Mesmerising Mnemonics

You’ll be pleased to hear that I’ve cheered up a little since my last blog of bleakness.  One of the things that has brought me some comfort is a joyous podcast that my cousin recommended to me which is the culmination of two of my loves – deep investigative thought, and Taylor Swift.   It brings together a literary scholar and historian uncle, Dr Jerry Coates, and his devoted Swiftie niece, Angela Wyatt McDow, who, within each episode, dissect one of Taylor’s songs and draw parallels from poetry, history and art. It’s called The Swiftie and The Scholar and you can watch and listen at all the places you get your pods.

It’s teaching me the names of lots of literary devices and helping me to see songs I know and love with new emotional depth.  I also love witnessing the connection that Angela and her Uncle have. It’s so respectful and yet fun, you can just see how much they value and appreciate each other. It’s delightful.

One of these delights is Jerry’s ability to quote reams of relevant text from different authors as he draws on the parallels between Taylor’s work and Charles Dickens, or Emily Dickinson.  Angela can do this too, but for Taylor Swift songs!  I binged all of the episodes over the Christmas break and one of them gave me an idea for a blog. It was actually an episode that was a bonus chat, not a song analysis, but Dr Uncle Jerry talked about how he had been incentivised to memorise poems, a dollar a time, by his Grandmother.  This had impressed upon him the usefulness of being able to quote texts, initially for his financial gain, then for teaching, and now for Taylor Swift podcasts.  He explained that he was assisted in this endeavour by one of his teachers “Mrs Martin” who had taught him the power of using mnemonics to help him to memorise things.

I too, love a mnemonic – a method to help you remember.

I mean firstly, there’s the word itself.  An M and N snuggled up together at the beginning of the word?! Mnadness.  Let alone the fact that it’s a one word alliteration party.

The mnemonic mentioned in the podcast is:

Someone, maybe Mrs Lydon, a teacher in my Primary School, taught me the power of mnemonics too.

“It is necessary for a vicar to wear one collar and two socks”.

A sure way to remember that spelling necessary involves the deployment of one collar C and two socks SS.

Emboldened by its genius when young I set about creating my own mnemonics to help me remember things. My most valuable device helps me to spell the oft tricky ‘calendar’ for example.

To spell calendar correctly you need to LEND A CAR.

You have to remember to hide the LEND A in the middle of CAR for this to work but it does work for me every time.

Maybe it will work for you too?

You’re welcome.

So now to Lean and its mnemonics!  Most of the Mnemonics I can think of are acronyms, TIM WOODS, Tiger’s brother, being the most famous:

• Transportation – the product or service moving around the organisation
• Inventory – the amount of product or service present within a process
• Motion – the employee moving around the organisation to enact the process
• Waiting – the time spent for the good or service to progress to the next stage
• Over-production – making and/or delivering products or services that customers don’t want
• Over-processing – doing more than is necessary to create the good or service
• Defects – the consequences of doing something wrong within the process
• Skills – the waste of not using human intelligence

Some people prefer the acronym DOWNTIME as a way to remember the genius wastes, I guess because Tim has no immediate connection to lean but DOWNTIME is something that lean works hard to reduce. *Lean Nerd Alert* HOWEVER, downtime isn’t bad if the demand isn’t there for the goods that you are making, plus downtime can also be when necessary improvement work takes place.

Don’t diss all downtimes guys.

• Defects
• Overproduction
• Waiting
• Non-Utilized Talent
• Transportation
• Inventory
• Motion
• Excess Processing

When tackling the wastes, ECRS, is a good guide. What can we Eliminate, what tasks can we Combine, what work can we Reduce and where can we Simplify?

• Eliminate
• Combine
• Reduce
• Simplify

Of course, we should always focus on delivering FIFO – First In First Out within our processes – and we can’t just apply these lenses once, we have to engage in what Eli Goldratt calls POOGI. A Process Of OnGoing Improvement.

The Lean Principles themselves, well how do I remember those? I tend to just hone in on the key words within each principle i.e. VALUE (always, most important), VALUE STREAM (end to end), FLOW (the stream flows), PULL (at the rate the customer wants it to), PERFECTION (we POOGI – the classic ‘and we’ve just got to keep doing these things forever ‘END’ of every improvement methodology out there).

To me they are easy to remember because their sequence makes complete sense within the world of work.  I encourage my students to remember them because if they reside in your head, alongside the wastes, they are honestly so helpful within a range of different meetings and conversations with customers or suppliers. They keep you on track, keep you focused, help you to remember what’s important.

Years of teaching lean have ingrained these frameworks in my brain, but every time I try to recap the principles with a group that I’ve been working with for a while, it hurts my heart that people just can’t remember them the way that I can!  I throw out pop quizzes and the only people who are able to answer me are also those that seem to keep glancing at their computer screens….. HMMMM.

So let me attempt now to come up with a mnemonic that I can share with people to hopefully help to remember them.

I value the stream that flows when I pull …. erm … ahem … this is going to need some work.