What kind of leadership does it take to flow value to the customer in a complex world?
The purpose of a company is to deliver value to customers. But for too many companies, this idea gets mixed with other goals that divert leadership’s attention from this most important focus.
Often, this unstructured approach to goal achievement causes confusion, overlap, and overburdening for team members. As an organization, how do we stay focused on delivering value to the customer? We emphasize FLOW of the work processes, working together to eliminate rework, delays, and interrupts. “Flow” is the value stream improvement approach to pay attention to delivering value to the customer. In their article, “Introducing the Toyota Flow System” for Planet Lean, authors Nigel Thurlow, John R. Turner, and Brian Rivera share this same idea:
“The [Toyota Flow System] model aims to sustain the flow of value to the customer, who is the center of the TFS universe. As such, in the TFS diagram it is both at the foundation as the cornerstone of TPS, and at the top of the house. In today’s hyper-competitive and complex world, we must be able to serve customer needs incredibly quickly — lest we become a victim of disruption.”
The authors go on to outline three pillars that they believe support the type of problem solving needed to survive in today’s fast paced, ever changing world: Complexity Thinking, Distributed Leadership, and Team Science. I applaud this Systems Thinking approach and the authors’ integration of these three concepts. The problems we face today have multiple, interdependent causes. This requires that people work together across functions and disciplines to make sense of complex problems so they can work in teams to improve the work flow.
Indeed, it takes complexity thinking to define the problem and begin problem breakdown to close the gaps. Teams need the social skills to respect each perspective and share in the problem solving process. Team Science is needed to practice building new skills of communication to build safety and respect. Two characteristics of Complex Adaptive Systems are emergence and self-organization. New solutions emerge out of teams working together in a complex adaptive system and it is that self-organization that results in the kind of Distributed Leadership the authors are calling for in this piece.
For the past decade, I’ve been exploring many of these same ideas, focusing more than anything on the personal journey leaders need to sign up for and experience in order to align with the focus on providing customer value while living in a complex and adaptive world. I wrote Transforming Leader Paradigms: Evolve from Blanket Solutions to Problem Solving for Complexity with my co-author Olga Flory to share what I’ve learned about this. In it, we talk about how leaders can do the hard work of modeling different leadership behaviors for creating a culture of “problem solving for complexity.”
Interestingly, we arrived at a similar hypothesis as Thurlow, Turner, and Rivera through years of practice in Lean. We consulted with numerous companies, I personally coached many leaders, and we even developed an experiential leadership workshop for The Lean Enterprise Institute where we observed leaders working together at solving business problems. Indeed, we live in a Complex Adaptive System, but still have management practices that are designed for stable, slow moving conditions. Most companies are still operating in a totally outdated paradigm of command and control that was developed over a century ago.
It is encouraging to see change models like the Toyota Flow System emerge and be covered in Planet Lean. I am curious, how can we work together to help leaders embrace new models, evolved ideas, and new lean research like this? What do leaders need to learn about themselves to change and grow with the times?
James E. Luckman, Partner, Lean Transformations Group
