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David Verble
At the moment, I'm most focused on a new concept, Leading Culture Change from the Hubs, that I believe is the wave of the future in lean continuous improvement.
Margaret Verble
Although I haven’t mentioned it on this page before, writing is a large part of my professional life. I write for two hours every morning before I come into work, and then often I come in and write some more. Some of my writing is ghostwriting I can’t discuss, but I’d like to alert you to pieces that will appear under my name either later this winter or this spring.
Judy and I have a new article scheduled for the March issue of Progress in Transplantation. It is entitled, “Addressing the Unintended Adverse Consequences of First-Person Consent and Donor Registries.”
Judy Worth
Sixty-two hospitals completed the Lean portion of 
the collaborative and reported their project results to the entire group last December. While the focus of the collaborative was improving Length of Stay in the ER, many of the participants found the enhanced communication and teamwork inside the ER and flowing out to units in the hospital, the lab, radiology and emergency medical services to be equally valuable.
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Verble, Worth & Verble
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Lexington, KY 40507
Phone: 859-254-0883
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David Verble talks about his work
A
t the moment, I’m most focused on a new concept, Leading Culture Change from the Hubs, that I believe is the wave of the future in lean continuous improvement. Lean thinking in the U.S. began in the 1990s in what I like to call “The Age of Just Do It,” -- a call to action by Womack and Jones to seize the nearest crisis, map a value stream and become a change agent. From there it evolved into “The Age of the System” in which a lot of companies tried to create and enforce their version of the Toyota Production System. The most recent incarnation of Lean has been the “Make Lean the Culture Age” where people have either tried to change the cultures in their organizations to fit Lean or have tried to create new problem-solving cultures.
It’s the attempts to create these new problem-solving cultures that have captured my attention. It seems like most people want to take one of two approaches: They either want to create a Lean culture from the top down, by announcements, pronouncements and mass training experiences, or create a Lean culture from the bottom up, with employee involvement initiatives, rapid-improvement events and specialist facilitators. Neither one of these approaches involves middle management – and that’s the rub.
Supervisors, unit managers, department heads and other operational leaders are essential to a functioning workplace, productivity and cultural transformation. If upper management is the axel, and first line employees are where the rubber meets the road, middle managers are the hubs. Without them, the wheels fall off.
How do you create a problem-solving culture from the hubs? I want to go back to my 15 years of experience working in Toyota to answer that. (I know. Toyota has recently had problems. But those stemmed from upper management losing sight of priorities, not from the middle managers, front line employees or the production system.) The thing that most stands out from my experience with literally countless Japanese practitioners of Lean is the consistency of their requests and questions to me:
“David-san, please think about…”
“What is the real problem you are trying to solve?”
“What is actually happening?”
“How do you know that?”
“Why is that happening?”
Those statements and questions pushed me back from my assumptions, ideas and opinions and forced me to think about what they were based on. And the message behind them was even more powerful and personal: My job included figuring out what caused problems and how to solve them. That message creates a totally different kind of worker than a message of, “Just do what you are told,” “We got these orders, we have to execute them,” “Get it done; we’ll worry about it later,” “Don’t give me the details, just fix it.” A worker who is asked by a hub manager to step back and think develops a sense of responsibility for problems and solutions. That’s the grease of culture change.
So what do I recommend to hub managers or upper-level (axel) managers who make the organizational wheels spin? I can only give you a brief outline here. But in short: 1) Recognize the central importance of the hub managers in your company; 2) Practice the discipline of refraining from asking the rhetorical questions you already know the answers to and instead ask your employees questions that pull up their deep, tacit knowledge of their jobs and the way things work; 3) Create safe zones where employees can experiment with improvements and countermeasures and learn from the outcomes.
There are longer answers, of course. And an art to it all. But I’m convinced the new age of Lean is the Age of Leading Culture Change from the Hubs.
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