WORKOUT
A short working session of the people on either side of a bottleneck, convened as a standing practice.
When a bottleneck breaks the beat, the people on either side of it are convened, not as petitioners to management but as the legitimate problem-solvers: designers, production engineers, workers, planners and buyers. They sit down for a fixed time and leave with an answer.
The format originated at General Electric in the late 1980s. In the four-wheel-drive operating system it is not a crisis intervention but a standing apparatus through which the system learns. The learning, as much as the fix, is the product.
Its precondition is psychological safety: a room in which a junior may correct a senior without cost.
“The bottleneck becomes the schoolhouse.”