Evolving Excellence

Stand Up to Learn

By Kevin Meyer

After my recent post with my thoughts after trying a stand up desk for a year, several readers wrote in to tell me about how the same concept is being used in education.  Yes, even with little kids.  It turns out that standing is a great way to eliminate fidgeting, which thereby improves the learning experience.  Some of the resources I was pointed to include this article in The New York Times.

Unlike children almost everywhere, those in Ms. Brown’s class do not have to sit and be still. Quite the contrary, they may stand and fidget all class long if they want.  And they do.

The children in Ms. Brown’s class, and in some others at Marine Elementary School and additional schools nearby, are using a type of adjustable-height school desk, allowing pupils to stand while they work, that Ms. Brown designed with the help of a local ergonomic furniture company two years ago. The stand-up desk’s popularity with children and teachers spread by word of mouth from this small town to schools in Wisconsin, across the St. Croix River. Now orders for the desks are being filled for districts from North Carolina to California.

With multiple classrooms filled with stand-up desks, Marine Elementary finds itself at the leading edge of an idea that experts say continues to gain momentum in education: that furniture should be considered as seriously as instruction, particularly given the rise in childhood obesity and the decline in physical education and recess.

Dr. James A. Levine, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, advocates what he calls “activity-permissive” classrooms, including stand-up desks.

So standing up not only improves focus and learning, it can help decrease obesity.  That could help more than just kids.  Studies to obtain quantitative data are in progress.

Researchers should soon know whether they can confirm those calorie-burning and scholastic benefits. Two studies under way at the University of Minnesota are using data collected from Ms. Brown’s classroom and others in Minnesota and Wisconsin that are using the new desks. The pupils being studied are monitored while using traditional desks as well, and the researchers are looking for differences in physical activity and academic achievement.

“We can’t say for sure that this has an impact on those two things, but we’re hypothesizing that they may,” said Beth A. Lewis of the School of Kinesiology, or movement science, at the University of Minnesota. “I think we’re so used to the traditional classroom it’s taken a while for people to start thinking outside the box. I think it’s just a matter of breaking the mold.”

The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel had a similar article.

Fifth-grade reading teacher Pam Seekel thinks maybe she did kids a disservice over the years when she told them to sit still, to quit fidgeting so they could focus.

“As a teacher, I never sit down,” said Seekel, who works in the School District of Somerset, near the Minnesota border. “I started to think: Why should I make the kids sit down?”

This year, many of Seekel’s students are using new, adjustable-height stand-up desks produced by a Wisconsin company, as well as a big, tall table that lets students work in groups while standing and shifting their weight, leaning, stretching, wiggling and generally doing everything but sitting still.

Even in kindergarten.

Since then, one kindergarten class even has them — at times when the students would normally be seated at desk chairs, Hamborg said, you can see pint-sized kids sitting on pint-sized balls, many of them slightly but continuously bobbing up and down.

Demand is kicking up.

Stand-up desks in the workplace have been a niche industry for years, but Skiba said that many companies like Sunway are suddenly starting to get a lot more requests for them. Former Wisconsin Sen. William Proxmire was known for using a stand-up desk, and the new dean of Marquette University Law School, Joseph Kearney, has a mahogany stand-up workstation on order for his university office.

There are even a couple of YouTube videos describing their use in the classroom.

Although this next one is in German and shows an interesting accessory.

So what can this teach those of us in the adult world?  Learning is important to any organization.  Should training be done sitting down at a conference table or behind rows of desks in a training room?  Or standing up?

Harvard's Flying Pigs

Pigs may soon be flying.  We've thrashed the large b-schools quite a bit for ivory tower wisdom that usually promotes the glories of oursourcing, offshoring, and traditional accounting.  But recently we've had to give kudos to Wharton, Kellogg, and others for an occasional understanding of true lean.  We now add the Harvard Business School to that list after reading Julia Hanna's recent HBS article titled Bringing 'Lean' Principles to Service Industries.

Thanks to the pioneering success of Toyota, the concept of a "lean" operating system has been implemented in countless manufacturing companies and even adapted for industries as diverse as insurance and healthcare. With its focus on standardization, quality improvement, cost reduction, and efficiency, lean's influence continues to grow.

No meat, but good start.  Understanding some of lean's conundrums is often an indicator of whether the author really knows true lean.

