By Mike Micklewright
This article is from the Superfactory Archives, an archive of content from the Superfactory website that existed from 1997 to 2012.
There’s a good chance that 20 percent of the people reading this article have dyslexia. Are you one of them? Are you proud that you have dyslexia? You should be. People with dyslexia typically are smart and creative. I wish I had it. Perhaps then, I would be leading my own huge consulting and training company rather than working as an independent consultant and trainer for the past 16 years.
I’ve asked my wife, Donna, if she thought I was dyslexic (kind of hoping she would say yes, as if that would suddenly make me more creative). She didn’t think so, but did feel I had at least one symptom of someone with dyslexia. She thought I did have um what was it again? Oh yeah, “word-finding issues,” which is oftentimes, but not always, a symptom.
I thought I might be a little dyslexic because I believe I have one of the positive characteristics of dyslexia—an ability to look at the big picture, think conceptually, and see relationships between two unrelated topics to form a third relationship or product. Maybe this is why I’ve been able to do stand-up comedy every so often, and how I linked “dyslexia” with “lean.”
A brief pause here for the collective, “Huh? How are they related?”
A couple months ago, my wife and I combined forces and gave a joint presentation at an American Society for Quality (ASQ) section meeting in Fox Valley, Illinois. I must say there was a great deal of interest. I then mentioned this presentation and the same general content as the emcee of the TWI Summit (Training Within Industry) in Las Vegas in May; again, there was a great deal of interest, especially from those with dyslexia or who have children with the learning disability—about 20 percent of the population. You see, people with dyslexia have suffered for years in an archaic school system that doesn’t know how to properly teach them, and continues to make them feel stupid and see themselves as complete idiots. They continue to suffer in the workplace as we in the workplace continue to not know how to teach them and continue to make them feel like idiots. We tend to treat them with disrespect.
Some of the attendees, especially those with dyslexia, came up after the presentations and, with tears in their eyes, thanked us for bringing up this sensitive subject. One person, a renowned TWI expert, confessed to me that he has dyslexia, and that he had struggled his entire childhood in school and failed many classes throughout his academic career. He also believed that this is why he became such a strong advocate of TWI—which many believe is the foundation for lean—because it teaches workers in an action-oriented and hands-on way, using multiple senses in its approach. Multisensory teaching is what those with dyslexia need to gain understanding of the topics, and it’s a standard part of TWI methodology.
So why did Donna speak with me?
Well, first because she’s hot and I thought it might be a good way to get a date with her after 17 years of marriage. Also she is an excellent speaker. For the first time I felt like Sonny Bono, establishing a singing duo with his wife Cher even though he had no talent and Cher did. Besides this, Donna is a strong child advocate and holds a bachelor’s degree in special education and a master's degree in curriculum and instruction with an emphasis on reading. She has served for more than 20 years in a classroom, as a special education teacher, and a reading specialist in the public schools of Chicago and Las Vegas. As a learning specialist, Donna currently runs a private practice in our home and on location, specializing in multisensory structured language training for adults and children with dyslexia, and related learning differences. In other words, she knows dyslexia.
On the other hand, I just know quality, lean, and Deming stuff. I’m the Sonny of the Sonny and Cher duo (“Babe I gotchoo babe...”).
So what is dyslexia?
According to the International Dyslexia Association (IDA), dyslexia is a specific learning disability that is neurological in origin. It is characterized by difficulties with accurate and/or fluent word recognition and by poor spelling and decoding abilities. These difficulties typically result from a deficit in the phonological component of language that is often unexpected in relation to other cognitive abilities and the provision of effective classroom instruction. Secondary consequences may include problems in reading comprehension and reduced reading experience that can impede growth of vocabulary and background knowledge.
The reason why so many people don’t know that they have dyslexia is because they would never understand the definition above. (Just kidding, gang or am I?) Actually, one of the main reasons people don’t know they have dyslexia is because they have never been screened for it, and it is pretty costly to do so. Some states, including Texas and, more recently, Mississippi, have passed laws mandating schools to screen students for dyslexia and provide special services to those who have it. Texas passed the law 25 years ago, and even though up to 20 percent of children have dyslexia, less than 1 percent of Houston-area children are enrolled in the state-mandated program. Of the 200,000 student population in the Houston school district, just 256 students receive the service. At the risk of stating the obvious, the screening process doesn’t seem to be working well in Texas, and those with dyslexia are still not getting the services they need.
