Why do lean efforts fail?

In a social media and email survey, Daniel Penn Associates asked operations experts why lean efforts fail. Below are the seven most common reasons cited, with a sampling of participants’ comments.

Reason 1: Leadership (Management) is not involved / not trained / don’t want to invest the time / think they don’t need it / don’t take ownership / don’t truly lead the charge.

• It starts from the top down. Many companies are excited about the change. However, change is also an investment over the short and long-term that has a huge impact on safety, quality, cost, and efficiency.
• Lack of leadership with sufficient vision, courage, and knowledge (or willingness to learn).
• Leadership is the start – designing an implementation plan that actually fits the culture and pace of the organization is also key. Many times I’ve gone into organizations that have had some training and done a pilot, but there is no investment in developing ownership at shop floor level. This is partly leadership, but there is also a role for advisers and consultants to deliver a sustainable program, where a key output is ownership.
• Lean, or any other initiatives, often fail due to insufficient accountability within the leadership team. Senior managers must be accountable for setting the mission, vision, values, and objectives. They must also provide the guidance (policies, plans, processes, procedures, measures) and assets needed to execute. Subordinates are accountable to execute and to notify senior people when there are deficiencies in objectives, guidance, or assets. A lack of productive leadership training and development also hampers execution. Leaders often haven’t been trained in leadership roles, attributes, skills, use of power and influencing others.
• Many people and organizations view themselves as successful by any number of measures (real or perceived). Compelling them to change their playbooks or leadership style is not highly likely if they perceive themselves as successful.
• Lean should not be “rules and tools.” That is doing lean. You must change your operating philosophy, culture, and management practices to be lean. Management is very resistant to change that applies to them, and culture change never embeds in the company. Do as I say, not as I do.

Reason 2: Unrealistic expectations / competing priorities / clear mission and purpose are not communicated.

• Continuous improvement initiatives can fail due to the people driving the change; often, leadership are ‘too busy’ to surrender the time to the business of change, instead, they nominate an individual or team to deliver change.
• If the original project plan oversold the benefits or underestimated the investment, the continuous improvement effort could have still delivered significant improvements. However, if they were not aligned with the original project plan, it could have still been classed as a fail. Most people are usually over-ambitious in defining planning stage deliverables. However, it’s usually better to under estimate and over-deliver.
• Lean is a corporate culture commitment that requires support (at varying degrees) from all functional departments. Often cross-functional management support was not built, nurtured and progress communicated across an organization resulting in great ideas in a target-rich environment falling short of goals. Depending on product life cycles it can take years to complete a true lean project.
• LEAN requires commitment, discipline and leadership. If any one of these traits is lacking the journey will fail. Often cross-functional management does not build, nurture and communicate progress across an organization. This results in great ideas that fall short of goals. It must be ingrained in the culture from the 30-year employee to the new person walking through the door.
• Companies try to do too much at once. It’s called continuous improvement, not fixing the shop all at once!
• Lack of commitment on the part of the organization. Too often, an organization is gung-ho for the effort until they see the short-term pain for long-term benefit. I am sure most of us have seen the “quality program funeral” many times.
• We tend to forget that lean and continuous improvement is part of building a culture and that it is always hard to change; it requires patience, persistence, and change management. What we usually see is a huge effort to bring actions that then create a bottleneck (due to a bad strategy of decentralizing load) and then efforts go down, frustration goes up and you are back to square one with a larger resistance than before from everyone.

Reason 3:  Lack of structured preparation / schedule / resources; no long-term focus on sustaining the gain.

• Lack of leadership support. Lack of resources. Project work isn’t aligned with organizational strategy. The continuous improvement program is too complex.
• If the original project plan oversold the benefits or underestimated the investment, the continuous improvement effort could have still delivered significant improvements. However, if they were not aligned with the original project plan, it could still have been a failure. Most people are usually over-ambitious in defining planning stage deliverables. However, it’s usually better to underestimate and over-deliver.
• There was no accountability implemented after the improvement.
• They don’t standardize or sustain and compete for checks on a regular timeframe. If you don’t complete regular audits of the standard you have set, it will always return back to the original state.
• Lack of determination, resources, and commitment to permit meaningful progress. In short … an under-appreciation of the process.
• Schedule and resources is the most often reason given. We have a saying used often by my team, “we don’t have time to correct it now, but do have time to do it over later.”
• Lack of leadership support, lack of sufficient resources, project work, isn’t aligned with organizational strategy and too complex of continuous improvement (CI) program. You can avoid many of those pitfalls by taking the time to build out a CI system that takes into account the type of organization, leadership, and other things. It isn’t a one size fits all approach or plug-and-play. Every organization is different, and you have to take those differences into account when building out the CI system.

Reason 4: Misalignment between goals and measurement standards.

• The number one cause why lean does not stick. Measurement (accounting) does not support lean efforts. In big companies, spreading direct labor costs like peanut butter is detrimental to lean!
• Waste elimination is what really matters. Bureaucracy and nonsense activities could make the implementation an obstacle to productivity instead of creating value and speed.
• There are several reasons. Fear of changes, looking at the process without perspective, lack of perseverance.
• LEAN requires commitment, discipline, and leadership. If any one of these traits is lacking, the journey will fail. Only the companies that embrace change & desire greatness and stay the course can build a sustainable lean program. It must be ingrained in the culture from the 30-year employee to the new person walking through the door.

Reason 5: Voice of employee is not heard / employees don’t receive training / aren’t given ownership / don’t receive the right incentives.

• Employees must be heard within an environment that respects and acts on their contributions.
• Employees stop believing after a few failed optimization attempts. Hence, it’s very important to execute the first optimization project well and show the value created. Then continuous improvement can be established. Always with the alignment of the stakeholders and measurable and impactful objectives for the business.
• The incentive systems do not align with the new lean approach. The bottom line is employees will always behave in a way which incented.
• Lack of results that frontline people can relate to. Too much talking and not doing and learning from one’s own actions.
• There is a contradiction between the short-term objectives applied to shop floor workers (“Produce to reach production goals”) and long-term objectives applied to management (“Reach long term targets, but if batches are not released today, you’re in trouble.”).

Reason 6: Taking a “one approach fits all” philosophy.

• Most fail in service industries because most initiatives try to remove variability and standardize processes. We should be building processes that allow variability at customer touch points and build to natural customer variability. This is an important point that is often missed.

Reason 7: The “consultant” isn’t also a coach / outside support must be hands-on involved throughout the process / focus on culture and process, not tools and techniques.

• Most lean interventions sell tools and terms/language. My experience…if something is implemented/changed in a value-added area you should be in the area and help coach during the transformation. Otherwise, you’re a consultant. Stand in the value-added change area and watch, listen and learn…then coach.
• Often I find that continuous improvement (CI) experts focus too much on the tools and techniques and not enough on building a culture of CI. That requires focus on strategy (ensuring you are working on the right things), training and coaching the subject matter experts and leaders on CI, and then ensuring the subject matter experts are empowered to improve their processes. It’s about a system, not a set of tools.