Paging Dr. Lean for Solutions

Could there be a quicker, more cost-effective approach to massive workforce development? I'm thinking digital supplemented by live experiential learning,  apprenticeships with coaching.  Kevin Meyer, co-founder of Gemba Academy and a veteran of both start-ups and a medical device company, began to feel that the broad landscape of continuous improvement training had lost its punch.  He wondered if there might be a faster and cost-effective approach to workforce development somewhere in between expensive degrees and blogging. 

“There is a tremendous amount of lean, continuous improvement and operations excellence knowledge available in the world, especially in North America.  And we all know these methods work and can transform businesses — the methods are proven, the resources exist and the demand exists.  But there’s a disconnect.  Why isn’t it happening, at least on the scale we need it?”

Is there a disconnect between senior leadership and operations?  Meyer has seen examples of a lack of direction and fuzzy understanding of the problem and the opportunity. He began to believe that the real problem was a learning and delivery problem centered on how to make learning last. 

“We send people to conferences — usually the same people year after year.  And what happens?  They sit in basically the same presentations, come back to their organizations excited and then immediately get sucked back into the day-to-day chaos. ”  Further, Meyer believes that bringing in consultants to train employees won’t close the big gap between executives and “everybody else.”   “Tidbits of knowledge are transferred, briefly and inefficiently, but nothing is sustained, ingrained, implemented.” 

Wow. That’s a pretty strong indictment of our training and development system.

Five years ago when Meyer, Ron Pereira and Jon Miller launched Gemba Academy, they used their dissatisfaction to create a different approach based on a web-delivery model.  The team set out to simplify life — “no tracking of individual usage, number of individuals consuming the content, etc.”  The content — topics such as SPC and lean accounting — found a receptive internet audience and in five years, the academy grew to a 1,000-member on-line user community extending beyond manufacturing operations to health care, government and other industries.  Meyer was surprised to see that although the original target audience had been smaller manufacturing operations, a funny thing happened. 

“Instead of our customers being primarily smaller manufacturers, a majority now come from larger non-manufacturers.  Lean and six sigma methods can be deployed anywhere — hospitals, law firms, defense, government, you name it.  And it turns out that the large multi-site organizations have many issues with communication and deployment of new concepts. That’s where an internet solution that could be easily deployed across large organizations with different geographies and languages just as easily as at a single site, made sense, ” Meyer said.  Early offerings were conducted in English;  Chinese and Spanish followed shortly thereafter. 

Other valuable lessons appeared from bringing together  global communications and delivery.  Communities, or learning networks, formed over common interests.  Participants learned that they could find their level and drill down on the specific tools and topics that they needed most.   And there was collaboration.  “Communication begets collaboration,” said Meyer. “which encourages learning and reinforcement and better execution.  So over the next three to five years, I see lots of potential in digital learning and collaboration technologies to enable professionals at all levels within and between organizations and industries to dynamically share, collaborate, learn and execute.”    Digital learning communities have come of age.  It will be exciting to see the next step.

Named by Fortune magazine a "Pioneering Woman in Manufacturing," Patricia E. Moody, The Mill Girl at Blue Heron Journal, tricia@patriciaemoody.com, an Industry Week  Idea Xchange Xpert, is a business visionary, author of 14 business books and hundreds of features. A manufacturing and supply management consultant for more than 30 years, her client list includes Fortune 100 companies as well as start-ups. She is the publisher of Blue Heron Journal, where she created the Made In The Americas (sm), the Education for Innovation (sm) and the Paging Dr. Lean (sm) series. Her next book about the future of manufacturing is The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Copyright Patricia E. Moody 2014. With permission.