BUSINESS & IT
Why Systems Thinking and Visualization Are Important Key Concepts in Obeya
Use this management tool to improve your business
Don’t think you can start with an Obeya and get better results right away. First, you have to change the habits and behaviors in your team.
Introduction & Review
In my last article, I wrote about why the Obeya is the ideal leadership and management tool. The Obeya helps to:
- determine goals together in the team
- develop a strategy
- implement the strategy
- avoid mistakes
- focus on the big picture
Missed what the Obeya is about? Read here.
Systems thinking and visualization
When you enter an Obeya, you see one thing above all: the walls are full of visualizations of the work.
Visual materials are tools designed to support employees’ cognitive abilities and enable them to act appropriately. The visualizations make the essence of the joint work visible.
It is important to understand how the plans, diagrams, and ideas on the walls of the Obeya are created.
For this purpose, each Obeya has several key concepts and rules of conduct that all team members need to know.
First and foremost is systems thinking. If each manager or employee only looks at one part, many causes of problems cannot be identified.
Example: If the quality of the products is getting deteriorated, additional quality tests at the end of production can only fix symptoms.
Instead, you should find the root cause of the quality problems.
So your employees should see themselves as part of a system and always consider the big picture.
Make ideas, processes, and system components visually visible. This can be done, for example, with the diagrams on the walls of the Obeyas.
But they are only the result of the collaborative thinking process: Which system element plays a role, and when, and how can it be influenced? This information can be visually represented.
Advice: Use clear, simple visual structures and a logical flow of information.
Conclusion
Change the habits and behaviors in your team to systems thinking. Be creative together. Use visualization in an easy, understandable way to display the results.
Join with my link to get full access to all stories on Medium!About Me — Iris B. Stehn ▪ Twitter ▪ Facebooksource: Tim Wiegel: “Führen mit Obeya”, Vahlen, ISBN 978–3–8006–6464–1
