Lean Light?

Last week the CEO of a client in Europe told me about his presentation of a Kanban board for a sales value stream to a bunch of his product development folks. They are only six months now into their Lean journey, but this is a company where the Chairman as well as the CEO have really have taken to heart that Organizational Learning is something that everyone does.  Continuous improvement is not something to be delegated down the ranks, or something that only applies to a troubled department.

Over the last few days I have been reflecting on how unusual this really is.

Nowadays, many IT organizations and technology companies are discovering Lean techniques such as value stream mapping and kanban scheduling, and they are applying these to software development. That’s a good thing.  But as these tools become better known, I worry that in the enthusiasm over short-term success, “the bigger game” here is being forgotten.

The bigger game of Lean is a social one – it is to create and nurture a Learning Organization.  A Learning Organization is an organization that expects, facilitates, and leverages individual and group learning to systematically innovate and renew itself, often in a rapidly changing environment. In a sense, all organizations try to do this on some level, but a Learning Organization is one that emphasizes learning as a critical means to value creation for employees, customers, and shareholders.

In a Learning Organization, everyone understands that individual innovations in the form of tools and techniques will come and go.  Indeed, just like in the world of manufacturing, the more we in the IT/technology space gain experience with Lean for knowledge work, the more sophisticated we will all become. About tools, that is.

Without senior executive involvement, however, an organization is sorely limited in what it can do with Lean. It will merely be able to address tactical problems and harvest some low-hanging fruit. An organization that that fully embraces Lean should:

• Have an organization-wide Kaizen effort, with time and resources set aside for continuous improvement and expectations for real, quantifiable results
• Engage in cross-departmental mapping of value streams and business systems
• Have time set aside for teams to do Hansei (reflection) to harvest improvement opportunities
• Provide mandatory training company-wide to standardize on a small set of basic rituals and processes for organizational reflection and learning (Hansei, A3)
• Have leaders who aim to become internal thought leaders on Lean topics and how they apply to their organization

Tools and techniques are important and must also be taught and supported with coaching.  But there is no way around getting the senior leadership involved, not if you really want to embark on a Lean journey. If you’re not doing Kaizen, if this is just a set of Toyota-inspired techniques being applied to do local optimization in a single silo in the organization, what you have is “Lean Light” at best.