The IDA believes that 15 to 20 percent of all school children have dyslexia. Counter to what Tom Cruise once claimed on “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” Scientology—or for that matter, any other program, fad, or religion—cannot “cure” one from being dyslexic. Which means that up to 20 percent of the work force probably has dyslexia.
How about your company? Does it screen new employees for dyslexia and provide special services when training them? Should it? Probably not. But perhaps we can and should keep in mind those who have dyslexia or other “issues” (e.g., other learning disabilities, ADHD, English as a second language) when we manage our business systems, much as lean principles and techniques have. Perhaps we can take the approach of what is called “universal design for learning” (UDL).
What is UDL?
Universal Design for Learning (UDL), according to Wikipedia, is:
“An educational framework based on research in the learning sciences, including cognitive neuroscience, that guides the development of flexible learning environments that can accommodate individual learning differences.
“Recognizing that the way individuals learn can be unique, the UDL framework, first defined by the Center for Applied Special Technology [1] (CAST) during the 1990s, calls for creating curriculum from the outset that provides:
- Multiple means of representation to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge
- Multiple means of expression to provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know
- Multiple means of engagement to tap into learners’ interests, challenge them appropriately, and motivate them to learn”
If we could just take the UDL approach and bring it to the business world, then we wouldn’t have to worry about screening for those with dyslexia or any other “issue.”
Ironically, UDL originated from the world of business. From Wikipedia again, “The concept and language of Universal Design for Learning was inspired by the universal design movement in architecture and product development, originally formulated by Ronald L. Mace at North Carolina State University. Universal design calls for designing and constructing buildings, homes, products, and so forth that, from the outset, accommodates the widest spectrum of users. UDL applies this general idea to learning: that curriculum should from the outset be designed to accommodate all kinds of learners.”
Many attributes of lean does just this. But which ones? In part two we’ll take a look at them.
Part Two: Lean attributes helpful to those with dyslexia
In part one of this series I described what dyslexia is and how I linked “dyslexia” with “lean.” I described how, despite the many positive attributes of people with dyslexia (e.g., tending to be more creative), schools and businesses have done a poor job of adapting educational and training systems to meet the needs of students or employees who are dyslexic. I suggested that perhaps we can and should keep in mind those who have dyslexia or other “issues” (e.g., other learning disabilities, ADHD, English as a second language) when we manage our business systems, much as lean principles and techniques have. Perhaps we can take the approach of what is called “universal design for learning” (UDL). How do we do that?
Respect of the individual
It starts with one of the key principles behind lean, “Respect every individual.” This principle is also one of the key principles of the prestigious Shingo Prize for Operational Excellence, in which it is stated,
“Respect is a principle that enables the development of people and creates an environment for empowered associates to improve the processes that they ‘own.’ This principle is stated in the context of ‘every individual’ rather than ‘for people’ as a group. Respect must become something that is deeply felt for and by every person in the organization. It is something that must be reflected at the individual level, because at the end of the day individuals drive continuous improvement throughout an organization.”
Let’s face it gang. We have done a terrible job of adhering to this principle. We have treated students as a group, not as individuals. Our schools tear apart the self-esteem and tear out the hearts of our little children with dyslexia by telling these smart, creative kids that they are dumb, in the form of report card peppered with Ds and Fs.
From page 59 of Innovate Like Edison: The Success System of America's Greatest Inventor (Dutton Adult, 2007) Thomas Edison, who was strongly believed to be dyslexic, once said, “I used never be able to get along at school. I don’t know what it was, but I was always at the foot of the class. I used to feel that the teachers never sympathized with me and that my father thought I was stupid, and at last I almost decided that I really must be a dunce.”
In The New Economics for Industry, Government, Education (The MIT Press, 2000), W. Edwards Deming, Ph.D., wrote, “People are different than one another. A manager of people must be aware of these differences and use them for optimization of everybody’s abilities and inclinations. This is not ranking people. Management of industry, education, and government operate today under the supposition that all people are alike.”
Children with dyslexia, after being battered and humiliated in our school systems, grow up to be adults and then we expect them to read e-mails, contracts, procedures, work instructions, and drawings as if they could read these documents as easily as a person who is “normal,” just because they are now out of school. We continue to fail these now grown up kids as we evaluate each individual “as a group” with grown up report cards, called “performance appraisals.” The result is the same—they continue to feel like failures, and we scratch our heads trying to figure out why they won’t participate and help the business improve.
