Napoleon Bonaparte's quote: "He who does nothing is never wrong" is known to almost everyone. Mistakes and failures are inscribed in the path of change - no one is infallible.
The real art is the ability to admit when you've made a mistake. However, what is crucial - as a result of a mistake, the guilty should not be sought. Instead, you need to focus on analyzing "what went wrong" and improving the process so that you don't make the same mistake again. This is called Hansei in Japanese. At Toyota, even after the successful completion of the project, a hansei-kai is held - a meeting to analyze the points that did not go according to plan.
As you can see, learning from your mistakes is a must, but it's definitely better to learn from the mistakes of others. Below, we will describe some mistakes that we made during the workshops ourselves, or we saw others make them, to prevent you from rediscovering them (in random order).
Treating 5S as a project
In many organizations, at the beginning of the implementation of 5S, ambitious plans, curiosity and willingness to change can be seen in successive positions. The first changes are visible, people are involved, but after some time the results, of which everyone was so proud, do not leave even a trace. When asked what went wrong - the most common answer is a misunderstanding of the idea of the fifth S - self-discipline and treating 5S as a thing to do, not as a way to change mentality. 5S is not something that can be "done", just like changing organizational culture is not something that happens in a month. 5S is not a project that has a beginning and an end. To achieve a change in the attitude of employees, many months and sometimes even years of hard work are needed. When 5S "dies", it is most often due to a lack of self-discipline.
Audit = self-discipline
But what about lack of self-discipline? After all, we have an audit system in place. You should ask yourself whether periodic audits are the best solution? Since we are talking about a continuous process of change, can it happen if we supervise it once a week or once a month? Self-discipline cannot be based only on the audit system - it is the continuous work of the entire team. This is an introduction to employees' awareness of the need to react immediately to observed discrepancies. Instead of a cyclical audit system, which experience leads to distortions and in the long run to unnecessary costs and small results, a better tool to use is the kamishibai board.
Let's look at the managers and their impact on changing the culture in the spirit of 5S According to the popular saying "a fish rots from the head down".
Turning a blind eye to minor deviations from the norm.
how often do we react to deviations from the accepted standard while walking through the hall/offices? Unfortunately, very often in the rush of current tasks, chasing from one meeting to another, we stop paying attention to the surroundings. However, this lack of reaction can be perceived as a tacit consent to non-compliance with accepted rules and standards. In this case, we can observe the same mechanisms that Stanford University professor Philip Zimbardo analyzed in his experiment. The experiment consisted in observing the effect on the level of vandalism on the reaction or lack of it on minor damage. Lessons learned from this experience show that failure to respond to minor damage is a sign of lack of care and adherence to rules, which in turn leads to greater damage and escalation of problems. If we do not react to non-compliance with standards, even in trivial matters, it will show that we accept breaking them. The result is less and less respect for rules and standards, which is crucial in the 5S method. Importantly, this applies not only to 5S itself. The same applies to all other principles that you as an organization want to maintain: from health and safety rules, through standardization of work, to implementing the company's vision and mission.
No example coming from above.
Albert Einstein said, "If a cluttered desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, what is an empty desk sign of?" This is an argument often made by management when brought to their attention. However, looking at the situation from the perspective of an employee who is required to change habits, who is required to maintain rigorous housekeeping, it looks quite different. On the one hand, the management conveys to him how important order is, but it demonstrates something completely different. Such a gap between what we say and how we behave results in a lack of trust and faith in the sincerity of words. It is impossible to change the culture of an organization if we do not have the trust of our team.
And what about the situation with inadequate/insufficient involvement of employees in changing the organization's operation from the 5S perspective?
Lack of employee involvement
When we decide to start 5S changes, a large team is involved. Not only people who work in a given position on a daily basis, but also their superiors and support departments run by someone who knows the 5S method. With such a team, unfortunately, the voice of a person from a given position is often omitted or is not able to break through the opinion of superiors. However, he will spend most of the day at work in this position. He will evaluate the changes that will be introduced for most of the day spent in the company. Therefore, one should listen carefully to his comments and criticism of the proposed solutions. Let us remember that 5S is not a one-off action to build a perfect workplace, but a way to continuous improvement - it is more important to convince employees to the method itself than to introduce as many changes as possible.
Failure to transfer responsibility
A common mistake made with the first 5S approaches is to delegate responsibility for changes to people who are 5S specialists but do not own the area. They are expected to achieve a result - a change in work culture. Unless they are the people who directly manage the area and employees, they have no influence on the prioritization of activities. They are often put in situations where 5S goes down the track - "because there is an urgent shipment", "because there are no people", etc. To achieve success, the owner should be responsible for changing a given area - a 5S specialist should support him. Only when the owner believes in the change and is committed to it, there is a chance of success.
