Field Notes
Occasional writing from the practice — observations from the floor, notes on Lean philosophy, reading we have found useful, and the occasional argument we want on record. Long-running, irregular, considered.
One classmate’s problem
Every student in the Green Belt class brings a real problem from their own workplace; the class votes on one to work all week. Only one gets solved — but everyone leaves with the method for the problems still waiting back at the office.
Who Should Write SOPs?
On why the front-line leader — not the operator, and not the Lean Manager — should own the SOP, and what an SOP is actually for.
Lean Tour: Via Seating
Field report from a Green Belt class tour of a Reno furniture maker that doubled wages and tripled output through Lean — and what the tour-takers' suggestions revealed about how learning travels between operations.
Improve methods and reduce risk with Lean Office strategies
Six questions left over from a Moss Adams + eta webinar on Lean Office, with Rishi's answers — including why Lean is most required by organizations that have too much work.
Training for Lean like training for a marathon
On Hal Higdon's marathon training programs, the difference between getting someone to their first three miles and the standardized twenty-three that follow, and what this teaches about implementing Lean in operations not yet ready for the scaled toolkit.
Compressing kaizens — can we, and should we?
An editorial defense of the five-day kaizen format, and why each phase of the work — current-state mapping, constructive complaining, radical redesign, implementation, and the closing presentation — takes the time it does.
Lean Six Sigma in small businesses
Notes from a visit to a $1.5M-revenue clothing manufacturer, on what Lean looks like when the operation is small enough that everyone knows everyone.
Reading: Daniel Levitin, “The Organized Mind”
Connecting cognitive neuroscience to Lean — why organizations that respect their workers' attention will tend to outperform those that do not.
Reading: Hiroyuki Hirano, “5 Pillars of the Visual Workplace”
A note on the originating text for 5S, and what the discipline of visual order actually buys an operation that adopts it seriously.
The simplest questions
A note on the value of unanswerable, child-like questions — why the queries that supervisors learn to dismiss are often the ones worth following all the way down.
Reading: Sheena Iyengar, “The Art of Choosing”
Tying the eight Lean wastes to the literature on choice and decision — what we lose when an operation forces decisions on people who do not have time to make them well.
Reading: Ray Dalio, “Principles”
On Bridgewater's principled discipline and what an operations practice can borrow from a hedge fund that has thought longer than most about how decisions get made.
Lean parallels with education
Notes connecting Sir Ken Robinson's argument for an education revolution to the Lean practitioner's view of what happens, and what does not, on the floor.
Reading: Satya Nadella, “Hit Refresh”
A note on automation and human work, and why the future of operations is not the absence of people but a different relationship between them and the systems they run.
Reading: Michel Greif, “The Visual Factory”
On process- versus result-orientation in operations, and the practical consequences of getting that distinction wrong.
Reading: Henry Ford, “Today and Tomorrow” (1926)
A note on the origins-of-Lean text most contemporary readers have not read, and what it gets right that later imitations do not.
Michael Sandel on continuous improvement
A short note on the Harvard professor's argument for non-business-case improvement — what we should change because it is good, not because the spreadsheet says so.
Pal’s Sudden Service
Note on a Baldrige-winning quick-service restaurant chain whose supplier-development practice deserves more attention than it receives.
NUMMI: from Toyota to GM
On the Fremont plant where US Lean was effectively transplanted, and what its history tells us about the conditions under which a culture of operations actually changes.
Failure modes and effects analysis
A short history of FMEA from NASA in 1949 to the manufacturing floor today — and what the technique still does for an operation that takes it seriously.
“How I Built It” with Chipotle’s Steve Ells
A note on Lean in restaurants — and the structural reason quick-service operations are sometimes better Lean classrooms than manufacturing plants are.
Reading: Atul Gawande, “The Checklist Manifesto”
On the surgical-checklist literature and what the discipline of small written instruments does for error rates in operations of every kind.