Are you really too busy for lean, or is that “busyness” a symptom of a bigger problem? For example, is your day comprised of endless firefighting because you never fix the root cause of a problem—the very challenge lean is designed to meet? Or are you too busy because your organization unwittingly incentivizes busyness—Is the busy-looking manager next in line for the big promotion over the efficient manager? Or maybe it’s simply an excuse because the organization doesn’t want to dedicate the time required to get a lean initiative off the ground.

In this episode of Behind the Curtain: Adventures in Continuous Improvement, hosts Dr. Mohamed Saleh and John Dyer deconstruct the popular myth of “We’re too busy for lean.” And while they focus on lean, the two say the myth applies equally to Six Sigma and other team-based continuous improvement initiatives. This episode concludes Saleh’s and Dyer’s series on lean myths.

Throughout this Behind the Curtain episode, the podcast duo return to an example of people mopping a flooded floor instead of turning off a running faucet.

“The analogy just kind of highlights that you have a choice,” Saleh says. “You have a choice to just keep mopping floors or carve out time to turn off the faucet. And I would say the ‘aha’ moment for me in this analogy was that being busy is not the same as creating value, and I think too many people are busy, but they're not creating value.”

The two discuss the idea that some organizations may consider lean as simply additional work, which is the wrong perspective, Saleh says.

“Lean, for me, is enabling you to get some of your capacity back,” he explains.

Dyer points out that a well-versed lean team could have solved the flooded floor problem well before it became a time-consuming issue.

“The people closest to the problem huddle real time, say, Wow, we've got this problem. There's water flowing. Hey, Joe over there from maintenance, who's been assigned to my area, who knows this area extremely well because this is the only area Joe works in—let's go grab him and see if we can work together to figure out how to turn this water off real time, so that instead of the entire floor being flooded, we only have a couple of mops of buckets of water to mop up, and we're done,” Dyer says. “And the problem never reaches any critical stage because it's dealt with real time, closest to the problem, and that frees up tons of capacity, human capacity, because we're dealing with the problem so quickly that it's no longer a plate spinning in the air.”

Both hosts acknowledge that additional time will be needed during a lean initiative’s launch. People won’t be comfortable and training takes time.

“But that's the point … you're building that muscle,” Dyer says. “When you first start, that muscle is completely weak and almost non-existent. But as you get more and more into this, that muscle becomes stronger and stronger to the point where it becomes routine.”

The two also delve into:

Where you place your lean team. “If they're reporting to the CEO, or in worst case scenario, the COO, then you know that this is going to be a success,” Saleh says.

The need to help leaders transition from being busy to being strategic. “We want them to be visionaries, and sometimes that means sitting in your office with two or three people, just dreaming and brainstorming and doing all those things that don't appear to be all that busy,” Dyer says. “If the problems are being addressed closest to the process by the people closest to the process, then that is going to free up time with those leaders, and if they don't know how to deal with that freed-up time, they may just be sitting in their office thinking, ‘What do I do now?’”

How to choose the perfect time to implement lean. Stop waiting for the perfect time, Saleh says. “Know that you’ll be waiting forever.”