The Post-Lean World

Over the past few weeks it's been interesting to see many posts and articles decrying the state of Lean management, even proposing its decommissioning.

I understand the reasoning for this, as its very clear that what many companies label as Lean is certainly nowhere near the essence, spirit and intent of TPS (the Toyota Production System) and the Kaizen Culture that generated the business success that they wish to emulate.

This prompted me to ask myself:

Does this mean that we are now entering a Post-Lean world?

Many of the posts recommend a shift to a purer approach, one of embracing Kaizen and forgoing the idea of 'Lean', the intent of which I support. However, I do believe that this doesn't address the fundamental challenge that we face in developing Leaders who properly understand the essence of how a Business's Operating Model should be built around an engaged and enabled workforce.

Many business leaders claim to want a 'Lean Organisation' but each of them ultimately means something different than the other and most simply don't wish to work towards, or are able to envision, the kind of Lean organisation that engages its people and creates a culture of Kaizen. It's certainly true that many of the Lean initiatives that I experience have failed to represent the people engagement necessary to be successful, and are instead very poor, tool-based, facsimiles of a Lean Operating Model.

Bob Emiliani explains the root causes of this extremely well and, if you're interested to learn more, I would direct you to his website: https://bobemiliani.com/wonder-no-more/

I've struggled for a while with the semantics around the terminology that is used in the 'World of Lean', and terms such as Lean, Kaizen, Operational Excellence, Continuous Improvement, Six Sigma, and many others, mean many different things to people. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that Kaizen is just as misunderstood, perhaps more so, than the term Lean.

I did flirt with the idea, for a while, of changing the terminology that I use, which is primarily around the theme of Lean Leadership but, after due consideration, determined that it would not solve the problem, only add additionally to an already rich lexicon.

Instead, I decided that it is necessary to remain focussed on the education of organisations' people, and in particular their leaders, in what Lean Leadership really means. I have three models that I use for this:

The Lean Leadership Model

Introduced in my first book Leading with Lean: An experience-based guide to leading a Lean transformation , the Lean Leadership model encompasses the four Leadership styles that must be practised in order to achieve Lean Leadership:

1. Leadership Activism

The Lean Leader needs to be 'in the game' and making an active difference. This isn't about advocating performance but about actively performing.

It's the antidote to the conventional 'Micro-management': Leaders who want to know every detail of every single initiative, programme and activity.

2. Visible Leadership

This isn't about being in the spotlight but is rather about being visible to the team as the Lean Leader role models excellence.

It's the antithesis of 'Red-carpet' Leadership: Leaders who turn-up on site with a 'red-carpet' approach, causing mass disruption to normal operations, with much preparation and 'wet-paint' to make things look better than they are.

3. Coaching Leadership

As a Lean Leader, coaching and developing team members must be a high priority and something that is done every day.

This is opposed to 'Directive' Leadership: 'Tell' Leaders who don't allow their people to solve problems but instead direct them to their own 'solutions'.

4. Mosquito Leadership (see article )

Rather than being a nuisance, Mosquito Leadership is about infecting the team with your enthusiasm for integrity and excellence, every day.

It's a philosophy that defies 'Magpie' Leadership: Leaders who move from one 'shiny' thing to the next, with no consistency on the real objectives and the key initiatives to win.

The Simplicity Model

I introduced the Simplicity Model in my second book The Simplicity of Lean: Defeating Complexity, Delivering Excellence .

It is the model that we use in the Leading with Lean Academy to ensure that all of the key elements of a Lean Organisation can be effectively taught in a systematic way, and ensures that the Lean tools aren't seen as separate from, or useful without, the people systems.

People Engagement

1. Culture: This 'chevron' consists of the elements of a Lean Operating Model required to build the cultural elements of Lean and to support creating a Kaizen culture.

2. Kaizen: Creating the Kaizen Culture is critical to the People engagement, ensuring that our people have the skills and support to make a difference every day, and this section supports the journey to attain it.

Process Improvement

3. Projects: Delivering step-change improvement is crucial and is an integral part of a Lean Organisation. This section covers the core elements of making successful transformation a reality.

