Sometimes the easiest way to explain a concept to your staff is with a simple story.  The story of Broken Glass is how I brought the hidden factory to life for my staff.  This story helped them to focus in on fixing problems once and for all.

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Episode Transcript

Hi and welcome to Episode Five. Bob versus broken glass. In the last episode we talked about the hidden factory, and it’s such an important concept that I wanted to take the time to give you a real world example of what the hidden factory looks like.

Many times these concepts are difficult to explain or convey to your staff so, I find that having a metaphor or a good story to go around it really helps to make it come to life for your employees and for your managers. That’s what we’re doing.

I want to share with you a story about how I brought the hidden factory to life for the folks that were working for me. And just to go back and give a quick reminder, the hidden factory is what happens when we have a process, and along the way, we create internal defects, on a partially completed item of work. Our staff has to rework that, but it’s not part of the standard process and it’s not something that we that we talk about.

This this work that gets generated because of the defects to make sure that we can pass the item down the line to the next person is really where the waste comes in. That’s why they call it a hidden factory because it’s hidden, no one sees it, no one talks about it, no one acknowledges it.

So, because it’s such an important concept. I brought this to life, to my managers. The way that I would explain this is, I would have them envision a factory, an assembly line in which we were creating glass vases. You know these fancy bases that you get when you order up a bunch of flowers. I would have them imagine these, these glass vases going down the factory down the assembly line. Somewhere in the belt that was driving the assembly line, there was a hole. So every so often, we would have a glass vase that would fall through the hole and smash on the floor, resulting in broken glass.

The natural inclination for most people would be is that when something falls on the floor and smashes, we would get out a broom, and we would sweep up that broken glass. Then we would move on and we would do what we were doing. Then five minutes later 10 minutes later, smash. Another vase on the floor, more broken glass. Get out the room we sweep it up. And this goes on perpetually. This goes on forever. We are constantly sweeping up, broken glass.

That is the metaphor that I would use to explain the hidden factory. Now I didn’t use the term hidden factory with with my guys. They didn’t need to know that concept, but what they needed to, to realize was that the way we deal with these problems, the way we deal with the hole in the belt is not with a broom.

What we need to be doing is we need to be looking for the root causes. Why are we getting these defects in the first place. Why is it that the vases, are falling off of the assembly line in the first place. Every time someone would be trying to fix a symptom, rather than addressing the root cause, I would say, are we sweeping up broken glass here, and they would get it.

What would happen is it changes the mentality, people start to understand that the important thing here is not to sweep up the broken glass. The important thing here is to fix the root cause of the problem. So that we can fix it once, and we can fix it for all. I’ll say that again because it’s important. We want to fix it once and for all.