I attended my first Michigan Lean Consortium (MLC) Annual Conference this past week in Traverse City, MI; it was a fantastic experience! Between Key Note Speeches, Active Learning Sessions, and networking opportunities I was surrounded by people from a variety of backgrounds at various stages of their Lean Journeys. Especially coming from an engineering background, it was eye opening to get to know people from the different industries represented at this conference. It opened my eyes to how remarkably different each person’s experiences have been, and yet they still had many similar underlying stories.
Throughout the conference days, I took more notes than I really know what to do with, talked to so many people that the conversations ran together, I ate well, and I learned more than I thought I would in just two days. The more speeches and activities I attended, the more inspired and empowered I felt. One of the activities I participated in involved creating a slogan to brand Lean to the world; and this session is what stuck most with me. The focus of this session was to find fun in facilitating and improvement events, and we certainly had a good time. We were split into competing teams and went through an activity called Ritual Dissent, this turned out to be a wonderfully engaging and fun way to get teams to reach a consensus. So what did we come up with?
Relentlessly, Continuously, Positively Improving People’s Lives
and
Working together to make life better for all of us
It is entirely up to you to decide how much you like our slogans, but given 20 minutes of thought and two iterations of editing, they are not bad. I never really considered the potential for Kaizens to be truly fun, but this theme ended up continuing throughout the conference. Making events fun not only makes them more enjoyable, it increases team member buy-in, overall satisfaction, and quality of the outcome.
There was also emphasis on creating competition as a way to drive people to actually improve continuously. Many people think of events as one-time occurrences, or something to drop by without getting too involved in; calling Kaizens “Improvement Events” carries those associated thoughts when in reality a Kaizen is just the beginning and creating some friendly competition keeps employees engaged and motivated to seek perfection and keep improving.
Beyond anything else, this conference really inspired me to take back my new knowledge and apply it in my work and my personal life; it lit the fire of improvement, now it’s up to me to carry the torch.