Sometimes the easiest way to explain a concept to your staff is with a simple story. The story of Broken Glass is how I brought the hidden factory to life for my staff. This story helped them to focus in on fixing problems once and for all.
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The Broken Glass Metaphor
Look for the Root Causes
The easiest problem to fix is the one you NEVER have
How to handle Broken Glass
Episode Transcript
Hi and welcome to Episode Five. Bob versus broken glass. In the last episode we talked about the hidden factory, and it’s such an important concept that I wanted to take the time to give you a real world example of what the hidden factory looks like.
Many times these concepts are difficult to explain or convey to your staff so, I find that having a metaphor or a good story to go around it really helps to make it come to life for your employees and for your managers. That’s what we’re doing.
I want to share with you a story about how I brought the hidden factory to life for the folks that were working for me. And just to go back and give a quick reminder, the hidden factory is what happens when we have a process, and along the way, we create internal defects, on a partially completed item of work. Our staff has to rework that, but it’s not part of the standard process and it’s not something that we that we talk about.
This this work that gets generated because of the defects to make sure that we can pass the item down the line to the next person is really where the waste comes in. That’s why they call it a hidden factory because it’s hidden, no one sees it, no one talks about it, no one acknowledges it.
So, because it’s such an important concept. I brought this to life, to my managers. The way that I would explain this is, I would have them envision a factory, an assembly line in which we were creating glass vases. You know these fancy bases that you get when you order up a bunch of flowers. I would have them imagine these, these glass vases going down the factory down the assembly line. Somewhere in the belt that was driving the assembly line, there was a hole. So every so often, we would have a glass vase that would fall through the hole and smash on the floor, resulting in broken glass.
The natural inclination for most people would be is that when something falls on the floor and smashes, we would get out a broom, and we would sweep up that broken glass. Then we would move on and we would do what we were doing. Then five minutes later 10 minutes later, smash. Another vase on the floor, more broken glass. Get out the room we sweep it up. And this goes on perpetually. This goes on forever. We are constantly sweeping up, broken glass.
That is the metaphor that I would use to explain the hidden factory. Now I didn’t use the term hidden factory with with my guys. They didn’t need to know that concept, but what they needed to, to realize was that the way we deal with these problems, the way we deal with the hole in the belt is not with a broom.
What we need to be doing is we need to be looking for the root causes. Why are we getting these defects in the first place. Why is it that the vases, are falling off of the assembly line in the first place. Every time someone would be trying to fix a symptom, rather than addressing the root cause, I would say, are we sweeping up broken glass here, and they would get it.
What would happen is it changes the mentality, people start to understand that the important thing here is not to sweep up the broken glass. The important thing here is to fix the root cause of the problem. So that we can fix it once, and we can fix it for all. I’ll say that again because it’s important. We want to fix it once and for all. Once meaning that we want to fix that problem once so that it never happens again. And for all means that we never have that problem for any, customer ever again. That’s why it’s so important once and for all.
It’s okay to have problems and to have defects, that’s natural people are people, we’re human beings we make mistakes. But ultimately, the profitability of your business and the ability to run a smooth and efficient operation comes from standardizing the process so that we minimize, and we eliminate those defects.
One of the quotes that I like to use very often is that the easiest customer support call to have is the one that you never get. What does that really mean? Well, what that means is if you have a problem in your software or in your product that is going to cause a customer to call. That’s an expensive proposition is to handle that defect.
The easiest way to handle that defect is to prevent it from ever happening. We never want to have that support call because it’s a it’s expensive, and B, it potentially causes grief for your customer so that they are dissatisfied and they don’t want to work with you anymore. They don’t trust your product.
This idea of defect prevention is critical in optimizing your operation. So how do you get to the root cause? How do you truly understand what is causing the problem? Well in process improvement, there is a very simple, but very powerful process called the five why’s. What the five why’s is is exactly what it talks about. We ask the question why five times. In the case of our imaginary glass vase factory. We would have the Smashing sound, and we would pause and we’d say, why do we have a smashing sound. Well we have a smashing sound because the vase fell to the floor and broke.
Why did the base fall to the, to the floor and brake. Well in this case it’s because we have a hole in the belt. Why do we have a hole in the belt? We haven’t done the maintenance that we should have on the belt. Why haven’t we done the maintenance on the belt? Because we don’t have the staff to do that.
So the real fix to this problem is not sweeping up the broken glass. It’s not putting a patch on the belt. It’s in fact, making sure that we have a standardized process in place to make sure that we never get a hole in the belt.
Obviously, Yes, we have to fix that broken glass, we have to sweep it up once. Obviously we have to fix the hole in the belt. But what we really want to do is we want to find the piece in the machine, that is that is cutting the hole in the belt so that we don’t have this problem every time.
Again just to reinforce the idea here is we want to fix it once and for all. And you can apply this to to any process problem that you have. Any time you have a defect. You, you want to figure out what the actual cause of it is. You want to repair that and prevent it from from happening.
Defect prevention is so important in optimizing any process. You have to have a number of things in place. Ultimately, you have to be able to detect that you have a problem. So tracking becomes important. You have to know what good looks like. So having explicit quality standards is also important.
If you don’t know what good looks like, you don’t know that you have a defect. The only way that you ever find out that you have a defect is when your customer picks up the phone and says, “Hey, this is unacceptable”.
Sometimes we don’t know what those customer expectations are. So you have to adjust your quality standards, over time, to make sure that your internal standards are sufficient to catch everything that the customer might find to be a problem. We talked about in an earlier episode when we talked about the Profit Vampires we talked about how you want to get a balance. You don’t want to overdo it so that you are delivering more than the customer is actually paying for.
Ultimately you need to deliver exactly what the customer is expecting and exactly what the customer is paying for. So, it’s super critical, you cannot prevent these defects, if you don’t know that you have them.
When the age old truisms in process improvement is you can’t improve what you can’t measure. Setting those standards, explicit quality standards, is super important.
To wrap up, the way we handle broken glass is, is by ensuring that we don’t have broken glass. We detect those problems, and we try and prevent them. That feeds back into the idea of BOB, the best of the best.
You want to make sure that everybody is doing things in a standard way. If you are in the world of the hidden factory and people are cleaning up messes for the people that came before them, you’re certainly not acting as the best of the best. You’re certainly not using a standardized process because no one would ever say, Okay, wait until the 10th revolution of the belt until that until that glass vase falls out, go pick up the broom sweep it into the dustpan take it to the trash.
No, we wouldn’t do that. We wouldn’t build that into our process. If we wouldn’t write it down and say this is the way you do things, why do we allow our employees to do it?
I hope you have found this useful. Do your deep dives do root cause analysis. Don’t sweep broken glass. Make sure that you are preventing these things from happening in the first place. You will have a much more efficient, and much more profitable organization.