A Green Board, a Silent Supervisor and a Nine-Day Escape
A 400-person food plant has run a daily 06:00 production meeting for eight months. Attendance is supervisors and above; the tier-1 team meetings on the lines were never started. The plant manager reviews a 12-metric board on which 11 metrics are green and have been green for five months. Meanwhile OTIF has slipped to 86%, the filler line lost 41 hours to unplanned downtime last month, and a customer complaint about foreign material took nine days to close. The sequence behind the complaint: a maintenance technician found a broken sieve screen on the 12th, told his supervisor, who fixed it but did not escalate it - because two months earlier the plant manager had publicly criticised a supervisor for 'bringing problems without solutions'. That supervisor, with 22 years' service and the deepest knowledge of the filler, has since reported no downtime on his shifts. Two team leaders have asked to stop the daily meeting because 'nothing happens after it'.
1. Explain why the board is green while performance deteriorates. What would you change in leader standard work and in the design of the daily meeting?
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The board is green because it measures what is comfortable, not what matters, and because there is no tier-1. With no line-level meeting, every number is filtered on its way up: each level reports what will not attract criticism. Eleven permanently green metrics are not evidence of control; they are evidence that the metrics are not connected to the losses. The nine-day complaint closure says there is no escalation clock and no owner. The 41 lost hours and the unreported sieve screen say the same thing - information is being suppressed at the point where it is generated.
Changes to leader standard work:
- The plant manager's day starts on the line, at a fixed time, with a standard set of questions (what was the top loss yesterday, what did you try, what do you need, who owns it). Standard work means a written, auditable routine - not 'walk the floor when there is time'.
- Start tier-1. Ten minutes at the line board, run by the team leader, with the team, at the same time daily. Tier-2 (06:00) then reviews only what tier-1 escalated, plus the top loss.
- Escalation rules with a clock: what must be raised within 24 hours, to whom, with what response time. Every escalated item leaves the room with a named owner and a date. That single rule answers 'nothing happens after it'.
- Retire the standing green metrics. Review by exception: green items are not discussed; red items and the constraint get the time.
A board that cannot go red is not a control system.
2. How would you repair the situation with the 22-year veteran supervisor and reset the plant's norm about raising problems, without excusing the non-reporting?
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Separate the two things: the supervisor's non-reporting is a behaviour that must change, and the plant manager's public criticism is the condition that produced it. Both need addressing, in that order of causation but not of blame.
With the supervisor, in private:
- Acknowledge specifically that criticising him publicly for raising a problem was wrong, and say what will happen differently.
- Ask what he stopped reporting and why - treat his silence as rational adaptation, not a character flaw. He is also the most credible source on the filler's losses.
- Restore status by using his knowledge: ask him to lead the filler loss analysis and to coach newer supervisors. The plant needs his 22 years, not his apology.
- Be explicit about the standard going forward: problems must be raised within 24 hours, and the leader's reciprocal obligation is to respond within 24 hours. Non-reporting remains unacceptable.
- Follow up in two weeks - one conversation will not reset eight months of learning.
Plant-wide:
- The plant manager should publicly correct the pattern, naming the behaviour rather than a person: 'problems raised here get a response, not a trial'.
- Change the meeting rule so that no one is asked for a solution in the same breath as the problem; solutions have owners and dates.
- Measure the response side, not just the raising side: median time to close escalated items.
Without reciprocal obligation from leaders, 'speak up' is just another slogan.
3. What leading indicators would tell you the culture is genuinely shifting, and how would you keep the new measures from becoming the next set of permanently green numbers?
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Leading indicators that reflect behaviour, not outcomes:
- Problems raised at tier-1 per team per week, and the proportion that were escalated (a healthy figure is neither near zero nor everything).
- Percentage of escalated items closed with a named owner and a date, and median time-to-close - this is the direct test of 'nothing happens after it'.
- Repeat-problem rate: the same loss recurring within 30 days means countermeasures are not being verified.
- Number of operators, not managers, contributing a countermeasure or A3 each month - evidence the tiers are real.
- Near-miss and defect-near-miss reporting, which rises before safety and quality improve.
- Completion of the plant manager's standard walk, audited by a peer or the CI lead, not self-reported.
Guards against green-washing:
- Pair every activity count with a quality check. Sample-audit three escalated items a week against the actual shop floor: was the owner real, was the countermeasure real?
- Keep the lagging outcomes on the same board (OTIF, downtime hours, complaint closure time). If leading counts rise while lagging results do not move within a quarter, the leading measures are being gamed.
- Watch the shape, not the level. Problems raised rising while closure time worsens means the meeting has become a complaint session; closure time falling while problems raised falls means people have learned to stay quiet again.
- Never attach individual bonuses to the counts. The moment a number is paid for, it stops measuring the thing.
- Audit the source of the data (ERP, machine logs, andon records), not the reported figure.