Lean manufacturing aims to improve companies. One approach used in many Lean initiatives is to involve everyone in the management and decision-making process. Accompanying this responsibility is the notion that if all people make business decisions, then those people must be “responsible.” This word embodies the nonsense of dogmatic management, another way of over a hundred years of command and control management theory and culture to acquire and maintain power. Yet we cling to this rhetoric—empowerment, responsibility—as if simply saying the words earnestly wins over the hearts and minds of subordinates. A manager who is mired in this old mindset will engage his subordinates, selling them ideas and initiatives. The unsuspecting employee sees a change from his headstrong former boss and willingly agrees to the program, cautiously optimistic if not enthusiastic about the whole situation. In the manager’s mind, the “decision” has been made, the rule has been established, and the employee indicates his willingness to try. The trouble starts when the plan falls apart. Skills have not been acquired, goals have not been set, problems have not been fully understood, and the manager holds the employee “accountable” for his actions. The employee is frustrated and is now wary of future initiatives, as he knows the manager will hold him accountable for the manager’s poor ability to develop people and the system.
This is a huge sore point for any improvement initiative, this issue of mutual trust and respect. Regardless of the program or approach used, there must be a willingness to focus on the process and make mistakes. When we see mistakes, we can work together to correct them. In continuous improvement, where problems are constantly discovered, we must overcome the natural reflex to disconnect from our problem-ridden environment and address those problems every day. There are two important concepts that help people fight the forces of complacency and wage all-out war on waste. Unfortunately, modern management theory has diluted these concepts into such nonsensical jargon that many people dismiss them as a fad: “5S” and “The Eight Junkies.”
The 5S plan falls apart when we deviate from the plan: engage people on a daily basis and encourage them to think about their work. Unfortunately, for many companies, this was never the plan in the first place. It really was just for people to clean up the place. Most managers never see the depth of 5S. Their perception is limited to the opportunity to visit the workplace, but not in order to involve employees in the improvements, but to hold them accountable. Because managers cannot let go of their command-and-control behavior, which is understandable given the mountains of literature and a century of conventional wisdom supporting this approach, 5S morphs into another arm of management control systems.
To understand why this is so, we need to understand the basics of 5S: namely, the five s’ and how they relate to the ‘eight wastes’. First, consider the components of 5S for a moment. The Japanese words seiri, seiton, seiso, seiketsu, shitsuke are used to describe a method of organizing and standardizing the workplace. At the very least, this is the most widely accepted definition of the system. Let’s consider for a moment the English equivalents of these words and bear with me as I build my argument about how modern management theory and business myopia have twisted and destroyed this incredible and revolutionary thought process.
The Japanese characters for seiri mean: comprehensive reasoning or organization or classification. The interpretation of this in the workplace to ask: why this thing here? Do I need it to do the job? Is there a reason why this is an important or integral part of the job? In other words, is it added value? The English version of seiri is: Order what is needed and what is not needed. Too many managers will open cabinets and drawers to question the reason for idle tools in the work area. What problem is attacked with these gestures? The goal is not to throw it all away if we don’t understand why it’s there or if someone can’t explain its presence, but rather to understand why these anomalies exist in the first place and then correct them through the subsequent 4S’s. First we must know what is needed and what is not needed to get the job done.
Seiton is comprehensive arrangement. In a word: neat or ready. Now I have what is only needed for this process. Now, is it in an orderly manner? If it’s not ordered, why? Are you ready to work? If it is information, ready means that it is complete and accurate. If it’s a person, ready means fully capable. If it is a machine, it means capable and reliable. What can I do to get it sorted and ready? It’s not uncommon to see managers tearing down the arrangement of machines, people, materials, and information on the floor, but for what purpose? Is the purpose to understand the current situation in light of problem solving, making the workplace ready and flexible? Or is it perhaps something much more superficial and diabolical?
Seiso is achieving ‘clarity’ through extermination; sweep or clean the contamination of the object that we are examining. The object can be anything. We can expand this in the sense of process improvement. In every process there is variability or contamination that does not allow us to see the desired normal state. So, the variability is the contamination of the pure process. In English we say shine or sweep. This is very unfortunate, because when a manager gains a complete mastery of the 5S’s, we see these first three S’s take on new meaning. In short, we focus on the verb to sort, set, and sweep and not in the context of how we think about process improvement. It’s not pushing your imagination or the limits of common sense to come to the disappointing conclusion that, given the myopia of managerial thinking, 5S has become a national cleanup campaign. No matter how much we clean, it’s never clean enough. It gets worse, as we add the final two S’s, managers have brought back the command and control mechanisms we love so much: standards and sustain.
Seiketsu means clear standards. Managers who have been taught to command and control treasure standards, as they excuse us from finding better ways of doing things. In many US plants, the first 3S’s are posted on the walls in the form of checklists, audits, and assessments. This only creates resentment among the masses of workers as managers, who rarely show up on the floor except when people of perceived importance are visiting, decide to surprise their colleagues with a workplace audit of how well they are adhering to workplace standards in the face of ongoing problems that workers receive little help to resolve on a day-to-day basis.
Shitsuke means training, nurturing, or discipline. In English we say that shitsuke means to hold. The image that most Americans conjure up in their minds when we hear the word sustain is sustain, and it’s easy to mistake this for discipline. In a continuous improvement organization, training means instructing or directing another in their job. Discipline refers to adhering to the cycle of continuous improvement, which inherently requires standardization. Discipline in this case is directed at management, not at workers. In the case of 5S, we are training others to make further improvements to established standards.
If you accept what I am arguing as plausible, then I must try to answer your question: why then do we do 5S? A common reason is that we’re told it’s because of the rewards we get from our efforts. The workplace is organized, clean and safe. The business is “ready to tour” and we assure everyone that we will no longer be closing production lines to clean for executives and new clients. Read any conventional literature on the fundamental principles of 5S and you will see that it focuses on “stuff” in the workplace. 5S, at least in the United States, is nothing more than a cleaning program. The fundamental question we must ask ourselves is this: the same conventional literature that advocates the virtues of 5S also affirms that it is the cornerstone of a successful continuous improvement program. Again, if you accept that American managers generally treat 5S as a cleaning program, how can a cleaning program be central to a continuous improvement program? This not only doesn’t sound good, but 5S isn’t critical, as we understand it, on any level. The truth about 5S is that the last thing it aims to produce is a clean workplace. Is this heresy? Yes, for some it is. How can I reconcile this argument? Fortunately, I have the concept of “Eight Garbage” to rely on.
In Part II of this article series, we will begin to integrate the 5S and the Eight Wastes.