Exclusive Interview: Steven Spear

The following piece appeared in a shortened form in the Winter 2012 edition of COE's newsletter, The Current State:

Steven Spear started out poring over early research on the lean manufacturing movement that got its start in the 1980s. Today, his own work is part of that canon.

Author of the 1999 Harvard Business Review article “Decoding the DNA of the Toyota Production System” and a number of other award-winning works, Spear has been credited with game-changing improvements at organizations ranging from aluminum maker Alcoa to the Pittsburgh Regional Healthcare Initiative. The Massachusetts Institute of Technology senior lecturer and author of the book The High-Velocity Edge recently visited the Fisher College of Business to coach the health-care cohort of the Master of Business Operational Excellence program.

While on campus, Spear spoke with the Center for Operational Excellence about what sets high-velocity organizations apart, why problem-solving takes a backseat in others and what challenges exist as lean makes its way into the health-care sector.

How does the high-velocity edge fit in with the idea of lean?

The concept of the high-velocity edge, Speer said, has its roots in the evolution of lean – particularly in what what he sees as missing these days.

“Originally, there was a technical and behavioral answer to how you got lean,” he said. “But what ends up happening is that behavioral element around improvement disappears – that idea that improvement is rooted in learning. What ends up happening is improvement is essentially buying off-the-shelf tools and applying them.”

A doctoral student several years into the lean manufacturing movement that began in the 1980s, Speer coined the term “high-velocity edge” in an attempt to explain the mystery of companies such as Toyota Motor Corp. The lean tools can be replicated, he said, but the problem-solving culture buried deep within the company’s DNA gives it an unbeatable advantage that goes beyond simply eliminating waste and standardizing work.

“Tools are helpful to create a stable environment but that stability is not the endpoint,” Spear said. “Stability is the beginning of learning.”

Do you still feel that behavioral element is missing from lean thinking today?

“Yes. When I go into organizations and ask ‘What is lean?’ they say ‘Elimination of waste by continuous flow, standardization,’ things like that,” he said. “What eludes me is … I can’t think of one Toyota leader who describes it as elimination of waste. It’s more like ‘Pursue perfection, delight the customer, create value for others.’”

If changing behavior is so important, why do leaders gloss over it and solve problems with technology?

Much of what managers are taught to think they do is make decisions,” Spear said. “And when you think your job is to make decisions … technical solutions look like something about which you can decide.”

Success, however, isn’t determined solely by good decision-making, Spear said.

“Certain organizations succeed not because their senior leadership makes decisions only but they teach people to how make discoveries,” he said. “Management  education is not oriented around how does one make a discovery or teach others to make discovery – it’s oriented around how to make decisions, so that becomes a hard nut to crack.”

You’ve written before that the need for health-care market reforms gets more attention than problems in the actual work professionals do. Any movement on that front?

Wide-ranging controversies such as reimbursement are taking a backseat in some circles, Spear said, “but you still have to worry about it and deserve to be.

“There are some health-care providers who realize that whatever they get paid, they can be much better off and patients will be much better off in the long run if their systems have more sophistication and maturity,” he said. “But I’m not sure that’s caught on in health care in a broad-based way.”

Speaking of health care, what do you make of all the attention to checklists?

 “The difficulty I have with checklists is that it’s a very, very narrow range of all the activities and interactions among activities and you declare what you think will work in the form of a checklist,” Spear said. “There are other ways to see you’re having problems than something isn’t on a checklist.”

Referencing the medical nightmare – and rare occurrence – of a surgical implement left inside a patient, Spear said “taking the clamp out isn’t learning. It’s not error-catching.”

The question, he said, should be: “How did we approach this that we would leave a clamp behind? I wonder if many places use checklists not only to see problems but to do self-diagnosis on their approach to work.”

Silos are a common problem in health care. How do you go about breaking them?

The creation of silos in health care, Spear said, stems from a promising wave of developments over the decades.

“Up to 50 years ago, very little medical science was known and there was no need, nor were there any opportunities, to have specialties,” he said. “As we’ve progressed through time, what’s known has increased … so the breadth of what you know relative to the whole field is considerably less.”

With the advent of a range of medical disciplines, Spear said, “it’s necessary to have an overarching, systematic approach to integrating the parts into a whole. Health care didn’t need that until reasonably recently.”

“There’s a very high degree of interaction in these disciplines,” he said. “The good news is that we have all of them but the challenge is to master the system.”