A BPT BOOK REVIEW
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Visual Workplace: Visual Thinking by Gwendolyn Galsworth
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Paul Harmon
March 2006
Changing human performance is more difficult than automating it. Managers and
employees are more complex than systems and they change constantly. There
are many different aspects of human performance that must be coordinated to
assure significant changes in human behavior. There's culture and values,
knowledge and learning, motivation and incentives, and there's the environment.
Guy Wallace, who is exploring human performance systems in depth in his
columns published a discussion, this month, on the relative importance of human
and environmental .
Visual Workplace: Visual
Thinking: Creating Enterprise Excellence Through
the Technologies of the
Visual Workplace
Gwendolyn D. Galsworth
Visual-Lean Enterprise
Press, Portland OR, 2005.
$55.00, 222 pages
Too often process analysts overlook environmental concerns. I remember, as a
young student of behavioral psychology, trying to control a child. My mother,
watched me and consistently suggested that I focus on changing the environment
rather than the child. In other words, where I would have been inclined to use a
schedule of rewards and punishments to keep the child from playing with matches,
my mother simply relocated the matches so that the child couldn't get at them.
After a brief period of learning, I realized my mother was a lot smarter about child
control than I was. I concluded that if you wanted to control behavior, the place
to start was with the environment. Later, I was able to sell her advice to clients.
Asked to work on a training system to "teach" employees to not drop trash on
the floor, I suggested that they focus, instead, on putting out more trash cans.
The average employee didn't want to litter, but they did it rather than going in
search of a trash container. With correctly placed receptacles, they used them
and the litter problem went away.
As you move beyond the obvious, arranging the environment can involve quite a
bit of science. It took a bit of work by psychologists, when the first freeways
were being built, to determine just how much time it took the average driver to
react to highway signs (Turn Right for Airport), what size print was easy to read,
and what colors would facilitate quick recognition. Similar efforts by media
specialists have determined the best font sizes for overhead slides and what
kinds of diagrams are most easily comprehended.
Gwendolyn Galsworth is obviously a master of these various approaches. She's
clearly studied quite a bit of psychology and physiology, and she's obviously
spent quite a bit of time in workplaces helping people solve environmental
problems. And, luckily for the rest of us she's written a wonderful book that can
help any manager think through how to arrange an environment to facilitate effective
performance.
Galsworth starts with a general discussion of her approach. She provides a
general approach that is structured around a Lean approach to process
improvement. She regards unnecessary motion, for example, as an enemy, and
urges that workplaces be designed to avoid unnecessary motion. She also
makes the point that information is not performance. People may know what to
do, but not do it for a variety of reasons. People may be overwhelmed with
information, for example, and not be able to sort through it to identify the specific
facts that require prompt action.
Copyright © 2006 Business Process Trends.
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A BPT BOOK REVIEW
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Agile Systems by Amit Mitra and Amar Gupta
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She defines a visual thinker as "a person who recognizes motion and the
information defects that cause it -- and knows how to eliminate both through
solutions that are visual."
The chapter headings provide a nice overview of the progression of this book:
Visual Basics
1. Visual Workplace and the Excellent Enterprise
2. The Building Blocks of Visual Thinking
The Culture Conversion
3. Leadership and the Power Inversion
4. The I-Driven Culture
Technologies of the Visual Workplace
5. Visual Order: Visuality's Foundation
6. Visual Standards, displays, and Metrics
7. Visual Controls, Guarantees, Machine, Office, and Beyond
Visual-Lean
8. The Visual-Lean Alliance
This book talks a lot about abstractions, like how the mind seeks patterns and
what patterns communicate most effectively. Ultimately, however, I liked it even
more for its many, many great examples. I remember discussions of drawing
lines on the floor and stacking parts in specific orders to assure efficient assembly,
arranging tools on a tool board, hanging signs to assure employees remembered
key metrics, or rearranging how items were stacked in assure they would be
drawn in the right order.
There is much that is clever and even more that is wise in these pages and every
process manager with operational responsibilities will benefit from reading this
book. The book is filled with color illustrations of work environments showing
exactly how solutions are implemented. Most of the examples are drawn from
manufacturing environments, but most of it is equally applicable to office
environments were people must organize and structure their tasks. Sales teams
need to keep track of work and have charts to compare results just as assembly
teams do.
If you have people to manage, begin by assuming that they will perform better if
their environment is structured properly. Then read this book to get an extensive
range of insights into how to better structure that environment. Then put it on
your shelf and pull it down every few months to see if there's some other way you
can improve the work environment. Better, loan your copy to your Six Sigma or
Lean teams to give them lots of good ideas.
This book wasn't available at Amazon.com when I checked for it. If you can't find
it at your favorite site, you can get it directly from Galsworth's site at
www.visualworkplace.com.
Copyright © 2006. Business Process Trends
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