Lean Thinking

It doesn’t need to be this way........

One of the biggest personal frustrations that I have in doing my job is dealing
with waste caused by basic poor design.

There is often not much "Lean Thinking" going on.

It is great for my business and gives me more work than I can handle, but what about the poor people who have to deal day to day with frustrations and flaws
that are not of their making.
 

We often ask people to battle for the common good of the organisation with one hand tied behind their back and an ill fitting set of boxing gloves. I constantly find myself going into Organisations that have lots of waste, and guess what, 80% of it is caused by poorly designed business processes.

Often there is little or no joined up thinking.
 

People try their best to make changes, but at the end of the day, you can only make so many improvements to a process that is fundamentally poorly designed.
 

It's a bit like trying to optimise a donkey with 3 legs, poor eyesight and a pathological fear of horses to compete in
and win the Grand National.
 

People say what is the point in trying to improve the donkey - it's never going to win any races.
 

But there is a point.

In my experience people need to learn the "Lean" tools and techniques on their existing processes so that they have
the knowledge to create new processes that really work well.
 

Unfortunately it is difficult to say let's stop everything for 2 years and start again.
 

Even if we did I still think we would get it very wrong.
 

People need to "get it" first.

They need to understand what creating a "Lean" business process looks like.

They need to experience the process of removing waste first hand before they are in a position to design processes without waste.

I call it "learning by doing".
 

There is a place for theory of course, but there is nothing like walking through an existing process,
being able to identify all the waste and then doing something about it, to bring clarity to what
becoming "Lean" is all about.

Once you have developed that skill then you are in a position to design better processes.

I believe you need to have felt a bit of the pain of transforming a wasteful process before you can design a great one.
The sad fact is that most of us either walk passed waste, ignore it, or even worse blindly accept it as part of the
system that we have no power to change.
 

By creating a culture of continuous improvement where waste is a real embarrassment, we have a chance to design really well thought out processes that meet the needs of all stake holders.

If I hear one more time "yes but you don't really understand what we do here" I think my brain will melt.
 

Every Organisation and Process I work in is different .They have different customers, they do different things and they provide different products and services. The one thing they all do have in common is that they have lots of wasted time that does not need to be there.
 

In all processes the wastes are similar although the products and services differ dramatically.
 

You could say that identifying and eliminating wasted time is just common sense.

I'm afraid common sense is not always that common.
 

People often hide behind Technical language, bureaucracy and legislation to prove how difficult the process needs to be.

Guess what - it does not need to be that difficult!
 

If we can eliminate wasted time from our business processes then a new clarity can emerge and the previously
"difficult" process suddenly becomes a lot simpler for everyone to understand.
 

By learning what becoming "Lean" is all about then we invest in knowledge that will help us create winning systems
for the future.