Don’t embark on a lean transformation believing that it will magically make all your problems go away. The opposite could be true, in fact. Lean may bring more problems to light than you were aware of—and that’s a good thing.

In this episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, podcast hosts John Dyer and Dr. Mohammed Saleh delve into the myth that says if lean is working, your organization should have fewer problems.

That’s simply wrong, the hosts say. Lean is about raising the visibility of problems because you can’t fix what you can’t find and you can’t solve what you can’t see. Hidden problems don’t get fixed.

“All of the lean tools' primary purpose is to make problems visible, and we still have to use our scientific method of problem solving to solve these problems,” explains Saleh. “But the purpose and the concept behind all of the lean tools is to make problems visible. That's what daily management is about. That's what gemba walks are about. That's what standard work is about. That's what andon is about. All of these help us … to be able to see abnormalities.”

“The only way that we can achieve excellence is we have to first admit we have problems, Dyer says. “The way I would put it is that lean helps to shift the responsibilities of solving those problems. We want to get away from the firefighting. We want to get away from the Band-Aids. We want to make permanent solutions.”

Among the topics addressed in this episode are:

• The distinction between special cause and common cause problems, and how lean addresses each.
• How leaders can accidentally teach people how to hide problems—not because workers are dishonest but because leadership has created a culture that says ‘red’ equals bad and ‘green’ equals safe.
• Problems have a shelf life. “The whole purpose of this is that we're also solving problems, and so if I see a problem that's on the board, and six months later that problem is still there, we have a problem, and that doesn't mean when I encourage people that problems are good that they should just linger and stay and not be resolved,” Saleh says.

The duo also discusses five questions leaders can ask during gemba walks to promote making problems visible:

• How quickly do we see problems?
• How comfortable are people in surfacing problems?
• How quickly do we respond to problems?
• Are employees learning how to solve them? (Are we empowering the front lines?)
• Are the same problems coming back?

“As lean matures, you don't necessarily stop having problems. You become better at seeing them. You become better at talking about them. You become better at solving them. But most importantly, you become better … at preventing them,” Saleh says. “A lean organization isn't one without problems. It's one where problems just have nowhere to hide.”