Why lean works

For years – decades – I’ve been wondering about why lean works (I’m talking about real lean). Yes, it might seem like a surprising question, but my firsthand experience is that when leaders are interested in the Toyota Way, curious about it and try its various aspects until they get it – and their company adopts its tools and techniques – not only their firm’s performance improves, but also their adaptability to changing market conditions as well as their openness to embrace innovation.

Okay: even completely out of its cultural or industrial context, the TW works – when one makes the effort to truly understand it. 

But why?

Part of the answer might be found in current sociology research on leadership, or, more accurately, followership. What makes a leader credible? How come people are willing to take personal risks, follow up and follow through for a, well, leader?

Current research shows that we’re ready to get bloody – and bloodied – for a leader if we see them as:

•  Competent:they know their stuff, they know how to get things done and blend these two qualities into sound judgment and the ability to see what lies over the hill, when we don’t.
• Caring:their heart is in the right place, they care about us personally, have the kind of values we recognize and as a result we trust there is a place for us in their solutions.

Now, some people have that knack, others don’t. The question is: is there a systematic way of acquiring these leadership abilities? How do we demonstrate competence credibly, and how do we demonstrate caring just as credibly? 

Then in 2001, Toyota came out with a white paper (well, green) summarizing its key values as the “Toyota Way.” It features two key pillars:

• Continuous Improvement:Challenge, Genchi Genbutsu, Kaizen
• Respect for People:Respect and Teamwork.

If we narrow down on it brick by brick, we learn that:

• Challenge means forming a long-term vision, meeting challenges with courage and creativity to realize our dreams.
• Kaizen means improving business operations continuously, always driving for evolution and innovation.
• Practicing Genchi Genbutsu means going to the source to find the facts to make correct decisions, build consensus and achieve goals at best speed.

In other words, understand how things stand in reality, figure out how to get things done with others and face present and future challenges – competence.

Then, we find that:

• Respecting others means making every effort to understand each other, taking responsibility and doing our best to build mutual trust.
• Teamwork means stimulating personal and professional growth, sharing development opportunities and maximizing individual and team performance.

Which is all about considering people as individuals, listening to their point of view, supporting them in their development and relying on them to build the future – and helping them with growth opportunities. Caring. 

If we put these two together, we get credible leadership.

Whether from experience, by chance or by design, the Toyota Way model is patterned against the best knowledge current sociology has to offer about convincing others to follow you voluntarily – as opposed to coercing them into doing what they’re told.

Having laid out the model logically, we can conduct counterfactual exercises by taking out the branches one by one and imagining the resulting approach. 

Because of its Asian cultural and historical roots, a key difficulty in studying lean is distinguishing Toyota folklore from general principle. From the Western perspective we tend to confuse both too often, paying too much attention to high-level concepts that don’t quite mean the same thing in context, and dismissing pronouncements such as “an engineer should wash his hands three times a day” as quaint old sayings. Curiously, the original Toyota Way document doesn’t explicit the various concepts beyond their definitions, but shares various quotes from its key authors. It’s an oral tradition.

Why bother figuring it out if it works as is? Personally, I feel that understanding matters if we are to interpret correctly in a variety of different contexts far different from the one the method was originally conceived in. 

Personally, I believe that the convergence of Toyota thinking and sociological research on leadership is not purely accidental. My hunch is that Toyota confronted global evolutions earlier than others, and as a result, put together a response that is far more adapted to our times than traditional command-and-control models. Emphasizing competence rather than compliance creates a completely different form of organization, which, nevertheless needs to be led. 

The Toyota Way is a time-tested, proven method tolearnhow to become a more credible leader, every day, everywhere – both in practice and in theory.

Find out more about our exploration into Toyota's unique form of management and the companies it inspired outside of the Automotive industry in The Lean Strategy.