Do we truly understand what Standardised Work means?
“That’s way too much effort, that. And for what return?”
That’s a leader’s voice on the floor. The ‘kaizen blitz’ (don’t get me going on terminology) was done some weeks back and now things are unravelling. I’ve been asked to give an independent’s view on the culture, not on the ‘blitz’. My problem is the culture that led to the ‘blitz’, the conduct of the ‘blitz’ and the aftercare for the ‘blitz’ are all part of the problem. I can sense the frustration building when I ask again about how this foisted change by leadership and its impatient attempt at a visual standard is going to cut it. The visual, for starters, is not that visual. It’s an A4 laminate with a great deal of words. The most visual part is the word visual in the title. I’ve suggested having a go at writing a proper standardised work, in fact three, to cover the process effectively. However when we went through ‘the system’ of Standardised Work and its componentry, the push back was immediate.
“No way, can’t see that working, mate.”
Mate… We’ve never met before today. The mate aspect always gets under my skin for some reason. It’s like I’ve been included into some chummy club, an invitation to join ranks with the promise of better things to come as long as I am willing to overlook this point of disagreement.
I give my view to the senior leadership team. It starts with leadership on the floor, a deeper think on the use of ‘blitzes’ and a strong recommendation to get the foundations in place, especially the system of Standardised Work.
Ten years further on, I bump into a fellow Lean journeyman in an airport. We swap a few stories and then he tells me he is on a 12 month gig overhauling Standardised Work in this very organisation. Oh well. They didn’t like my message then and I’m sure things have changed considerably, but I can’t help wonder if my explanation of the system had been good enough at the time. Or had I just put them off with some evangelical guff about standards before kaizen?
Standardised Work Is a Lifecycle, Not a Document
A true standard does not begin when someone writes instructions. It begins when an organisation decides that learning must be preserved. Every standardised work document passes through a lifecycle; a cradle-to-grave responsibility shared between operators, team leaders, engineers, and leadership. When this lifecycle exists, the standard reflects reality. When it does not, the document slowly becomes a work of calcified fiction.
The lifecycle, I reckon, has four essential responsibilities.
1. Creation: Capturing Reality, Not Designing It
Standardised work cannot be authored from a desk. If it is written away from the work, it describes intention rather than practice, and invariably ends up as a catch-all for anything that might go wrong. A cover-your-arse document for leaders when the auditors come knocking.
We all accept it should be done in the workplace by those doing the work and adding the value. The main thing here is that we accept it is our best representation today and is not there to be defended against change but there to invite challenge and betterment.
2. Governance: Protecting Alignment Over Time
I am a bit worried about this word. It gets used frequently in the consulting world to try and demonstrate transparency and control when things can be anything but. However, in the world of Standardised Work, this is everything. Once created, a standard immediately begins to age. Without governance, divergence creeps in and the reflection of reality is lost.
And without repeating my last few blogs on spans of control, time to lead and so forth, if the Team Leader / Supervisor is not the central cog in the governance process, the system is flawed in its design. I would go so far as to say, governance is not bureaucracy but the act of preventing organisational memory from drifting away from reality.
3. Training and the Skills Matrix: Turning Standards Into Capability
My Kawasaki training didn’t cover this aspect as well as I’d thought. It was only later in my Lean development that I understood the depths of thinking that came with Standardised Work, and yes, I of course mean: the Toyota way. I will talk about the architecture of the standard in another blog, but suffice to say, if the standard cannot be taught, we have lost from the start.
A standard that exists but is not taught does not exist operationally. Training activates standardised work and this requires structured teaching; not informal explanation or shadowing, but deliberate skill transfer.
A member of our team took me through the depth of training provided for newcomers to the assembly line in Burnaston. The measure of capability and understanding and the journey towards holding quality at takt. It is remarkable and warrants further explanation, but for now let’s just say, our efforts to train someone to hold the Standardised Work will, in 99 cases out of a 100 fall short in comparison. I don’t say this to belittle anybody, but to urge you to explore the efforts Toyota will put in to developing their people and safeguarding outcomes of the process.
We know the role of the matrix connecting people to standards and making capability visible across the organisation. My observation from my time in the field is that the skills matrix is often out of touch with the reality, mostly down to the challenges of being a team leader. As a middle to senior leader, digging around in this space, and ensuring its integrity goes a long way to shoring up the whole system. And the best way to do that would be through process confirmation.
4. Process Confirmation: Ensuring Reality Still Matches the Standard
Perhaps the most overlooked element of standardised work is process confirmation. It is often mistaken for auditing or compliance checking. In reality, process confirmation protects learning, provides coaching opportunities, exposes our perception of reality as leaders (keeps us humble) and more importantly sparks improvement.
This is not policing people. It is validating knowledge. I would go further and say process confirmation is checking up on your intellectual property and your capacity to whup your competition; a chance to strengthen that further.
When confirmation is routine, problems surface early. Standards evolve continuously and improvement becomes a positive churn. Without confirmation, standards decay unnoticed along with the organisations strength to react or act.
The Invisible Work Behind Stability
When organisations dismiss standardised work as paperwork, they are reacting to a version stripped of its system. They are seeing the output without the effort. Because maintaining standardised work requires leadership proximity, disciplined governance, structured training and continuous confirmation. It is ongoing, vital work that separates a good business from a fragile one. And that work is largely invisible when done well.
The Significance?
The improvement flag allocates half of organisational effort to standardisation.
Not because stability is comfortable but because organisations constantly lose knowledge through turnover, promotion, and change. Standardised work is how learning survives those changes. It ensures that improvement becomes organisational rather than personal.
The document on the wall is not the point. The system behind the document that keeps it alive is. And understanding that system is the first step toward understanding what standardised work really is.
See you next Friday, mate.
