FEATURE – A lean management system is necessary to effectively run a business. Can Art Smalley’s four types of problems framework help such a system to focus on what’s really important?
I have studied and practiced Lean Thinking for the past 20 years, mostly learning by doing – on the job – and using our plant as a laboratory. It was our drive to always run experiments that led us, in September 2019, to try and implement the ideas contained in Art Smalley’s Four Types of Problems. The book had recently been translated into Spanish and, upon reading it, I was immediately impressed.
We set off to determine whether or not the lean management system that we had put in place in our plant could match Art’s categorization of problems. We began with a workshop we co-organized with Lean Institute Colombia. The (many) questions that came out of it were really our starting point to run this experiment.
The four types of problems Art Smalley describes in his book seemed very interesting to us, but we struggled to marry them with our management practices at first. There were clearly some common points, but overall we found it difficult to recognize the different types of problems in our context. Little did we know Art’s categorization would soon turn our management system on its head!
Not knowing exactly how to approach this experiment, we decided to look at the four types of problems in the context of the lean house, thus making the link to our lean practices (from standards and Kata to the Balanced Scorecard) more explicit. That way, we were able to create an interesting model that we integrated in our weekly management business review.
Before long, the walls of our Obeya (where the management review takes place) reflected the shift we were hoping to create with our experiment. By rearranging our boards on the walls to reflect the four types of problems, we changed the way we talked about issues at the plant.