Unfortunately, lean's prevalence has led to some misconceptions. "Some people think lean means 'not fat,' as in laying people off," [Professor David] Upton says, noting that in their paper they propose that the difference in a lean operating system comes from how it alters the way a company learns through changes in problem solving, coordination, and standardization.

The author goes on to describe Professor Upton's analysis of lean at Wipro Technologies.  Interestingly enough Wipro is an Indian outsource provider of software services... that is going lean.  A lesson to those in higher-cost countries that haven't yet embarked on lean, or are resting on their laurels after starting the never-ending lean journey.  Wipro has done well, but one of Upton's more interesting comments is,

"These companies are intellectual environments. People are very interested in taking conceptual ideas and figuring out how to put them into practice. There's not the same division between the 'real world' and university research that you often encounter in the United States."

Or vice versa.  I hope the academic world continues to learn about the 'real world' of lean manufacturing.

Fluff and Project Management

Each week I generally take a quick glance at the Business Week best seller list to see if there are any new  or unusual books that might hold my interest on a long flight.  It's always the usual suspects... books that purport to identify some until now unknown aspect of leadership such as The No Asshole Rule and Leadership and Self-Deception, get rich without working delusions such as The 4-Hour Workweek and The Automatic Millionaire, and the self-perpetuating best sellers such as The World is Flat and What Color is Your Parachute?  Blah blah blah.  Some are good entertaining reads, few say anything truly meaningful.

But one sort of stuck out this week: A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge.  Say what? A deep project management text book on a list full of fluff?  What the heck?  I've thumbed through the book, and it is top notch... but not exactly Sunday plane reading.  The author is... a standards committee!  If I was drooling at the prospect of another United $5 box lunch and contemplating the choice between watching Oceans 13 for the thirtieth time and reading that book, I would probably default to daydreaming about having the wealth in just one of George Clooney's pockets.  I guess I should have picked up The Automatic Millionaire after all.

Don't get me wrong... it is a great book for anyone involved with project management.  Chock full of tools and techniques and pitfalls to avoid.  Just make sure you have a source of caffeine nearby.

What is your training threshold?

I think we all know what the Law of Diminishing Returns is but for the sake of clarity I’ve included the wise words of Wikipedia to improve our understanding.

Definition from Wikipedia:

“According to this relationship, in a production system with fixed and variable inputs (say factory size and labor), beyond some point, each additional unit of variable input yields less and less additional output.”

Example from Wikipedia:

“Suppose that one kilogram (kg) of seed applied to a plot of land of a fixed size produces one ton of harvestable crop. You might expect that an additional kilogram of seed would produce an additional ton of output. However, if there are diminishing marginal returns, that additional kilogram will produce less than one additional ton of harvestable crop (on the same land, during the same growing season, and with nothing else but the amount of seeds planted changing). For example, the second kilogram of seed may only produce a half ton of extra output. Diminishing marginal returns also implies that a third kilogram of seed will produce an additional crop that is even less than a half ton of additional output. Assume that it is one quarter of a ton.”

So to create an analogy from the example above let us assume that each ton of seed is equivalent to 30 minutes of training and the plot of land is our brain. It is easy to speculate that if 30 minutes of training on a task leads to a 10% increase in knowledge then 60 minutes of training on a task will lead to a 20% increase in knowledge in the same training session. If no other variables change beyond the length of the training session, it is probably more likely that there will only be a 15% total increase in knowledge. If you increase the training session length by an additional 30 minutes you may only increase the total knowledge transfer to 17% and so on.

Before somebody quotes me as saying that you can only get a 17% increase in knowledge in 90 minutes, it is important to remember that we are just building from the original Wikipedia example in order to clarify a key principle. That principle is that training follows the Law of Diminishing Returns.

Now I will proceed to use some anecdotal data to further prove my unscientific point. Have you ever sat through an 8-10 hour training session on a single topic in a single day? If the answer is yes, then you already know this is true because at the end of the day you may actually feel dumber (not sure this is a scientific word or not) then when you started. This is an example of planting so many seeds that you actually poison the ground so that it can no longer produce.

Today I spent about 90 minutes in a class on Chinese. During that time we learned how to pronounce several pinyin syllables and say a few useful phrases. By the 89th minute the only thing I could remember was how to pronounce the vowel “i” in pinyin.

Maybe our brains are like water balloons and every once in a while we just put in too much water and end up springing a leak at the nozzle.

