Make It Real

I created the Wheel of Sustainability many years ago. It’s been applied to many different industries and problems. On the first day of every Kaizen event I facilitate, I introduce the concept of the Wheel and help teams utilize it to sustain the solutions they create during the week.

Most people haven’t heard about the Wheel and don’t know how to utilize it effectively. As the Kaizen week progresses, I help team members implement elements of the Wheel so they have a better grasp of things and know what to do moving forward. Recently, I noticed my Kaizen team wasn’t taking full advantage of what I was teaching them and decided to try an experiment. I abandoned my facilitator role and demonstrated a specific approach to a problem they were trying to solve.

They were working on strengthening a major equipment installation by creating control plans for different aspects of the project. The control plans were owned by various members of the team. They created twenty-eight plans over a resource pool of nine owners. Some team members had up to five control plans to manage. Others had as few as one. These control plans were intended to reduce the risk of failure for this critical project. Their success was vital.

In a traditional project management approach, each control plan owner would deal with their issues on their own and bring problems to light when it was too late to take preventive action. We had to come up with a system to manage all of the control plans and keep status of them visible to everyone, so help could be deployed before it was too late. That’s where the Wheel of Sustainability came into play.

Using their control plan structure, I helped the team build their “why.” In other words, “Why were these control plans so critical to the success of the project?” This would enable them to explain to others in a meaningful way, so they would be aligned and willing to help, should something go sideways. This enabled Notification and Training and Review. Next, we developed Visible Evidence for the control plans. Each owner installed a whiteboard outside his or her office. On it, the status of each control plan was displayed, along with critical tasks to be completed on the current day, week, and month. Anyone walking by could see what was going on and easily engage with the owner, during their daily Gemba Walk. This was their Layered Audit.

Next, we had to make sure each owner had all the tools needed (All Tools Available) to access the information around the project easily. The team created a shared document and gave access to all control plan owners and the Leadership Team. The Clear Benefits of this work were easily verbalized by all of the team members, and they were enthusiastic about this new approach. We tested our logic with others who weren’t on the team, and they agreed with us.

Accountability for each control plan was obvious, and Leadership accountability was demonstrated by the new daily Gemba Walk through all of the offices with white boards. Finally, stories of risk reduction and prevention created Recognition for this new approach.

Leadership Commitment was demonstrated by support of the new system and leadership engagement in the daily Gemba Walk. The team is confident they have successfully mitigated and managed the risk of their most critical equipment installation

By using the Wheel and applying it to a specific problem, I was able to help the team implement a system to prevent problems from derailing their most critical project.