I have a French last name and French-Canadian heritage, but I do not really speak French beyond a few phrases. That has created more than one awkward moment, including on Air France flights when someone sees “Lussier” and assumes I can carry on a conversation.

I have also had French friends joke that I do not seem to enjoy the language enough when I speak it to ever become truly fluent. Fair enough.

Maybe that is why the word dépaysant caught my attention. It was familiar and unfamiliar at the same time.

This summer, after years of heavy travel, client work and constant motion, I found myself in a new chapter as a professor of practice. The work did not stop, but the rhythm changed. I had time to think, write, exercise, take a real vacation and occasionally experience a day without treating every quiet moment as a chance to catch up on email.

That slower pace created something I had not expected: breathing room. With that breathing room came enough perspective to see familiar things differently.

Then, while watching "The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon," I heard the word dépaysant. The first use of it comes in the second episode of the second season, when one of the female lead characters, Isabelle, utters it in the context of a change of scenery: her desire to leave France and find a fresh start in America.

The word does not translate perfectly into English. It generally describes the feeling of being taken out of one’s familiar place—displaced, unsettled, refreshed or able to see the world differently. It is the sensation of being removed from your normal surroundings long enough to notice what you usually miss.

That struck me as a deeply useful leadership idea. Lean thinking begins with seeing, but seeing clearly is harder than it sounds. Leaders can become so familiar with their organizations, routines, metrics and problems that the abnormal starts to look normal. The workaround becomes the process. The daily frustration becomes “just how things are.”

Sometimes leaders need a dépaysant moment: a deliberate break from the familiar frame so they can return with fresh eyes.

Familiarity Can Dull Observation

One of the quiet dangers of leadership is that familiarity can dull observation.

The longer leaders live with a system, the easier it becomes to explain it instead of improve it. A blocked aisle becomes “temporary storage.” An outdated visual board becomes “something we need to update.” A recurring quality issue becomes “one of those problems we are working on.” A workaround becomes part of the job.

None of this usually happens through bad intent. It happens when routines go unexamined, and the current condition begins to feel permanent. Systems have a way of settling into equilibrium, even when that equilibrium is not ideal. People adapt, teams compensate and leaders get busy.

Some friction is useful because it creates learning, dialogue and better decisions. But unexamined workarounds, stale information and normalized risk are different. They are signals the system needs to be seen, studied and improved again. 

That is why fresh perspective matters. Leaders do not only need better dashboards or more reports. They need the discipline to look again at what is already in front of them.

The opposite of fresh eyes is not ignorance. It is familiarity.

Go to the Gemba with Shiny Eyes

In lean, leaders are encouraged to go to the gemba, the place where the work happens. But walking through the operation is not the same as seeing it.

I have heard this desired curiosity described as “shiny eyes.” It is not a formal lean term, but it is a useful metaphor for intellectual curiosity in action: looking closely, asking better questions and staying open to what the work is trying to reveal. Too often, we become dulled by familiarity. We pass the same trip hazard, outdated visual board, awkward reach, blocked aisle or workaround so many times that it becomes invisible.

That is where a dépaysant mindset becomes practical. It gives leaders a way to interrupt automatic seeing. 

The practical answer is not simply to “walk the floor.” It is to walk with purpose.

Take a safety gemba walk and look intentionally for trip hazards, blocked exits, missing guards or behaviors that suggest risk has become normalized. Take an ergonomics walk and look for awkward reaches, poor lift positions, repetitive motion or workstation designs that quietly wear people down. Take a rack inspection walk and look for damaged uprights, overloaded locations or missing capacity discipline. Take a visual management walk and ask whether the information is current, useful and actually helping the team manage the work.

Purpose sharpens observation.

Without purpose, leaders often see what they already expect to see. With purpose, they slow down, focus and notice the gap between what the system is supposed to do and what is actually happening.

That is not an audit mindset. It is a learning mindset. The goal is not to catch people doing something wrong. The goal is to make the invisible visible so the team can improve the system together.

Discomfort Is Useful Data

A fresh look at the work can be uncomfortable.

A leader may discover that a process is harder than it appears from the conference room. A standard may not be understood. A metric may be driving the wrong behavior. A team may be relying on heroic effort to overcome poor system design. A “minor inconvenience” may actually be a daily source of frustration for the people doing the work.

The first instinct may be to explain it away.

“We have always done it this way.”

“That is just temporary.”

“We already know about that.”

“We are too busy to fix it right now.”

Those explanations may contain some truth, but they can also stop learning. If a leader’s first reaction is to defend the current condition, the opportunity disappears. If the leader can stay curious, discomfort becomes data.

That is one of the most important leadership disciplines in lean: Do not defend what you need to understand.

The people closest to the work often know where the real problems are. They know which fixes never held, which workarounds everyone depends on and which issues have been accepted as normal. A leader with fresh eyes and humility can create space for those truths to surface.

Make Fresh Eyes a Leadership Routine

Fresh perspective should not be left to chance.

Leaders can build it into their routines by choosing a specific lens each time they go to the gemba. One week, focus on safety. Another week, focus on ergonomics. Another week, look at visual management, material flow, standard work, housekeeping, tool availability, information flow or customer pain points.

The point is not to create another checklist for leaders to complete. The point is to create a rhythm of intentional observation.

A simple test for leaders is to ask:

• What have we walked past so often that we no longer see it?
• What workarounds have become normal?
• What information is out of date?
• Where are people making the process work through effort instead of good design?
• Where is the system asking people to be careful instead of making the right way easier?

These questions help leaders recover their “shiny eyes.” They also show respect for people because they focus attention on the conditions surrounding the work, not just the performance of the worker.

That distinction matters. Lean leadership is not about walking around looking for someone to blame. It is about seeing the system clearly enough to improve it.

The Value of Stepping Away

The irony is that sometimes leaders see the work more clearly after stepping away from it.

Many operations leaders live in constant motion.  They go from meeting to meeting, crisis to crisis, metric review to metric review.  They are surrounded by information, but not always by insight.  They are close to the business, but not always close to the work.

Stepping away does not mean disengaging.  It means creating enough space to return with better perspective.  That space may come from a vacation, a visit to another plant, walking a process with a new employee, or asking a frontline team member, “What have I stopped noticing?”

Leaders need moments that interrupt automatic seeing.

Parting Thoughts

A French word from a television show may seem like an unlikely source of leadership insight. But useful lessons often appear in unexpected places.

To be dépaysé is to be moved out of the familiar. For leaders, that may be less about geography and more about perspective. It means stepping away from assumptions, routines and explanations long enough to see clearly again.

That is not separate from lean leadership. It is central to it.

Before we can improve a system, we have to see it. Before we can see it, we may have to become a little less comfortable with what we think we already know.

Sometimes the most powerful leadership move is not to push harder.

Sometimes it is to step back, breathe and look again.