I was listening to a podcast from our friend Mark Graban over at the Lean Blog where David Meier mentioned that we generally want to chunk the training into about 30 minute blocks. 15 minutes of that might be presenting and explaining the task and the other 15 minutes the learner would be demonstrating that they can explain and perform the task.

Now that is more like it. I can’t even start daydreaming in 15 minutes. And the second 15 minutes is all about me showing that I learned something. That sounds like training heaven. In training Hell they make you sit through a 90 minute lecture followed by a 5 minute bio break and 90 more minutes of lecture.

To simplify your comments on this blog I’m adding a multiple choice question:

What is your training threshold?
a) < 1 minute
b) 1-15 minutes
c) 15-30 minutes
d) >30 minutes
e) The average training hell is my training heaven

Are you Smarter than a 5th Grader?

If you are not smarter than a 5th grader it may not be entirely your fault. It turns out that most of us just can’t remember the things that were told to us many years ago. It is probably associated with the fact that most of our schooling is lecture based. Twenty or more kids are lined up in rows facing an instructor that proceeds to tell them a bunch of interesting facts as they frantically try and capture notes so that they can pass the exam at the end of the semester.

Unfortunately it is fairly difficult to gain knowledge by merely listening to a lecture, reading a book, and/or taking an exam. That doesn’t mean that study of this sort isn’t important. It just means that you won’t likely be able to remember a lot of it as time progresses.

Here is my non-scientific theory on this. Our brains are like those machines I used to see at the county fair where you could strategically drop in a penny and a little bulldozer would move back and forward pushing other pennies off the edge. We might only have so much capacity in the brain alone so that when we add more stuff it knocks the other stuff out.

In the penny game there are always a few of the pennies that get so well lodged in the machine that no matter how many new pennies you jam in they never get knocked off the edge. In learning there are also some things that need to be jammed in so well that they won’t get knocked out over time. The way to keep things from being knocked out again is to follow a principle that is often overlooked by overzealous organizations in their attempt to develop people. It is based on the old proverb:

“Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish and you feed him for a lifetime.”

In human development you give a man a fish when you just tell them the right answer in the beginning. On the other hand you teach a man to fish when you help them find the answer on their own.

If you tell them the answer they will soon forget. If they discover the answer they will likely remember forever.

So if we know that knowledge transfer is facilitated when the learner can discover their own answer, why do we continue to tell them the answer?

I recently visited Georgetown, KY to talk with some folks at the Center for Quality People and Organizations (CQPO) who learned first hand how to fish. These were men and women that had been associated with the Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky TMMK startup some 25 years ago. Most of them came in as Team Members, Team Leads, or Group Leaders and then worked through the system. One of them was even a Plant Manager before leaving Toyota a few years ago to give back to society. They partner with Toyota and the Scott County School System to develop the entire human supply chain.

I asked them how they learned about Lean and the Toyota System. They described a process that has been handed down over thousands of years in the world but still hasn’t caught on. It is the concept of Learn by Doing. It involves the Socratic Method. It requires patience and humility. It is why so many companies fail at Lean.

There were 300 senseis in the early days of TMMK. Over time that has dwindled to very few and will eventually be zero by 2010. But those first 300 senseis were hand picked from the best of the Toyota Motor Corporation and sent to Kentucky. I can only imagine the culture shock.

The senseis were not sent over to give TMMK a fish. They were instructed to teach them to fish. Their primary job was instruction. In fact, they told stories of times that the US employees were allowed to fail many times only to be shown an A3 completed by the sensei with the answer after they had reached the same point themselves. In the meanwhile the US employee would learn from each successive failure and the subsequent reflection process.

The sensei did not resolve the manager’s problem nor did he subvert his authority by rebuking or questioning him in front of his team. It was important that the chain of command continue through the local leadership. It is a slippery slope if the sensei starts to give fish instead of teaching to fish.

The end result of the years of patient instruction was that a Group Lead could move up to Plant Manager in five years when normally that process took twenty-five years in Japan.

I’m hoping my organization spends more time teaching me how to fish instead of giving me a fish. And I’m not just saying that because I hate fish.  ;-P

Toyota Training the World...sort of

It appears that Toyota has set up a 3 year technical training school in India to expand automobile manufacturing expertise in that area. According to one report this is the only training school outside of Japan.

“The Toyota Technical Training School will train students in various aspects of automobile manufacturing such as welding, painting, automobile assembly and mechatronics.”

Another article described the venture in this way:

“The purpose of this technical training institute was to offer an opportunity to acquire special skills 'Monozukuri' or skilled manufacturing, for those students who had the talent but could not go for higher education due to economic reasons.”

