supplier failed to meet the design demands for assembly and leaking. (The customer really should specify a roughness range.)
I do like the idea of negative accidents, but I can’t figure out a possible way to create a negative accident. We can’t count people healing from work related injuries as negative accidents, because the fact that they are healing implies that they were injured. We can’t count near misses as negative accidents, because technically, they are near hits. Perhaps if we counted safety or ergonomic kaizen ideas implemented… but wouldn’t it be easier to set a positive standard for safety kaizen implementation? Still, the safety standard should be continuously improved. If the current target is no accidents a day, the goal should be to increase the target to no accidents a week, to no accidents a month… to the theoretical no accidents EVER.
I am in agreement that once a standard is met, the target should be improved until perfection is met. The philosophical question that is sometimes the problem is, ”What is perfection?” One important motivator for kaizen is that if you can do it well, your competition can find a way to do it better, so you better beat them to it.

I think the turns in you example aren’t negative…it’s infinite! and counter some other points, if your business is truly (and I really mean truly) operating this way and STILL meeting customer requirements, (meaning the customer isn’t having to wait longer than they want) how can it possibly get any better?