Missed the target Why the lean community failed

Some time ago I read an article about Toyota. The person sharing this article asked the question "Did Toyota fool the lean community?" The linked article was dealing with the question how projects and improvement activities are prioritised at Toyota. It showed that it is not just about increasing efficiency and eliminating waste, it is more about developing the entire company towards a long-term existing entity. This obviously concerns customers and employees.

The typical paradigm of chasing efficiency and increasing profit was entirely missing. The people commentating the article were trying to squeeze the findings they have not expected, into the old fashioned and typical approach they know best: Something what has to do with “efficiency”. But there was one exceptional comment by a person who worked for Toyota as a TPS expert and trained me about 15 years ago. He replied:

"Toyota did not fool anybody, the lean community fooled itself".

With this response he told the truth, because the lean community was always on the wrong path.

For almost 30 years the same story

Considering the contents provided on all these lean conferences, it turns out that it is always the same conclusion. Even though some new items like New Work, Digitization and IoT were added to the discussions in the past years, it has always been the dogma about eliminating waste and increasing efficiency combined with the demand of having everything under control.

All processes need to be leaner and more efficient so that a company is becoming an even better cash machine. It is just about the old-fashioned currencies profit and growth – and even humans are still considered as "waste" which has to be eliminated.

The majority of the speakers at lean conferences are mainly consultants who want to sell their fancy tools which have already been existing for decades and which do not get better with a new packaging. Only a few speakers come from a real environment with real life experience. However, these few contributors mainly speak about "best practice" which means, only success stories are told. Speaking about failures is not expected, this obviously does not belong to a real lean conference.

Nothing but marketing

Providers of seminars are heading into the same direction. Typical lean topics are enriched with add-ons such as "agile", "digitisation" and "change management". Some want to sell lean in combination with SAP and all these topics are furthermore squeezed into special applications, such as maintenance (Lean TPM) or human resources (Lean HR). And in case people do not have any new idea for selling old stuff, they invent new words by combining existing ones (e.g. "Lean-SixSigma" or "Digital Lean"). Or they create entirely new items (e.g. "Kata") in order to give already existing knowledge new brand names for creating new marketing opportunities.

In specialised social network groups, the group managers are leading the groups by not allowing contradictions and counter-speech. They do not expect an exchange of different experiences, in fact they want to minimise other opinions in order to tear down competition. 

Obviously, everyone is talking about culture because almost everyone has recognised that lean and culture have many things in common. But the real meaning of culture seems to be a mystery to the majority of the "experts" - since they try to come up with some kind of "implementation" process for culture at the end. Everyone who is somehow familiar with the meaning of culture should be concerned about this kind of assumption.

Many contradictions

That all these patterns are far away from the core meaning becomes visible when the item "lean" is still used on a very large scale. Some count themselves to a very exclusive group and name themselves "Lean Community" or even "Lean Freaks" and they think that it is cool and fancy to be "lean". At this point it must be stated that the item "lean" itself is already a big mistake.

The item is unfortunately well established so it is partly not avoidable to use it. But this must be done very consciously because it was never about being "lean" and having lean processes. If someone uses this item very frequently, this raises the suspicion that the real meaning was not understood. If the main aim is getting leaner, the focus towards the target group, means the customers, was probably lost.

Also the ongoing discussion about best practice and bench-marking is ridiculous. Obviously, good examples make sense and it is possible to learn from them. But often only copy&paste happens instead of real learning, which leads to a lack of acceptance. Failures can be even more relevant as people learn much more by bad experiences. Failures must not be something bad, they are opportunities for improvements. Therefore, it is suspect if people speak about their success stories only.

Counter-speech is not accepted by many leading people within the lean scene. Especially some consultants see themselves as something like a "guru" who assume that their approach is the only one that counts. If the promoted approach does not work, what happens quite often, they blame the customer. The previously mentioned group managers in social networks sometimes also belong to this kind of people. The Kata-community behaves very often like this. They see every critique of their approach as something like lese majesty or blasphemy. Hence, the basic principle of questioning oneself is running into a dead end.

The basic misunderstanding

After "lean" was established by the three MIT scientists Womack, Jones and Roos beginning of the 90ies, many thought it was just about lean processes. People wanted to understand Toyota, in which they did not succeed and started to copy the obvious. Out of the car industry, this misunderstanding was spread throughout the whole world and all branches - and it has still been very persisting until these days. Even though some items have slightly shifted, the basic wrong path about implementing tools and methods in order to gain more efficiency and increasing profit remained the same. But it was never about these things and we can just speculate why so many key players never got the meaning right.

Conclusions

Finally, it does not count which methods and tools are implemented, what counts is that the right things are done. And it is about the ability to evolve and change ourselves into the right direction in order to maintain a sustainable existence. Change is not an end in itself, as the world surrounding us is also continuously changing. When the own organisation does not adapt to these changes it will not survive. This finding fits to companies, authorities and even for entire societies. However, a certain amount of efficiency is required but the effectivity counts much more, since it always includes the benefit for a certain peer group which in terms of economy are mainly named as "customers".

The overall world of lean emerged out of a misunderstanding and remained almost the same until today. This misunderstanding is based on the dogma of running blindly after efficiency, greed for profit and continuous growth - and it was never solved. People wanted to understand the secret of the success of companies like Toyota but they mainly failed: 

Questioning oneself and the personal attitude continuously and change it if required.

This is exactly in which the Lean community almost entirely failed. A few methods and tools still do not make a change of personal attitude.

#RestartThinking #Lean #Agile #LeanManagement #Kata