Duncan was temporarily reflective. “Yes, we did get behind on our efficiency project. I guess we do need to start over, collecting our metrics again, to see where we are. I think I can pull somebody off, after their shift to begin the count.”

“Do you really thinking counting is going to get the project back on track?”

“It’s a start,” Duncan shrugged.

“Starting the count is doing. Your efficiency project isn’t off the rails because you stopped counting. Your efficiency project disappeared because of the way you think. In the beginning, you were focused on daily improvement of throughput, finding out why things got stuck in your system, how to expedite an order without gumming up the works. Then, something happened that changed the way you think. You got busy. You may have thought that busy-ness was more important than efficiency. You thought that if you could just get all the projects out the door today, we could get back to our efficiency focus tomorrow. Free beer tomorrow never comes.

“Change the way you think first. When you get busy, think how much more important it is to look at your throughput. It is not a matter of finishing all the orders today, so we can get back to efficiency tomorrow. It is all about a focus on efficiency so we can build our capacity to get everything out the door today. It starts by changing the way that you think.”