I's on the Prize

An inevitable characteristic of any organization pursuing lean is the use of visual management systems.  5S, kanban, andon lights all are rooted in the idea of making things visual, so it's no surprise to see visual tools springing up all over the place.  This sort of thing is fundamental to the principles of lean, so naturally I'm a big fan.  But I've also noticed that many of these, though well-intentioned, miss the point of visual management and wind up being little more than window dressing.


In my mind there are 3 things that are required for truly effective visual management.  I call them the 3 I's (not to be confused with the 5 S's, 8 D's, or the 12 Days of Christmas).

First and most basic, a visual management tool must INFORM.  (You could also substitute INSTRUCT or perhaps ILLUSTRATE here.)  It tells you something about what's going on in a particular process or situation.  This could be as simple as a number on a whiteboard: we generated 250 sales leads last month.  It could be a priority list posted on the wall: here are the top 5 development projects for this month.  The basic intent is to allow anyone interacting with or simply observing a given process to understand the current situation. This is very useful, but unfortunately many attempts at visual management simply stop there.

In order for visual systems to be really useful they must also IDENTIFY whether the current situation is normal or abnormal, desirable or undesirable.  It's nice to know that I have $1.5M in total inventory, but is that good or bad, too much or too little.  Can I walk up to a visual management board and tell right away whether we're winning or losing?  If not then I have to question its usefulness.  You can generate very elaborate dashboards with tons of charts and tables showing the details of every aspect of the business, but if you can't use that to quickly identify problems then is it really helping you?

Satisfying the first 2 I's is a big step in the right direction, but to really take advantage of visual management you also need to be able to IMPROVE.   Visual systems should inspire action and communicate what action is taking place to return the system to a normal condition.  If you've informed me that you have booked $500k in sales this month, and identified that this is 15% below the plan, then I will naturally want to know what actions are required to improve this situation.

Effective visual management can take many, many forms and must be suitably adapted to the process being managed.  But I think that in any situation if you can satisfy the 3 I's you'll get the most out of it.  I'd love to hear what you think about how to make visual management more effective.