Understanding Lean Transformation

You, your team, and your company are trying to keep up with ever-changing customer expectations and business conditions. You are doing your best to solve problems for basic stability, improve for elevated performance, and innovate for breakthrough impact. You are practicing lean thinking in everything you do.

However, you are struggling. You might say you are failing.

The Lean Enterprise Institute (LEI) has studied lean transformation for decades. We have learned that successful transformation requires addressing five questions:

1. What is your value-driven purpose? What value do your customers need you to create? What problem(s) must you solve?
2. What is the work exactly that needs to be done? How will that work be improved?
3. What are the capabilities – knowledge, skills – that are needed? How will those capabilities be developed?
4. What management system will monitor that work in terms of performance and improvement and develop those capabilities? What leadership behaviors will be necessary?
5. What basic thinking, mindset, or assumptions will guide this transformation and new way of running the business?

LEI calls this set of questions “The Lean Transformation Framework.”

The questions are fractal — meaning that the questions apply to the enterprise level and the level of individual responsibility. So, anyone — from the CEO to the frontline supervisor — can use the Framework.

Critically, the Framework is not a roadmap. Every transformation is unique and requires a situational approach. By repeatedly answering these questions, you, your team, and your organization can develop its own successful path to transformation.

Learning Objectives

Through instruction, discussion, in-class and on-the-job exercises, participants will be able to:

• Develop a personal connection with the Lean Transformation Framework.
• Apply elements of the Lean Transformation Framework to scope the work of a provided example.
• Connect high-level goals with daily action (think globally; act locally) in a more nuanced case study.
• Define your own high-level goal and connect it with a manageable scope of work.
• Prepare a plan going forward based on an experiment run at your own work.

Who Should Attend

This session is ideal for executives, operations leaders, and continuous improvement leaders, who are eager to actively participate and explore together. If you prefer a more passive role and just want to receive answers, this might not be the right fit for you.