The proof of the pudding is in the eating!
Learn by doing
Theory is important but getting the message across and stuck in the brain is the main goal. Letting people experience the concepts they are learning is much more powerful than just telling them what it’s about.
Besides being on the work floor as a coach, helping people and teams to take their collaborative work to the next level, I love to make use of the power of play.
Recently I had the pleasure of facilitating some gamestorming sessions for a crowd of enthusiastic employees of SNN in the Netherlands. The three Northern Dutch provinces of Drenthe, Fryslân and Groningen work together as the alliance SNN, with the aim to strengthen the economic position of the Northern Netherlands. This organization has seen the advantages of working Lean and have started to move ahead, guided in the process by ProjectTeamWork.
Last week was one of the regularly held teamdays at SNN, focussing on improving their teamspirit and work processes. The location for this day was the Puddingfabriek in Groningen, a former factory where they used to make -yes- Pudding.
Though some people at SNN had already experienced some aspects of working Lean, the majority of them had not. So the challenge was to let everybody experience concepts and understanding of what being Lean is about. Yvonne from ProjectTeamWork came up with the idea to play the Kanban Pizza Game with the group and approached me to facilitate this game.
After ramping up with some basic theory on Lean and Agile principles and explaining the position of Kanban in this, it was time for some action!
This day being a day about teamwork, we formed random groups of 4 to 5 people and letting them come up with a restaurant concept first; something to trigger team emotions and a fun way to enter the creativity zone. Nice to see a wide variety of restaurants and the visualization of it.
By now everybody was hungry and excited for some Kanban Pizza! After having explained the basic rules and everybody got their necessary supplies it was time to “Just do it” in Round 1. Pizza dough, sauce and toppings where flying around the tables just like it was any ordinary day in the lives of work at SNN. After ending the first round after a couple of minutes, with exception of the “Toosties”, all teams had to cope with too much “Work in progress”, as way too many toppings and preparations where spread across the tables.
Time for some looking back at what happened, why and how to improve on this. The teams now mapped and visualized their workflow by putting painters tape on the sections on the table. Discussing what would be sensible WIP-limits per section per team resulted in making this explicit by using numbers on the tape.
Making sure you don’t have too many unfinished items or “waste” in your process but enough to put to use gives you a couple of advantages: letting items “flow” speeds up the entire process (reduce lead time), which results in more throughput. Also the fact that the process is visible and transparant, makes that team members communicate more and to the point.
All teams made major progress in their results after finishing round 2. I had the feeling they were really excited on the realization that they had a direct influence in the way they worked and the results thereof. Having the intermediate reflections on what went well and where could they improve as a team resulted in an even better team atmosphere. These feedback cycles take some time, but result in advancing to a better outcome. I took some more time than usual explaining also side effects, such as quality towards quick deliveries, customer satisfaction and learning from other teams by collective sharing of knowledge. Therefor I skipped the diversity part of the game, this time not introducing the Pizza Rucola.
Round 3 had to do with more refinement it seemed, people started to anticipate the length of the round and make some inventory for later. Well, since that was NOT the intended message, I decided to cut the length of the round in half. Scores dropped drastically of course. We discussed the way you can anticipate on things that you control, opposed to forces out of your span of control which are best not anticipated on too much. Trust your team members and your ability as a team to cope with change by understanding and visualizing the workflow, collaborating to improve step by step and adapting when and where necessary. That’s what team agility is about; the final round 4 proved this point.
When failing on some parts of their efforts, each of the teams had the resilience to bounce back; to understand what went wrong and adapt to improve again. Improvements are best done as a continuous effort, going step by step instead of going for the big bang at once.
After having a stomach full of pizza we had a little break and got ready for dessert! For the closing of the day the teams spent time on their retrospective to think about what they had learned from the morning and afternoon sessions and what to do with that in the near future. To stick to the restaurant theme, we asked them to visualize the lessons learned in desserts. Wow! Lot’s of very different styles going from ice cream cones to chocolate fountains to chocolate & vanilla pudding.
Well, the proof of the pudding was indeed in the eating! The teams scored points during the games for their visualizations, their learnings and points in making pizza and their explanations.
The scoring itself was quite simple: the team for which everybody rooted the loudest would win :-)
By hearing the cheers and applause of the whole group the winner was: team “Signoritas”!
Thanks everybody at SNN for the enthusiasm and willingness to learn in such an unorthodox way.
