Lean Thinking is an approach to continuously finding the best way to produce value for clients using fewer resources and less Waste.
For that purpose, Lean Thinking focuses on developing the people producing the value – so working together – for clients. Hence, the thinking revolves around developing people’s ability to continuously experiment and learn iteratively, with the ultimate goal of zero Waste while striving to deliver the perfect client value.
When you observe people using Lean Thinking in their work – in delivering a product or a service, you may see the following (these are examples):
- People are obsessed with ensuring a periodic collection of the client’s satisfaction. They make the required changes in their work to seek better client satisfaction.
- People develop focus and frequent changes on several working steps of the delivery chain. It is because they seek to reduce the lead time or continuously improve the quality they track daily.
- Colleagues conduct live observations on the working process because they all look for opportunities to reduce costs.
- The working space or specific workstations are frequently reorganized because people want to feel better about producing the product or service.
- There is a recurrent dedicated time for everyone to work on continuous improvement. It includes group activities where people seek to learn faster together.
Progressing that way requires observing activities with specific perspectives, using structure to resolve problems, and capitalizing on learnings using approaches. Those are codified as Lean techniques such as observing Waste, managing Variability, using PDCA, and much more. These are proven techniques professionals are already using, but ultimately, it is up to each organization or group of people to codify their improvement techniques so they learn and progress faster together.
Progressing in Lean Thinking creates a highly adaptable organization in an ever-changing environment. That ability is a competitive advantage.