From fast thinking to deep thinking

29 March 2015 / article

A true lean transformation relies on the engagement of all people all the time or, as the lean masters taught us, on “developing the kaizen mind in every employee rather than applying improvement tools to every process.” Kaizen is the Japanese word for improvement, or “change for the best” that, in the lean context, means relentlessly challenging how we work and what can be improved, step-by-step, in the spirit of 100 improvements of 1% being more powerful than one improvement of 100%.
Lean thinking, as we now know, requires a complete mindset turnaround of the company’s leadership, which must learn to: lead from the ground up; to put the customer first no matter what; to relentlessly focus on improvement and teaching problem solving; to understand and develop the power of intense collaboration; and, lastly, to aim to engage every employee in making suggestions on how to run their own work and contribute to the company’s success. This is never easy, and not all leaders have the gumption to take it on board, but 20 years down the road the leadership aspects of lean is well understood.
The model, however, relies on a profound transformation of every person’s way of thinking – not simply C-class level. Therefore, the question for employees in a lean company is: what does lean do for you?
When all goes well, if you work in a lean process you will see:
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Leading author, speaker and researcher, I work on both the "hard" (improve quality, reduce lead-time, eliminate waste) and "soft" (engage people in problem-solving and improvement to develop them to the fullest of their abilities) dimensions of Lean transformation.

I started studying improvement initiatives twenty years ago as part of my PhD. research on Mental Models. I was persuaded by Toyota engineers that to understand lean you had to practice it firsthand and I have been working with supervisors, site managers and now CEOs to leverage their lean efforts into market share, people engagement and bottom line results. You don't know what you don't know and the most surprising thing I've learned as a cognitive sociologist is the value of: see with your feet and think with your hands!

I co-founded the Projet Lean Entreprise and the Institut Lean France. I have written several books and articles about the links between knowledge and management (Managing With Systems Thinking, The Effective Organization, Les Modèles Mentaux), and more recently, co-authored three business novels published by the Lean Enterprise Institute, one about lean turnaround, The Gold Mine, one about lean transformation, The Lean Manager, and a novel about Lean practice, Lead with Respect as well as a Lean manual in French, Le Management Lean.