4. Kaizen Events: The other side of the Kaizen-coin are Kaizen Events, although few organisations execute these well. They cannot exist in a vacuum and in this 'chevron' the enablers are explained.

Download the first two chapters of The Simplicity of Lean for free:

The BTFA Model

In my third book Leading Lean by Living Lean: Changing how you Lead, not who you are , I utilised David Bovis, M. npn 's BTFA model.

BTFA stands for Believe-Think-Feel-Act and is a revolutionary model for understanding the neuroscience behind how our brains work, and has helped the engineer in me, comfortable with the Plan-Do-Check-Act (PDCA) model of Deming / Shewhart, to understand why logic and facts are very often not the principal players in the game of change, and to explore a different way of dealing with change, that factors in both the eminently logical, and the less tangibly emotional.

In the book I reveal how long-held beliefs about how change is made, fails to properly recognise that everything that we do as individuals, and hence collectively, is a result of what happens in the brain, which has been 'programmed' since birth with the collective experiences of our life.

Many readers will already be familiar with the Deming / Shewhart, or PDCA, cycle, which explains how change is a cycle of:

• Plan: Plan the change activity, understanding what the underlying issues are that need to be addressed and determining how to best address them.
• Do: The implementation of the change, whereby the effort is made to execute the plan as effectively as possible.
• Check: During and after the change has been implemented, the efficacy will be assessed to understand if the anticipated result was achieved.
• Act: Based upon the check, either adaptations will be made and / or standards put in place to establish the new practice.

Whilst this is very logical, and especially attractive to those of us who are engineers, scientists, accountants, or other professionals who tend to deal in 1+1 = 2 types of problem solving, what it doesn’t adequately demonstrate is how the humans in the change process react in reality, which ironically includes those of us who pride ourselves in the application of logic.

What the Bovis cycle helps to explain is that, as we run through the logical PDCA cycle, there is an emotional BTFA cycle also at play:

• Believe: As we go through the problem solving and planning of the change, there must be a belief created that it is the right thing to do. We sometimes refer to this as stakeholder management, forming a guiding coalition, or other approaches which accept that change requires the acceptance of the people involved.
• Think: Whilst the plan is being implemented, it is experienced and processed by the people involved. What do they think about the process of change? How does it affect them?
• Feel: As the people experience the outcome of the change, what it means to them and how it impacts their world will evoke an emotional reaction, they will feel the impact of the change.
• Act: Logic should drive the actions taken as an outcome of the success or failure of the change. However, in reality it is often driven emotionally and often will be contrary to what logic might suggest.

As we utilise the model, what we start to recognise is that every single brain (each person) will have a different response to the stimuli of the change process, responding with a plethora of emotional responses but many of them masked, as the business environment that they work within is likely to subdue the admittance of emotional response. Without the understanding of this, we will continue to labour under the frustration of slow or failing transformations, as the explicit nods mask the implicit resistance to a change that the brains do not want.

Are we in a Post-Lean world?

The world of work faces ever more complexity from a combination of societal changes, brought on due to Covid and generational advances (the impact of Generations Y & Z in the workplace, aging populations, etc.), and technological changes (AI in particular starting to have a significant impact in the workplace).

This is resulting in both the role of Leaders and the relationship that employees have with their employers changing significantly, which is also leading observers to question whether Lean has a place in the modern workplace. Nevertheless, hopefully I've convinced you that it is, in fact, required more than ever, as we think about Lean Leadership and how we utilise its philosophy to engage and empower our people.

We may indeed be in a Post-Lean World, in the sense of moving beyond a bastardised version of the Toyota Production System, and having now entered into a new era of Lean Leadership, an approach to running an organisation with a philosophy of Kaizen, built upon a solid foundation of people engagement.

A future with Leaders who understand the impact of their actions on the brains of their people and work every day to make the world of work a better place for people.

Interested to learn more? Then click on one of the links below:

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• Leading Lean by Living Lean: Changing how you lead, not who you are
• The Simplicity of Lean: Defeating Complexity, Delivering Excellence
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