Describing Lean to people can be both extremely easy, and extremely hard.

Easy because many people brush over it in a sentence, and tell their audience of the massive increase in quality and reduction in time it takes to do the work that Lean can bring.

Hard because the depth of Lean, once you really get into it, is massive.  Yes, it is a method for improving your business, and your work processes, and it can increase quality and reduce delivery times significantly.  But it is also a mindset change, where team-mates embed a problem solving and continuously improving culture that supports the tools.

If you are talking to someone with even the slightest knowledge of Lean tools and practices, however, I’ll make it easier for you.  That’s because I can sum it up in two concepts: Standard Work, and Kaizen.

Standard Work

It’s hard to improve something that you don’t have.  That is why it’s important to have a standard, repeatable process in place before you set about improving it.  While this might seem like a mundane or ordinary thing, very few companies actually have it (or even know how important it is to have).

Michael Gerber called it out in his best selling book “The E-Myth, Revisited”.  He used the term “operating manuals”, but it doesn’t matter what you call them.  If you don’t have Standard Work in your job or business, there’s a good chance you will have to hire or work with expensive “experts” with their own knowledge and way of doing things, or rely on people who have been doing the job for years.  Their methods may not even mesh with what you want, and certainly may not match the work culture you already have in place.

With a good standard operating procedure, a person off the street should be able to come in and do the job with a minimum of training.

Kaizen is Continuous Improvement: Every Person, Every day

Kaizen is the term for continuous improvement in Japanese, and when we have a stable, standard process, it is our aim to work on improving it.

We do this by calling out problems as quickly as possible – anything that slows it down, causes re-work, waiting, unnecessary inventory (pretty much any of the eight wastes).  It means supporting a culture that celebrates problems instead of hiding them, that error proofs the process or at the very least stops work if something is not right.

Put Together, They are Unstoppable

So we have standard work, then we improve it.  This creates a better process, and we can improve that.  This creates a better process again.  As we progress, lead times go down.  Re-work goes down.  Complaints go down.   Costs go down.  Morale goes up.  Customers are happier.

And suddenly, you find yourself enjoying your job again.

Yours in change,

David McLachlan