Three Faces of Lean Management 

The Machine that Changed the World ushered in a new era when it proclaimed that “lean production” was the future and companies needed to commit or be run out of business by competitors that do. Then we learned that underlying lean production systems was a way of thinking, lean thinking, that needed to be adopted by all executives and managers. And the model for lean production was not Japanese automakers in general, but rather Toyota and its Toyota Production System (TPS). 

Since then Toyota has continued to practice and refine TPS, and in the world outside Toyota there has been an explosion of lean books, lean training, lean certification, and lean programs in most sectors of business, government, non-profits, and NGOs. Having a ring-side seat as both a participant and observer in lean transformation, I have seen three general approaches where often one is done to the exclusion of others. I argue that these three faces of lean *combined* are more powerful than any individually. 

1. Lean as Technical Solutions—The simplest way to understand lean is as a technical system that has as its goal to flow some specific value to each customer by eliminating waste.  

The vision is one of a stream with no dams or rocks to interrupt the flow and cause stagnation. Value-stream mapping  (VSM) has become the tool of choice to help visualize the current flow with all of its nasty wastes, and then sophisticated users will define a lean future-state VSM. The last step is to create an action register with what, when, and who. Then implement all the lean solutions in the future state and, voila, you will have a lean system that better flows value to the customer with high quality, low cost, and rapid response times. (Note that the VSM, called the material and information flow diagram in Toyota where it was created, is only intended to show the technical flows of material and information, and at a 10,000-foot view. There are no human systems whatsoever. And in Toyota’s view the future-state map gives a high-level picture of what you are striving for, not a set of tools to implement.) 
 
In other cases organizations implement lean tools as solutions in isolation. We do not have standardized work, part of a lean system, so let’s write standardized work and post a sheet for every process and then audit workers to be sure they follow the steps. Toyota does not schedule, they pull using kanban, so let’s replace our scheduled system with pull systems everywhere. And so on. 
 
The goal is to transform processes as quickly as possible primarily driven by experts on lean and change management. Often, they are called “lean conversions” and the expectation is that in a matter of weeks or perhaps a few months we will go from not lean to lean. This is common among those who use kaizen workshops as the main approach to transformation or those who drive lean by lean six sigma blackbelts. 
 
Ask anyone in Toyota well versed in TPS what keeps them up at night about the lean movement and they will say so many people think it is all about the tools. The Toyota folks take seriously that TPS is a system and it includes the technical bits and the social bits working together toward clear goals—the purpose. Somehow this seems to have gotten lost in the mania to implement the tools as fast as possible.  

TPS is a system and it includes the technical bits and the social bits working together toward clear goals—the purpose.

This is not to say that transforming a value stream based on VSMs or introducing lean tools like standardized work is a waste of time. Creating connected processes is a powerful intervention and can have a myriad of benefits. There is an art to developing lean solutions, and I have marveled over the creativity of true TPS masters, though most of us mere mortals do not have their level of expertise. Deploying lean tools is relatively quick and efficient and as humans we like to see quick results to our efforts. However, many of us has experienced the decay that happens in these new systems after the experts move on to other projects. 

2. Lean as Social Solutions—Another popular way to understand lean is that it’s all about the people.  
 
There are ample books out there, including mine, that describe Toyota’s human resource systems, especially those on the shopfloor. The most visible are daily management meetings where team members huddle to discuss what happened yesterday, what to expect today, and how to improve processes. They huddle around well-designed visual boards with KPIs and designations of what is green, yellow, and red. Focus on the red.  
 
You can do that. But there is another key ingredient, and that is the people who lead the huddles. Toyota calls them “team leaders,” production workers that have been trained in leadership skills and the basics of TPS, and “group leaders” who are the first line of supervision. That is a bit more challenging than putting up boards and scheduling meetings. You need to involve human resources and a union if you have one in formally creating these positions. You already have supervisors who can be trained in lean and problem solving so you put together a greenbelt program. Later you might add the team leader role. Seeing some benefit of the daily meetings you then study up on policy deployment and put in place tiered meetings at all levels so there are aligned goals and checks on progress toward those goals. Those TPS experts can sleep well at night knowing you have gone beyond the tools. 
 
What you have done is intervene in the social system, but, in a sense, it is similar to the technical solutions approach. You have copied social structures and activities and presumed you can implement these solutions with a cookie cutter approach. There is generally limited training, and the assumption is that mass deployment of meetings and visual boards or obeya and cascaded goals will have a certain power onto themselves without developing deep capability in leaders.  

Without leadership capability we may have the positions on an organization chart, and people filling those positions, but we do not really have the leadership roles.

Even more so than with technical solutions, the quality of these interventions is likely to be low in most groups and quickly the interest level will fade, and it will become empty rituals. There really is an important skill set in Toyota leaders, including in the team leader role, and Toyota is obsessive about training and development. Without this capability we may have the positions on an organization chart, and people filling those positions, but we do not really have the leadership roles. 

3. Lean Mindset. A third way to understand lean is as a way of thinking. 

I had the pleasure of interviewing a number of direct students of Taichi  Ohno , some would say the father of TPS. An assignment to learn from the master was an intimidating experience. What would he teach first, about cells, or kanban, or andon? Ohno did none of that. He drew a circle on the floor and ordered his charge to stand in it and look. He would check back periodically and ask what they saw. When they worked hard to describe what was happening, he would look annoyed and tell them to keep looking. I asked one of his students how the training ended, and he said Ohno at the end of the day said, “You look tired. Go home.”  The star students did not have to come back a second day. 
 
