It’s not about bein’ lean and mean...

An elephant. What is it? You can grasp its essence watching it rush past the brush on safari in the Kalahari. Or astride a decorated temple elephant on procession in Kerala. You could even theoretically experience it as the five blind men do in a dark room, touching its various parts to describe what it is. I have tracked this beast called Lean for a long time. And hope it would be useful to you to hear what it has come to mean to me. Quickly. Without too much Japanese or jargon.

That’s the term I embraced with glee when Womack’s book came out and I stood in line to meet and greet him at GM. I recall my first personal experience of Lean at Eisenach with my first plane-load of team leaders from Lansing pounding rear hatch interior trim on Opel Astra’s at 60 jobs an hour with my bare swollen hands. And in the almost twenty intervening years encountered the application of this method across industries, cultures and geographies. 

So here is my definition of it:

Lean is the act of empowering team members to continuously improve business performance. 

Allow me to break it down some more.

It is an act, a verb: Broken down to the smallest work element, lean involves actions taken by individuals with eager observation of intended results. Actions where the results are measured with care to loop back to modify actions swiftly until desired results are obtained. Do not be mystified by Japanese words. Do not be mesmerised by long PowerPoint presentations, or audits, or “Gemba walks.” More was learned or taught about lean in 8 hours of a “simulated world environment” or even simpler, a day long Lego line simulation than all the classes you will ever attend on Lean. 

It empowers team members: Oddly enough, it took me a while to understand that empowerment in a lean environment is simply the comprehensive and caring availability of competent support at all times. They will tell you that ANDON is key to Lean. Every team member has to be empowered to pull the cord and stop the line if they found a defect or problem. At one plant we empowered them. They hung off the ANDON cords. And nothing came off the line for days. It took me months to learn that empowerment involved an entirely different set of actions. It means to set clear standards. For example, on how to complete a job through clear work instructions. Empowerment is the investment in hours of training to ensure that a team member is truly certified to perform that job to deliver exact quality within the time available to do the job. Empowerment is the care to ensure that no one ever gets put on the line without that certification. And empowerment surely meant that the moment someone pulled an ANDON cord a competent team leader is available to take the “problem” off the team member’s hands allowing him or her to return to their standardised work. And that virtual cord reaches all the way up to the CEO in an orderly series of escalations, confirmation and actions to ensure that problems get swiftly resolved within the correct level of capability and authority. I have always said that lean is where every team member feels emboldened to act as an owner of the business. Not an abrogation of responsibility to the lowest levels of the organisation, but the honest and humble provision of tangible and timely support to succeed in accomplishing results at the lowest levels. Easier said than done.

It implies constant improvement as a way of life at work: Some will tell you that the tyranny of lean is that just when you reach a target, they raise the bar and you have to go experiment and search for the right set of actions to get to the new target. If you are tired, you might even think that lean is a grand machiavellian plan to manipulate workers to give more and more. Yet, the key role of leaders in a lean context is to clearly, honestly and regularly communicate how the business context of competition and shareholder expectations drives the need for continuous improvement. And yes, you also have to honestly provide the means to improve the life of a team member; whether it is better wages, or self advancement, or new learning opportunities. 

It implies true alignment of actions with desired business outcomes: bottom-up experimental improvement of a business is really the most exciting part of lean. The first alignment is one where every team member is convinced that when they help the business improve, their lives improve. The second alignment is one where the team member understands exactly what small increment of improvement is required to accomplish a larger annual business goal. And the third alignment, and most critical one is the belief that the organisation stands ready to provide the resources and support to conduct a series of experiments to devise just the right solution to get the required improvement. Controlled experiments with (likely) repeated failures are encouraged. Final confirmation of good solutions are celebrated. And I cannot emphasise the value of celebration enough. Depending on the country or culture, I cannot even begin to estimate the ROI of the equivalent of  “pizza & pop”’ in immediately celebrating the smallest of victories.

And for God’s sake don’t even think of applying Lean at home! So if your instructor starts talking to you about 5S in your kitchen, run.