Safety first!

Since my first encounter with Lean, I have learned and lived by the mantra SQDC, and always in that order! Meaning, always prioritise Safety over Quality and Quality over Delivery, then the Cost will reduce as these factors become better.

So what is safety? In production that is a bit easier to grasp, no incidents, clean environment and order, the right things in the right place, so that no one gets injured, and a safe product to our customers. Also safety, to me, is the direct link to Respect for people, a value that has always been at the centre of Lean - we respect all of the people working for us and around us, in all that we do, meaning we do not compromise with safety just to make a delivery or do cost cuttings - short for safety first.

Now, after ten or so more years working primarily outside of production I have met a lot of confusion when it comes to safety first. What does it mean for engineers or anyone else working in a knowledge-based environment? Well, as I start thinking about it, maybe it has even more meaning in a development department. Now, of course you could argue that safety in the office has all to do with the physical safety, and of course that is important too, the desk and the ergonomics, the air and ventilation and so on. But a more, and I suspect, important factor is the psychological safety.

When Google in 2012 did their Aristotle’s project, in search of building the perfect team, they set out to find what ingredients made up the best teams. Was it the diversity of team members? Did they share the same interests? Or the same background? Was it their personalities? Or how long they had been working together? No matter how they piled up the data, no pattern was to be found. They looked at 180 teams all over the company, gathered huge amount of data for over a year, but could still not find a common factor, other than that the norm in the group somehow mattered. But they could not conclude what norm was the one that made some teams more successful than others.

They went through all the research they could find on the area and, as I also did, stumbled over Amy Edmondson’s research and what she calls psychological safety. It is the group culture that the Harvard Business School professor Amy Edmondson defines as a ‘‘shared belief held by members of a team that the team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking.’’ Psychological safety is ‘‘a sense of confidence that the team will not embarrass, reject or punish someone for speaking up,’’ Edmondson wrote in a study published in 1999. ‘‘It describes a team climate characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect in which people are comfortable being themselves.’’

It all fell to place for the research team at Google, and their data indicated that psychological safety, more than anything else, was critical to making a team work.

I read Edmondson’s book “The fearless organisation” a time ago, and it suddenly became clear to me as well. I knew that feeling instantly, the feeling of safe risk taking, on joint learning without fear of being embarrassed or trivialised. I could without hesitation recall all the teams where I have had that feeling!

The first team was actually one of the first that I was working with in production, and also the one moment I always reefer to as the game changer for me, the reason why I got hooked on Lean and turned my career around.

At the time I was the responsible project leader in operations for setting up a new production line, all according to new Lean standards, U-cell with one-piece flow, balanced work and Takt time. I had held all the work shop Kaizens with the team in production and out of engineering. We had done the calculations and the time estimations, we had set up the visual instructions and the Kanban, all the structure and the participations of the team made me feel certain this would be a huge success, even though the production rate was far above any of the production cells currently in operations. The math was easy to grasp for me, and we had proven it with the team. And the week before production started I had already promised a celebration cake to the production manager. It was just that I had a planned vacation coming up, a three-week all girls hike around Australia. Well, I genuinely trusted the team and missing the start up of production was not a concern for me, I knew they would be successful!

So imagine my disbelief when I, sunburned and energized, returned three weeks later. The team in the cell was at the brink of bursting, the yelling and complaining, the poor results and the upset members that met me as I come down to production. What had happened? They had dropped all the belief in our set up, in all our calculations, and returned to a frenetic batch system, attacking each other for working too slow. All the energy, the trust and shared belief we had build up just a few weeks ago was gone. Why? As I started to put the pieces together my first instinct was to release the team from all pressure, protecting them from anyone criticising and questioning them. I went to the supervisor and the manager and got them to agree that the only questions they were allowed to ask the team was:

1. How is the Takt going? (taking away all complaints about the teams production rate)

2. Have you had any interruptions in the Takt?

3. If so, is there anything I can help you with?

When I reflect about this, I can see that my instinct told me to put safety first. In the state the team was in I could not make them do anything. First safety, then we could return to trying the Lean principles again, the one-piece flow and take away the batches. The rest was just magical to me. It took us one week to get back on track, outperforming the results and re-establish the trust in the team. I remember so well one of the operators, after redoing the standard work calculations and just talking about trying the one-piece flow principle, she turned to me and said “To be honest I just do not believe that we can produce that amount of units when working that slow (referring to the calculated Takt time), but Malin, if you say that it works, I am willing to try”. And that was it. We tried, I said I would take the blame if it didn’t work, and I spent that week on a office chair in the middle of the cell, just recording the stops and the problems, helping them keep the Takt time, and most of all, as I look at it now, giving them that space of psychological safety. I learned not only the principles in Lean, but also how it felt to really be part of a team, learning together and trusting one another.

This is for me one of the most important factors of safety first. The psychological safety, as without it we do not become a learning organisation.

Do you know that you can measure the psychological safety in your team? Go to Amy Edmondson's homepage and let your team go through a short test. https://fearlessorganization.com