Two Pillars of Lean

What is the essence of Lean thinking? Usually people might think of terms such as Kanban, pull, waste reduction, queue management, and other lean tools. Recently I read the article “Lean Primer” (authored by Crag Larman and Bas Vodde). The authors made it clear that this is a profound miss-understanding of Lean. They note:

” Management Tools Are Not a Pillar of Lean…. Reducing lean thinking to Kanban, queue management and other tools is like reducing a working democracy to voting. Voting is good, but democracy is far more subtle and difficult.” [Lean Primer, Crag Larman and Bas Vodde]

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Well, what are pillars of lean then?!

The two pillars of lean are continuous improvement (also called Kaizen in Japanese term) and respect for people. The real value of continuous improvement is in building organizational culture of continuous learning. Respect for people is the foundation of team work and collaboration. I highlight some points I think are critical for establishing a culture of continuous improvement for an organization:

• “Management commitments to continuously invest in its people and promote a culture of continuous improvement.”[The Toyota Way, Liker, J. 2004.]
• Challenge everything and embrace change mindset. Never blame people for making a change and messing up. The only real failure is not to try improvement.
• Encourage sharing knowledge laterally rather than pushing people to conform to a centralized “best” processes mandated from top-down. There is no “best” .
• Make change one small step at a time and incrementally. Avoid working on too many improvement at once.
• Managers are teachers. Managers are expected to provide mentoring and coaching to others.
• Go See at gemba – Managers should go to the real place of work (gemba), build trust with the people there, and help them solve problems.

There is much more we can learn from Lean thinking. The ultimate goal is to build continuous learning culture to make the organization successful. Let’s outlearn our competition!