Standardizing processes vs. individualizing employees
Processes need to be standardized. People need to be individualized. It is well understood in the lean world that, for a process to be improved, it needs to be first understood and standardized. People are then trained to the standardized process to ensure consistency. A new thought or idea is brought forth by an employee, it is attempted, the results are checked or evaluated, and a new standard is developed. This is the basic plan, do, check, act process that so many of us understand.
However, it does not apply to people. We cannot, nor should we, try to standardize people. It is not respectful of them because we are all different products and we cannot force all of us to behave or perform the same way. And yet, we continue to train people to the same types of procedures, using the exact same methodology for all individuals, even though we all learn differently. The methodology is not universal in design. It does not allow for:
- Multiple means of representation to give learners various ways of acquiring information and knowledge
- Multiple means of expression to provide learners alternatives for demonstrating what they know
- Multiple means of engagement to tap into learners’ interests, challenge them appropriately, and motivate them to learn
We then also evaluate all employees on standardized criteria and we “inspect” them, as we would in the final inspection process of products coming off of the assembly line, in a process called “the annual performance review,” even though we know people are different and excel differently in different areas. For more information on this topic, refer to a previous article entitled “God’s Mistakes .”
Lean, on the other hand, embraces differences between employees and encourages us to find the best attributes of all employees and use those to the advantage of the employee and the company. It does so, because respect of all individuals is the key principle by which all tools and the culture are based.
Furthermore, in the job instruction module of training within industry (TWI), the training process is one in which a trainer trains an employee by actually doing the task (trainer and trainee), seeing it, vocalizing it, and explaining why each step is important. This is more of a universal approach in training employees, and gives them multiple means of representation and expression.
Edison, with the assistance of a strong and supporting mother, overcame his feelings of inadequacy because he intuitively came to understand the importance of experiential learning, combining multisensory information with words. It is said that he touched and “tasted” associated objects with his readings, including ores, rocks, powders, leaves, wires, wood, bark, and other elements of nature. A lean environment allows for those who learn differently to excel in the company.
Visual controls/visual management
If it is difficult for one who has dyslexia to read requirements on a print out of a specification, procedure, spreadsheet, or work instruction, then what should we do? Should we keep giving him or her the same types of documents, expecting different results, not getting different results, blaming the employees for incompetency, adding more of the same difficult-to-read words, retrain him or her again, and achieve the same negative results again? Or, should we look at different alternatives?
How does a fast food chain ensure consistency with its products from restaurant to restaurant, across the country or globe, while employing people of so many different backgrounds, cultures, and languages? Pictures! Photos!
Lean is all about visual controls. Lean is about color coding, color logic (e.g., red is bad, yellow is caution, green is good), and color standardization. Lean is about outlining different tools on a pegboard or in a tool chest so that it becomes obvious if a tool or piece of equipment is missing. Lean is about creating photos of the ideal situation and placing them out in the open, so that the situation can be seen by all—including responsible managers—to allow for a quick comparison between the ideal state and actual state. Lean is about not hiding problems and openly showing problems. Lean is about mistake-proofing so we don’t have to think or read, thus making it universal in design once again.
Lean is also about visual management, so that a leader, at any level, can be at the process and see exactly how the process is performing at that moment in time, without having to ask anyone. Lean is about seeing the problems or the misses to expected performance, and seeing the actions that are being conducted at that time.
Those who have dyslexia would thrive in a lean environment, because of the lack of reliance on the written word and the desire to install and maintain visual controls and visual management systems.
Gemba walk/process focus
Paul Smith, an individual with dyslexia and former president of the Kroger Co.’s Atlanta division ( a $3 billion dollar a year division, with 24,000 employees and 16 stores) has no computer. “Computers don’t run companies. People run companies,” Smith says.
From The Power of Dyslexic Thinking: How a Learning Disability Shaped Six Successful Careers , by Robert W. Langston (Bridgeway Books, 2009), Smith also says, “I get up every morning and I drive to my stores. I go to as many stores as I can a day, and I talk to baggers, I talk to cashiers, I talk to managers, and I talk to my customers. From that, I try to get a feel for what we’re doing right and what we’re doing wrong, and then I call the office and tell them what to fix.” Every day, he was an “Undercover Boss” as depicted in the hit CBS show—except he wasn’t undercover.
So was Paul Orfalea, another famous person with dyslexia and founder of Kinko’s (the name originated from a reference to Paul’s kinky hair).
“I didn’t keep paperwork, files, a pen, or a computer. In a way, the office was just for show because I didn’t like spending time there,” Orfalea says. “We were an oral company, a verbal company. My restlessness propelled me out of doors. How many managers do you know who really understand what is happening at the front lines of their business? I did. I visited stores to find out what our different locations were doing right. Anybody can sit around in an office thinking about what people are doing wrong. My job was to get out and find out what people were doing right—and exploit it.”
