Thoughts on Lean

Lean is an interesting subject.  As you move along the journey, your thinking continues to evolve.  I wrote about this back in 2014.  I was re-reading that post the other day and thought it would be interesting to post again on what my current thinking is.  I’m sure it will change again, but for today in the middle of 2017, here are my current thoughts…

1. Lean is a system.  At the beginning of the journey, you are learning to solve problems.  First within a group then across departments.  But as you move along the journey, it becomes necessary to create a production system in order to get flow from the beginning of the process to the end.  If you don’t get to this stage, then improvements in one area are bound to create problems in other departments.
2. Lean is about quality.  You have to focus on removing defects from the process.  A fanatical focus on quality in all things.  This is what the Japanese did.  They created a better quality car by driving out the defects in the process.  Then the entire automobile industry changed.  When touring companies in Japan, we saw boards where people had worked for 18 months without one defect!  We toured companies that had furnished millions of parts to Toyota with 15 defects, and these were small scratches that would never be seen.  That same company had a goal to reduce their defect rates!
3. Lean is source control.  This is something we learned from Ritsuo Shingo when he visited our office.  If you solve problems at the source, they are much simpler.  At the source of the stream, you could literally carve a little groove in the mud and redirect the entire stream.  But go a mile down the mountain and try to re-direct the stream and you find yourself staring at a fairly large river and a difficult project.  Fix things at the source where they are small.  As the problem moves through the value stream, it is 10X for each department it flows through.  A problem in the order becomes a larger problem in the shop and a giant problem in the field.  Concentrate on the source first.
4. Lean is a management system.  It changes the entire perspective of how we manage a company.  We get better by having the managers and leaders working at the gemba (where the work is happening) with the people doing the work and helping them solve their frustrations.  As people learn the process and see the progress they start taking ownership of the work and solving their own problems.  We facilitate, coach and encourage.  People do the work, make the improvements, try new ways, fail, try other ways, succeed, etc…  Leave your ego behind.  Admit you don’t know how things really work and get into the process and observe.  It is amazing what you learn.
5. Lean is simple.  But not easy.  Lean is the accumulation of small ideas from everybody.  Lean is a deep attention to each detail.  Lean is small incremental improvements over time.  Lean is a lot of base hits, not home runs.  The accumulation of small experiments, both failures and successes, that teach us the lessons on how to move forward.

Many companies call it the “lean journey”.  At Walters & Wolf, we call it the “lean crawl”.  You feel like your progress is so slow!  You want to see immediate results.  You want to transform your company.  You want to do that in a couple of years, not decades.  But like most things that have value, you need to learn to enjoy the journey.  It takes time for the leaders to grow enough to grow the company.