Lean Was A Mistake

Two of these things are kind of the same. One of these things does not go with the others.

Toyota Production System. Honeywell Operating System. Lean.

By attaching their names to the descriptions, Toyota (TPS) and Honeywell (HOS) fully 'owned' their approach to work. Their work represents decades of effort in shaping and implementing a unique 'home-grown' approach. These approaches are expressions of a culture.

Then we have the word Lean.

It has three problems.

1. It is No Name. It is an adjective. It can be applied to anything and connected to nothing. When we put "Toyota" or "Honeywell" in front of something we understand it is 'owned' by that organization. It grew from them; it reflects their particular values and emerges as a product of those values, not something applied externally and generally. Without a proper name it becomes the perfect tool of technocracy : bland, generalizable, and drained of any of the messy attachments to an actual organization. It is not the expression of a culture; it has been abstracted into a tool, a methodology.
2. It is a product of aggregation. Technocracy cannot deal with the individual or the unique. The Machine functions best on averages and aggregates. To attain its ultimate value, efficiency, The Technological Society (Elul) requires that all things must be generalized into a 'mass'. Mass markets. Mass consumption. Mass behaviours. "Lean" is perfect for this. It is stripped of any identifiers and infinitely reusable. The title of the book that popularized the word Lean (it first appeared in a 1988 MIT Sloan article by John Krafcik ) is The Machine That Changed The World . No, that's not a joke.
3. It is Lean. Of the many possible words or phrases (I do also wonder how intentional Krafcik, Womack and others were coining a single word instead of a phrase) they chose this one. The word emphasizes technique over culture. The word Lean focuses on one element of the total Toyota Production System: reducing inventory; running 'lean'. It focuses on the quantifiable activity of reducing waste found in general inventory stocks, and 'work in progress' inventory. By focusing us this way it strips ANY culture from powerful ideas like Kaizen ('change for the better'), Gemba (the shop floor, used as a metaphor for 'deal with the real'), and Andon (through which any front-line worker has direct control the entire production line), and turns them into coded passwords for a technocratic cult.

In that third problem, we touch on another issue: the colonialist overtones of the the transformation of TPS into Lean. It is exactly analogous to our stripping the word Right from the Buddhist phrase 'Right Mindfulness'. The leftover - just Mindfulness - is a thing so bland and unthreatening and un-messy it disturbs and changes nothing. There's an app for that. Right Mindfulness is no longer a long, difficult practice. It is a single word, ready for consumption by the masses who require it to numb the torture of functioning within the bureaucratic, technocratic machine (see Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times).

This excavation of the cultures of the exotic East is richly described in Edward Said's Orientalism .

Make It Real

I'm not a fan of using the Japanese words associated with the TPS, in our work in organizations. It feels like appropriation, and smacks of cult-like technocratic elitism. I prefer the plainest English words that will do the job.

But sometimes a word in another language can invoke a complex of thinking and/or feeling that a near-proxy in English can't.

In this case I think the word gemba or genba ("the actual place") - and its parallel phrase genchi genbutsu ("real place real thing") - are importantly evocative. They evoke a central idea in TPS of working with the real, the actual, the local. The place.

This is why the title of our newsletter is Re:placing Organizations. We want to change the way we lead and manage organizations, and doing so above all, by replanting our work in a place, with a people, in a time.

This is us. Here. Now.

Our modest proposal is to retire the word Lean and replace it not with one word or phrase, but hundreds of thousands of "Toyota this" and "Honeywell that" and "[Your Organization Name] the other thing".

But don't we need a common term to describe what we are doing?

Sure, if what we are doing could ever have been described by one common term. But it never could.

The idea that we were ever able to describe some normed set of behaviours and standards and goals with one word is a technocratic sleight of hand. Technocracy requires the belief in a generalizable 'best practice'. That the thing being described this way never does what they tell us it does, and that in any particular local incarnation it is consistently a failure, is irrelevant. The consultants, the authors, the experts, the technocrats require it to be true, lest suddenly a child in the street point out that the emperor is naked.

What's the Recipe?

There isn't one.

We have instead a set of outcomes and a trio of behavioural traits that get us there.

The outcomes are straightforward. Organizations that:

1. Create value for all of their stakeholders;
2. Are sustainable in every sense;
3. Are led and managed by people who treat 'people and place' with deep respect and compassion; and,
4. Are not parasitic.

The organizations I've worked with and observed reveal few common patterns, sequences or methodologies in striving for those outcomes. I've seen only three consistent values on the way to success: commitment, responsiveness, and persistence.

The commitment is to doing what it takes to enroll humans as directly in the value and product of their work as possible; increasing connection, ownership and accountability. A commitment is a promise.

Being responsive means not getting stuck on a particular approach or perception. If its not working, its not working. Dive deeper; dive deep into the systems and human realities of the work. As you learn, change. Being responsive also means committing resources - especially time - where they are needed. Money and hours won't solve everything (in fact simply throwing money at this work is a surefire way to ensure it fails) but without the resources, you'll get nowhere. This is not work that ever happens off the side of someone's desk.

Being persistent means showing up every day, for years, to do this work through successes, failures, and setbacks. It means showing up emotionally and with humility every day - for years - to hold space for people to succeed and fail. Persistence means accepting a failure as a sign of a problem not well-enough understood. It means, in turn, being responsive: clearing the whiteboard and starting over again, and again, with fresh voices and fresh perspectives. Persistence means refusing to move from your commitment to doing better in this place, with these people, at this time.

A Footnote

This writing emerged from thoughtful questioning of the 'meaning' of Lean in our time, by Dr. Sue Hanley , intersecting with some ah-ha's in reading Stephen Denning's The Leader's Guide to Radical Management . Denning's work mines territory similar to that in his book The Age of Agile , but drives home even harder that Lean is a culture before it is a methodology.

Thank you for reading.

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Clemens Rettich