Lean is about getting the butts of managers and leaders out of the office and conference rooms and into the process. Smith and Orfalea had no choice. They ran their organizations from where the action was. It would not even come close to making any sense to them, both figuratively and literally, to run their very large organizations from the comforts of a corporate office, because this is not where the action is and besides, the only thing that really gets produced in offices are difficult to read words and numbers. Who would want that?
In lean lingo, we refer to the Japanese word gemba, which means the “actual place.” The more appropriate longer version of this term is genchi genbutsu or “going to the actual place to understand the situation.” Is this not the lesson being taught in CBS’ “Undercover Boss”and by our many dyslexic corporate leaders?
When developing a lean culture, a key component is to have the leaders—not managers—from all levels, including the CEO, go out to where the action is to see the situation, to coach, to mentor the people, to see and show the waste, and to ask the people what they could do to make the process better. This is a largely misunderstood process in the United States, primarily because it requires leaders to be humble and not egocentric. It requires tenacity, vigilance, patience, and discipline. It requires process focus, process knowledge, and it requires the ability to study and see situations objectively. It requires being a leader of people, not a manager of people.
So often, after teaching a company about the gemba, a supervisor will walk up to me and say, “I do gemba every day.” I am very skeptical. Usually they mean they walk the floor daily— this is not doing the gemba. Gemba is not performed correctly in most cases.
Doing a gemba walk comes naturally to a person with dyslexia. Those of us who are “normal” would benefit in learning from those who have dyslexia. Lean allows those with dyslexia to thrive within the organization.
Part Three: Problem-solving, creativity, and mistake-proofing
In part one of this series I described what dyslexia is and how I linked “dyslexia” with “lean.” In part two, I suggested an approach to training in the work place called “universal design for learning” (UDL), which takes into account those who learn differently from others. In this part, I will discuss how lean techniques allow people with dyslexia (and other populations for whom written or verbal instructions might be difficult) to function and contribute within the organization.
Those who have dyslexia have an ability to look at things much differently than “normal” people. It also just makes sense. Their entire lives, they’ve had to deal with discovering ways to make it, or to pass, in a world that is not well suited to them.
Lean and the Japanese word “kaizen” are about “continuous improvement,” which represents the little improvements made every single day by everybody. Lean is about exposing problems not hiding them. This is where continuous improvement and creativity are required. Creativity is about solving problems by looking at them from a different viewpoint, a different and unique angle. Those who have dyslexia have done this their entire lives.
“People with dyslexia discover new associations between ideas or concepts that no one really thought about before.” —Dr. Gordon Sherman
This is true in humor. Examples (from my stand-up comedy routine):
“I got my mother interested in taking a class on mistake-proofing right after I was born.”
“What do new graduates call mistake–proofing these days? My bad-proofing.”
This is also true in the business of teaching creativity. Years ago, I became a certified instructor of Dr. Edward De Bono’s courses in “Six Thinking Hats” and “Lateral Thinking.” The green hat of the six thinking hats was the hat of creativity, or the hat of how to do “lateral thinking.” The tools taught within lateral thinking allow the student to think differently than the norm and come up with entirely new ideas and concepts. In a sense, they basically teach linear thinkers to think like as a dyslexic does. Those who have dyslexia have so much that they could teach us about creative thinking. Talk about untapped resources.
Those with dyslexia can often “see” the big picture better than the rest of us. From John Chambers, famous dyslexic and, oh yeah, CEO of Cisco, “Dyslexia forces you to look at things in totality and not just as a single chess move. I play out the whole scenario in my mind and then work through it . All of my life, I’ve built organizations with a broad perspective in mind.”
Since one of lean’s most important principles is “continuous improvement,” those who have dyslexia should excel in a truly lean environment if they are encouraged to do so and if a business system does not continue to keep them feeling unappreciated.
One very beneficial and under-utilized technique that is encouraged in the lean world is mistake-proofing. What’s the best way to improve a process? Find ways to make mistakes impossible or nearly impossible to make. Those with dyslexia have made “mistakes” when measured against unfair standards their entire lives, in school, at home, and in the workplace, and so they are used to finding ways to mistake-proof what they do. They are naturals and we can all learn from them. Lean tools and techniques, without exception, encourage mistake-proofing.
