Lean parallels with education

Sir Ken Robinson, the late British educationist whose 2006 TED talk on creativity remains the most-watched talk the platform has ever published, spent the last twenty years of his life arguing that Western education systems were not failing — they were succeeding at a job that was no longer the right job. The talks and books that followed extended the argument into operations the practice had not expected to find it useful in. The parallels to Lean, once one has noticed them, are difficult to unsee.

Robinson’s central diagnosis is that contemporary education has been organised around standardised testing as the dominant operating discipline, with the consequence that almost every other aspect of the system bends to serve the test. The classrooms are organised to produce test-takers; the curricula are organised around test-able content; the teachers are evaluated on test outcomes; and the students learn, more reliably than they learn anything else on the curriculum, that the test is what counts. The two passages from Robinson’s TED talks the practice has found most useful in client conversations:

> Standardised tests have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be diagnostic. They should help. But all that should support learning. It shouldn’t obstruct it, which of course it often does. So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. > > The real role of leadership in education — and I think it’s true at the national level, the state level, at the school level — is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn’t have expected.

Three of Robinson’s points translate directly into the practice’s work on operating floors.

Tests are diagnostic instruments, not output measures. The Lean discipline of visual management — the dashboards, the standard-work boards, the shift-change displays — is, structurally, a system of diagnostic instruments. The risk in a Lean transformation is the same as the risk Robinson identifies in education: the boards stop being read as diagnostics and start being managed as output measures. The number-on-the-board becomes the thing the operator is rewarded for moving, rather than the thing that helps the operator notice what to attend to. The discipline has been mistaken for its own measurement, in other words; the operator is now serving the dashboard rather than the dashboard serving the operator.

A culture of compliance crowds out a culture of curiosity. Lean, properly run, depends on operator curiosity — the willingness to notice, to ask, to suggest. Operations that have implemented the visible disciplines without preserving the underlying curiosity end up with the appearance of a Lean transformation and almost none of the cumulative gains. Robinson’s framing of culture of compliance versus culture of curiosity describes the failure mode the practice sees most often: the boards are populated, the procedures are followed, and the operators have stopped looking for what the boards and procedures do not yet capture.

Climate control rather than command and control. Robinson’s distinction is the cleanest contemporary statement of what Lean leadership actually requires. The plant manager who has decided what the line should produce, in what sequence, by which method, is the wrong manager for a Lean operation; the plant manager who has built the conditions under which the operators can decide most of those things for themselves is the right one. The practice’s engagements that fail tend to fail at this point — not at the technical disciplines, which are well-documented and reproducible, but at the leadership transition the technical disciplines require to survive past the consultant’s departure.

Robinson’s audience is the educator. His subject is the operation.

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