Developing Problem-Solving Capability in Employees

Airline operations leave little room for improvisation. Standards, procedures and checklists are there for good reason. People need to know what to do, and they need to do it consistently.

In Lean, standard work provides a starting point for improvement. It gives us a clear understanding of how a process is expected to work, making it easier to see when reality differs from the standard. Without that reference point, problems can become accepted as simply “the way things are done”.

But standard work should not become the end of the conversation.

A recurring delay, a maintenance finding that keeps coming back, or a process that requires people to constantly work around it should not simply become part of the daily routine. These are signs that something deserves a closer look.

This is where employee development has an important role to play. If we want continuous improvement to become part of everyday work, people need more than knowledge of Lean tools. They need the opportunity to develop their own problem-solving capability.

Learning to look beyond the task

The person closest to the work will often notice things that are difficult to see from a report or a performance dashboard.

They know when a handover regularly causes confusion. They notice when information arrives too late, when equipment is not available where it is needed, or when a particular step in a process creates extra work.

But noticing a problem and knowing what to do with it are two different things.

Employees need to be encouraged to investigate what they see rather than simply work around it. What is actually happening? How often does it happen? What does the process require, and what happens in practice? What evidence do we have?

That shift in thinking can make a significant difference. Instead of waiting for someone else to provide a solution, employees start to take an active interest in how the work operates.

Developing the habit through Kata

Kata offers one way of developing this capability.

The idea is not to teach people a fixed recipe for solving every problem. Kata is about practising a way of working: understanding the current condition, establishing where we want to get to, identifying the obstacles and running small experiments to learn what moves us forward.

For some roles and situations, a structured Kata approach may be very useful. For others, particularly where work is tightly prescribed for safety or regulatory reasons, it may have less direct application.

The useful point is the practice itself. Problem-solving gets better when people have the chance to work through real situations, receive coaching and reflect on what they are learning. It is much harder to develop that capability through classroom training alone.

Over time, the questions become more familiar. What is the actual condition? What is preventing us from reaching the target? What do we expect to happen if we make this change? What did we learn from the result?

That is a very different skill from simply knowing which Lean tool to use.

Making time for Hansei

There is another part of employee development that is easy to overlook: reflection.

Hansei provides a useful principle here. After an improvement, a project or a difficult operational event, teams can take time to look back at what happened and consider what they have learned.

This does not need to become a formal exercise every time something happens. Sometimes a short conversation is enough.

Did the change work as expected? What surprised us? Where did we have to rely on individual workarounds? Is there something we should change in the standard?

The value is in making learning part of the work rather than moving immediately on to the next task.

It also changes how people view mistakes and unexpected results. A result that was not expected is information. It may tell us something about the process that we did not understand before.

Don't keep good ideas in one department

There is little value in learning a useful lesson if nobody else gets to hear about it.

This is where Yokoten becomes relevant. The concept is about sharing learning horizontally across an organization.

Airlines have plenty of opportunities for this. A station may find a better way of managing a particular activity. A maintenance team may identify a recurring source of wasted time. A ground operation may change a handover process and see a clear improvement.

The question is whether that knowledge stays there or travels.

Yokoten encourages teams to look beyond their own area and ask whether an experience elsewhere might be relevant to them. It can prevent different parts of an organization from spending time solving the same problem independently.

For a large airline, this matters even more. A lesson learned in one location can potentially be useful across several stations, fleets or functions.

What leaders can do

Developing problem-solvers is not something that can simply be delegated to the Lean team.

Managers and supervisors have a significant influence on how people approach problems. When an employee raises an issue, the easiest response is often to provide the answer. Sometimes that is exactly what is needed. But not always.

There are occasions when a better response is to ask: “What have you seen?” “What makes you think that is happening?” or “What would you like to test?”

The intention is not to make employees solve everything themselves. It is to help them build the judgement to understand a problem before reaching for a solution.

That takes time, particularly at the beginning. But it is part of developing people rather than simply managing tasks.

From doing the work to improving the work

Standards remain essential. Procedures remain essential. People still need to know their responsibilities and perform them correctly.

The difference is what happens when the standard does not match reality.

An organization full of task-doers will find a way to get around the problem and continue. An organization that develops problem-solvers will stop, understand what is happening and look for a better way.

Kata can help people practise that behaviour. Hansei gives them a reason to reflect on what they have learned. Yokoten helps that learning move beyond the original team.

None of these needs to be applied everywhere or in exactly the same way. The important thing is to give employees the skills, support and space to become increasingly capable of improving the work they already know so well.

Learn to develop problem-solvers and build continuous improvement capability →