Students for the school are carefully screened prior to admission.

“...the first batch of 64 students has been selected through a competitive exam and classes for the three-year residential course will commence this month.”

Wow, a three-year residential course. How can someone afford to drop everything and take three years off to learn about automobile manufacturing? The article answers:

“The students will be paid a monthly stipend in the range of Rs 1,800 and Rs 2,200 for the duration of the course.”

So not only will Toyota train you, they will also pay you to be trained. I guess in order to do something like that you would have to have some sort of binding contract that the trained individual work for Toyota so the investment is not lost. Nope, see what the Toyota spokesperson had to say:

“We are not making them sign any contracts at this point, but it is possible that the whole batch will be hired by Toyota once the students pass out”

This effort shows Toyota’s interest in developing communities while developing their hiring pool. In a previous article I mentioned the work they were doing with Kentucky K-12 schools to Strengthen the Human Supply Chain. Toyota seems to make a habit of trying to improve the education programs around their factories. Here is a quote from another article describing Toyota’s effort:

''I have seen nearly a dozen multinational car manufacturers come to India. But they have been busy in increasing their manufacturing capacity by opening up more plants. But Toyota has been faithful to the local community by opening up training centres and helping the industrial training institutes and other technical institutes.''

What would be the impact to the entire world if all corporations showed the same attitude toward education in the communities in which they operated?

Simple to Complex

In the Toyota Talent book by Liker and Meier a principle called “Simple to Complex” is discussed. Here is their description of the principle:

“When learning any new skill, it is best to begin with fundamentals and move toward mastery of the more complex techniques”

In instructional design (my field of study), this is an often overlooked principle. You might ask yourself, “How could someone overlook a concept that just seems intuitive?”

In fact, it may be easier then you think.

I’ll take an example out of one of the first projects I worked on several years ago. The training we were to provide was for a multi-million dollar piece of equipment that would be used in a number of our factories by a group of our technicians. It turns out that there were some previous training materials that the vendor had agreed to let us incorporate. A fellow designer spent some time breaking down the content prior to my involvement. His method for doing this was to take each feature of the equipment and describing it in detail by its functional area.

Does that sound familiar?

It reminds me of a factory that I did some consulting with in my college days. The first time I walked into the deafening and dirty environment I noticed that the whole factory was organized by functional area. All the welding equipment was in one location, all the paint in another, etc. It was near impossible to see any flow until you got to final assembly. The company had a virtual monopoly in their market and had revenues of nearly a billion dollars annually yet they couldn’t turn a profit due to all the waste.

This factory is a lot like the training that was designed by my colleague. The intent was to expose the learner to all the pieces of content according to functional area of the equipment. To all but those of us that are trying to implement Lean, this seems to make sense. In the end, however, this leads to tremendous waste in the learning process and reduces the transfer of knowledge. This happens because the technician struggles to pull the functional concepts together into a cohesive real-world scenario.

How does one create a simple to complex learning experience without breaking the training down by the equipment features?

The answer is simple. Focus on the context first and then align the content. So in the case of the equipment training for the technician, it means learning what is the simplest task or scenario that the technician must be able to perform on the equipment and then create a learning experience around that complete task. As part of completing the simple task the technician will be exposed to the functional elements. Now you can go the incrementally more complex tasks one at a time until the technician has mastered the most complex tasks for the equipment. This method of focusing on simple to complex tasks vs. focusing on the functional areas of the equipment provides the technician with a knowledge of the functional areas in the context of the real world tasks they will be asked to complete. In all likelihood the complex tasks will be a compilation of many of the simple tasks.

This seems like common sense to many of us but you would be surprised how often we try to teach things without a contextual framework. I bet if you walked into any class in any major university you would find a professor using the “feature” approach to help their students understand very complex topics. In fact, I bet even the classes on Lean are broken into functional areas by topic (Kaizen, Poka-yoke, etc.)

Can you think of any other places where a simple to complex learning approach would yield better results than the current method?

Education Destroying Creativity

Over the last few days I've been perousing some of the presentations from last year's TED conference.  TED, or Technology, Education, and Design, is an annual conference that brings together about 1,000 thought leaders from those three perspectives.  The confluence is fascinating.  Videos of almost all of the presentations are available online at no cost or even registration.

