Copycats abound for the Toyota Production System (TPS), which for years has been held out as the benchmark for Lean processes. There’s a widely-held belief that practicing Lean means eliminating waste in a process or in an organization, as the TPS does. But that’s wrong-headed; it’s much more than that. According to Srinivas Garapati, author of Core Thinking Patterns for Lean/Agile Organizations, to be truly Lean, organizations must also understand and incorporate the “why be Lean”, taking into account their own context, values, and goals. Explains Garapati:
When we attempt to copy the success of a person, team, or organization, we most likely fail to grasp the complete journey that was undertaken to achieve that success, including the thinking process and the enormous challenges involved. We tend to repeat only the visible practices, yet any attempt to derive the same practices from the visible outcomes of a successful path in a certain environment without understanding the underlying thinking might not be applicable to our situation. As a result, emulating any visible practices from others will only put us on a journey that is unnatural to our own context, abilities, goals, and aspirations. Moreover, we will be undertaking a route with no strong core foundations; that is, missing the “why” for every step of the journey. At the same time, we are rejecting our own core values and potentially ourselves when we emulate some other person or some other entity. Consequently, we are rejecting our innate thinking abilities.”
Garapati advises that developing a successful Lean organization, begins with evolving and adjusting the core thinking process in your organization and developing the potential of your people, with a primary emphasis on designing and developing the whole organizational system(s). This ensures the organization has the capability to meet uncertainty and unpredictability and be adaptable. Only then will you get “real lean”.
The real “lean” in the Lean world (or the “agile” in the Agile world) will manifest only when an organization’s focus is on the development of the whole organizational system (i.e., developing the capabilities of all elements). This focus must be on the continuous development of the capabilities of throughput processes, organizational processes, functional domain expertise, the people, the thinking patterns, and the technology. All systems within the larger organizational system must be explicitly designed in a manner similar to the thinking behind designing a product, but the focus must be on the dynamic interactions and the thinking patterns of the human elements that help meet the primary goals of cost, quality, time to market, safety, morale, and predictability at all levels.”
More Insight on Lean/Agile
Cutter Research: Cutter clients can discover the thinking patterns required to be successful with Lean and Agile, the nature of an Agile organization, and strategies for organizational design in the Cutter Business Technology Journal article, “Core Thinking Patterns for Lean/Agile Organizations” by Srinivas Garapati.
In “Big Data and Lean Thinking: Balancing Purpose, Process, and People” by Karen Whitley Bell and Steve Bell, you’ll learn Lean Thinking lessons can help guide ensure you’re getting the most from big data, cognitive computing, and whatever lies beyond, to improve the probability of making the right decisions, in the right context, for the right reasons.
Em Campbell Pretty offers a dozen new practices to help make you the best leader you can be in “12 Lean Habits of the 21st-Century Technology Leader”.
Cutter Workshop: The one-day interactive workshop, Maximize Your Return on Big Data Investments with Lean Thinking, focuses on the capability development of two key Lean practices — Value Stream Analysis and Disciplined Problem Solving — as applied in a Big Data ecosystem. Your teams will engage in a series of structured, hands-on exercises, and will end the day with solutions specific to your organization’s unique challenges.
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