By recognizing the conditions of our current state, we are better armed to manage implementation of an ideal future state. Beyond most people not having any formal training to “problem-solve” or practice PDCA, other challenges include: our approach being skewed by our biased tendency to jump to solutions without understanding root cause, or our organizational influence for immediate results.

Practicing scientific methodology can sound foreign or like something for academics and not what we do as owners, designers or builders. To help with this perspective, start by caring about yourself and the stakeholders around you. What bugs you or makes your work hard? What does value look like for those you work with and serve. Once you have some idea of the elements that bother you and perception of the things your stakeholders value, you are well on your way to a better tomorrow.

Effective problem-solving with PDCA doesn’t need to be hard, but a couple key lessons can make a big impact on results.

Lesson #1 – Early Investment Adds Value

The diagram below from the Lean Enterprise Institute, illustrates how more time spent up front in the “Plan” phase to deeply understand the problem and it’s root causes can shorten the overall time and effort needed to get to the “Target Condition” of closing the gap. By jumping quickly into implementing actions in the “Do” phase without spending appropriate time to truly understand the problem and it’s root causes can lead to more time and effort revisiting and addressing ineffective countermeasure and their unintended consequences.

If there is one thing to take away from this post, practicing the principles of scientific methodology is key. People in our industry are good at planning and doing, but we still have room to improve with how well we check and adjust. Often, we, our teams, and organizations, don’t allocate the time and effort to deliberately learn from what we do.

Only performing the first two steps of the PDCA cycle is such a missed opportunity as most of the effort has already been invested. Doing something without checking if we achieved the intended results does not provide any new learning and this is waste. Without checking, it is also much harder to make meaningful adjustments and we frequently lose out on the reward of learning from our mistakes or institutionalizing best practices.

Having a problem well stated is a problem half solved. PDCA is a structured approach to: identify, analyze and describe, clarify root causes and countermeasures, and implement countermeasures to achieve desired results. Without this structured approach, we are throwing darts blindfolded, wasting our effort, and undoubtably repeating the same things that make our industry hard.

Lesson #2 – People Are a Force-Multiplier

As my dear friend David MacKay always said, "if you are building a chair in your garage by yourself, this might not apply to you", but we operate in an industry that requires teams of countless multidisciplinary participants and many organizations. We thrive through the success of the people around us and the people we involve with problem-solving and supporting our improvement matters most.

Organizations like Toyota, which achieves industry leading bottom-line results, deliberately makes continuous improvement a cultural norm, starting with leadership, and includes every stakeholder they work with. Beyond ensuring improvement efforts include a cross functional team representing each stakeholder in a process or challenge, inclusivity achieves faster and more impactful outcomes.

Unless you are Thomas Edison, innovation rarely happens in a vacuum. Joking aside, even he worked with many people to think through his work. Solving problems alone, and without utilizing the talent, perspectives, and ideas around us, is what will keep us from evolving and inhibit our actions to single-digit results. Engaging the people around you for clarity of value and to support your work to improve, will not only get you further faster, lasting change is created in the form of developing high-performing teams and industry leading cultural norms.

Lesson #3 – Practice PDCA to Develop People

People are the only asset within our organizations and industry that appreciates. Practicing PDCA is not only a method to improve what we do; it should be seen as an opportunity to develop people. One of the best ways to practice PDCA, and develop people, is A3 problem-solving. It is an extremely powerful mechanism to interact with and build people by using a coach/student model, where the student who is working through the A3 learns through discovery. A great resource for this is Managing to Learn by John Shook. Another resource is Brendan Healy’s Lean Construction Blog, A3 – A lean Approach to Problem Solving.

The other benefit to the A3 is that is forces us to slow down and make sure we actually perform all of the PDCA steps.

Lesson #4 – Think Lean to Avoid Reoccurrence

Our PDCA adventures should consider some Lean thinking drivers such as putting the customer’s perspective of value first, validating the intent of the improvement, using fact-based data, and involving a cross-functional team. When practicing PDCA for existing processes, the goal of the effort should not be random brainstorming, but looking at standard work with a focus on improving abnormal flow and implementing steps to see when the flow breaks down. Skip Lessons Learned tracking and implement the improvement in a way that the problem can never reoccur.

REFERENCES

[1] Deming Institute, 'PDSA Cycle' Available at: Deming Institute
[2] Lean Construction Blog, A3 - A Lean Approach to Problem Solving
[3] Lean Construction Blog, First Run Video Studies: Plan-Do-Check-Adjust
[4] Managing to Learn, John Shook, 2008