Do you remember the original purpose for embarking on a lean initiative? Can your employees articulate that purpose? Are the steps your organization is taking, or the moves you’re making, designed to achieve that original mission or have they drifted off course?
If the answer to any of these three questions is “no,” then your lean initiative may be in trouble.
In this episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, hosts John Dyer and Dr. Mohamed Saleh continue their exploration of symptoms that indicate an organization's continuous improvement efforts may be headed off the rails. This episode’s symptom under discussion: the lean initiative that gets disconnected from its original purpose, or, as Saleh says, “Lean starts to lose its ‘why.’ People don’t know the purpose of why we’re doing it.”
The hosts launch their discussion with the question: What is the purpose?
“In my mind, it's employee satisfaction and customer satisfaction. How do we increase each of those? That should be the end prize,” Dyer says. Both hosts also emphasize the importance of linking lean to growth.
Saleh weighs in the language an organization uses around lean, and takes aim at cost cutting.
“… but if the language is all about cost-cutting language, okay, then we did lose the purpose behind this, because the engine that drives continuous improvement is respect for people,” he says.
The podcast hosts also discuss the risks of copying best practices from other organizations, such as:
- You may be copying from someone who is not doing lean well.
- You may be copying only the visible elements and missing all the unseen challenges. “It's like you're missing out on all the ingredients that led to what you see, and then you're copying what you see, but you have no foundational ingredients,” Saleh says. “You've planted no seeds, and you just saw the output.”
- You may be copying a solution to an entirely different root cause than your operation is experiencing.
Further, Dyer and Saleh reflect on the importance of understanding cultural differences before trying to implement common approaches to continuous improvement.