What Ohno and his disciples learned to do was put the student in a position to learn by doing. They were teaching a way of thinking, what was described in the first TPS manual as “scientific thinking.”  Step one—learn to deeply observe at the gemba. When you think you understand everything look some more. There is another layer to reality. This is just step one and one of the many skills required to be an effective leader in Toyota. As in any complex skill we learn by breaking it down into smaller pieces and practicing each subskill over and over, with corrective feedback, until we master that skill and are ready to move to the next micro-skill. In the Japanese martial arts, they call each skill a kata. And you start by doing it exactly as instructed by the master. 
 
Hajime Ohba was one of Ohno’s best students. He was sent to the United States to teach TPS and he did this by setting up what is now called the Toyota Production System Support Center (TSSC). He refused to try to teach in a classroom. Instead, he met with the executive team to define their vision and a big challenge and they selected a “model line.”  This was an area in one plant to work on as a learning laboratory. He was also teaching Toyota members assigned to TSSC who helped with the consulting. He taught them the material and information flow diagram method but would not allow them to show clients the diagrams. He wanted the clients to learn by doing, starting with the challenge and then discovering the next problem and through rapid and repeated PDCA learn their way to a system that met their goals. He was teaching a way of thinking, not a way of creating a diagram. 
 
Mike Rother picked up the term kata and created what he calls the “improvement kata” and the “coaching kata.”  He created a simple four step-improvement model—1. Define the longer-term challenge, 2. Understand the current condition, 3. Define your next short-term target condition, and 4. Experiment to the target condition. Then reflect and repeat over and over on the way to the challenge, iteratively. He calls this a model of practical, everyday scientific thinking.  
 
The idea of kata is to practice them, not to implement them like solutions, in order to develop skills and mindset. We repeatedly see people trying to adopt the kata as if it were another problem-solving method to implement like a lean solution. Add it to the toolkit to mass deploy. That is contrary to the intent of learning a way of thinking through long-term, deliberate practice. 
 
Not surprisingly this four-step process looks a lot like what Toyota master trainers do. They train leaders at the gemba on real projects always starting with a big overwhelming challenge. They suggest the student needs to observe the process and then select something smaller to work on first. They push the student to test their ideas quickly and cheaply and thus learn fast, even if it means fail fast. They are relentless and push the student to a level of focus and persistence they never thought possible. 
 
Rother observed these Toyota masters at work and created Toyota kata to simulate their teaching process. If you go into a Toyota plant and look below the surface you will find an obsession with coaching scientific thinking, or what Toyota calls problem solving, at all levels. Every manager is a student and a coach and the training is located every day at the gemba. 

Putting it Together 

By now it should be clear that the three faces of lean are not mutually exclusive. There is a body of knowledge of some powerful tools and social structures. But copying them exactly misses the point. They are ideas, concepts, principles, and thought starters. They can help you develop a future-state vision. But you are trying to lead positive change in your specific environment with specific challenges and obstacles to achieving the goals you have set, hopefully strategically. Even if you had the identical future-state vision of Toyota, your starting point would be very different as would the obstacles. And in reality, you are probably in a different business with different business challenges and different technical systems. 

I titled the last chapter of the second edition of The Toyota Way:  “Be thoughtful and evolve your enterprise.”  I am quite serious about that. TPS evolved in an evolutionary way over decades, not as a change management program in a conference room. It continues to evolve today. Underlying TPS is the way of thinking, the scientific way. That is drilled over and over, relentlessly, into every leader. Scientific thinking can accompany you through your particular context and situations. It helps you wield what is perhaps lean’s most hallowed principle and what is probably the key to growing organically: PDCA. 

One obvious question if there are multiple approaches to lean is:  What is the one best way for deploying these three faces of lean? Ask a well-trained Toyota leader how to deploy lean, with what timing, and in what sequence, and they will likely answer “it depends.”   

Ask Mike Rother and he would say view the process not as deploying solutions with some rigid method, in a cookie cutter way, but as a process of learning your way forward scientifically. Follow the steps of the kata model and its practice routines. What is your vision, not the vision of lean gurus or of Toyota?  What is your current state?  What are your strategic plans?  How can you get started converting these into clear challenges?  Then get started developing leaders to think more scientifically in the process of learning their way toward the challenges. What are you learning? This is evolutionary. This is creating a learning organization. It is in some ways the opposite of mass deployment of cookie cutter solutions. 

Of course there are some powerful principles, tools, and social structures that Toyota has discovered on its journey. Studying them, considering them in your vision, considering them in your target conditions, and even developing your vision of flowing value to each customer is very worthwhile. At various points you may want to teach lean concepts, but I prefer just-in-time teaching. Teach the tool when the student has a need for it. 

I am not suggesting this is easy. I am not suggesting it is even likely to happen in many organizations. In that sense Toyota is special. There is a place for kamikaze deployment to get efficiencies or solve quality issues that threaten to shut the company down. There is some positive learning that can happen through huddles and tiered goals and value-stream mapping. None of it will be wasted. But at some point, it is desirable to move to the next level—lean thinking in a scientific way.  

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