Jim Womack’s newsletter this month, posted here, very clearly explores one of the underlying reasons that Lean or Operational Excellence initiatives are often difficult to sustain (and sometimes even get off the ground). Every affected stakeholder -whether the executive leadership team recognize it or not – looks carefully at that proposed improvement effort and asks “what’s in it for me?” and “what happens to me if this moves forward?” So I ask, what does that individual do if he or she is getting an answer with which they’re not entirely happy?
In his article Jim refers to Pareto’s (Mr. 80/20 rule) second concept of economic optimality, and immediatly reminds me of this phrase in the Hippocratic Corpus: “first do no harm.” Some lean practitioners attempting to drive change unfortunately ignore this admonition at their own peril.
If, in our zeal to improve something, we cannot envision how our ideal future state may negatively impact another part of the organization’s currently “adequate” state, then we are indeed not optimizing the whole. Rather, we fall back on the silo-thinking which created the need for making changes/improvements in the first place. And that’s where true “Lean Leadership” in the executive ranks shows what it’s made of. Go forth, ye, and make sustainable Lean happen!
And that’s the way I see it. Adam Zak
We know that functional or “silo thinking” will disrupt a lean transformation. That is why we need to introduce “total systems thinking” along with lean technologies to all levels of the organization to insure its success and sustainability. We need functional leaders to step back and optimize the whole company as their CEO does. And we need workers to step back from their work stations and optimize the line as their supervisor does. To transfer gains without this change in thinking, change in systems, change in measures is futile.
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