Start by asking “why?” and then “why?” again

23 March 2016 / article

“Where do I start with lean?”

I am often asked. How do I eradicate waste from my processes? How do I reduce costs? How do I improve flow? Why not start by asking “why?”?

Yes, productivity is wealth. Yes, the key to prosperity is increased productivity. And, yes, in economics, there are three main factors of productivity:

Labor: better organization yields more output per person
Capital: innovation and better technologies yield more output per investment
Human Capital: education enables you to leverage the two previous factors

Many economics studies converge to show that education is the key to prosperity.

How does this apply at your business of department level? Well, lean is first and foremost an on-the-job education method. The idea is that to make better products you first have to make better people:

more educated people will organize themselves better and have better productivity
more educated people will adopt new technologies smartly and leverage capital productivity
more educated people will be more engaged in outcomes rather than output

So, rather than start by better organizing any process or changing the technology why not ask yourself how to deepen the thinking in your department: look at issues, ask why? and then why?

Asking why repeatedly is the first step of lean thinking, by getting your team to think deeper about the issues they face. As a team, you can then explore the other levers of lean productivity:

How to flow better work and how to spot mistakes before they’re made?
How to improve technical processes to explore new techniques or technologies?

Lean thinking brings education in the day-to-day course of the work (and out of the off-site classroom). We work, we look at the outcome, we see problems, we ask why? we think, we improve. All in a day’s job.

Without the curiosity of “why?” both these changes will revert to taylorist impositions of new processes, and teams will resist what they haven’t invented. With the magic of “why?”, on the contrary, they will seek answers themselves and surprise you every time.

“Why?” because creativity is fun? Why? because that’s human nature. Why?…

Tags: start

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.