"You should only go to the refrigerator once..."

Okay.  Apparently I watched one or two video clips of The Brady Bunch on Facebook, because now my feed is full of old clips and recent updates on what the cast is doing now.  There's an episode during the first season (episode #24 to be exact, which first aired on television on March 13, 1970) where Mike and Carol Brady decide to change roles - Mike will help Marcia with her cooking merit badge, while Carol will help teach Greg and the boys how to bunt a baseball.  They both learn a very important lesson ("the grass isn't always greener on the other side" which incidentally is the title of the episode), but I wanted to focus on the scene where Mike is telling Marcia how to be more efficient in the kitchen.  He starts watching her go back and forth between the refrigerator and the counter and says, "Hold it.  No organization.  You should only go to the refrigerator once and take out everything you need, see?"  I won't tell you what happens next, so you will just have to watch the scene and see for yourself.

What's my point?  One of my goals this year was to finally take the step and obtain my Green Belt certification in Lean/Six Sigma (hopefully to prepare for my eventual Black Belt certification, but let's not get too far ahead).  As I am learning more about spaghetti diagrams, I can't help but think of Mike Brady in the kitchen.  Briefly, a spaghetti diagram is a pictorial representation that uses a continuous line to trace the path of an item or activity through a process.  It allows teams to identify redundant steps in the work flow, so that they can make reduce the number of steps and improve efficiency.  Here's an example:

It's amazing to see the number of steps (literally in this case) in the process before and after the improvement project.  Similarly, a value stream map is a flowchart that outlines the different steps in a process, again as a way of identifying any opportunities to make the process more efficient.  Again, in the example below, there is a significant difference between the "before" and "after" in the process itself.

During my online class, the instructor mentioned a scene from the 2016 movie "The Founder", starring Michael Keaton, Laura Dern, Nick Offerman, and John Carroll Lynch.  The movie tells the story about how Ray Kroc (played by Keaton) turned the two McDonald brothers' (played by Offerman and Lynch) fast food restaurant into the biggest restaurant business in the world.  Kroc was a traveling milkshake machine salesman and wanted to learn why a drive-in restaurant in San Bernardino, California was ordering so many milkshake machines.  While there, he meets the McDonald brothers (Mac and Dick) who give him a tour of their restaurant McDonald's, a popular family-friendly, walk-up restaurant with fast service, high quality food, and disposable packaging.  The rest, as they say, is history.

Apparently (and according to my sources, this is exactly how it happened), the McDonald brothers actually drew a mock-up of their restaurant using chalk on a tennis court.  They would then bring their employees to the tennis court and simulate the restaurant's operations, identifying where they could make the operations more efficient.  In other words, they developed a large-scale spaghetti map!  It's really a great scene that perfectly illustrates the utility of spaghetti diagrams and Lean/Six Sigma (and it's a lot better example than the scene from The Brady Bunch!).