Problem-Solving is vital in the Lean Business Culture, and I plan to invest another week on this topic. Here are 3 important points about problems:

• We WILL have problems.
  Because our world is flawed, there will be problems all day long. Bible-minded Christians know this from what God said in Genesis 3:17. “Cursed is the ground because of you…” God declares that farmers will have “pain, thorns, thistles, and sweat…” as they attempt to grow food. We must assume that every area of business will have it’s own equivalent of “thorns and thistles” to deal with.
• We can’t ignore problems.
  Someone has to do SOMETHING to deal with a problem–even if it is just setting a defective workpiece aside for later repair. Problems always cost us some labor. The question for us is this: “Will the labor we spend on this problem help us SOLVE it? Or will it just bypass the problem and thereby set us up to repeat it in the future?”
• We CAN reduce problems.
  One of the foundational habits in Lean is to practice root-cause problem-solving in a disciplined way. This requires us to designate a first-responder for problems (typically a Team Leader). We must train our first-responders in effective problem solving. Our goal is for problem-solvers to identify root causes of the problem and change our process so that problem happens less often. Over time, our production system gains more stability and has fewer problems.

Spot, Sort, Solve
Those of us who follow the Lean culture set up systems to detect problems quickly, select the most important ones to work on, and correct our processes to address the problem’s root causes.