On the Importance of Deep Dives

To manage your shop floor, or maybe even improve it, you need to understand it. Yet, the complexity of modern manufacturing makes it all but impossible to truly understand the system and all its aspects and correlations, and the whole mess that we call “unintended consequences.” Hence, you need occasional deep dives in addition to the big-picture view. In this blog post, I will talk more about deep dives. Let’s… ahem… go diving…

Introduction

The better you understand the shop floor, the better you can manage and improve it. For managers (and many others), it is important to have a big-picture view to understand how the big levers connect, and which lever to pull when and in which direction to achieve the desired consequences. However, this big picture also needs a foundation of understanding the nitty-gritty details of the operations. And that is not always easy.

Maybe you are lucky and you grew up in your daddy’s (or mommy’s) small company. All your student jobs were about helping out in the family firm. You knew all machines, all processes, and all people in the company before you took over a management role. Congratulations, you have a deep understanding of your shop floor (with the caveat that you may not know anything else). Or maybe you started your own business from scratch and have now a small handful of employees who you trained yourself. This may also give you a fairly good understanding of what is going on, on the shop floor.

However, chances are you at one point took over responsibility of a new area that you had little familiarity with. Maybe you have some experience in the product category, but even within the same company plants are very different, let alone plants for similar products across different companies. A Toyota car plant looks, behaves, and performs very different from a Volkswagen car plant. Your prior experience helps, but you still need to understand the plant in more detail.

Why All the Details?

But why do we need all the nitty-gritty details? After all, in an MBA program, you learn which big numbers matter, and then you put pressure on your people to make the numbers (and your bonus) better. Also, you rename the departments and merge with some other company… or something. Okay, I’m exaggerating a bit here, but you may have met at least some examples of this type of high-level fly-by manager, and may have learned that this does not always work out well.

Granted, you need a big-picture view. But you also need at least some understanding of the details. There are a few reasons for that. First of all, of course, is if you yourself do an improvement project on the shop floor. Doing an occasional improvement project yourself can spread your problem-solving philosophies to your people.

Even if you don’t solve a problem on the shop floor yourself, you sometimes want to understand a problem and its solution in detail. This can help you to understand how your people work and improve on the shop floor. It helps you to see where support is needed, whether it be resources, time, training, or otherwise. It helps you with coaching your people to improve. It is also a form of process confirmation to see whether the problem is actually solved (or wehther they just temporarily addressed the symptoms only). Last but not least, it helps you to understand if and how much (some of) your people are lying to you.

It also helps you to understand more about the complexity of the system. Bit by bit you may understand how the individual parts of the system connect to each other, reducing the likelihood of unintended consequences.

How to Get the Details?

There are different ways to understand the shop floor in more detail. Usually, generally available data and KPIs may not be the best starting point, as they often are aggregated on a too-high level.

Instead, the most effective method is physically going to the shop floor. In lean manufacturing, this practice is often encouraged with the phrase “Go to Gemba,” meaning to observe the actual place where work happens. This approach is powerful because it is much harder for inefficiencies, mistakes, or misleading information to go unnoticed when the manager is physically present. Visual management plays a crucial role here, making it easier to spot issues at a glance. Tools like a chalk circle—where a manager stands in one spot and observes operations for an extended period—can reveal inefficiencies that might otherwise go unnoticed. The most time-consuming but insightful variation of this approach is actually performing the job for a period, which provides firsthand experience of any challenges workers face.

Finally, listening to employees is an essential source of insight. Workers often have valuable firsthand knowledge of process inefficiencies, recurring issues, and potential improvements. However, their feedback may not always be well-structured, and there is a risk of opinion being mistaken for fact. Even when employees are not trying to influence decisions or mislead management, unconscious biases can shape their perspectives. I talked more about this in my last post.

How Often and Where to Do Deep Dives?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question of how often and where to do a deep dive. Generally, if you are starting in a new position, deep dives are really useful to get a feeling for the shop floor, but also to show the shop floor personnel that you care. Similar applies to new production lines or new processes for the shop floor. Deep dives are also good for problems. While you may not have the time to deep dive for all problems, you may want to go deeper on selected larger or more frequent problems.

In my experience, many managers spend too little time on the shop floor. If possible, don’t just attend the shop floor meetings, but also do an occasional deep dive (while of course still managing all the other demands for the work). Besides, if you are, like me, a bit of a nerd, it can be a lot of fun to go deep. Now, go out, go deep, and organize your industry!