Lean and Trust--Applications

“Jaded Julie, I presume you can trust your husband?”

“Couch Potato? I can certainly trust his character; his personal values are impeccable. (Impeccable? Did I say that?) But his competence is something else. He’s pretty good at clicking the TV remote. I guess with him, having one out of the two main dimensions of trust isn’t bad.”

“To a degree, Julie, a hospital is a bit like your husband. It should be safe to say that virtually everyone who works in a hospital has his/her heart in the right place. If a person had a shady character, they would go someplace else. People’s deficiencies and the reasons that we might not fully trust them are more likely to be related to their competence.”

“I need some examples, Curmudge, especially those showing a link between trust and Lean.”

“We’ve talked a lot about using Lean to minimize the eight types of waste, so there’s no need to list them. Let’s consider just one—inventory. People keep ‘rogue’ inventory (1) because they don’t trust the hospital’s system to always have what they need when they need it.”

“As a nurse in a patient care unit, my first thought would be that the person who does the restocking is incompetent. In reality, it probably means that the standard work for the restocking process has not been properly designed and implemented. That’s Lean with a capital ‘L’.”

“Right, Julie. And perhaps the restocking person appeared incompetent because he did not receive adequate training or the authority to increase the inventory when he saw it running out. That’s Lean too.”

“Here’s one, Curmudge. How about the time wasted due to excessive checking and obtaining unneeded approvals? These so-called requirements are put in place because we don’t trust somebody’s competence.”

“One of the most basic of Lean activities is the rapid improvement event that makes a process more efficient. The team members enthusiastically support the change because they own it. They trust their own competence and that of the other team members.”

“Hey, Curmudge, this is a slam-dunk. ‘Trust and be trusted.’ But are there some other threats lurking in the bushes that we haven’t discussed?”

“For the good of the order, Julie, I must confess to a skeleton hiding in my personal closet. During my first year as a lab manager, our lab had a big job to do for the corporation. I gave part of the job to a chemist that I knew to be brilliant, but at the time I didn’t realize that his memory leaked like the Titanic. Anyway, he forgot to do a critical part of the job, and our lab ended up looking like the Keystone Cops.”

“Wow, that’s no way to win a Nobel Prize. So what happened?”

“Of course, I viewed the chemist as having violated my trust in his competence. In addition, my boss felt the same way about me, and her boss probably felt the same way about her. The lesson here is that a middle manager is in the middle of a long chain of ‘trusts,’ and his job is to make sure the chain is not broken. In the current instance, my career with the company was almost truncated.”

“(Truncated? That must mean he came close to being sacked.) Well, Middle Manager, how did you avoid the axe?”

“It was intense service recovery, Julie. There were many 8:00 a.m.-to-9:00 p.m. working days devoted to regaining trust in the lab’s competence. I ended up working for the company 10 more years.”

“And then, Curmudge, you retired?”

“No. Then I was sacked, possibly because I was 66 years old. With a lot of hard work, one can overcome a perceived violation of trust, but you can’t hold back the sands of time.”

Affinity’s Kaizen Curmudgeon

(1) Martin, Karen. The Trust Factor. Industrial Engineer, p. 31-35, (March 2006)