Unfortunately, at nonlean organizations the only time “mistake-proofing” is used is after there has been a safety or other expensive mistake. It is reactionary. There are so many opportunities to mistake-proof processes, if we only tried to be more proactive. I think I would want individuals with dyslexia on my team when designing products or processes to be more robust to mistakes.
Relying on others/communication
These days, so many people speak of the necessity to network. To one who has dyslexia, networking and relying on teammates is a necessity for survival, because in the written world, all the required information needed to survive is basically inaccessible. A dyslexic knows she must rely on others to provide the information or data required to make decisions. In order to do this, she realizes that the only way to obtain the required information is to talk to others and to ask others for their assistance.
Lean encourages open communication and relying on others within the organization to help out. Those who have dyslexia are naturals at this and would thrive in a lean world.
The unfortunate reality of the situation
“I want people to wish they were dyslexic. There are many positive attributes that can’t be taught that people are generally not aware of. We always write about how we’re losing human capital—dyslexics are not able to achieve their potential because they’ve had to go around the system.” —Sally Shaywitz
There is a stigma about being dyslexic because it is still largely misunderstood, especially within organizations. People feel ashamed. The quotes above are from leaders of top organizations and many of them come from Robert Langston’s excellent book, The Power of Dyslexic Thinking (Bridgeway Books, 2009). They are or were at the top of their organizations and had nothing to lose about proclaiming their dyslexia. But what about the people in middle management?
“ if you’re a corporate VP in the mid-ranks, there’s a very large disincentive to saying you’re dyslexic, because you’re still being evaluated.” —Ben Foss, researcher
So people continue to hide their dyslexia for fear of being found. They fear the potential consequences related to an annual review and the associated stigma of being viewed as a “dummy.”
Again, a full 20 percent of your work force could have dyslexia. Unless you know this and are actively considering the implications, two problems could occur: not creating an environment in which those with dyslexia can flourish, and not exploiting their talents and using them to the best of their ability and to the full benefit of the organization. What is your organization doing about this?
With regard to the first problem, we need to understand that even though some people find a way to become very successful in spite of their dyslexia, there is a large population that still feels dumb, stupid, and idiotic. Though they may be talented and creative, they don’t feel or see themselves that way. This lack of self-esteem can lead to a lack of self-confidence and a reluctance to actively participate in continuous improvement teams or volunteer any improvement ideas. What a shame and waste of talent.
In fact, author Robert Langston states that if one was to draw a success diagram with success on the bottom or x-axis, and low success levels being on the left side and high success levels being on the right side, the shape of the curve would be that of an inverted bell curve. In other words, there are many unsuccessful and unmotivated people with dyslexia. I believe this is the result of a broken school system that ensures their lack of success (an almost self-fulfilling prophecy), by essentially telling them they are failures. There are studies that suggest that a significantly higher percentage than normal (up to 20 percent of those with dyslexia), reside in our overcrowded jails. If you are told your whole life you are a failure, maybe you are more likely to become one.
On the other end of the curve, there are many successful people with dyslexia who, because of their natural creativity, and typically a very strong support system at home, overcame the obstacles and used their talents to grow a business. There are some studies that show the percentage of small business owners who have dyslexia is significantly greater than the typical population. What to do?
In this article I have focused on one part of our diverse population, those with dyslexia, because it’s a personal interest of mine. But there are other portions of our population for which a lot of what I have discussed also applies. The purpose of an organization is to maximize the strengths of its employees to the betterment of the company’s products and environment. This won’t happen if employees are treated as one-size-fits-all, with all employees wedged into the same size and same shape hole regardless of their talents or methods of learning and communicating. Lean has a lot to teach us about creating an environment that embraces employees with a variety of skill sets and learning abilities.
If what you have read in this series has caused you to think a bit more about your co-workers then you might be asking yourself what the next step is.
- Understand the principles, culture, and practices behind lean and embrace them and expand beyond them, including training within industry (TWI), gemba, and visual controls/management. Lean did not purposely build an environment for those with dyslexia or other learning differences. Lean just built a culture of respect of all individuals.
- Understand the concepts behind “universal design” and build them into your internal documentation and training systems, much like many aspects of lean have been.
- Evaluate the value of your performance appraisal system and determine if it is unfair and detrimental to a portion of the population. Consider abolishing it.
- Review your diversity program. Does it address identification of those with dyslexia? Should it? What are the pros and cons? How else can you take advantage of the great talents of that population?
- Explore creativity courses that encourage “normal” people to think like those with dyslexia.
- Learn more about dyslexia.