Simple Systems; Smart Behaviours
Philip Holt
Business Transformation Leader and COO | MBA | Leadership | Business Transformation | Operational Excellence | C-suite Level Engagement | Lean Thinking | Organisational & Value Stream Design
In 2008 I joined the newly formed Lean team at Royal Philips, which was tasked with deploying the ‘Simply Philips Operating System’, and the team started its formation phase with a two-week-long ‘Kaikaku experience’ to Japan. It was an eye-opening visit in which we spent the first week establishing the fundamentals of the operating system and our team values, and the second week visiting world-class Lean organisations. It was during this visit that I had the first realisation that my then nearly 20 years of experience in industry, with more than 15 years of practising Lean, had been based upon a considerable misunderstanding of what Lean really is.
As an engineer, I’d enthusiastically embraced the Lean and Six Sigma toolkit and had experienced great results in the projects that I’d run, which had been enthusiastically received by senior management, and the teams that I’d been part of had been considered to have been highly successful in solving some of our largest problems. However, I’d always wondered why the dramatic improvements in the focus area of the project had not always translated into overall improvements in the value stream, or why the results of the improvements had diminished over time. As I saw more of how those best practice companies had embedded Lean into the very fabric of their organisation, the proverbial scales started to fall from my eyes.
This would become even clearer over the next few years as I gathered more evidence of how the?behavioural and system elements of Lean were far more important than the tools themselves. Consider the development of what we now call Lean, which has a long history and a journey which many companies, including Toyota, began as early as the 1910s but essentially evolved from the Japanese shortage of resources and capital after World War II and specifically the way that Toyota adopted and adapted Western-quality tools to create what became the Toyota Production System (TPS) and further evolved into the Toyota Way.
Studies by Womack, Jones and others resulted in the transfer of TPS into the Western world through the many books, articles and other publications released since the late 1980s, and as part of this the term Lean was coined by John Krafcik, who was a graduate student at MIT working for Lean Enterprise Institute founder Jim Womack on the research into The Machine That Changed the World.
The scientific approaches of the West, developed by the likes of Taylor, Shewhart, Deming et al., were adopted by the Japanese but merged with their culture, developing into an operating system built around a philosophy of people-centric problem solving. Unfortunately, as Lean was welcomed into Western practices, it was the toolkit that was readily embraced, whilst the philosophy behind its success was mostly ignored.
This isn’t surprising, as the philosophical elements of Lean and its implications for leadership are subtle and much less obvious than the explicit engineer-friendly toolkit, and it took me many years to fully understand what Living Lean really means and the importance of the intangible behavioural aspects of a Lean operating system, as opposed to the concrete tools that can be used with a misleading sense of confidence.
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While we were on the Japanese Kaikaku experience, the team coined the slogan for Simply Philips:
Simple systems; Smart behaviours
Those ‘smart behaviours’ are the premise of Leading Lean by Living Lean, how Living Lean is about developing the right behaviours to ensure that we remove the barriers to our success, those things that cause delays, frustration and excessive working hours, and ultimately make the difference between world-class performance for our customers, and the mediocre outcomes that the leadership practices of many organisations deliver.
Leading Lean by Living Lean is a guide to taking control of both your professional and personal lives.
Leading Lean by Living Lean is a guide to taking control of both your professional and personal lives, providing you with an alternative to the?status quo and a means by which you can rise above the daily grind of fire-fighting.
Interested to learn more? Click on the following links to read the introductions or buy one of my books:
Feel free to visit?my Website at:?LeadingwithLean?and?my other?LinkedIn posts?may be found?at this link.
Head - Global PMO | PMP?, Black Belt, Lean Champion, CMMI, ISO Lead Auditor
2 年Philip, amazing work by you ..are your books available on any platform in India ?
Philip, I've read many explanations of the difference between doing Lean and being Lean. Yours is clear and simple, making the points many have failed to do. Congratulations and thanks.