You've Got Muda On Your Shoes

 

Waste.

There is almost nothing I despise more.

Muda is a Japanese word meaning waste; activity that does not add value.

Why would you do such a thing?

Why?

“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.” ? Peter F. Drucker

Shoveling Muda

For a long time now corporate offices have been intent on efficiency, on productivity. We have been shoveling value littered with muda, in some cases mostly muda.

We have been focused on getting better at shoveling. More efficient shoveling is the only way to get more done, right?

In our current mindset, yes. If you aren’t able to change the content of what you are shoveling, you are doomed to go on shoveling a mix of what’s valuable and a great deal of what’s not. We bring in machines to automate the shoveling to make it go faster. Sometimes this means even more muda seeps into the mix, but we’re moving more tons per hour so it must be good.

And then we use our fancy tractor shovel to dump the mixture of half value, half muda on to our customers.

Self-Induced Muda

Now what if I tell you the muda involved in the above scenario is mostly self-induced? We’re actually creating the muda ourselves in many different ways.

We start with a pile of diamonds, but bring along some mud ourselves which we throw onto the pile of value. We tell ourselves the mud is necessary to keep the diamonds from moving around so much, or perhaps our supervisors require us to use mud. We see no useful purpose of the mud in this process, but we go along like good employees and do it the way it’s always been done.
Many times the mud had a purpose once, but now we are mining something entirely different than when the mud was introduced originally. However the old timers have always used mud, so we keep using it too.

Eliminating Muda

What if there was a way to go about delivering what the customers wanted, without the mud? Or at least without bringing along our own mud to the project?

Well, there is. It’s called Lean Thinking.

You can start by asking Why. And then ask Why again, and again. I’m not talking about the 5-Whys technique, that’s a different topic.

I mean every time you or your teams partake in an activity of any kind, ask these questions:

• Why are we doing this?
• What’s the value of doing this?
• Who gets value from doing this?

By the way, an answer like “upper management gets value because hey, they asked for it” is not good enough. Doing something just because somebody wants it isn’t good enough. Why do they want it? Are you sure they want it?

I’ve seen people produce reports by hand for years, and email it out to executives every day and then find out that no one ever, ever opened them. The reports were started at some time because a director asked for them. She probably used them for a week and got the information she needed, and then they became irrelevant.

But no one asked why. They just added it to the daily reporting deck, assuming it was valuable.

Well, it wasn’t. And as a result, some people’s entire jobs are almost entirely spent producing waste, when they could be producing value instead.

Think about the project(s) you are currently managing. What is their value to muda ratio?