Half Cooked Lean

How will you react if you are served best quality rice - half cooked? How about wearing spectacles with glass only on one eye? You might be thinking why would someone do this when there is no gain, obviously you will not enjoy the rice and probably throw away the rest after sometime and in second case you might even damage your eyes. Ironically that's what happening to Lean in most of the organization these days. Lean is half cooked which is hurting them instead of benefiting.

Lean is used as marketing word to impress the customers and has become talk of the town, but a scant few organizations truly able to completely transform themselves. Imagine what would be the reaction of Toyota pioneers like Taiichi Ohno and Shingeo Shingo, had they make a visit to the organization who claims to be a Lean organization and not even 5S implemented inside organization. Many companies follow lean but they never truly embody it as part of their basic code.

I am not saying Lean is easy to adopt and practice but this is something which will not help if half done. Before an organization decides to LEANify itself, there has to be a  (1) clarity of purpose (Strategic vision) , (2) buy-in from Top Leadership, (3) plan in place to ensure its success ,  and (4) enthusiastic team /change agents to cultivate lean in every corner of the organization.

If any of the above mentioned elements is missing, Lean Transformation mission will lose its lustre and Half Cooked Lean will be the deliverable of whole exercise. In that case organizations would just end up copying others. There will not be any sustainable results but only superficial gains and deceiving progress.

There are organizations who want to Leanify themselves and have structured programs in place to train and coach its employees but fails to do so. The reason is Lean is forced upon the employees as a set of tools rather than as thinking. There is a popular misconception that lean is about tools such as 5S, Kaizen, VSM etc. This is one of the biggest reasons of Lean Transformation failure. However the truth is “Lean is a thinking”. As mentioned by James Womack in his book “Lean Thinking – Banish Waste and Create Wealth in Your Corporation”

“Lean Thinking is Lean because it provides a way to do more and more with less and less – less human effort, less equipment, less time, and less space – while coming closer and closer to providing customers with exactly what they want.”

Lean thinking is based on certain basic fundamental assumptions and principles. To become truly effective at lean, organization must understand these fundamentals. Lean transformation will not be successful if we are not aware of Why we are doing this? What is the purpose?, What Lean can do to us ? and Why only Lean ?

To understand Lean completely we should start our program from the basics, basics of when Lean came into existence. We need to learn and understand the fundamentals and principles behind lean and grasp the approach of How Toyota evolved as a world best organization using Toyota Production System or Lean Manufacturing. That will help us in understanding What Lean can do.

There were no fancy names of Lean tools we used today, just the thinking, philosophy and fundamental assumptions behind this.

It is not about tools, it is about thinking..

Lean. Organization leadership should acquaint themselves with Five Principals of Lean before cascading down the concept to lower levels.

Five principles of Lean are :

1. Specify Value 
2.  Identify the value stream 
3. Create Flow 
4. Establish Pull 
5. Seek Perfection

After organization leadership has complete understanding of Lean Principles, proper plan needs to be established to spread its awareness to all the employees. Leadership themselves should act as change agents at the initial stage and identify new enthusiastic team members who can take the concepts to every employee and even to organization suppliers.

Your Lean Transformation journey must begin with an understanding and acknowledgement of Lean’s true principle.

Lean should not be limited to the folks working in teams like Process Excellence, Operational Excellence and so on. It has to flow like blood in nerves of every employee, then only an organization can call Lean Transformation a success. 

To ensure Lean Success and as an advocate of Lean, I must insist “We have to work hard passionately to spread awareness about basic fundamentals and principles of lean” rather than projecting them as set of assorted tools.

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