One of the topic areas was Bold Predictions and Stern Warnings, with presentations as diverse as genomics and our future, how technology will transform us, and the world's killer diet.  However the one I found most fascinating was by Sir Ken Robinson titled Do Schools Kill Creativity?  It's a relatively short 19 minutes, but well worth watching, and he's a pretty funny guy to boot.  If I can invoke some tech gods I'll embed the video at the end of this post.

Robinson's premise is that creativity is as important as literacy, however schools are killing creativity.  His definition of creativity is "having original ideas that have value," which finally differentiates it from the ubiquitous "innovation."  When kids are young they aren't frightened by being wrong, but by the time they reach adulthood the focus of our (and he believes all the world's) education system drive a fear of risk.  In effect, as he puts it, we are "educating people out of creativity." 

Our current education system is inherently focused on "creating university professors," not a generalized educated population.  With math and science being at the top of the current knowledge pyramid, this is therefore a focus on one half of one organ, without any significant development of the rest of the body.  He ends with how this is really limiting human potential, as "education has mined our minds for a few specific commodities."  We are increasingly diluting the impact of such narrow education, as over the next 30 years the world will educate more people than have been educated in combined history until this point.  A bachelors degree is already almost the same as a high school diploma, with a masters, and increasingly even a PhD, required for an educational differentiation.

Obviously in the business world we are often focused on science, math, and primary technical skills. But Robinson's 19 minute talk will give you something to think about in a broader societal context.

Learning Lean: Industry Needs

A few weeks ago several of us participated in a study by Gene Fliedner and Kieran Mathieson of Oakland University. The researchers were attempting to determine what industry was looking for in terms of the lean manufacturing knowledge of university graduates, and they have generously made their findings available to all of us online in their paper titled Learning Lean: A Survey of Industry Lean Needs.

Fliedner and Mathieson came to three primary conclusions. The first is that industry would like graduates to have a comprehensive view of organizations.

Why is this whole firm view so important? Most people in firms work in specific functional areas, like manufacturing, accounting, human resources, and so on. Their jobs are defined by their managers, who should make sure that, when everyone does his or her particular job, everything fits together into a coherent whole. Unfortunately, this simplistic command-and-control view of organizational design does not fit with the realities of today’s cost cutting, globally competitive world. The goals and assumptions that drove a firm’s design yesterday may not be true tomorrow.

Lean thinking is at its best in exactly these situations, when the parameters have changed, and business as usual will not work. The best Lean employees are those who can step outside their limited day-to-day roles, and ask difficult questions like: am I doing what I’m doing? How does it contribute to the firm’s strategy? What needs to change if the company is to adapt? These questions demand a systems view of the business and its processes.

How does this impact the university curriculum?

Most academic curricula emphasize a somewhat deep, yet relatively narrow preparation in specific disciplines. Lean requires something more, however. Specifically, it demands that people take a whole firm view of their companies. arrangements. Perhaps faculty in Lean would find kindred spirits in MIS, and in other fields that focus on business systems. This could be done formally through coordinated courses, or informally through ad hoc arrangements.

The second conclusion is that industry lean professional would like graduates to have better human relations skills.

To meet industry needs, universities must teach students Lean as a set of relationships, as well as a set of concepts and skills. Some faculty dismiss this as "fuzzy." Today’s business world is fuzzy, in many different ways, from the uncertainty of the global market, to the angst of wrenching organizational change. Effective leaders deal with this fuzziness. If university faculty are to help graduates become effective Lean practitioners, they must face it too, even if it is unpleasant. The human element is essential in attaining the goals of cost cutting, waste elimination, productivity, and quality improvement. To think otherwise is, well, fuzzy.

The third conclusion is industry's desire that graduates have real-world business knowledge and experience.

There are a variety of approaches currently being pursued in academia today, ranging from semester-long cooperative industry/academic projects which typically focus on a small portion of a firm’s process (e.g., conducting a kaizen event), to internships, to other hands-on approaches. Satisfying the desires of industry requires a partnership between academia and industry. So far, we have considered what faculty can do to help prepare students for industry. It is reasonable to ask what industry can do to help faculty and students. Internships can be invaluable. They help students understand how real business differs from the clinical experiences of the classroom. Faculty can become interns as well, and improve their understanding of the challenges students will face.

Those three conclusions pretty well line up with my experience as an industry professional who has often hired new engineering grads.  Real-world experience is an obvious desire, but being able to hire a new grad that understood how entire organizations work and had the people skills (respect for people...) would be a major plus.