A Broader Definition
Lean is a function of leadership, an organization-wide strategy for achieving excellence:
· By creating value from the customer's perspective.
· By creating a culture of continuous performance improvement and working to eliminate all waste of resources and time.
· By creating high-quality, stable processes and emphasizing respect for people throughout the organization.
Lean is a function of leadership…
Function of Leadership: To be successful organization-wide, Lean must become a function of leadership, versus just another program offered by the quality department. To achieve success, the leadership team must be out-front, visibly promoting and leading the Lean transformation.
…an organization-wide strategy for achieving excellence:
Strategy: The word of focus here is "strategy." To successfully implement Lean, the leadership team must treat Lean as a system-wide strategy. When Lean is approached any other way, it fades away and eventually becomes what's sometimes referred to as "the flavor of the month." As with other "flavors of the month," there's often initial leadership attention, excitement, and some progress. After a short time, the momentum tapers off or just stops altogether. Unfortunately, based on my experience and research, this scenario has become the norm in many organizations across the country.
Additionally, if Lean is not treated as a strategy, processes targeted for improvement may not be aligned with the organization's strategic plan. In these cases, scarce resources and time are wasted, minimizing the overall benefits for the organization, customers and staff.
So, how do we avoid Lean becoming the "flavor of the month" or wasting scarce resources and time? We avoid these and other pitfalls by understanding that Lean should be treated as a strategy which requires leading the Lean transformation from the top.
The next word of focus, "value," comes from the first bullet in the definition.
By creating value from the customer's perspective.
Value: The word "value" denotes the idea that we intentionally focus on improving those steps that add value from the customer's perspective. And, we focus on eliminating steps that are considered non-value-added from the customer's perspective.
Note: The ongoing relentless pursuit of customer feedback is a hallmark of a Lean organization.
When making improvements and determining value, we often use something called value stream mapping to map out our processes. Once we've completed the map, we look at every individual step and ask, "Does this step add value from the customer's perspective?" This helps us better understand the value-added versus the non-value-added steps from the customer's perspective.
At this point it is normal for someone involved in the process to say, "Hey, wait a minute, I have to complete each of those steps considered non-value added to help the customer." Under the current process this is likely true. However, the goal now should be to build a better process with fewer non-value-added steps.
For the second bullet of this definition, I want to focus on the words "culture" and "waste."
By creating a culture of continuous performance improvement and working to eliminate all waste of resources and time.
Culture: Because we're asking people to do things differently, sometimes even just a little differently, we are encroaching on the organization's culture. Since we're dealing with people and their culture, we must approach Lean transformations as a strategy for moving from traditional thinking to Lean thinking.
Waste: Just about any definition of Lean you'll find will include the idea of eliminating waste. The word "waste" in those definitions refers to process waste. This waste could be anything from waiting, mistakes (defects), excessive motion or excess inventory or other types of waste.
Note: The primary reason we want to eliminate waste is to improve the flow of the process.
For the third bullet of our definition, I want to focus on the words "processes" and "people."
By creating high-quality, stable processes and emphasizing respect for people throughout the organization.
Processes: We want our processes to be documented, stable, and continuously improved over time, which is at the very heart of Lean.
People: The last word of focus in this definition is "people." Ideally, each person becomes a problem solver and is challenged (a major part of respect for people) to improve their own processes. People make up the culture, and the culture is what we are trying to change. Therefore, Lean must be treated as a strategy and led from the top to achieve maximum success.
About the Author
Terry Norris, MBA, is a Lean Master Black Belt and author of How to Make Lean Work in Your Hospital and Lean Healthcare + AI. With over 20 years of experience leading Lean transformations across industries, he brings experience from both senior leadership and consulting perspectives, helping organizations implement Lean as a leadership-driven, system-wide strategy.
