Creating a kinder, wiser work environment

17 June 2015 / article

Lean is a heartfelt commitment to completely eliminate waste from work. The biggest waste being failed relationships and dumb decisions, lean isn’t about slash and burn cost reduction, it’s about creating a kinder, wiser work environment where every person has something to say about how work is done and how it could be done better—with less waste—for themselves, our customers, and our colleagues.
How do we tackle a new situation in a lean way?

TAKE A WALK

Right away, before we get dragged into the fire-fighting (which will unavoidably happen). We take a walk to visit a few customers, internal and final, to meet the people who do the value-adding work and to understand our partners and suppliers. We take a walk to see things firsthand, for ourselves. This doesn’t mean we ignore the data, but that we complement the data with facts—what the people who do the work actually think about the work.

This is a disciplined walk. We don’t go there to immediately reinvent and redesign how everything should work. We go there with the specific aim of trying to imagine how we could get what is there to work better, before changing it:

How could safety be better?
What would make customers happier?
Are there specific points where we could be more flexible?
What would make us more productive?
Is there any way to obviously reduce costs?

Read on here

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.