Heed the Warning Signs That Your Lean Initiative Is Going Off the Rails

Your lean initiative failed. It began strongly, with lots of training, a rousing speech from the CEO and a wildly exciting launch. But then it began to fizzle—maybe in a year, maybe in five—and you don’t know why.

But there were signs. You just missed them.

In this episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, hosts Dr. Mohamed Saleh and John Dyer discuss several warning signs that point to a lean initiative or other team-based continuous-improvement transformation that is starting to go off the rails. It’s the first of several episodes on this topic.

The duo focuses on two warning signs in this podcast: “tool worshipping” and a failure to invest in freed-up capacity.

The former occurs when a lean initiative becomes tool driven rather than principle driven, says Saleh.

“Lean dies the moment the tool becomes more important than the thinking behind it,” Saleh says.

“You see this obsession around 5S scores, an obsession around boards and templates and audits and language, and it becomes very much a tool-based thing,” he describes. “And teams start to memorize language but start to lose the purpose of why we're doing it.”

Adding to the discussion, Dyer points out that learning the tools, with a few exceptions, isn’t that difficult. “It's the cultural side of all this that's the most difficult,” he says.

Moreover, it’s not just the employees who must embrace a new culture. Leaders “will have to really take a hard look at their role, at their job, and their roles may need to change pretty significantly to embrace this new culture where the problems are being solved closest to the process,” Dyer adds.

The continuous improvement experts then transition into the perhaps less obvious warning sign of a lean effort that is going off the rails: The organization’s failure to take advantage of the freed-up capacity that accompanies great lean efforts. We’ve freed up 8% more capacity; why aren’t we selling it or otherwise using it?

This second warning sign is a symptom of not getting everyone engaged in the lean initiative, Dyer asserts. If the lean effort is confined to a small group of frontline employees, other functions may not understand it or may not even believe the improvements even happened.

He shared a manufacturing example in which a lean initiative had dramatically reduced manufacturing cycle times and improved quality, freeing up significant capacity. Dyer, who was facilitating a staff meeting in this example, said, “I turned to the sales and marketing person and said, ‘How are you all taking advantage of these improvements?’ And he looked at me, and he said, ‘You know, John, to be honest, I have no idea what he's even talking about.’”

Dyer notes that the lack of understanding also translated to a lack of faith that performance had really improved, leading to an unwillingness for sales and marketing to take a risk on selling that extra 20% or 30% capacity.

On the flip side, Saleh shared a healthcare example in which the lean initiative’s waste elimination and growth of capacity translated to a redeployment of resources and the opening of a new office—accomplished without hiring any additional people and improving the work-life balance for some as they were able to work closer to home.

“It was really driven based on respect for people. It was really driven on volume in that community, and so there was a lot of collaboration,” Saleh says.

Saleh closed out the podcast with this reminder: “If the transformation is not about behavior and culture, all the other stuff becomes noise.”