Are lean practitioners

Description

Lean Thinking is an essential part of the toolbox for modern leaders. At its heart, Lean Thinking is about a commitment and focus on growing the organisation's people and building a culture of continuous improvement into the organisation's DNA. Build the people first, and then build the products and services.

Rationale

Great Agile and agility are founded on many of the principles found in Lean.

Lean or Lean Thinking is the Western name for the system commonly referred to as the Toyota Production System or Toyota Way. There are many concepts incorporated into the system, but it has been summarised as two pillars that support it:

• Respect for people: As solving customers’ needs is becoming more complex, Lean recognises the importance of enabling and trusting the people doing the work to know how it should be done best. This involves building a supportive environment that provides purpose, autonomy, empowerment, psychological safety (and sometimes physical safety) and professional growth and learning.
• Continuous improvement includes:
  1. Challenge – perfection challenge - long-term improvement vision to target improvement experiments.
  2. Kaizen – continuously seeking to learn and improve through evolutionary experiments.
  3. Genchi Genbutsu – or Go See. Go to the place of work (gemba), as close to the source to find the facts to inform better decision-making decisions and improved collaboration and clearer communication.
  4. Flow - Leaders need to optimise the flow of the organisation, meaning removing wasteful activities and arranging the order of left elements/steps.

Visualising, analysing and improving flow can be achieved through tools such as:

• Value Stream Mapping - A value stream map creates a view of all the steps in the process towards delivering value.
• 5S - The 5S methodologies help achieve a sustainable and flow-optimised process for our value stream - Sort, Set in Order, Shine, Standardise and Sustain.
• Kaizen - Kaizen help our flow to be clean and tidy and allow for continuous improvement of our flow.
• Removing waste
• Removing impediments
• Limit WIP at the organisation level, "limit Initiatives In Progress"

Related Principles

• Catalyst for change
• Evolutionary over revolutionary change
• Create the environment for people to thrive
• Leadership supports rather than drives the work
• Foster a high trust environment
• Create a Learning Organisation
• Organise around value streams
• Optimise the system of work for the majority of cases rather than the exceptions

References

Lean Thinking — Lean Primer

https://management.curiouscatblog.net/2010/04/15/the-toyota-way-two-pillars/