by Norbert Majerus, Shingo Faculty Fellow
I was about ten years into my Lean journey when I heard, “You cannot think yourself to Lean acting, but you can act yourself to Lean thinking.” I didn’t understand it, so I dismissed it; it was just another Lean slogan.
But then, thankfully, I had the opportunity to hear Arnoud Herremans, a psychologist, at a conference, and I started to change my mind. Arnoud taught me that common sense tells us — incorrectly — that our behaviors are essentially driven by our beliefs, and thus, we are convinced that we can change our behaviors by changing our beliefs. And we apply the same logic when we try to influence or inspire others to change their behaviors.
Here’s an example to prove Arnoud’s point: Who firmly believes smoking is good for your health? Nobody, yet people still smoke. The reason for their behavior lies in their current and past environmental conditions. Historic conditions supported the developed habit of smoking, and the habit is still maintained by current conditions. Knowing that smoking is bad for you — and still doing it — causes a strong feeling of cognitive dissonance. Cognitive dissonance is the discomfort a person feels when their behavior does not align with their belief or vice versa. To reduce that dissonance, smokers come up with all kinds of excuses why their smoking is not as unhealthy for them as it is for others. Of course, they could change their behavior and quit smoking, which also reduces the cognitive dissonance, but that is far more difficult.
Changing behaviors is difficult but doable. If you change the conditions and circumstances so that an old behavior is no longer maintained and, at the same time, create conditions that shape and reward a new behavior, a change in behavior will occur. And while this new behavior develops, you will undergo a seamless change in beliefs to go with it.
Arguing for hours about how beneficial Lean is to your work and the organization will rarely result in a change in behaviors, although most will nod and wholeheartedly agree with you. And changing to Lean behaviors may be as hard as kicking bad habits like smoking. So what do you do?
To change to Lean behaviors, you must change the system to encourage the new behavior. Lean behaviors/acting must be made easy to do and be supported in all aspects of the work. For example, focusing on ideal Lean principles such as Lean problem-solving, creating primers that guide individuals through huddles and gemba walks, or coaching people to role model ideal behaviors gets people to act Lean. Only when the environment is changed into a “Lean friendly” environment, do the behaviors change. And believe me, the thinking and the beliefs will follow.
What I learned from Arnoud helped me engage leaders at the Goodyear Innovation Centers. As I wrote in Lean-Driven Innovation, “management and leadership play key roles in a transformation, and the change should engage them in the process early and often. They must, at a minimum, allow change to happen.”[1] This is what I tried to do at Goodyear.
Following the example of a colleague in Sweden, I started to invite senior leaders to teach 30 minutes of our mandatory Lean 101 classes. Many leaders accepted the challenge, and most did well when explaining ideal principles and behaviors — after all, our CTO led the way, so they were at least compelled to try. After they taught the ideal behaviors, many leaders acted accordingly and eventually supported the Lean initiative. One case I remember very well was one of our most “I know everything and I tell you how to do it” leaders who changed completely to “Please tell me how you suggest we solve this problem.”
Another example was the weekly huddle in the visual planning room. Cross-functional leaders would gather in front of a visual planning board that showed R&D work in progress, and it was often full of red sticky notes indicating projects that were not meeting the schedule or target. Although problems stared at everybody who came to the meeting, there was nothing but yelling and blaming each other. The dysfunctional behaviors started to change when we started to coach by asking the right questions and engaging the leaders in developing a process and a system that encouraged cross-functional discussion.
Inspired by the 10-second rule (every problem must be visible to everybody in the room in less than 10 seconds), the behaviors changed to cross-functional collaboration as people helped each other recognize and solve problems together. Our senior manufacturing leader summed it up one day: “When I came to this huddle for the first time, I never believed that something like this could ever work at Goodyear. I have no idea what happened — we are still all the same people in this room!”
What had happened was that the conditions and the environment created a change in behaviors that led to the conviction that this new collaborative system was the right thing to do. The system that all the leaders helped to create eventually led to scheduling and delivering 1,500 new products per year on time and on target.
I’m an engineer. Engineers are not psychologists, and sometimes, we need a little help from an expert like Arnoud to see how the human mind really works. Today, I’m a firm believer in what he has often said: “Change the behavior and the belief will turn over like a leaf on a tree.”
[1] Norbert Majerus, Lean-Driven Innovation, Routledge, 2015.
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